Can you find the True Snowman title?

Here it is, the final shoutout to play SBExtreme. To also pass along the love here are 3 games from the 177 (~6.2%) games I rated that I found interesting or fun.

Octov by Taldius

Interesting take on command sequences and you are a Shyguy!

Darkness by Sineglitch

A sound-centric experience with visuals to aid it instead of the other way around.

Conservation of Ninjutsu by kuhnerdm

Ridiculous, fast-paced, simple and funny. A great compo entry.

I wish you all a happy and creative 2016!

Hi folks. I did a little platform game for this 34th LudumDare session with a cute aesthetic and a quiet mood. For this project I used Unity (code C#), Gimp, SFXR for the sounds and SoundTrap for the music. I am very proud because I think that I did something (more or less) interesting with funny physics – even if this game is really hard. Now I am working on a post jam version with enemies and more features. Use right mouse button to attract cubes or the seed – use left button to freeze objects in the air. Jump on them so as to reach the next island. If you dare, try it. I wish you the best and see you later friends ++

The Seed

Also you can visit my itch.io page which hosts other little projects ++

We’re still interested in more feedback, especially on the post-comp version, so if you haven’t already, and have some time over, we cordially ask you to check out Interstellar Cruise.

A cruise in interstellar space

I made a lot of improvements to my entry for post-jam updates and am relatively happy with how it turned out for being my first Unity game that I made from scratch. I started out on the Friday of the theme announcement with next to no experience in Unity and spent 90% of my development scratching my head and researching how to get my ideas into code form.

A few improvements I never got around to are improving the audio and sound effects, made a new song but it was just slightly better. The next one that got skipped was fixing the zero G collision that causes the player to spin out. The main complaints on my game were the controls and the lack of direction, and I fixed one of them.

I hope to make something impressive in LD35, but for now here is the final version of Stardust.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on my game page and I’ll try to play your game before the time is up.

Implemented the gameplay code and pushed to Itch.io. Pardon the blurry Gif:

The new flight model is easier to handle, trust me. It even has a controls help panel!

Give it a spin

Tags: finished, gif, itch.io, post-jam, release

I know 8 seems like an odd number, but it’s not, it’s even (Heheh). I could only find 8 entries that I thought were really good. I know that there are still great entries out there but I just haven’t played them all, wish I did. I’ve only rated 50 games, so these are just my favorite 8 of the 50.

I need to rate more games before the results come in, so if I haven’t rated your game yet, DROP A LINK IN THE COMMENTS! But before you do that, please look at my Top 8 Games (in no particular order).

Double Kick Heroes (Jam) by blackmagic

Conga Master (Jam) by BubsyPoochies

Pistil Pistol (Compo) by HacksawUnit

2 Button Metroidvania (Compo) by JaJ

Concrete Jungle (Compo) by Miltage

Agent Hooker (Jam) by Phoenix849

Left-Leaning (Compo) by tayl1r

Deseeder (Compo) by Zanzlanz

Thanks for reading, but have you checked out my entry yet? Check out my game, Arc! I’m currently at 180 votes, let’s get to 200! If you’ve already checked it out, then check out the POST COMPO Version! Includes Different Colors, New Power Ups/Power Downs, More Music, and MULTIPLAYER! Check it out!

And if you don’t want to check my game out, at least check out the new track I made for the Post Compo Version:

Since my LD34 game Super 2-Button Growdown took some inspiration from TowerFall, I decided to go all the way and replicate my game inside it. This custom level includes all five maps from my original game, custom tiles and music, and an optional ruleset that tries to mimic Growdown’s gameplay.

The TowerFall stage is available here, and if you haven’t played Super 2-Button Growdown yet, grab a few friends and rate the game here. Leave a comment and I’ll rate your game back!

This is my first time entering the Jam instead of the Compo, and I did it with Tifu, a friend of mine that usually enters LD by himself as well.  Together, we made our entry, “Nightlight“:

I handled the programming, sound and music, while Tifu handled the characters, graphics and level design.

Things that went well:

• I loved the theme Tifu and I came up with while brainstorming ideas at the beginning.  Focusing on the “Growing” aspect, we implemented it three different ways: the growing fear, the doll growing in power, and the overall theme of the child growing up.  I feel that anyone who makes it to the ending will be able to fully appreciate the theme.  Also, though we didn’t specifically use the “Two Button Controls” theme, we did make a reference to it by naming the doll “Two Buttons”.
• I really like how the visuals came out.  Tifu had enough time to create separate animations for the main character for both normal and scared states, and I think little touches like that help add some additional charm to the game.
• Everything came together well for the sound, from the constant sound of rain outdoors to the intermittent flashes of lightning, and even very subtle things like the main character’s footsteps becoming louder with faster movement.  Anyone familiar with my previous entries knows that I like putting in dynamic music, so of course I had it increase and decrease the intensity of the music based on the fear level.
• I’ve never coded a dialogue system before, and while it wasn’t perfect, I’m glad I was able to get it working.  Using different fonts and colors for the text made it easy to tell who was speaking when multiple characters were talking.
• We were just barely able to get both the intro and outro completed before time elapsed, and I’m glad we did, as it would have felt very incomplete without it.
• The four photos that the player has to find are adorable; Tifu did a great job with them.

Things that needed improvement:

• While doing the movement coding, I had the semi-brilliant idea of making it so that as the player got more afraid, the main character’s movement speed would become gradually faster when moving towards light sources (or outlets while carrying the nightlight) and slower when moving away from them.  It made sense in a realistic sort of way, but in practice, I realized too late that no slowdown at all should have occurred.  As a result, some of the runs in the game ended up being more difficult than expecting, and the very first room of the game unfortunately ended up being difficult to pass (not a good first impression to make).  Unfortunately, I’m worried that some people may not have successfully passed it due to the difficulty, and this may have had an impact on the ratings they gave.
• As most LD entrants know, running out of time is the greatest problem.  While I’m glad we finished a complete experience, there were some things that were cut for time.  Most specifically, the doll (Two Buttons) was originally going to show up throughout the house to hound the player at random and not-so-random points, but we felt that this was secondary to the rest of the game, and focused on getting the core gameplay done first.  As a result, there aren’t any scares as we had originally planned.  In a way though, it kind of still works: there’s a constant fear of something scary happening that never comes, which fits in with the realization that it’s all in the main character’s head.  (I kind of wish we at least had time to implement the TV scare.  Tifu had animations ready for it, but I just couldn’t get it programmed in.)
• Originally I had set up a system by which light sources would cast shadows and consequently produce unlit areas that the player would still end up being in the dark and afraid.  In practice though, it didn’t look good with the perspective we chose, so I ended up cutting it out.  The only way it would have worked was if the perspective was directly top down, and I think I prefer the RPG-style top down we went with instead, since it allowed for more expression on the characters.
• I’d like to have put in a dialogue system that typed out what was being said, like most RPGs do (instead of having the text just appear), but this feature was very low on the priority list, so I cut it very early in development.
• With how much time everything else took, I didn’t have time to make a proper opening and closing theme to the game.  This is the first time I’ve ever had to cut music from an LD entry.

Anyway, there’s still time to play it if you haven’t yet.  We hope everyone likes it!

I think my game Psychotennis works pretty well as a quick LD game, where you can expect a player to sit and play for a bit.  It’s quick and fun with a very short game loop, so there’s a minimum of fluff and just straight gameplay.

But for a post-compo expansion I would want to reward a longer play session.  To that end I’ve already changed the game from a one-game Match, to a “Best of 5” format, where you advance to new Matches by winning 3 games, and the fail/retry loop is at the level of this larger Match.

This also invites the idea of an “Adversary” who can apply some character to the procedural generation of levels and make a few taunting comments for some flavor.

Of course, expanding in this way can be at odds with a tight game loop, and mapping out the new expanded game flow in advance helps me to know what I’ll need to build before jumping into coding.

So here’s a map of the game flow before and after:

I made this map pretty easily on draw.io and it helps me to minimize the button presses required from the player to move between states (Red) and know what I’ll have to implement in terms of UI (Blue) for the various states.

Game Description

A puzzle game focusing on level discovery through the use of illumination. Use multiple perspectives to find the path that leads to the goal. While viewing your character from above you can navigate the world and switching to a first person view you can shoot light emitting arrows to light the world around you.

Before the 3 days

Planning:

• Leading up to the final day our team shared our voting results on our Slack message board. We would talk about what we enjoyed and disliked about each theme. Once the final vote was open our team gathered on Skype and discussed the final themes that we enjoyed and disliked. Together we created a list of game ideas for each theme. We stacked up some of the game ideas to cover multiple themes, this allowed us to have fewer game ideas so we could focus on making them more developed.

Once our team had decided that most of our games would be created in 3D, we began researching 3D game development in Unity. During the few hours before the Ludum Dare our team watched videos such as:

• Treehouse: Unity Basics & How to Make a Video Game
• Roll a Ball Tutorial
• Unity: Graphics Tutorials
• Unity: Tanks Tutorial: Camera Controls

Things we had before the start:

• Used the Unity Standard Assets as a base for third person and first person movement controls.
• Also used Unity Game Jam Menu Template as a base for the main menu and level select.

Challenges

• Timing of Ludum Dare wasn’t ideal:
  • Leading up to the event we communicated by Slack instead of having in person meetings. We tried to maximize time we did have available by having agendas for discussions before Ludum Dare, and using Skype to communicate throughout the weekend. We also prioritize letting team members sleep/break when they needed.
  • An example of our timing problems was: our artist had other responsibilities that weekend and had to split their focus on Ludum Dare and their own responsibilities. This was mitigated with the help of coffee, coffee, more coffee, and dogged determination.
• One of level designers did not always have things to work on:
  • Periodic check-ins about what could be done to help teammates were conducted hourly by the team member.
• Time:
  • 3 days is never enough! Comparing to previous projects we found this game was more polished and complete compared to games we had 6 months to work on. Overall we have found that the more games we work on the better we become.
• Theme:
  • The team struggled for inspiration on the selected themes, but with a quick reconstruction of previously created themes we developed an idea that we were both satisfied with and was scoped well for the Ludum Dare. Although the game we wanted to make that was out of scope was: a game in which the player discovers new lands and makes a map of their discoveries everyday. When night approaches the player would sell their maps to gain money to buy upgrades on their explorer gear. We had plans for this game being procedurally generated with a vast amount of places to explore, unfortunately this was out of scope and we decided to go with plan B.
• Unity Scene merging problems:
  • While working on the project our Unity scenes would not merge correctly and required each team member to reimplement anything done in a scene by another member. This was fixed by unignoring meta files and correctly setting the mercurial configuration file on all developer machines. This fix was unable to merge scenes created before the fix, but worked for all scenes created after the fact.

What went right during this Ludum Dare:

• Found free open-source music online to fit the theme, and contacted artist about inclusion into our game. He was excited and posted about the game on Facebook. The music and ambience added to the atmosphere game.
• Several compliments about Mood and Scream in game.
• Visuals reflected a minimalistic style that we enjoyed.
• No one died, everyone ate, we were able to attend to life responsibilities during the weekend as well.
• Camera controls in third person turned out great.
• Modeling a 3D character, rigging and animating in just 5 hours.  We are very proud of the amount of 3D environment props that were created as well.
• Streaming people’s games on Twitch and watching Ludum Dare streamers play our game was very enjoyable for the whole team.
• Lots of great feedback on the game (People loved the scream)
• Female main character.
• The team completed their first 3D game! (Yay artist!)

Things we would like to do differently next Ludum Dare:

• Build a level editor.
• Sleep the night before/take a nap before the theme reveal.
• Request vacation for all three days.
• Not have finals directly prior to the jam.
• Zip files. No installer.
• Release for all platforms upon completion.
• Test levels with someone not on the team.
• Leave more time for visual polish at the end of development.
• Post progress to Ludum Dare during the 3 days we are developing.
• Optimize the game to be smaller than 50MB

Future Plans for “A Shot In The Dark”

• Implement an engaging story
• Create a more open world design similar to Zelda games, where parts of the game are block off based on what powers/upgrades you have unlocked.
• Make levels which use all the implemented features.
• Either remove one of the perspectives, or sync rotation between them.
• Fix the falling bug that allows people to get stuck on the corners
• Add Cat’s Pajama Logo
• Create a compelling UI
• Polish the visual style and the Character animations.
• Reduce the load time when launching game by removing some of the larger sound files.

Credits

• Designers:
  • Paul Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith
• Programmers:
  • Paul Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith
• Artist:
  • Lynne Startup
• Level Designers:
  • Jami Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith

Data Box

​Developer: The Cat’s Pajamas

Publisher: Ludum Dare/Itch.io

Release Date: December 14, 2015

Platforms: Windows and Mac

Game Link: http://thecatspajamas.itch.io/a-shot-in-the-dark

Ludum Dare: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=66266

Twitter: @TheCatsPJSGames

Team Size: 4

Length of Development: 3 days

Lines of Code: 1403

Development Tools: Unity 5.2, Visual Studio 2013, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Audacity

Asset Resources: Free Music Archive, AudioMicro, freesound.org, YouTube Audio Library

This is going to be a pretty dull post mortem because very little went wrong. Nonetheless, I did learn some stuff and I’ve not done a self-promo post that actually contributed anything yet so here goes!

Play Slum Runner here

I’ll rate you back and provide delicious feedback btw, so make sure to leave a comment!

Now, onto the post-mortem…

What was my mission?

I’ve had a pretty tough year in 2015 for LD. The last game I felt that was reasonably successful was Silian Rail for the Entire Game on One Screen theme (last December). I really felt I did a good job on that game, and it was easily the most complete and polished product I’ve made myself from start to finish. With that setting my standards much higher, I had raised the stakes impossibly high for the next few LDs. I was all like “I need to break the top 100!” and “I need to get a 4-star rating for fun!”.

For Unconventional Weapon and You Are The Monster I was too ambitious, poor at planning, and making some pretty bad conceptual decisions that resulted in so much wasted time. Unconventional Weapon I didn’t submit. It wasn’t done. You Are The Monster I submitted, but it was critically buggy and I didn’t bother promoting it.

This time my mission was to finish the core gameplay programming in 8 hours. Of course, as a solo dev I wanted to enter the Compo, but these were my only two missions.

What went poorly?

I’ll start with the bad stuff because I think it’s clear that I failed my two mission requirements!

My 8-hour programming limit was more around 12 hours. Those 4 hours really mattered, as I could have probably made the Compo deadline using that time to craft all the levels I needed (I have 8 missions at the moment) or build the music. There aren’t really many lessons to learn here though. I worked flat out with no breaks at a breakneck pace (for me) and it just took longer than expected… so c’est la vie!

I wanted to submit to the Compo but I needed an extra 72 hours for the Jam. Technically I could have released a much worse game for the Compo,  especially if I had those 4 extra hours, but I really enjoyed the concept and felt I had to do it justice and polish it up. The compo version would have had placeholder art, no music, and only 5 levels (with the first 2 basically being an easy tutorial). You can see it below as I made a ‘I failed’ video about an hour before the Compo deadline.

My hacky game jam code was really pushed to the limits in this one. Each level took about an hour to build rather than the 10 minutes it should have.

How I usually build levels is by using Adobe Fireworks (sort of like Photoshop) to place all the buildings, characters, and UI with a lovely drag and drop experience. Then I can go to GameMaker and use the X/Y coordinates from Fireworks to accurately place objects in the room using instance_create and all the draw calls. This was my first game using view ports and I just fucked something up. I’m not sure what it was, but basically there was a small, seemingly random, offset between the Fireworks XY locations and the GameMaker XY locations. This meant that every level I had to input the data for, then play through multiple times and manually adjust +/- xy values one at a time to get things to line up. ARGH!

What went well?

What I found really interesting about this project was that I had zero hurdles. For the first time ever there were no critical bugs that wasted hours of my time, there was nothing I had to really learn to do during the jam, so I had zero resistance to content with.

Using the extra 24 hours from the Jam was also surprisingly satisfying. I was bitterly disappointed that I couldn’t submit to the compo.. I mean, that’s the REAL Ludum Dare and I’m still a solo guy making all the assets so I feel I’m at a big disadvantage compared to jamming teams without all the rule limitations. Nonetheless, the final product is so much better because of that extra 24 hours. Those 24 hours were pure polish and content creation. They were relaxing, they were stress free, and therefore I could be much more creative. The quality of my final levels, the quality of the writing, as well as the quality of the music, is much higher because I wasn’t super stressed about hitting the deadline. Also I don’t hate my own game, which is what always happens to me when I try to power out a compo submission!

I can’t be very creative under massive pressure, so this was probably the key to Slum Runner’s success.

What did I learn?

For the hacky jam code level creation, I feel that if I’d have been a bit bolder and had taken a risk refactoring the way the level content was input, I could have saved a ton of time creating levels. This might have allowed me to polish up the art and add some sound to submit for the compo. However, I think it might have been a make-or-break decision. If I spent an hour or two trying to figure out the problem I might have lost all motivation to finish the game at all. This leads to my next lesson…

Avoiding all possible stress was really nice. I’ve never had a jam go so smoothly. I think because I was rushing as fast as I could, with crappy hacky code, and a relatively simple game… I never hit a hurdle that would typically demotivate me and reduce my productivity. Playing it safe was probably a very productive idea, despite each level taking me 6x as long to input.

I’m really finding out what my limits are for Ludum Dare, which is great. I know I’m a terrible programmer and artist, I worked as hard as I could for the entire 72 hour period. I know that for this particular concept, there’s nothing more I could have done personally to make it better. Any improvements 100% required more time or more skill. I think that’s a really nice thing to think about. For the next Ludum Dare I can now focus on one of two things; improving my skill level, or finding a concept with more potential.

I suppose the high level behaviour I’ve learned from the final LD of 2015 is that I really shouldn’t care so much. I put way too much pressure on myself and the final result. It’s a competition with no prize that’s supposed to be about a final product you can be proud of. I learnt this time that when I just give up caring about where I place in the rankings, whether I hit the compo deadline over the jam, and whether I create something super revolutionary… I can work much better, much faster, and have a much higher quality end result.

The Future

What I like about Slum Runner is that it feels pretty much complete. I have a feature already built that I just didn’t have time to build levels for, so I could go back and do that… but overall it does what it says on the tin and it’s a nice little holistic experience. I usually feel super guilty about not going back to Game Jam games and improving/building on them, but I’m ok with that here.

If I get a ton of good feedback then maybe I’ll reconsider, but for now I’ll see what the results are tomorrow (or is it the day after?) and probably work on my larger side-project that I’ve been putting off for the whole holiday period 😉

Thanks for reading and lemme know what you think about the game!

 
snow eater has almost passed number of ratings!

not played it yet? PLAY IT HERE

Hello Friends,

First I want to desire a HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone!
I hope in 2016 we can make many games and obtain much success in our projects!

Also I want to make a last invitation to play my game Armageddungeon:

I launched a post compo (beta) version with a lot of enhancements and will be pleased if you play it here!

Kind Regards,
Diel Mormac

I made an Android build of my open world racing game Unintended Acceleration.

There are some differences from the desktop version (seen below). I moved the HUD elements so you wouldn’t obscure them with your fingers and added the visible arrows for steering. I also tweaked the lighting a bit for performance.

Aside from some shameless advertising for our LD34 game entry: Spinning Around, we will be describing some of the more interesting aspects of making this game.

For this jam, we focused on the ‘two-button-controls’ theme. We wanted to make a puzzle platformer where can only go left and right, but with a ‘twist’: You go around in circles.

Our first idea was to model and pre-bend all our assets in our modeling tool. It quickly became clear that this would make it very hard to align the models correctly in Unity and even harder to build levels.

Our solution was to create a script that automatically converts a flat 2D platformer level built in Unity to a circular, bent version. In short, the script moves and rotates all level components so that they map on the cylindrical level shape, and also ‘bends’ all meshes so that they correctly fit in a circle. This script took some precious jam time, but it made levelbuilding so easy and fun!

The bending, combined with some nice detail/variation textures on the props and some custom a composed groovy music track  really made the game world come alive!

Overall, we are very pleased with the result. If you haven’t played our entry yet, don’t hesitate and visit our entry page. We hope you enjoy the game as much as we did making the game over the weekend.

PS: if you get stuck, Little-Burrito made an awesome review of our entry on Youtube.

I’ve made a gif of my game, The Gardener.

Hey everyone!

Thank you to all who have played my game! I’ve enjoyed playing all your entries, but the rating period is almost over! I’d appreciate any final ratings and feedback before judging ends, I hope to get a few more votes in. Play Edo Arena.

New animation stances

Sometime after the deadline (I’m not sure when, it’s not done yet) I will release Edo Arena’s post compo version. I didn’t have time to add much to this yet but my main goal is to tidy up the animations and item store. I hope to tweak the gameplay as well. However, I’m putting together an update for my bigger project so I can’t devote all I can to this post compo version. There will also be Mac and Linux standalone downloads.

Read my Post-Mortem here. If you haven’t seen the timelapse, take a quick look!

Thanks for reading and I hope you all get great results! ☺

Tags: compo, ld34, unity3d

Hello all! I turned my Ludum Dare entry into a kickstarter! I really enjoyed making “The Journey East,” and I think with better art and sound it can become a fantastic game!

You can check out the Kickstarter here!

And if the game seems interesting, you can try it here first!

Just posting to announce that our game where you’re a hovership thing dodging stuff coming at you faster and faster still indeed exists, and you can play it here.

We’re looking at doing an Android version. That might be cool!

We have made game Star Warrior mixing cheesy 80s and Star Wars styles.

Star Warrior

PLAY & RATE IT

Game was done in Unity and we aimed for smooth and joyful gliding mechanics. My friend kozun took care of steering, camera movement and whole logic behind space shuttle. Later on programmed nearly whole gameplay. It was inspired by mario and we wanted to take advantage of terrain. Yeah, based on your feedback we are aware now, it’s not so perfect but we couldn’t came up with anything better at that time. I’ve figured out wireframe shaders and experimented with shading effects. I’ve parametrized every detail of dunes and lava look, the world is endless. Then I made space fighter model and painted skybox. At the end I had to rewrite all wireframe shaders since WebGL does not support geometry shaders and update some screen effects since WebGL does not support MovieTexture as well. We had quite busy week and tons of fun working on it. Hope you like it!

Tags: 80s, ld34, starwars, synthwave, tkgames, unity

Excited to see all the results for LD34, it was a gr8 jam. Looking forward to LD35!

Our game High Noon Swinger was made for the 2 button controls theme, we did actually add in some growing to the character, but it requires completing an easter egg to see it. Overall we love what we came out with. tweaking the controls is definitely a must for improving this game, we think it could be a really fun and simple PvP game. Thanks for all the feedback! Love being apart of the community.

PS: Since it’s last day I’m going to give anyone that plays the password for the easter egg 😉 there are two passwords “hotdoge” and “weiner”

Link to da Game

Hi everybody! I enjoyed a lot this LD, my first one and I’m feeling like writing a Post-Mortem and sharing with you my favourite games.

I’m happy with my first experience with LD. I participated on the compo and it was quite a hit. The weekend went terribly amazing and crazy (and short). To get some inspiration for the main idea of the game I got a little bit… intoxicated, which helped me a lot with the music creation. I am a musician so I always work this way:

• First, I record myself improvising about an hour and a half on the piano while thinking about the subject.
• Then, I select the best melodies and play them on loop to help me think about the gameplay and graphics, all at a time.
• When I got some clear sprites, backgrounds and ideas about the gameplay I focus on art or gameplay (depends on which one makes me feel more comfortable) and after that all goes smoothly.

Now, what went right?

• I managed to finish my project (Actually, I think it’s the first project I finish).
• Graphics went waaaaay better than expected. I know they’re not great, some people dislike them but I’m terribly bad at drawing, real bad. So I’m happy with them. Funny thing is that I randomly found a filter on Gimp that I liked. Graphics are shit without it.
• The plot is more solid, deep and playable than I thought I could ever do in 48 hours.
• Some conversations are funny.
• Music is great! I was soooo inspired.

So… what went wrong?

• I had to hurry a lot in some scenes, music jam part went very bad. The music didn’t loop ok, the sounds you could make are terrible, etc. I wanted to make more games on the game scene…
• I worked with RPG Maker XP, wich doesn’t give you as many posibilities as Unity or Gamemaker does.
• It’s a walking and talking game… nothing interesting about gameplay. But there are some masterpieces with the same gameplay 😀
• I wanted to use the “two button controls” theme too.
• The installation is full of problems for some users. Some people needs to install adittional software. Sorry, its my first upload.
• As I saw in other entries, the have around 60-70 ratings. Mine have only 32.

You can check my game here:

Now, here are some of my favourites. I’m sure I forget lot of games, but here are some I remember:

Shot snap – Very creative game about perspective. You have to understand how this game works and its difficult but awesome when you understand it.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=8101

Grow a beard! – Hilarious game about growing a beard. Its gameplay are mini-games

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=65958

Gjallarhorn – Interesting gameplay and superb graphics and music

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=50652

As I said, I forgot tons of games that I enjoyed, but these remind on my thoughts.

Thanks to you all, and thanks to Ludum Dare! Enjoy this last day and good luck with the results! And Happy New Year! See you on the next LD

I’m been working on a post-compo version of my LD game Sanctuary Station, cleaning up the codebase, and adding some new controls/features.

Some improvements:

• Plan multiple moves ahead
• NPC movement orders (the grey arrows)
• NPC behaviour & hitpoints

But now that that is mostly done, I am making more missions! First one is where there are two alien races that are mortal enemies and you want to save them both.

Of course, I then tried to make them fight to the death instead… (yes all grey ones are dead bodies :D)

A real massacre…

Play my original LD entry to see the pod-puzzling part in action. (not the combat, as of yet ;))

146 votes so far, this is awesome!!!

Thanks a lot everyone for playing our game Long Long: A snake lies in the Past and giving great feedback!

Tags: 2D, 2d game, ld34, LongLong, mashup, parody, pixelart

I joined this ludum dare compo for the first time and learned my lesson. I did not have a plan and did not start off with any base code. I decided to do it in C++ and SDL. Also not the best choice. I spent the first day trying to get music working then realized that my computer speaker was broken. Second day I scrambled to get the game playable and somewhat failed. After that, the game was just available on Linux for a couple days. Then I made a windows version which was very glitchy. All in all a good experience and I am going to do again, this time actually making a playable game!

Hey everyone!!

So I’ve played and rated around 171 games so far for this Ludum Dare (which is a crazy amount but don’t get me started on those who’ve somehow rated around 200-400 entries) and before judging ends tomorrow, I’d like to show you (in no particular order because picking favourites is already hard :V) my top 5 entries so far (i.e. the ones you should totally give a go):

O3000

Guru

Super Lefty Garden Fighty

Soulless Capitalist Robots

Space Plant 6000

Also, since judging ends tomorrow, I’m going to shamelessly plug my local multiplayer entry Rolla Grolla Arena once more because why not (There’s 72 votes for it so far and I’m aiming to reach 100 by the end).

Click the pic to play!!

Hey guys, just wanted to give one final push and encourage you all to play my game, Twin Condition. I am so grateful for all the feedback I’ve received so far. I’ve been blown away by so many of your entries and had a blast playing them.

Below is a video of a complete playthrough of my game. Thank you everyone and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare!

Play Twin Condition

As soon as the two button theme was announced, I knew that I wanted to make a game where you used a sword and a gun.  The sword would be used to gain forward movement as you cut through enemies, and the gun would use backwards momentum as the gun recoil would push you back from wherever you were shooting at.  My first idea was for a side scrolling infinite runner type of game, but in my head the mechanics didn’t seem to mesh that well for that kind of game.  My second idea was for a top-down room clearing shooter, which seemed like a better fit for the mechanics, but I wasn’t in love yet.  The idea I went with was for an arcade arena shooter that used gravity to add extra importance and nuance to the movement mechanics.

The end result is Captain NinjaBeard.  This is my fourth Ludum Dare and in my opinion, this is by far my best game.  The mechanics work really well to create a frantic, fast paced experience.  You can of course go HERE to play, rate, comment, subscribe, follow the game on Twitter and MySpace, etc.

(Just ignore that fact that I’m plummeting to my death in this picture)

Things I liked/ went well:

• The Mechanics work like a dream.  The wild movement and spray of your gun complements the incredibly precise movement of your Katana really well.  It’s always nice as a designer when things just work.
• The difficulty curve is nice and snappy.  One of the biggest mistakes I made with my second game, Final Breakfast, was that the difficulty curve was so slow that you would never want to replay the game.  Arcade games often need a much steeper curve than you’d think in order to keep them interesting across multiple playthroughs.  I ended up more than doubling the speed of the difficulty increase in this game, and I still think it wouldn’t hurt to be raised a bit more.
• The Primary color pallette works great.  It wasn’t something I planned since the beginning but it was something that sort of developed as I started to finalize the look of the game.  The red and yellow objects really pop against the deep blue backdrop.  The color pallette isn’t completely consistent accross some of the earlier sprites (like the UI) but that’s just a small issue.
• The death sound/animation turned out really well.  It’s always a huge plus when dying in a game makes you laugh.

Rough spots:

• I was completely out of my element with trying to make a seascape.  Originally, I was going to add waves and ripples to my ocean backdrop, but when it came time to actually drawing the background, my attempt was… pretty embarrassing.  I ended up just slapping some parallax on to some blue rectangles and clouds, which actually turned out looking ok.  It’s very clean, but it’s not particularly impressive.
• Sound was a nightmare.  Usually just going into SFXR and cranking out some sounds is the easiest part of the whole process, but as I found out, SFXR can’t make sound effects that loop very well, which I needed for my laser enemy.  Luckily, I eventually remembered that Milky Tracker, the tracker I used, can make excellent looping samples.  I was going to make a looping sound for the rockets as well but I couldn’t make anything that sounded pleasant so I just made a one time sound effect for when the rockets enter the game which ended up being an important game element since you could now tell when the rockets have spawned and how many there are in the group without seeing them.  I was also going to make a sound effect for the waves you create when you get close or shoot at the water, but I couldn’t make anything that didn’t sound like ear cancer so I just made the spray silent.  Overall, the sound turned out fine, but I lost a lot of time and got pretty frustrated through the whole ordeal.

So far, apart from my first game, all of the games I’ve made have been lighthearted, simple arcadey action games.  Next Ludum Dare, I’d like to try something a bit more complex with maybe a bit more mood and atmosphere, but I really can’t know what I’m going to make until the competition starts and the theme is announced.  I don’t want to force myself into making a game I’m not really inspired by so who knows what kind of game I’ll make next.

A little later than planned but All Ways Down Post Jam beta version is now available.

Changes include:

• Various bug fixes,
• Increase pellet size,
• Faster player,
• Input from left and right arrow keys,
• 5 new levels,
• New obstacle type – Zapper
• And most importantly, Camera Shake!

The post jam version can be either downloaded or played in browser over on its itch.io page.

Or if you haven’t already, you can check out the jam version of All Ways Down on its entry page over here

Tags: 2D, All Ways Down, Post Ludum, unity, update

A screenshot of our game, Susception!

Hello, everyone!

Judging is drawing to a close in less than 25 hours, and I would genuinely appreciate some extra feedback on the game my friend teledoor24 and I made, called Susception. This was our first Ludum Dare, and any constructive criticism would really help us improve our process for future competitions.

Susception is based around feeding, splitting, and growing a small colony of cells, all while fending off incoming viral invasions. It was created and programmed in Unity, with art assets created using GraphicsGale. It can be played in-browser using the Unity Web Plugin, or run as a standalone program on Windows.

Play it here!

Thank you!

-WolfkingW

Harvest Dues is a match-3 style game where you manage resources to grow plants and upgrade your farm in order to pay back the loan you took out to get the farm in the first place!

Play Here

We want to say:

• “Thank you” to everyone who participated in LD 34. It was a blast making a game for this event and we had great fun playing your games.
• “Thank you” to the Ludum Dare hosts and orga teams. This is really a stellar event and went just flawless, like everytime.
• “Thank you” to everyone who played and rated/commented our game Bloat Blaster. We really appreciate your feedback and and every submission to our HighScore list.
• “Thank you” to everyone on Twitch and YouTube who covered our game. No matter if you liked it or not, we learned so much about our game and it´s flaws just by watching you play it.

Besides being part of this awesome global event, making a game and playing yours we could also recruite the artist of Bloat Blaster for our upcoming next game.

If you want to check it our, we would appreciate your visit and “like” on our Facebook page. We will announce the project soon and will keep you guys updated with the progress of the development.

See you all next time!

Marcus – The Arrival Games

Make sure to check the Post Compo Version out! Includes Three Types of Difficulties for Classic Mode, New Power Ups/Power Downs, More Music, and MULTIPLAYER!
I’m currently at 186 votes and would absolutely LOVE to get to 200, let’s make it happen! We’ve only got about 15-20 Hours! c:

And if I haven’t rated your game yet, drop a link in the comments please!

Hi guys

i was really amazed to obtain way more votings than on last LD
For those who did not played my game yet :
could you kindly  : play and help me get 11 more reviews to reach 100 !
that would be awesome !

links to the game are here :
http://tinyurl.com/LD34-2gB

Thanks in advance to those who’ll take time to test !

It was my first LD and want to get many reviews and feedback. Can someone review my game?

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62226

This was our first Ludum Dare and we had alot of fun and pain making the game.

Thank ya’ll for the nice words and feedback. If you have not tried it yet, give it a try Here!

Adam and Markus

This is my 7th Ludum Dare, and I know it’s basically tradition for all of us to complain about themes once they are chosen. However, out of the previous 6 times I’ve participated, I don’t remember the theme seriously HARMING games. Even the entire game on one screen theme probably produced some neat games. Maybe they were small in scope or a little annoying because of the one screen, but normal controls could be used etc.

However, out of 30-something games I played and rated this time (and that’s low by my normal standards), plus my own game, I feel some games were actively HARMED by the two-button theme. I know it’s theoretically optional, but many developers including myself apparently decided that we wanted to use it — or that perhaps we would be judged harshly for ignoring it and using the other theme.

Whatever the reason, many people including me ended up using two controls, and in some cases made neat, clever games THAT WERE REALLY ANNOYING TO PLAY. I thought maybe Morse code would be a clever idea, but the timing was too difficult for the vast majority of players. Even if the two-button mechanic was creative (maybe one does one thing, and one does the other thing, and both does a third thing), it might range from glitchy to frustrating to nearly ruining the player experience.

I may be a minority on this, and I’m sure some games WERE good even with two buttons. But next time you’re voting on a theme, I respectfully ask this: Please consider voting for a theme that relates to content rather than mechanical restriction. I really feel that the player experience will be better because of it.

My first ludum dare game ended up becoming chaotic(in a good way), with awful sound but I’m quite happy with it, try the chaos yourself and tell me what you think !

Chaotic Potato(my game): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=64420

Tags: #potatoe, 2D, chaos, compo, flash, html5, ld34, Ludum Dare, potato

Hi everybody and happy new year!

For reminder Switchies entry is reachable following this link.

Post jam version is actually in development. We still improve our game and you can play our last version here: play.switchies.xyz.

Thank you for your support,

Switchiers

Another Ludum Dare is almost over, we had a lot of fun participating this time as much as the previous time and we hope you enjoyed it as well. Let the year 2016 be a successful one to all of you gamers and indie devs!

If you haven’t tried BoltStorm yet, you can:

PLAY HERE!

We’ll see you next LD35. Keep making awesome games!

Cheers.

Hello my fellow ludum dares. I only need 9 plays to get to a 100 playes in total help me out. And try and SAVE THE OAK.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=40092

Hi there, folks! So… we’d like to tell you how was our first experience developing a game in 72h for LD34 with Unreal Engine 4.

Everything began at 3:00 a.m (Spain). Our first reaction on the “two themes draw” issue was… well, laughter! Our first Ludum, and beggining like this…!

We had a breath, and then we decided to make a very very simple game, talking about mechanics. It was our first time joining LD, we didn’t want to be incautious. We had to plan something “accomplishable” for us in 72h without dying in the process.

Finally we decided to make a “choices” game, where you only had to decide which button to push and when to push hit. Relfexes were the key. Also, we wanted to make it frenzy, so the player had to look at both sides of the screen without rest.

And then, we started searching for references and making sketches at the art department. We wanted a Little carácter, but very very glutton, (related to “growing” theme)

Once we had the main ideas and sketches clear, we did a layout, so that the “coders” could have something to work in as soon as posible, and the “artists” could finish modelling.

While the layout was being done, we started with the PJ. It was important thtat this one was the first “final model” to be done, so that the animator could start rigging, while the rest kept on modelling props and scenario.

Lightmapping and Ambient Occlusion textures done, as well, and then, to UE4!!

Once modelling was finished, we did the UVs and then gave them to the RIG department.

Rigging and Skinning finished, so our animator could start as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, all objects were modelled and UVs were done, so that UE4 lightmapping worked perfectly and optimized for HML5.

When every UVs was ready, we started rendering all lightmaps and shadows. Then, we treated them in Photoshop and passed each texture to each material.

We wanted some variety in the suitcases, so we did 3 different textures. It’s a pity, but we couldn’t use them in the end

Once every model and map was done, we put toghether everything in UE4, replacing the initial layout.

In order to optimize and make it work smooth in HTML5, every light was “Cooked” and the used the least amount of opacities we could. We also used simple materials, as well. Almost all lighting work is pre-rendered.

To achieve the ‘growing’ effect, we used morphers, so that we can make it “grow” as he swallowed.

Meanwhile… in the “coding” department…

After the “initial joke” (two simultaneous themes), we took a while to think how we could structure this game, and more important. What did we need?

• A system that pulls out the suitcases in both ways.
• A “suspicious case” detector.
• A “feeding tube”, where we could gather the suitcases.
• A suitcase with some different internal values and a “thruster”
• And a “game script” that could connect everything

We decided to use “Blueprints”, because in this game we didn’t need extremely complex coding, and results with these are just great, they’re easy to do and intuitive.
So, we started to work in separate parts and, the moment we had the layout ready, we started putting everything toghether.

This is a very basic scheme. Each scanner “reads” an internal value the suitcases going through have. A boleean (Radiactive? True: scanners change material to “Green”, False: Leave the suitcase alone!)

Each scanner have three colliders. “In”, changing the suitcase material in case Plutonium is “true”. “Out” turns the material back to normal in case it changed previously (and the player couldn’t grab the suitcase on time), and “feeding tube” collider, which “gathers” every suitcase the player decide to pick.

There is also a “BoxTraceForObjects” collider that “sucks” every suitcase inside it when the player push the button.

Each suitcase is a “dummie blueprint”, containing only a boolean value, mesh with its materials, a thruster, activated only when “sucked”, and some internal values, as speed and direction.

The tube is an array, storing suitcase in the lower part and feeding “Springol” in the upper part. We add a “floating” effect to the suitcase and kept the material color of each sucked suitcase.

To pull out suitcase, as well as point calculation, “radiactivity” indicator, etc… we used the same blueprint to control and communicate them all.

And… well, that is the most important part!! Now… talking about audio…

This was the most “abandoned” part of the Project, but we really liked the result in general. We used, mostly, Audacity. (Free, simple… did I say free?) for the main SFX. We took most of the sound effects from freesound.org, but “Springol” voices were our recordings.

Fort he “feeding tubes” (or the suckers) we used turbine sounds, mostly, and treated them so that it fits with the main idea we had in mind.

For Springol, we only could finish “joy” and “death” sounds. (Poor, por Springol), which are, basically, my voice treated with so many filters. We couldn’t make a proper ‘character’ design. 😛

Fort he music we had, literally, just one hour! We used Logic Pro X and lots, lots of VST, and started playing, just having in mind one thing: it had to be a loop, so it couldn’t be too “messy” for the player (we didn’t want you to get bored of the music).
And that was, literally, the only consideration we could have about music… it’s a pity, but we think the results are really nice, if we consider we only had… one hour!!! L

Anyway, again, we thing the results are quite good. Just take… an ear!!!

So… i think that’s all! We hope you like this game. In the future we will fix some stuff, like playability, achievements, difficulty (suitcase types, time…) and it’s quite sure we’ll be making iOS and Android versions in the future so… keep up!

Cheers!

Only 13 hours before the end of the rating and this is our last post!

It contains only one message to you:

CHECK OUR GAME BEFORE THE TIME RUNS OUT

HERE IT IS: Play Glow&Grow

AND A TRAILER OF COURSE:

Entry page

my first ludum dare…
only 3 more votes needed…
so play
Snow Eater

Less than 12 hours remain to play and rate games! I am going to try and play as many as I can today, and I would appreciate if you would check out my game, Retro Rebound Challenge,  as well.

Overall, my first Ludum Dare was a success! I did actually release something, I used Unity to publish, and I am working on a level editor for RRC with hopes to polish this game enough that I can be released on Steam.

Looking forward to the next LD.

LD34 was a blast for our team.  We’re extremely grateful for the ratings, comments, and feedback that people have given our game so far!  Now that we’re down to the final hours for reviews, we wanted to ask for anyone’s last-minute thoughts, and, to give that some context, we hoped it would be fun to walk through the design process that went into our game’s art and animation efforts.

• Play Sushi Roll here, if you’d like to see the game in action.  (We’d love your review!)

After a while of grappling with the double-themes of the jam, our team got a huge creative charge out of taking the “let’s just start working” approach, which let us divide up our first technical and creative steps.

On the design side, the first thing to tackle was naturally our star and hero, Fugu the pufferfish.  The pufferfish (his name didn’t happen until mid-day Saturday or so) was the first of a few ideas meant to capture the “Growing” theme (among others such as a pig that grew by eating, a snowball that grew by rolling up more snow, and just a man that happened to fall down a hill… whose misadventures made him “grow as a person,” we joked).  While all of these were fun and funny to us, the pufferfish had a kind of instant magic once he appeared on the screen, and gave us all the laugh that sent him rolling along down our creative pipeline.

Blender (free and open source!) gave our team the full 3D production workflow we needed to produce assets for Unity — sculpture, polygon modeling, texture painting, rigging, and animating.

Our team had decided even before the jam to commit to making a fully 3D game, so the first step was to get our fish sculpted in Blender.  This was the first challenge in matching the art to the theme(s), since this meant that our star required two different base sculptures — one to represent both his puffed and unpuffed state.  (The puffed version actually came first, and was saved and then I sculpted that down to his unpuffy self for the second version.)

With a normal model, the next step would be to adapt the sculpture into a game-ready, lower-polygon model.  We actually had to do this pretty differently, essentially making the same model fit both sculptures, in order to reflect both of the puffed/unpuffed states.  This was one of our bigger design challenges, and took a good bit of finessing to get just right, but when it came together we had a version of Fugu that was able to morph (using Blender’s Shape Keys feature) between both states, using a numerical value that we would later be able to drive in Unity.

The same low-polygon mesh had to be adapted to fit both original sculptures, letting us make use of Blender’s “Shape Keys” (“BlendShapes,” in Unity) to morph between them incrementally.

The result was something both simple and perfectly suited to the second theme goal: “two-button controls.”  One button grows, one button shrinks.  The game design decisions (where growing makes you pop off the ground, and boosts your speed) all fell in line as a natural progression from that idea, giving us room to test, tune, and try to make it feel fun.

After a team vote on what would ultimately be our game’s main color palette, Fugu was given his texture pass (painted in Blender) and finalized.  …But not before we all decided to push the design one step further and give our fish even one more level of “hyperinflation” puff.  (Sadly, we didn’t get to use this extra-puffy state by the end of the jam, but ohh, do we have plans…)

(Side note: The wincing puffed face only got funnier when we realized that, as he rolls, he rolls over his face.)

With our fish all ready to go into our world, the logical next step was to fill that world with things that would try to kill him.

First up was the (slightly less-than-menacing) “foe” of the tree, which we tried to keep simple enough to pay off twice over, as the simple low-poly shapes of the leaves were easy to repurpose afterwards into the rocks and pebbles that would block the path.  Navigating over and under these obstacles is intended to set the pace for the bulk of the game’s flow, so it was important to get these into the game early, letting us start to fine-tune them into our terrain generation workflow.

Next up was the first of the true villains, who we designed as the answer to the question of: “if trees force you to shrink, what forces you to grow?”  Enter the natural enemy of fish everywhere: the cat.  Running into one would force you to puff up in order to get by unharmed — too small, and you’re cat food.

(Pretty much the sushi chefs of the animal kingdom.)

The cat was our first rigged/animated character in the game, and took a fair bit of time to get implemented.  We knew we wanted him to have a menacing pounce to avoid, but seeing him in action (in Blender), gave us all another useful creative kick, and we all laughed at the idea that this cat (when bopped by a large-enough Fugu) could be yet another thing that rolled down the hill with you.  (Poor kitty.)

With the cat modeled, rigged, animated, and finally painted, we had (most of) the main art assets we were hoping for (mostly) in place.  We started on the final assets — a quick Japanese-styled pagoda to sit on top of our hill as our deadly restaurant escape scene intro — and started to pull everything together in Unity.  This was Sunday evening.  We were getting close to the end of our art assets to-do list, and (somehow) even a bit ahead of schedule…

Which, naturally, meant it was time to go big or go home — the last idea that had been lurking in the room (initially deemed too much to hope for) was to load in the villain himself: the Sushi Chef.  It’s hard for me to imagine the game without him at this point, but even for his huge role, he was actually a fairly last-minute long-shot of an idea to try to build him by the jam deadline.  (This also meant programming him, after all.)  But, hey, we decided to go for it.

There was really only time for one round of character design, so it was important to get our chef “right” on the first try.  We agreed right away to keep him pretty cartoony, in order to let me design and sculpt him quickly, keep his rig and animation simple, and of course to match him to the cartoon style of the fish and the cat.  Thus, between trying to keep his facial features simple and trying to keep him a bit funny (he is a knife-wielding would-be fish-murderer, after all), I tried to simplify his face by pulling his headband down over his eyes, colorfully emphasizing what had become a running theme of cartoonishly-angry eyebrows in the other character designs up to that point.  He made us laugh on the first try, which we decided meant that he was probably good enough to move ahead with.

He’s a man with a dream.

By the (late) end of the night, the chef was ready to go as a low-poly game model, rigged, animated, and painted, and our fish was free to be chased by a floating placeholder-Unity-capsule no longer — and, instead, by an angry, knife-waggling chef.

Our group parted ways on early Monday morning, leaving the final design work of our game’s logo and game over screen graphics (a last-minute 3D scene modeled and rendered just in time to drop into the final jam build) to be assembled remotely.

It was amazing to see it all come together, once everything was rolling, hopping, pouncing, and knife-waggling together in one combined setting.  That, plus the final versions of the movement/controls, terrain generation, and chef-chasing functionality — and all set to the final music handed off by our team’s musician — really pulled it together into something that we were extremely proud of.

We wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone that played, rated, and commented on our game.  It’s been extremely gratifying to get all of your kind and helpful feedback, and it’s given our team the drive to keep working.  We’re happy to say that we’re already well on our way to implementing some of our next ideas, which we hope will help turn Sushi Roll from a prototype into a really fun little game.  So please stay tuned — and send us your thoughts!

• Try out Sushi Roll here, if you haven’t already.  We’d love your review!

S.A.A.A.M. Post Jam version is out now! There’s a new ending, faster doors, bug fixes and much, much more. There’s even a sharknado for you to find! Why are you still here? Go play it!

S.A.A.A.M.

Tags: fireline games, post-jam, saaam, sharknado, sharks

Intro

12-ish hours remains for voting at the time of this post. Normally, this would be an opportune moment to showcase my game (which I still will), I think it’s also the perfect time to jump the bandwagon and list down my favourite games for others to try and vote on as well. I feel these entries deserve more attention, so without further ado, and in no particular order…

1 Button Wizard X2 by BoxedMeatRevolution

This game can be summed up as “1 Button Magicka”. It has a surprising amount of depth for a one button game, and the bots are actually rather decent. Some people might not dig the art, but it has a certain charm to it that I like. And it’s consistent. Try playing it with a friend. It’s extra impressive that the dev used one button for each mage, actually limiting the number of buttons used at any time to two.

SlimeCraft by jacklehamster

If you told me an RTS existed that only used two buttons, I would’ve scoffed at your face at the notion. I mean, how is it possible to condense resource management, logistics and strategy down to TWO BUTTONS? And yet, here I sit, flabbergasted that something like SlimeCraft exists. It’s actually reasonably easy to pick up and get used to, and can support up to 4 players! Splitscreen! What other RTS can do THAT?

2 button metroidvania by JaJ

Another very interesting entry! I’m a sucker for Metroidvanias, so the concept of a two-button one definitely sparked my interest. Don’t expect any story here, but the game does follow the formula correctly. You can learn new skills, as well as go back to previous places once inaccessible to you. With two buttons, the controls are understandably complex and difficult sometimes, but the whole game is rather polished otherwise.

Frogtale by rzuf

If you loved Undertale, you may enjoy this game. Comparing ANY LD game to Undertale is probably rather hard to believe, but it does come close. The mechanics aren’t the most original, sure, but the humor is top-notch. At least, I found it hilarious. It starts off a little slow, but after gaining a few levels, talking to the quirky NPCs and beating the game, you’ll be left wanting more.

become a game developer in 60 seconds by unprompted

Another entry that totally blew my mind. If you think playing RTS with 2 buttons was difficult and complicated, what about making a functional game using only 2 buttons? I couldn’t believe it when I tried it out, but it works rather well indeed. Sure, the engine is limited, since you only have 2 buttons, but damn is it cool to see the product of your ‘hard work’ actually playing before your eyes.

Final Words

Of course, this is where I’d showcase my game to play. Remember to play the regular version, not the post-compo one, if you intend to vote. I hope you all had a wonderful Ludum Dare. I know I did. Here’s to the next LD jam!

Here’s a timelapse of my sixth Ludum Dare game named GrowForce.

Entry page

If embedded video doesn’t work here’s a link

Tags: final timelapse, ld34, timelapse, unity

Finally got around to uploading the source for anyone that wants it.

Also, there’s not much time left for voting so please try my compo entry and leave me some comments

Try it

THANKS!

If you haven’t tried our game, Box ‘N Bash, and would like to, time’s running out during Ludum Dare! Stack up boxes to fill your quota, but don’t smash the box goblins – and look out for the infamous boom boxes! Work fast and efficiently to get your teetering stack of crates to the tape, all while dealing with your antagonistic foreman.

Sound interesting? Give it a spin before time runs out on Ludum Dare 34.

Tags: box, ld34, unity

We’re entered the final 10 hours before voting for Ludum Dare closes, so time is running out to rate my entry, Grow in the Hole!, a 2D side-on procedurally generated golf game where the ball grows after every hit and gets smaller after being holed, meaning players also have to ensure the ball remains smaller than the hole as well as aim for a low score over 18 holes. Work is also beginning today to turn it into a ‘full’ release, which hopefully should be done by the end of January.

Away from the somewhat shameless self-promotion, I’d also like to point people toward Relay and Glow&Grow, my personal favourite entries from this Ludum Dare.

Thanks for reading and rating and good luck to everyone who took part. Here’s to the next one!

There’s only 10 hours left before the results are out ! 10 hours to try and rate more games, including mine : Stem ! Be quick !

And while I’m still here : I want to thank everyone who has tried, rated or commented on my game ! You guys rock !

(First of all, I was originally concerned about not having enough votes when I started this post, but I’m all good now. That said, you should still play my game because it’s cool, but perhaps consider playing other games too, there’s still time!)

Tamamystery is a cutesy virtual pet game with nothing mysterious or nefarious involved at all. Nope. Why would you suggest that? Also it’s in Flash, so there’s no download or anything, which means you should totes play it!

[Click to play!]

You should totes play this game

Now that that’s out of the way, lets get to what this post is about: How I came to using papercraft for my Ludum Dare game!

The first thing you’ll notice is my freakish hands holding some type of paper-craft device. But it wasn’t always going to be this way…

Once I knew I was going to do something Tamagotchi related, I started off by doing the classic Google image search to get ideas.

So many Tamagotchis…

I also watched some Youtube videos to get an idea of how the Tamagotchi gameplay typically works. I also came across this Tamagotchi device with the little cake on the top, which I liked, and is why I added a bow on the top of my toy.

Apparently if you’re into Tamagotchi videos then you also want to know how to make a Crochet Mini Coin Pouch

So I started creating the graphics of the game. I knew I wanted the game to look like a real device, and so it had to be fairly realistic looking. So I started in GIMP, first by taking photo of an actual Tamagotchi and adjusting the colours a bit. Using that as a basis, I was going to try to essentially redraw it in GIMP, but soon realised that it looked pretty bad, and was going to take a while to do.

(I’m not very good at this way of doing art)

So I ditched that idea. Then I remembered “Hey, I’ve done nice vector stuff in the past, right? I’ll do it in flash!”. I quickly realised that THAT was going nowhere too.

I was hoping the grid would help me make things even, but I couldn’t even get the curves to look right

So I drew this little place holder graphics and moved on. Also, here you can see I had the idea of having a background that’s permanently etched in the game, like some Tamagotchis and small toys do.

The “figuring out graphics is a problem for Future Jez” graphic

Then I tried to figure out what it would look like on paper, and an idea hit me: If I can make it look good on paper, why not just use that as the graphics as is! I have a whole bunch of cardboard in my room (I often use it for craft things for kids), I had everything I needed really.

Even though I wasn’t trying to make it look good, I felt like this sketch was better than my my actual graphics attempts

The actual process of making the toy wasn’t too hard, all I did was draw each piece lightly on the cardboard in pencil and then cut out the outline. I made sure to measure out a piece of cardboard with the same dimensions as the screen so that they lined up.

To put the pieces together, I used Blu-Tack, which is good for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s not permanent so you can move things around. Secondly, it makes the pieces stick out a bit, so you don’t just end up with a flat piece of cardboard, but instead have something with a bit of depth in it. Depending on how much Blu-Tack you use, you can adjust the height of each piece a little bit.

From side on, you can see the layers… kinda. That screen is coming of a little.

To get it into the game, I just took a photo on my phone, put it on the computer, and then skewed it a little bit to compensate for the slight angle I took it at. Then I scaled it to make sure the screen was a nice multiple of the game window size, in pixels, because otherwise you get awkward half-sized pixels or blurry edges due to anti-aliasing, and nobody wants that.

This one is nice in the way that you can clearly see that it’s made of paper, it’s not as obvious in the actual one.

It looked pretty good at this point, but I felt like it needed colour to look more like an actual device. So I added in the colour in GIMP by using layers with the “Multiply” blending mode. If you just transparently overlay a colour, you lose some of the contrast as all your shadows become lighter, whereas with multiplying, you preserve all the blacks as black, and keep the subtle paper texture better. That’s a little tip for ya.

Whee! Timelapses! (click to see the unsquished version)

And to add in the hands, I just took a photo of me holding it with one hand in the different positions, and photoshop’d that in with GIMP (am I allowed to say that?). It would’ve been nice to set up a tripod and take photos of me holding it in the different positions to get the shadows right, but that also would’ve taken a bit longer and would’ve meant I had to skew, scale and colour 4 photos instead of 1.

Whee timelapses again!

And that’s it! I had a lot of fun with using papercraft, I might try to make an all-papercraft game next time. I’ll probably need some better equipment though.

Thanks for reading! See ya later!

Tags: how to, papercraft, timelapse, tools

With the results approaching, some of you might be in a rush, and don’t know what games to play. Then, give a shot to SLUG STORM. We believe the game is really well polished for a compo entry, and we would like as many returns on it as possible !

You can play it here, please read the instructions and feel free to leave a comment ! 😀

I had a lot of fun picking out my favorite games last time, so I’ve done it again. They are still broken up into categories that I think each game excels at. I’ll be interested to see how highly these games rank against all of the entries.

Theme (“Two Button Controls” and/or “Growing”)

Mood

Fun (Engagement)

Audio

Humor

Graphics

Play Ours

If you liked the list, consider checking out my team’s game “Exponential Cris(m)is!”

view this list on my website

Tags: favorite games

TL;DR:

BOOOST Post-compo version is here!

Please compare it to BOOOST Compo version if you have time, and let me know if what I’ve changed is for the better 😛

———————-

Hey guys

It’s the last day, and I’m finally kicking my own ass to put this thing up! I’d been working on it on and off pretty much since the day after LD weekend, and… What can I say, it’s been a thoughtful couple of weeks.

Booosting the ship

I spent a lot of time tweaking the flight physics again, that being the thing that really defines this experience. It was a real struggle getting it between satisfyingly drifty and satisfyingly responsive. This new version is much more responsive in some ways, but does not let you do anything you want. It’s.

A big change was to the fuel system – instead of two bars, there is now one. Left and right flight does not require fuel, but thrusting directly up does. This lets the player manoeuvre when needed without worrying about fuel, but the regeneration and cost is higher than before, striking a new balance.

The top of the game field also expanded, affording the player more time to react to incoming ships, if they’re not invincible. You’re not always invincible while flying up – you’ll only be if you have 50% on your fuel meter and continued burning after the initial boost.

Booosting the enemy

The big bad changed from the wall of flame to an actual ship with armour and engines. This gave the player something to focus on besides what’s ahead. In the earlier levels, interacting with the boss isn’t really necessary, but later, the boss’s speed picks up, and your escape would be made easier if you blew up the boss’s engines, slowing it down.

The idea was to have more variety in the boss’s composition and components, but I haven’t gotten that far yet, and balancing the numbers on this has proven to be very, very very hard. I would love some input on how you perceive the difficulty of the game in its current state!

Play BOOOST Post compo!

Play BOOST original LD entry!

I started the new year off by getting back to my weekly gamedev streams. My original plan for this weekend was to work on my long term project, but I ran into issues even getting it to run, and rather than fight with that on stream, I pulled out my LD34 project, CentiSnake, and started adding some of the items that feedback had indicated would be good changes.

I’m already very close to having the first of those new features added: Custom color controls, allowing gamers to pick the precise color they would prefer. All that remains for that feature is to get it to save the value between play sessions.

I’m also going to add a volume slider, the ability to toggle the retro-CRT effect off, a help screen before new games start, and I’m going to clean up the sounds and graphics a bit more.

I’m excited to see what my actual scores were, and how I ranked, especially since this was my first ever game jam, and only my second game project at all.

So, there’s still a small time for voing, so that’s probably my last chance to post my game’s postmortem. That was my second Ludum Dare, and as last time, I’m so impressed of how many feedback I received in comparison of most global game jams! After saying that, I’ll explain the pros and cons of the game’s development.

Cons:

-Spent too many time fixing bugs that I should have prevented. That lowered a lot the game’s producction.

-Graphics. They are a bit rushed.

-Get some headache when making level design. May beacuse I was so obsessed at making 20 levels. Because of that obsession I made too many tutorial levels

-Pallete. Not sure why but I’m really bad at choosing a color scheme. In most comments of this and other games from mine, people says that colours hurts. May I should tryin at using a Game Boy pallete like in my entry of LD31. No sure if people noticed the level names above because of background.

-Music. Because of Compo rules and because I suck at music, I needed to generate it using CGMusic. Great program if you need music in a Jam, though.

Pros:

-Managed to get some good levels. That was one of my objectives, and I’m glad to have acomplished it.

-People actually liked the gameplay.

-Though I used only one theme, I think I implemented it well. Using growing here would force things too much.

-I think that the difficulty balance is good enough.

-Managed to enter in the Compo!

In conclusion, apart of graphics and audio, I hope to get a decent score in other categories (not in the top 100, though). What matters is that I’d fun making this game and got some good feedback.

Feel free to check the game =) http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=44355

Please do not feed it!

Play it, enjoy it, love it!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=53964

It was bound to happen one of these Dares. On the Saturday night of the compo, I lost power at my house and succumbed to sleep. Between the initial outage (around 11:30pm) and my ensuing extended power nap, I lost about 12 hours of development time in a 48 hour contest. Then I lost two more thinking that I should just give up and write this one off.

What was I thinking!?

For me, the spirit of Ludum Dare is that you make what you can and ship it. This time around, surprise: that limit was suddenly 36 hours instead of 48… and that’s it. Nothing else changed. Sure, 12 hours is a full 25% of the time allotted, and that means drastic cuts, but it doesn’t have to mean an unfinished experience. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

• Had to drop a number of features.
• Didn’t have as much time to polish as was necessary.
• Game felt full of potential but didn’t get a chance to deliver.

In other words, Demon Truck felt just like every other Dare project, just shorter. When I realized that, I was able to put the final hours into making the game a closed experience– one that starts and ends satisfactorily.

Enemies got cut and there are only two bad guys with two bad guy behaviors, all the other ones were dropped.

Upgrades are handed out in a static pattern over the course of four waves, and not randomized choices after each wave.

Waves are all built by hand in some awful code, and not the dynamic endless-wave style of previous LD projects of mine.

The game ends after a short set period of racing and demon-fooming, with a humorous nod to the power outage that made me cut things short.

Compared to many other LD compo entries, Demon Truck lacks complexity and challenge. However, the spirit of the Ludum Dare is not to make something complex and challenging, it’s to use the time you have to make what you can and ship it. Players can sit down with Demon Truck, have a fun ride, and be done in a few minutes. I’m proud of that, and it’s a lesson I’m taking with me to April’s contest as well.

Play it here if you’d like! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=5448

Hiring new employees.

As voting draws to a close, I thought I’d write a bit about our jam game Trimmer Tycoon and our post-jam progress. Our original game puts the player into the role of a barber shop owner. Your job is to take in customers, shave and color their beards as close to their wishes as possible as quickly as possible. You get more money the more accurate your shave and color are, but you can’t spend too much time on a single customer, you have rent to pay!

We were very happy with how the game turned out originally. The player feels the rush of trying to get customers out the door while staying accurate. When we looked at what we wanted to work on next, we knew we wanted the shop to keep evolving. You should be able to use your extra money on something: hiring customers, developing your shop, buying ads, etc. That’s the first thing we did. In the current version you can hire employees of varying skill levels and buy all kinds of decorations for your shop. Additionally, each satisfied customer adds to your shop’s popularity, which in turn brings in more customers more quickly. Dissatisfied customers reduce this stat. Buying decorations also add to your shop’s popularity. In addition to these new features, we fixed a few quality-of-life issues: the color sliders now start at the beards current color. You can now hear and see if you gained or lost money on a customer and how much.

Decoration shop (placeholder items)

So what’s next? Next big target for us is art. I feel very good about our game mechanics in their current state; the only thing that’s really missing is proper sprites for all the new stuff. We’ve been thinking of redoing some of the old stuff as well. One thing we’ll add to the in-game shop is the ability to buy a bigger place for your salon, which in turn makes more room for employees and decoration.

Thanks for playing our game and for all the lovely feedback!

Links:
Play Trimmer Tycoon here: improx.itch.io/trimmer-tycoon
Vote for us: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=59894
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/improxgames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/improxgames
Website: www.improxgames.com

We have further developed Flobe into a full game!

Now with added content, including new enemies, increased levels of difficulty, extremely challenging bonus rounds and KEYBOARD CONTROLS!

Due to the major changes we have made and the massive amount of content we have added, we have removed the download option from our Itch.io page (voting on our game had pretty much stopped anyway).  We didn’t want our game to be judged on it’s current state, and with all the development we’ve been doing, we didn’t really have time to do a Post-Mortem for Ludum Dare.  We thought it was best to just remove the download option and be very happy with the Ludum Dare votes we did get.

We have however, taken our newly expanded version of Flobe to Steam Greenlight!

We would greatly appreciate our fellow Ludumites to please go visit our Greenlight page and cast us a vote.

Thank you once again Ludum Dare for helping us improve our video game development and design skills. Making games for your jam is always a blast!

Thank you to everyone that played and voted for our game and we really hope you can show us some love in Greenlight!

Cheers!

~Forever Humble PDX~

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=590068485

Hello! Happy new year!

It’s only 5 hours left and the Mocos are waiting for you!

Try it here!

Thanks for playing!

Right now I have 18 votes, so I only need 7 more. If you play and rate my game with some friends and leave a comment, I’ll rate your game back in time for the end of the judging period! Play Super 2-Button Growdown by clicking here.

So if you havent tried our game Double Helix you realy should – it’s fun (i hope)!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=42427

This is our 4th Ludum Dare entry and our most accomplished game to date, we even have levels this time. Each time we do one of these we learn just how much we dont know and player feed back is a huge part in the learning we do on here. So we would appreciate any and all comments, be brutal, be honest, and help us improve.

Special thanks to Molpe for doing a let’s play of our Double Helix, we really appreciate it! If there are any other videos of our game in action our egos would love to see them.

Last chance to play and vote for my first LudumDare 34 Game Jam entry: Grow Big and Go Home! A big thanks to everyone who has provided feedback already.

Play it here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62227

Game Walkthrough:

I told myself I’d be more involved after submitting this time, but I let the Holidays get the better of me. I guess I still have a little bit of time to get a postmortem in. As always, I’m blown away at the creativity and ingenuity of everyone’s submissions. There are always more to play then I ever find time to get around to.

So this was my second Ludum Dare and I am, for the most part, pleased with how I’ve progressed since last time. We will start with the…

PROS:

• Was happy to experiment with music this time. I didn’t get to practice as much as I had hoped between Ludums, but I made a push before the compo started to learn the basics of MilyTracker and was able to produce a loop that I hope wasn’t too annoying.
• Made a time table this time and did pretty well sticking to it. Taking time up front to plan out and schedule makes a huge difference.
• Liked the look of my art (much more than last time). I think I made some simple choices that allowed me to get a look that I liked in a short amount of time.
• Actually finished in time to enter the Compo!

CON – I’m only going with one, because I was happy with everything else:

• My game mechanic/loop.

I tried to stay away from “snake/nibble” games as I figured they would be in abundance. When I started on Friday, I created a prototype for a procedural side-scrolling runner that involved using one button to grow the player and another to grow the world (shrinking the player). The problem was the procedural world was either too difficult or didn’t work well in the puzzle aspect I wanted. Once I realized I was designing levels, I didn’t want to fall into the same trap as last time. So I went to bed, that idea scrapped and no new idea.

When I awoke I had an idea for a much simpler mechanic of a guy that that could either a) turn a crank to charge a battery/light or b) shine the light. The light would in turn keep the monsters surrounding our player at bay. The goal was to see if you could manage the two tasks and see how long you could survive as the resolve of the monsters would increase. I proceeded to code the prototype for this idea.

While designing visuals for the prototype, I somehow let the idea become warped and started messing around with the mechanic. I never really took the time to evaluate the whole picture/project as I kept making tweaks and changes. This was my ultimate mistake. In the end, the final game mechanic feels very muddied and confusing.

I look forward to April and entering my third LudumDare, where I hope to expand on what I’ve learned through these past two weekends. Thanks to everyone that has already tried and commented and Happy New Year.

If you haven’t had a chance, you can try out ‘The Cube of Zanigriv’ here.

Tags: ld34 Postmortem

With the final hours ticking down before scores are revealed, I thought I’d fill the time by doing a post-mortem for my LD48 compo entry. Revolver is an action puzzle game about growing plants by rotating the planet toward favorable weather conditions.  You can play it here!

What Went Right

A:\> Let’s build a time machine!

Time management. Unlike most other jams, the first time ever I felt in control of my time. I didn’t get in everything I wanted to, but I delivered the key elements I needed to. I chose an idea with core mechanic that was design-complete. The idea hit both theme targets. By the end of Saturday, the sandbox prototype was playable, which is a target I don’t always hit. I did a really good job of “layering” my needs, ensuring that every element of the game had a placeholder first, before several iterations of refinement. I don’t just mean art, I also mean text, sound, and code. In this way, as time became short, I could say “you know, that placeholder here is good enough” and polish where it is more needed.

Challenge. I tweaked the levels to be tough on the timer, particularly the last 3-4 levels. While this got some users cursing at me, most said it was on the good side of challenging.

B:\> I’m not looking for judgement, just a yes or no — can you assimilate a giraffe?

Unity. I entered previous compos using Flaxen, which is built on HaxePunk using Haxe. It’s great stuff, but I’ve been wanting to get more experience with a game engine that has 3D, a lighting model, and a proper scene graph.  (Hopefully, HaxePunk 3.0 will have these things.) I had a really good time using Unity. I’m not so much of a Microsoftie so was I  surprised to enjoy many of C#’s features. I mean I’m never going to love capitalized function names, and Unity/MonoDevelop makes it excruciating to use third party libraries (see how haxelib does it), but overall it was smooth.

In-editor configuration. As much as possible, I exposed all level data and configuration to the editor. Each level was a prefab that I dragged to the Level Manager array in the order I wanted them. This made it easy to tweak and change the levels and messages. Unity does have a really ugly built-in array management with no drag and drop reordering, but it’s passable, and you can customize the inspector view to some extent with a little more time. The configuration for the item types were also fully exposed.

C:\> Good job doing basically nothing

In-game tutorial. Not only did I fit several levels, I also worked in a couple tutorial levels to explain the controls and concepts. I was very pleased to fit this in.

Unfiltered sarcasm. Because I layered my time, I used placeholders everywhere first, and this included the level message texts. The requirement for a placeholder is BUILD IT FAST, so I did what comes to me naturally. That is, I was a sarcastic and obnoxious ass. As time wound down, other things took up my time, and I never went back to the level text. As it happened, however, my sarcasm turned out to be a popular aspect of the game. So yay me and my immaturity!

What Went Wrong

D:\> Please, sir? Can we have some more, please?

Moar levels. I put in just enough levels to introduce the three types of atmospherics (rain, snow and tornado) and three plants (smirkflower, smeggplant, and flurp trees).  Barely enough time to dip your toes in.

Less samey. I envisioned a more complex dynamic between the atmospherics and plants. Although I exposed a lot of the configuration to the editor, I didn’t tweak them much. In the end, each plant had an atmosphere it grew 4X as fast in, and an atmosphere that stunted it’s growth completely to 0X. These values could have been tweaked to be more interesting, but with as few levels as I had in there, it would be an underused subtlety.

Moar items. I also pictured two other atmospherics (flock of birds, swarm of bees) that could move around the planet – this would have looked cool! It would have also fed into new asexual and sexual plants which spread via seeds and/or pollen, and were endangered by birds.

Moar animations. My biggest regret on the art side was not making time for a better plant-growth effect. It just scales out along the length, which kind of looks like growth, and kind of looks like it’s rising from a deep bow. What I really wanted was a dynamic art that could support a tweakable growth pattern. If I did that, maybe I could have fit in more plants.

Moar UI. The level transitions were very minimalist. The font was hard to read on some levels if there was foul weather near the south pole.

Overall I had a great time this Ludum Dare. My feedback has been largely positive. Regardless of my scores, I’m still very pleased with the result.

Tags: compo, ld34, post-mortem, screenshot, unity

This was our first Ludum Dare competition entry.

Game took 5 hours from concept to submission.
Removed time for Dinner and watching Red Vs Blue

It is a pure gameplay focused game.

No animations to distract attention.
Used both themes: Two Button Control and Growing.

Lessons Learnt / Postmortem

The comments provided a lot of invaluable feedback.

The biggest theme to summarise this would be:

1) Do not stray too far from the standard of what is expected.

A common comment was that having no visual feedback through animation made it difficult to play.

Our internal thinking at the time:

• We were just focusing on gameplay.
• It was a 50 / 50 decision and as there were only two of us, TrollPiggy vetoed as he was the lead 😉 (Not pointing fingers, just saying it how it is)
• We made it purely so that the player would try to psych each other out.
  • Think of how cycling sprints work in velodrome, they will follow each other slowly and then sprint when they think they can get the upper hand.
  • This is why there is very little on the actual screen itself.
  • There is like a meta game built in

It turns out that by doing this, it made it too hard to play.

A more standard design would have had animation and/or sound to provide additional sensory feedback.

3) Remembered how powerful Construct2 was as a tool

We first picked up Construct2 back in 2011. At the time, HTML5 was not that widespread, so game performance on different platforms was not very good. Trying to target mobile was quite difficult.
Since then, we have used both Unity and Unreal Engine 4.

Getting back into using Construct2 was just like riding a bike. After not having used it for a long time (years??) it was easy and felt natural to use.

Remembering how easy it was to use, allowed me to finish the One Game Per Month Challenge (#1GAM) after this Ludum Dare. I finished an additional 8 games before the end of 2015.

In Summary / TL;DR:

Keep expected parts standard and Construct2 is just like riding a bike. 😉

Sam and Mas Two Button Attack Game was TrollPiggy’s 2nd game, richardboegli’s 4th.

TrollPiggy:

1) RunGunSwordPunchKick: YouTube

richardboegli:

Tags: gamedev, ld34, ldjam

I just wanted to thank the community for all of your amazing feedback and lovely comments for FRUITWOLF. This was my first LD, and it has been the best thing to create and play amazing games.  <3

Here is a link to an ending which didn’t make it into the game due to time constraints (spoiler warning!). If you haven’t played it yet, here is a link to the game . Which ending do you prefer?

Don’t have much time but decided to write this little post mortem.

My game is here. It’s called Flower Power.

I didn’t have much time to make it so really went into minimalistic gameplay. First thing that came into my mind when I saw first theme “two button controls” was Timberman, made by developers from my country – Poland. I didn’t want to make 1:1 clone so I thought maybe I can make reversed gameplay – instead of cutting tree lets help it grow.  After some iterations and thinking with my girlfriend I immediately went to make what you see now.

All planets aligned all themes fit in After < 24h total the game was finished.

What went ok:

• themes fit perfectly
• challenging and nice gameplay
• graphics and animation

What went wrong:

• didn’t have much time to test it properly so there was little floating point related bug, when you have ~140 points plant is too high and collision detection goes crazy

What next:

People like to play this game, especially mobile build I made for android so it’s 100% sure I will release it for free on android with some ads to earn big $$$ 😛

Last words

I will try to spend the last few hours left to play some more games by you guys and I also encourage you to play and rate mine.

PS.: If you want you can also check my other game that is currently on Steam Greenlight. It’s design-based cyberpunk puzzle game – there’s demo version to download (win,mac,linux,android). If you like it please consider giving it your vote.

Cheers guys!

I’m so excited! That’s how I feel right now.

4 hours left till the Results come in! That also means, 4 hours left to RATE MORE GAMES! If you haven’t rated more than 30 games, you should try to get in about 10-20 now! And if you need more votes, drop a link in the comments and I’ll go check it out!

If you’ve already checked out my game, Arc, check out the Post Compo Version, it’s much better with more modes! But if you haven’t checked out my game yet, check it out! It’ll be fast, I promise. I also currently have 196 votes right now and would LOVE to get to 200! c:

Oof, families visiting for the holiday sure got in the way of scoring-period activities.

Oh well…

If you are looking for things to score last minute, I finished a browser port of our board game, Family Board Game Night: The Board Game, last night. It’s more a board simulator than a full video game, since you’ll have to read the rules and cards and figure out what to do, but this way, you don’t have to print everything out.

Here it is.

If anyone has a game that works well on cell phone browsers, let me know in the comments and I’ll score it on my bus ride home.

Unintended Acceleration gameplay

Just go here already.

Those of you who enjoyed my LD34 entry: Crashteroids are in for a treat, as development on a sequel is already underway.

Some obvious updates and some huge updates are due.

Keep playing and rating the original though people

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=64484

If you haven’t played my compo entry, now’s your chance!

Edo Arena gameplay

I’ll be finishing up the post-compo version. Thanks for playing and good luck with results!

The last chance to play, vote and comment

PLAY!

I swear, this is the best game you will play! Okay, maybe not the best…

Maybe not even within the best but…

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=46975 <– In this game you can not jump

cries

Time is running out.

SUMMON THEM

Ok, I know that I’m very very late, but here is the list of my favorites this LD, in case you’re looking for something to play!:

• Growth Control by Akhera
• Double Helix by BroCade
• Homewards by M a r o o v a n
• Growing Sakura by ripatti
• FlOBA by RHY3756547
• My Best (Magical) Friend! by spotco
• Riders On The Steppes by theholychicken

Of course, I’d be glad if you also checked out my game!

This is my post-mortem about my game, Spindulum, which can be played in here.

There’s, also, the post-jam version of the game here, but don’t use it for judging, ok? 😉

First, for those who don’t like to read much, my list of what went right/wrong this time.

I’m pretty bad with english, so please bear with me if I write something in a wrong or weird way. 😛

WHAT WENT RIGHT:
– The theme I wanted was selected :3;
– I mocked the whole game and had the whole concept before I started developing the game, so I had a pretty clear idea of what I really wanted and sticked with it until the end;
– The idea was pretty simple to implement, and with both themes in mind;
– The code I wrote was pretty readable and fully commented;
– It’s the first game, from the 3 times I did LD, that feels like a “proper” game;

WHAT WENT WRONG:
– The idea, even though simple, came up pretty late and I had little time to properly work on it;
– I spent time on things that could be done last, like explosions or transitions;
– Also left audio/music for the end of the jam, which ended up being quite repetitive;
– Controls, difficulty and rotating speed are pretty unbalanced;
– Due to being totally random, there’s the possibility of not spawning non-hostile projectiles during long periods of time;

This last LD, even though the theme I wanted was selected (2-button controls), the ideas came up pretty late and I had to juggle work between “real-life” work and the jam, which left me with little more than 24h to properly write and publish the game.

I had some rhythm-based game ideas involving love, dance and some hearts, but it would take too long to build, so I scraped these ideas in favor of working with something pretty simple.

The idea for Spindulum came after playing with a water toy that my GF gave me, and it brought me this idea of collecting bubbles to make something grow up. From this base idea, and in my need to insert some 2-button-based, challenging game mechanics, the final gameplay concept was born. I did some mockups for the base screens for the game (it uses only 4 scenes) and, for the first time, I tried building the game strictly following these mockups.

The base concept for Spindulum is to have the player in the middle of the screen, connected to a pendulum/collector, that can be used to collect specific “dots” coming from random directions, and avoiding others, to make the player grow in size and, when a target size is reached, the player would explode and advance to the next level.

At every level, the target size would increase and, with it, the line connecting the collector to the player would too. This would give the user playing the game a “false” impression that the rotation speed was increasing when, in fact, only the tangential speed would increase, while rotation would be the same.

This base mechanic would save me from the task of level design so I ended up having time to work on some music, sound effects and the voice acting for the game. 😛

The way I built the game, together with the little time I had, made the game pretty unbalanced, though, and lacking in lots of points (controls, difficulty and “depth”). Which ended up being part of the feedback I received from the ones who played it, which I thank from the bottom of my heart. 😉

I finished working on the post-jam version of the game, which doesn’t differ much from the jam version besides being more stable and available for Android now. I’ll be putting this on the project list, though, because I had some pretty nice ideas for the game, based on the feedback and after playing it for a few hours too!

I hope I can finish the games I’m making right now and that I’ll be able to fully implement this game too, in the near future.

Thanks for reading this post. Thanks for playing my game, if you did so.

See y’all on the next LD or Mini-LD!

Cheers! 😉

Grab a friend and smash their face in with lasers!

A Subtle Dispute: A Game Of Rock Paper Lasers

Play it HERE!

Hey look at that sweet 4-player game! Check it out, it even has the surf ace from LD29, a snowman from LD31, and kittens from every LD theme voting (except these past 3 you terrible theme slaughterers)! HOW REFERENTIAL AND COOL! But it lacks the 3 votes it needs to reach 25! HOW HORRIFYING!

IF YOU’RE NICE ENOUGH TO LEAVE A COMMENT I’LL RATE YOUR GAME IN THIS SMALL TIMEFRAME WE STILL HAVE

GRAB SOME FRIENDS AND PLAY HERE PLEASE

Hey, This time I had to go alone so the game weren’t that complete, but I would still love it if you would check it out anyways 😀 Click HERE to review my entry 😀

Thanks to everyone who has already voted! and thanks for the awesome feedback! 😀 You guys are amazing

There’s literally less than an hour left to play/rate entries and my game Rolla Grolla Arena could do with some more votes (it’s probably not possible given the short timeframe but I want to get 100 votes by the end of the judging period).

Click The Pic To Play!!

Tags: 2D, ld34, local multiplayer, multiplayer, multiplayer game, unity

thank you very much to everyone who voted

If you have not done, you can do it here !

Thanks for the love all! Happy New Year!

Click for game link.

Win the battle to dominate the territory of your enemy.

PLAY ME: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=36629

I wanted to thank everyone that’s voted so far on our game, RollingFlames. If you haven’t played it, you can play and vote for it here, and you can view our post-mortem right here!

I also want to thank all of the developers for putting so much hard work into their games. I’ve played a couple of fantastic gems so far that I could see becoming something amazing in the future. Can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare to roll around.

Thank you all of you! Fluffy Horde will become a full game. 30 minutes last. Give us your love.

Play Here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=63879

Follow us @turtlesdestiny

Time to say thank you all again, for all the feedback we received for our game!

We hope to be here April again. It’s our first LD and we had a lot of good time playing games. It was more fun than we expected to review games. We did our best to be valuable in our comments too (positives or negatives).
We did a making of too… well, kinda.

Here is a 3D rendered version of our 2D character (the background is a random picture we found on Google, we’re not into the 3D modeling, it was just for fun).

And again: Happy New Year!

Tags: 2D, christmas, jumping, ldjam, snowman, two buttons

You can still check out my first entry for Ludum Dare here !

A 2D physics plathformer.

Tags: ld34, ldjam, shape magnet, zpeedtube

I can has?

Music?

Thanks,

Thank you, generic kind words, words of kindness, bountiful thanks. Thank thank thank, thankthankthank. 

But seriously, thanks to all who rated and commented and also to those who participated. You all made this one awesome Ludum Dare!!!

Thanks everyone who played my game and left some criticism. This is the first game I’ve ever “finished” and had feedback on, so it has really been a great learning experience.

I really enjoyed seeing the variety of games that came out of this topic, and was really impressed with the amount of creativity some people have! Bravo, and good luck everyone!

When a couple of friends and I decided to do this ludum dare together, our goal was to come in the top half overall. Not only did we achieve our goal, but we placed 39 in humour! Not to shabby for 3 fifteen year Olds making a game about a turkey gone mad and killing chickens with an ak-47.

Congratulations to the winners. And good work to everyone else who entered.

Top 100.

Top 100.

Wat.

Top 8% for everything. 81 overall. Wow.

Thank you. Everyone. This elates me beyond words, especially since I improved around 500 places on average on each category.