So, here goes my first Ludum Dare entry post mortem. I went for jam since the start, and to be fair I’m proud on myself finishing something in the given time scale. How it all began? I’ve waited off for theme announcement (which was 3AM here in Europe), and as I was quite tired after the work I went straight to bed right after. So, Saturday morning (technically almost 12AM), I’ve started coding up very first version of the game, coding movement, selection of minions, building selection and UI. The whole game core was created during the Saturday.

Sunday was a bit slower for me, I worked mainly on art – creating up buildings and units, and as I’m not really an artist, it took me huge amount of time – I’ve just spent evening on the menu. Monday, the first work-day of the week. I spent most of it in work unrelated to any game development, but in the end I’ve put up the ‘High Score’ logic and attached music and sounds to whole game.

In the end, well you can check out some gameplay video at: YouTube. Although you might as well prefer to Try It yourself.

For me, it is definitely a success. I wanted to participate in Ludum Dare few times already, yet I’ve never had enough courage to do so. And here we are, I have finished something – there were quite awesome ideas during the streaming on Twitch and talk on TeamSpeak (where I have a point for next time – do that in open community, not closed one -> more people can watch it & talk during it!) which could improve the actual gameplay, most of them didn’t make it through due to time scale.

Anyways for me it is time to give some attention to my girlfriend, as I’ve put her aside for the weekend!

Thanks everyone for support, participation and playing games!

Tags: 3D, LD 35, post-mortem, RTS, unity

Lets see if it makes a nice mobile game. So far looking good. Next up: basic touch gestures. Thats an interesting programming challenge. I suspect there is an additional game mode possible on mobile with all the sensors and gestures… Until then:

Play & Rate the desktop version (MAC & WIN)!

Anyone want feedback on their game. Let me know in the comments!

Hi guys! I’m Ranquil and I worked as an artist in this jam for our game Transformagician. I thought it could be interesting to hear an artist’s perspective on the development of the game.

I, along with the game’s programmer HuvaaKoodia, study in a game school. However, I don’t actually specialize in graphics; my specialization is in game production and design. Still, in this project I worked as an artist and left production and game design to the programmer. I wanted to focus my efforts in this jam to produce graphics because, even though I’m not an artist, I’ve always been interested in making game graphics and I wanted to see what I was able to pull off in the given time. Seeing all the nice comments about the graphics really warms up my cold, dead heart!

The process of making the graphics began by finding some reference pictures for the color palette of the game. I wanted to produce something slightly surreal but still intelligible to human beings so I chose pastel paintings as my source for colors. In the end I used 2 paintings as a full range of overall color, made individual palettes for each piece of graphics and and allowed colors to vary a little in shade and ever so slightly in hue from the palette. The end result seemed to work pretty well!

As for character design, I started by sketching very vague outlines for the main character and the enemies. Then I started making the sprites in Photoshop while using the sketches merely as a very rough guide. The main design ideas could by summed up in three phrases: topsy-turvy, not human and artificially created life. If you take a closer look at the character design and the ending, you might start to notice the theme of artificially created life on your own too. As for animation, I reused the torso and the head with as many sprites as possible but the enemies in the last level required drawing each and every frame from scratch beca use of the… consistency of that particular enemy. 😀

What I’m the most proud of, though, is the ending cinematic. I had absolutely no idea I could pull off light in a three-dimensional space that well in a limited amount of pixels or that I could make all of the frames in just 3.5 hours! Of course, HuvaaKoodia added quite a lot to it with clever compositing. 😀

All in all, I enjoyed this game jam a lot, improved my skills and a learned lots of new things. I don’t know whether I’ll take part in the next Ludum Dare but I’ll definitely keep on jamming!

Tldr: I’m not an artist but I made graphics anyway, did good and learned lots.

Play Transformagician here!

Hello everyone!

I want to introduced our concept. Frozen Water Maze is a game made with Pygame, a Python framework, where you are a little water element player who can switch from droplet to ice and cloud shapes.

And there is a preview of our game. Sorry…it’s not already finished  !

This week-end we had met Richard Stallman, from the project GNU, in Nantes, France. So we had sleep the next day’s morning because we had a lack of sleep. Please tell us if you think that the game should be ended and leave us your comment. Thanks!

You can play and rate here!!!

Come try my game, you can throw things at things 😀 ! Ludum Dare Page

People tripping on street lamps!

Exploding cars!

Hey there, I’m playing games just link me yours, here’s mine.

Give it a play here!

Thanks to everyone that’s been patient with my having made a VR-centric game for LD35! The future’s coming, really it is! (but maybe for LD36… or LD37)

To help share Terminal Shift, I threw together a pair of videos!

Gameplay-sample (short)

(yep, ran out of time before adding A/B/L/R shapes and a scoring mechanism… lessons learned!)

Project walkthrough (long)

Also, I’m guessing the dreams/nightmares of endlessly falling are going to continue for a few more days. Even though this game’s dirt-simple, the experience sticks with enough time played. 😛

Edge Shift – Game for LD35 by Dan Rosser

Dance across the bounds of the inevitable end of all things to come by shape shifting to re-pell foreign dark matter entities of form and shape.

Please come check out the game, enjoy the visuals.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=92215

Coded for WebGL / iOS / Android in C++ / OpenGL ES 2.0

Or play directly here:

Edge Shift – WebGL (1920×1080)

Edge Shift – WebGL (1280×720)

Enjoy

-Dan

Hi Everybody!

When the theme Shapeshift was announced, my immediate thought was John Carpenter’s The Thing. Not only because the titular monster can change shape, but the movie’s theme took shapeshifting to explore the human condition really well. How do you know if someone is really that person. If something can imitate it perfectly, is it still them?

These are the themes that “shapeshift” really gets to touch on, and what we hope to achieve in the game.

So I present you: The Thing From Beyond!

Become the monster. Gain their trust. Be the humans.

Shape Shifters

WebGL version or downloadable “.zip” files for Windows, Linux, and Mac!

Shape Shifters is a game where you launch “shifters” in order to shift the weight of big shapes. Levels are completed when a shape touches the surface. The last level has a shape that have buttons attached. Once there are no buttons left on the shape to push (once it touches the surface) and the shape itself touches the surface, the level is completed. Have fun!

Future plans: Many more levels!

I and my two other team mates decided to join the LD35. We couldn’t go all in, with different IRL stuff that needed to be done for all of us.
Saturday morning we started brainstorming Everyone for themself. In the end we elected the idea of making a videogame about a Mimic Octopus. Using unreal engine. I was the only one with a bit of knowledge of unreal but our other scripter quickly started to make nice Blueprints, it’s amazing how fast one can learn those!
On the other hand, we lacked the organization. The reasons reside in myself, I had the lead in this project, but I never had the chance to coordinate other people. It’s a skill I lack and I see now I have to work a lot on it! I’m pretty sure the lack of organization not only affected the production speed, but even more the overall morale of the team!
Always organize ahead the work that has to be done!

The biggest hit on our morale and work speed anyway was the source control. We never really used it before, and starting in a jam is a big no no no!: D Really, it’s best to just build on different things and then merge all the stuff together, especially if you are a small team!

We used unreal – svn (tortoise) combination. It’s a good thing, but still, it’s slow (especially if your connection is bad). After a while we simply disabled the internal unreal engine control and started to just commit outside of it.

But we pulled together something. It’s missing most of his features, it’s bugged but it’s ours and we made it from scratch by ourself!

So in the end two things i have to keep in mind for the future:

1)Plan for every feature before starting to work.

2)Don’t use new tools no matter what, stick to the old stable ones.

See you around testing all the games we made!:D

Our game is realized!
Rate and comment this game!
Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=85681

It was my first game jam… (have mercy!!) I’m so happy for the result. I hope you enjoy it!!

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=59433

Tags: 2D, html5, jam, Ludum Dare, unity, unity3d

We finished our entry which turned out to be a simple little point and click adventure. We really enjoyed making it and hope you enjoy playing it!

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=44770

Thanks to the comments that points out that the first level wasn’t quite fair (I couldn’t disagree) I tweaked the difficulty equation. I made it a bit more progressive across levels, not perfect yet but still better !

Shape shifting tycoon is playable right here : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=44826

Hey guys!

We have submitted our game late in the night (deadline at 3 a.m here!!). We are proud of what we have made and we hope you will like it ! Now, it is time for us to check what others teams did.

You can try our entry here !

Enjoy !

Enjoy! Will do a post-mortem down the road when I’ve caught up on sleep lol I’ll be turning this one into a full game when I finish my current project, follow me on Twitter at @BPOutlaws for updates! -Jeff

Ludum Dare 35

Tags: 2D, final, game, gamemaker, iamawesome, jam, LD35, Ludum Dare, progress, screenshot, video, Windows

If you didn’t, then play it right away!

Ludum Dare 35