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We fixed a scoring bug and a few other minor issues in our game Hart of the Forest.

Check it out, and make sure to look at our plans for Post-Jam features!

Play the game here!

Hello there,

So this year is my second Ludum Dare (and faaaar from the last), but for this jam i though i’d try out Game Maker : Studio. I had it on my computer for a few month now, from when Humble bundle featured a GMS pro Licence and the licence to export to Android for 1/45 of the price.

So here it is : Tetrashifter . Please tell me if you have any advice about making games on smartphones, I think i’m going to do a lot more of it. =)

If you made a game that is playable on android you can put the link in the comments, i’ll definitely check it out.

We have fixed the positioning bug on obstacles and enemies in v1.1.

Plus there’s now a GNU/Linux build! \o/

Download the game

Vote for the game

Tags: puppy, pygame, python

Well, I’m now awake enough for the first time since the jam ended to write about my game, The Outsider.

It’s a first-person space shooter with 360 degree movement (y’know, like Descent). With this Jam, I really wanted to try out some simple techniques I’d been working out for making passable art (I’m no artist!). Mainly using flat colours with lighting + outline shaders and SSAO to create quite a strong, abstract style. It seemed to work out pretty well!

Gameplay wise, I actually changed the game quite radically early on. The idea of creating cube-rooms was really just because of limitation of my artist abilities. And I figured it would be quite easy to have a transformable world of such rooms, which would fit the theme well. From there, I started thinking about the movie Cube (for which the set for the entire film was just a single square room) – and in some ways it’s similarity to the dungeons of the original Zelda.

I like the idea of building the dungeon in real time around the player so I stuck with that, but originally, I thought the player should choose which rooms to build. I wanted to make them a wizard constructing the dungeon around them to try and reach an objective. I had difficulty with building on the core gameplay with that one, though, and I was eager to get started implementing something so eventually I decided to go with a more traditional dungeon crawl but with Descent-like twist.

I actually got most of the work for this done pretty quick! The core gameplay was playable by Saturday night (I didn’t start till mid-day due to time zones and obligations). So I had time to compose music and add some special features… I even got a boss encounter done! It’s the sort of thing that I always think about having quite early during LD then usually abandon before the game is finished due to running out of time for new features.

You can play it here!

It is a challeging endless game and we hope you have fun playing it!

Feel free to share your highscore and try to beat our personal best of 81! ( that was really hard to set!)

—-      Play here    —-

Have fun

Play it and rate it here!

This was a peculiar weekend and, as always, very fun and rewarding. After spending most of Friday on a train which arrived with an hour and a half delay due to most unfortunate reasons, I overslept and had a late start on Saturday. Then, even if I had a clear idea of what I wanted, I ran into some early problems because I’d forgotten about some really basic stuff related to the way Flixel handles positions. Luckily I managed to overcome all that and the end result this time has been more than satisfactory.

The idea came relatively easily. My first inspiration was Altered Beast, but that would have probably been overkill in terms of asset creation, so I discarded that and went for another classical genre with very clear references. Back on LD30 I had wanted to make a shoot-em-up where the “ship” actions in one world would affect interconnected ones, but unfortunately I run into some technical problems and couldn’t participate in the end. Ever since I’ve been wanting to resurrect that project or implement something similar, and the opportunity presented itself this time.

(From left to right, Ikaruga, Waves and Geometry Wars)

My references were immediate, too: the main one would be Ikaruga and its colour switching mechanic as key, but I also checked other two shmups I’ve always liked: Geometry wars and Waves. The connection to the theme is obvious (switch shapes for fun, profit and devastation), and decided to go full abstract/geometric instead of my original approach, where you would be some kind of a microscopic drone with Transformer-like abilities and your task would be to defeat viruses and bacteria. It’s a good way to achieve some pleasant visuals without having to spend a lot drawing.

What went well:

• Controls. Having gameplay just feel right were a must, and this time I think I more or less made it I would have liked to add some acceleration to motion and so on, but making that feel right could have been tricky and time consuming, so I aimed for the basics first (orientating the sprites and aiming in particular).
• Scope: By resorting to a well known genre with simple yet effective mechanics I managed to keep the game scope under control. Of course there are lots of things that didn’t make it, but the current result feels complete.
• Development speed: As a consequence of the previous bullet point, having a restricted and clear scope and feature set I managed to keep a constant and fast development pace. That’s a huge bonus for motivation.
• Visuals and effects: At the moment the game is getting some nice comments (thanks!) about the graphic style. They can still be improved, but it is true that they can make a huge impact on the perception of the game.

Now, the ugly:

• Slightly chaotic process: I wanted to make up for the late start, so I just started coding as soon as I pinned down the basics of the game and completely forgot about planning for several hours on Saturday evening, when I finally decided to create my usual Trello board to keep the tasks and my progress controlled. This wasn’t bad per se, but I also made a risky gamble with version control, and I completely neglected it until it was actually time to submit. Then I created and pushed the sources to Github. I was very lucky, as I didn’t run into any problems or had to roll any feature back, but the next time I should at least be more careful with that just in case.
• Not directly related to the competition or the game, but…THAT ARTICLE (you probably know what I’m talking about, I’m not going to give it any more publicity). I read it while on the supper break and got incredibly angry.

…and what went wrong:

• Music and unbalanced volume, and glitchy mute option. The thing I regret the most on this edition is, no doubt, the music. I wanted to make some fast-paced tune with a psychedelic vibe, but I got stuck and, when I realised that there was only one or two hours left before the deadline, I chose to leave music as I had it and moved to UI coding. I need to practice a lot more on composing the game music. Besides, the effects volume was irregular, and muting them was glitchy.
• Difficulty progression (or lack thereof): The game can feel very hard to some people, but for those who do master it, it gets monotonous. The truth is there was no difficulty balance at all. I managed to hack a “hard mode” in the last ten minutes before the deadline for those who managed to play for more than three minutes, but that’s still not enough. Another option would have been to have more things to do, but of course that would have been more time consuming. At the moment this is probably my main goal for the post-compo version.
• Remembering Flixel: I hadn’t touched Haxe+Flixel since the last LD, and I regretted that this week. First I had decided to upgrade the pipeline to the last version. This wasn’t particularly problematic during the Ludum itself, but I had some old projects I wanted to check for references and they broke. Additionally, I always forget how anchors, pivots and positioning work on Flixel until I’ve spent a while re-checking it.
• Performance, esp. HTML5: I wanted to release the main build as HTML5, but it wasn’t consistently performant. At the moment you can experience hiccups on any platformer when you shoot many ships or use the blaster, but playing on Firefox or Edge was veeery slow most of the time compared to Chrome, for instance. Interestingly enough, on another project I’m currently working on on Unity, the WebGL build runs into memory issues on Chrome but not on Firefox or Edge.

Next steps:

I’ve already made some changes to a Post-Compo version (you can also find it on the submission page), but I want to add many other features that couldn’t make it into the main submission. This is a list with some of the most important ones.

• Different control schemes and gamepad support – DONE
• Difficulty and player progression – STARTED, still a lot left to do.
• Decent music, and fix that darned mute.
• More content: Bullet patterns, enemy types and behaviours, pick ups,…
• Better movement.
• Better visual feedback: Put the previous/next hints right on the ship, clearer indications of when you increase your score multiplier or when the blaster becomes available.
• Better graphics: This fits more as polish, but I would like to change the graphics for almost all elements of the game, make the lines of the ships clearer, replace some UI texts with icons or bars and perhaps add some nice and trippy background effects (like in the video below, but waaay more subtle). And many more particles! ;P
  
• Better performance. Of course, to support all that and not burn people’s computers I need to optimize a lot, starting as soon as possible, as I already had some problems in certain moments of gameplay.
• Tracking scores/times locally on a save file or, even better, keep an online leaderboard system somewhere.

Tags: 2D, HaXeFlixel, postmortem, shmup, twinstick shooter

Go play SUBJECT 26!

It’s been amazing experience to participate in LDJAM 35 as our first game jam ever.
Overcoming frustration, insomnia and countless headaches and seeing so many people doing the same is an uplifting and inspiring feeling!

So here it is, our first ever LDJAM entry (and, by the way, the first project we actually finished!):
“DR. LEPUS – The Last Rabbit On Earth”
( Link to LDJAM entry)

Visit us on our Twitter channel, Facebook site and Web page!

Now we’re excited to play all of your amazing games!

We had a lot of fun making our entry and would like to share it with everyone.

John Wizard, a tale of rescue and revenge, is available to play here!

(Mac build included!)

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=89786

Just added the first wave of bugfixes to Tale Of Shifted Shapes

Please read the instructions completely!

I plan on doing a nice and detailed “post-mortem” later in the week, but for now, I’d like to share my first solo LD project with you all! Sparrow and Flitt is an old-school 2D platformer with a twist–all of the protagonist’s abilities come from his shapeshifting bird companion, Flitt. Without him, Sparrow is unequipped to face the dangers of the forest, and his only way to command his companion to take action is to whistle to the bird. Enjoy!

Play it here!

Tags: DevSocYork

I’ve just gone ahead and fixed up some bugs with the menus, sounds, and AI in ‘So You Think You Can Science?’. I also ported it over to mac and linux so all you fine folks on systems other than windows can enjoy it. We all had a blast putting this game together and we really hope you enjoy it as much as we’ve been enjoying playing all of your games. If you haven’t played it yet, check out SYTYCS? here. Just remember, the original game submitted at the jam deadline is the windows version here on the Ludum Dare site. Anything you find on itch.io is slightly updated.

Thanks for playing!

Hello LDers!

This LD was quite different from what I’m used. I had a few short slices of time in which I could work on my entry through the weekend, until I was finally able to work almost 10 hours straight on Sunday’s afternoon (the only part of the jam that I did timelapse).

Here’s briefly what went right/wrong:

What went right

• I finished something
• I used the theme on the narrative (in a way that I rarely do)
• Even though running out of time, I was able to explain the theme in-game
• Graphics were done quickly and (mostly) smoothly
  • Also, the flapping of the evil fairy!
• I was able to do three (pretty simple) variations for the game’s theme song

What went wrong

• The idea was too big for the time I had (less than 24 hours)
• Everything is as rough and unpolished as possible
• Gameplay is really dumb
• I was away from my battle station until mid-day, on Sunday

And here’s the timelapse, taken for around half the time I worked on the game.

Later, I’ll write a proper post mortem. I’d like to explain why I didn’t have much time, how I got the game idea, how I quickly done the graphics… etc.

Until then!

Tags: compo, LD35, post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

I’ve been able to recover my HDD in it’s entirety, this means I have restored my Ludum Dare project. I don’t know whether Mike will still allow to me submit my game but if he does I’d be totally down. 😀

Here’s a screenie (same screenie from previous post):

Whew, another Ludum Dare down! Good job everyone – I’m enjoying what I’m seeing from other people’s efforts in this collective insanity.

This time around, I put together a game called Robot Escape. The weekend had its share of ups (I finished! I had fun! I’m proud of my idea!) and downs (I started over 12 hours late! I lost 2 hours to a power outage!) and I’ll put together a proper post-mortem soon enough. For now, the timelapse:

Check out Robot Escape here!

Tags: final, timelapse, unity

Hello guys!

Has anyone else has had some really weird sprite rendering bugs on WebGL versions of your games?

I mean, man! I would love to see WolfBit running smoothly in browsers – even though I think the best experience comes in a dark room, headphones and glorious fullscreen for our 64-bit display :).

Also, on a side note, we will study reducing the size of the Downloadable versions of the game.

By the way, if you haven’t played WolfBit, you should and it’s awesome.

WE MUST GO TO THE WOODS.

WE MUST GET RID OF THE DARKNESS.

WE MUST STOP THE BEAST.

Yeah ! A PostMortem final version with report bug is online

*****************************************
VERSION POST MORTEM
*****************************************

THIS IS THE SECOND VERSION OF THE GAME (after the legal 72 h of ludumdare 35)
__________________________________________

2 major operations priority bugs reported by players :

1) repair the bug “electrical wires”
2) Skip dialogs by clicking the mouse key or spacebar

Bonus : Added Phylactere for a more readable text and more cartoon appearance

Click on this link to download the new version of the game :

http://adipson.free.fr/SHAPESHIFT FOR CHEESE postmortem.zip

Thank you for playing and don’t forget to rate my game on
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=22158
__________________________________________

Tags: 2D, adipson studio, cartoon, mouse, point-and-click

Hello everyone, I have been working on my first game called Countdown 10 and I would really appreciate if you could take the time and play the demo I have. It is only 8 levels, so it shouldn’t take that long.

Controls:

• Arrow keys to move
• Space Bar to jump
• Down arrow to fall through some blocks
• Space Bar on wall to wall jump

The game is called Countdown 10 because you only have 10 seconds to complete each level before it resets, I would love to get some feedback on what you do and do not like, but keep in mind it is my first attempt at creating a game, so don’t expect too much!

Click here to download the game!