Game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=92927

Someone made a video of my game  =D.

Yay! It makes me so happy to actually see someone play my game.

I’m just gonna put this slimy dude here… just in case you want to click him:  ( °°)

This was my first Ludum Dare experience, and it was a lot of fun developing my game while livestreaming all weekend! I had some input & suggestions from viewers along the way and even had music contributed by one of my viewers along the way.

The game is a combination of 2D platformer & top-down space shooter where you play as a robot mech who “ShipShifts” into a spaceship to take out enemies. You can check the game out for yourself here!

This is my second Ludum Dare, and it was a much bumpier ride than the first one. In LD34, I already had an idea brewing in my head for the better part of a year that just happened to fit the theme. The added two button control limitation simply kicked everything in place forcing me into decisions. It was great.

The competition started at 4 am for me. I chose not to set an alarm, but woke up at 3:50 and decided to stay up. Checked the theme and was very disappointed. I feel shapeshift is a very rigid theme without enough room for interpretation, it could be a theme tacked on anything, but it didn’t drive any interesting mechanics for me.

I tried thinking outside the box, what can shift? the player character is obvious. Maybe the levels? Maybe something else. I came up with a sort of neural network idea. Entities moving across nodes through connections, and the player changing the connection to achieve some goal. For some unknown reason, I falled back on an idea I had a long time ago, of remaking a version of the board game Dominant Species. This was a big mistake. I didn’t think it through, and didn’t properly estimated the time it would take to implement. I should have stayed with a neural network idea, where each node changes the entities moving through it.

At the end of the first day I have not made enough progress, I had an ugly UI that didn’t convey shape shifting at all. I went to sleep unhappy.

7 am on Sunday, I woke up with the decision to scrap the game and start over. Having a much more limited time, I had to choose something very simple. Inspired by an old game called Blast Chamber, I decided to make a chamber you can shift around. I initially wanted to make it multiplayer, local, but thought I won’t get as many votes, so made a solo experience instead.

Hard at work, I finished the core game, playable and all, in about 12 hours. I decided I wanted the game be polished, so spent 5 hours adding graphics, sounds and menus. At about 11 pm Sunday I was burned out. I stopped short of prettifying the menu, and spent the next hour uploading and editing pages.

What went well:

• The second game is really solid with an interesting core mechanic.
• I managed to polish it fairly well and happy with the resulting aesthetic.
• I’m really happy I finished a game in spite of initial unhappiness, I pushed through and I finished it.

What went badly:

• Pigeonholing myself into an old idea because that was what worked last time.
• Not correctly estimating development time on initial project.
• Designing a UI that is contrary to the initial design, which was entities moving, and ending with a circle with numbers inside for nodes.
• Pushing forward on Saturday while I already knew the idea was a bust.

All in all, I’m really happy with this game, and if I find the time and motivation, I intend to work in some more content. And I’m looking forward to the next LD!

Well I’m actually really bad at this !
Play it here !

LINK FOR GAME :         ————>      http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=91623

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to say thanks for all of the constructive criticism for my entry. This was my first LD and I really worked hard and enjoyed it. I learned a ton, since it was compo for me. I pledge to correct all of the things that were wrong with my game, even if just for a learning experience.

I’m going to sit down and really analyze and work out how to make good controls for a game. Also, I found this video about juiciness on YouTube. Seems really good, so I’ll share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

I think if I work on those elements and my art workflow, I’ll be able to come back and really give you something good next time! 😀

For anyone that hasn’t seen my entry, here is a link to it. Who Let The Chicks Out?

Thanks for playing!

Tags: compo, LD35

In the rules it says that you are allowed to fix “game-breaking” bugs. What is meant by this? For instance, in my game there are mainly 3 issues I want to fix:

1) A location where you can glitch out into a place where enemies can’t reach you – ruining the point of the game.
2) Towers – in a tower defense game – that don’t fire properly, they only fire at certain enemies when the should be firing at all.
3) Difficulty – the game is way to easy, which could be easily fixed by tweaking some properties.

Now, number 3 is obviously not a bug, and definitely not a game breaking one, so I am not going to fix that. Number 1 doesn’t really matter too much in my opinion. It is number 2 that I feel is the big issue. The game works, and is playable, but one of the big mechanics doesn’t work, and if the game only had that, it would be unplayable in my opinion.

Of course, it is hard to judge this and it is very subjective. My real question is: Can I upload versions alongside the original? Say, having one version that is the game in its current state, one version with the tower bug fix, and a third version that would, in my opinion, not be qualified for judging but there for fun with balanced difficulty and fixed glitch.

– Mango Malarkey
PS. My game is a compo entry and this is my first time participating in LD

Ludum Dare 34 was my first ever gamejam and in-turn my first ever completed game; working with all of the members of Questionable Quality (four at the time) we made something fun, addictive, and different to the LD35 project: a game. However this time around- Ludum Dare 35- we only had two of our members: myself (the artist) and Matt (the co-director). We had less manpower to get more done. So the question was: what could we do?

P.S. I would recommend playing the game here, as this contains spoilers.

Honestly I probably shouldn’t have been doing the Jam in the first place considering how much work I had to do for my final degree projects. Luckily one of my final projects was meant to be done with the studio at a later date: to make an experience/world made for VR, which to me basically meant ‘let’s play god’. I pitched we work on that and Matt agreed. To be honest I had zero idea on what I wanted to do with the piece anyway and being thrown a theme made for a great starting point, especially when it turned out to be one of my favourite subjects: Shapeshifting.

Our LudumDare adventure was- as usual- a part of Plymouth GameDev Soc, and so we were all gathered in a little room somewhere in the university, locked away from the world whilst we cackled away like the deities we had become, living on snacks from the nearby Tesco. Matt- being one of the heads of the society- had to be around for the evening previous, so when I arrived Saturday morning, fresh and feeling great… Matt was ready to sleep. Before he left for the day we discussed ideas on what we wanted to do, what the capabilities were and- well, actually it turned out he couldn’t do anything without knowing what I actually wanted. I told him to head home and by the time he returned I had written up a script, designed and illustrated most of the world, and figured out what I was doing with the character.

Shapeshifting is a topic I overly enjoy, having found myself almost obsessed in the past with the idea of doppelgängers and changing forms, even down to subjects like being a cosplayer and changing faces/identities. There was just so much that could count as shapeshifting, and it made my mind race with ideas. What could I do? Where could I start? What atmosphere could I go for? I knew for certain that what I was creating here was a world and although it may not be living and breathing, I was bringing a new world into existence none-the-less. It needed personality, a core, it needed emotions. With what I had in mind, for starters, it needed to be confined, claustrophobic even; that could work for the atmosphere, I thought.

At first I decided to go for a shapeshifting world theme, jumping from one world to the next (I had been playing a lot of Mickey Mouse & the Enchanted Castle recently and the idea of multiple worlds had rubbed off on me), following a figure perhaps? Or were you the adventurer? You wouldn’t move in this world for sure; I wanted it to happen around the player. The idea of being stuck had reminded me of Sleep Paralysis and how terrifying a subject it was. I had read a long time ago about multiple accounts where the dreamer ‘woke up’ in their own bed, only to be unable to move and for a shadowy woman to crawl on top of them and maul them, and that it felt so terribly real. Being a ‘sufferer’ of vivid and lucid dreams, the next night I had a similar dream out of fear of having the dream. I realized on this thought that that this could make for a very good creepy game without having to hit tropes of jump scares and running away from things. I feel you don’t have to stick to the trends to make something interesting, and sticking out can be refreshing.

In the end I decided on a forest that shapeshifted into a crystal cave, a shadowy creature darting from one tree or a rock to another, hidden yet visible enough to be aware that it’s there and you don’t know what it is or what it wants. I started on the forest designs and illustrations, deciding to go from an earlier take of a ‘sketch’ style (everything in moving lines) and make a fully illustrated world with an animated character, etc. By the time Matt returned I had the whole thing up and ready for him to start on it in unity and perform his gamedev wizardry. Looking over the script he pointed out that the crystal caves felt a bit disjointed and so we left that out, making a slightly longer part in the middle instead.

The ‘monster’ was next. All I knew was I wanted it to be a shadowy figure with no real features, to be small and then shift into a larger creature at the end. I tried a few creature-like designs before I got to the idea of ‘ghost children’ or at least the idea of a lurking child that was not quite human. I found myself inspired by old folklore and the animation studio ‘CartoonSaloon’s movies based on Irish lore (even whilst writing this I find myself listening to the Song of the Sea soundtrack). Suddenly a Changling child came to be.‘Síofra’ was born.

Eventually I fixed up all of the sprites and passed them over and we ended up with something close to finished by leaving on Sunday night. I knew I wanted to change some parts but I wasn’t going to force my perfectionism on Matt as I was pretty sure he was dead inside by this point.

What went well:

• Unity. I now have a better understanding of what can be done in Unity without worrying that I’m being a bit too over-zealous. To finish this project I’ll need to learn how to do things myself and am more eager to learn the software

• World-design. The world turned out gorgeous and the atmosphere was just as I wanted: Something relaxing yet not-quite-right. Not too scary, but a little bit magical and uneasy.

• Character Design. Síofra herself was my favourite part, her magical whispy being coming off as I wanted it to. I’ve become quite fond of her.

• Teamwork. I definitely feel like Matt and I worked well together and I gained some good feedback from him along the way.

 
What went wrong:

• My own anxieties took over at times and I felt like I was being a bit too bossy with Matt or being too over-the-top with ideas. Yet in the same way I also felt like I wanted to go into more, only for my mind to go ‘no, you’re making the poor guy do enough’. Directing is not something I’m very good at.

• SFX. Although background music and some effects I managed to pin through either editing or a lot of searching, there were a few I didn’t like. The monster’s roar and Síofra’s growl came to mind, and other than timing placement that I gave, I didn’t like how they sounded at all.
• Sprites. I got some sprites down well (the skipping animation was tough but I cracked it) yet there were sections I disliked a lot. The whole monster section from when she stops in front of you needs to be better thought out, to have a few frames switched around and generally re-drawn (especially with the monster design itself). The lines need to be thicker on the further away sprites too, the whole thing too thin and messing with the image’s quality.

• Framerate. On the rare occasion we got to test it on VR we were having big performance issues. We had to drop moonlight from an earlier point and have it manually drawn in; this only helped a little. Upon revisions I plan to make the sky one entity at least, and perhaps the leaves on the ground. I may be entirely wrong on this but I imagine the less sprites the better performance.

• UI. We didn’t even have time for a UI. We actually didn’t finish it until Monday because we’d lost all steam by the end of the GDC weekend. I’d love to put in a start button eventually, or at least some way to close it without alt+tabbing out and manually doing it.

Hello everyone!

We made our first ludum dare game and are happy to announce that our game now has a WebGL version instead of a Unity Webplayer as requested by some of our players. Also we now have a Mac version available for the Mac users (Mac version hasn’t been tested so if you run into errors please tell us ;)).

You can find Bloodbearer here!

So have fun playing and don’t forget to grab those potions when saving the town of vile monsters of darkness, you’ll probably need them.

I’ve posted a short video of a “Perfect” shift score for shift #1 in my game.

A lot of the game posts have these amazing animated GIFs of people’s games. What do people generally use to make these for Mac/PC?

just curious, thanks!

Change the cave’s shape to keep the miners away.

Yesterday I pushed an update to Greedy Miners addressing some issues:

• Fixed performance issues due to wrong texture loading.
• Added a button to disable GPU-Intensive shaders. (Hotkey: Q)
• Fixed the game window not being resizable. Fullscreen is now possible.

The rest of the game remains intact. Have fun jammers! =)

Play Greedy Miners

Guys…. Play my game and rate!!! It is my first LD and I’m so excited

 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=91656

Hey! Are you looking for something challenging? Then you might consider playing Shpaceshifpt !

Have fun !

A bit late but Hey

This was suppose to be a compo entry but I felt it needed more fleshing out.

PLAY NOW!

Try beating that time :)

6th participation and 6th game. And first time seeing someone mastering my game at that point! Even my last personal best is just above the 1,600,000 mark. Well played studdert249, and thank you again!

studdert249 record

Take a break and try a run! Give your best and try to break the new record: 1,815,880! Pretty high mark, but not impossible!
(And leave a comment, so that I can play your game as well!)

Listen and Shift – Compo Entry

I’m still working on this, yo.

Let’s get it out of the way first why I didn’t submit anything: the point of LD for me is to get insightful comments about what to improve, and the flaws were obvious to me already. It’s like, yeah I get it, it’s confusing and feels unfinished, cause it is. If I don’t find the gameplay appealing myself, there’s no point in having the community repeat that to me.

I clearly focused on the wrong stuff on the weekend. My sweet AI patterns didn’t end up mattering in the end. I sorta forgot I was making an arcade game, and swamped myself by bringing too complex behaviour into it. Such a Jwatt thing to do. People don’t care about the AI doing a dance, they just wanna shoot some bad guys and rack up points.

By the time I’d reduced the thing to a “Human Tetris with random encounters” like it should’ve been from the start, everything was a mess, and there was no time left to fix the game (or to thoroughly playtest it). So I figured I’ll continue working outside of the event with a “soft reset” mindset. The main mechanics and many of my enemy designs are still functional and reusable, after all.

Importantly, there’s still a community interested in playtesting it, and some have even suggested putting a price tag on it once it’s done. I’m not big on monetizing my games, but I do see the point; it could be a neat touchscreen game, considering your main interaction is literally an analogue for swiping. And it’s not like difficult to build for Android with Love2D.

Not to mention Love2D’s sweet shader FX brah didn’t you say you owned a GPU?? We can like 60 FPS on your GPU if you don’t mind??? 60 FPS on the “P.C.” console forever???

Tags: pre-rebirth post-mortem

PLAY IT