Hey everyone,

I just started streaming and rating Ludum Dare games, so if you want to send me yours you can join here:

http://twitch.tv/thesemo

I’ve fixed most bugs, come and have a try 😀   Click me

I just hit my 2oth review and just checked my desktop which is now filled with 2.3 gig of LD games 😀

Great effort all of you, I will be reviewing more games for the next 2 weeks!

72 hours condensed into 5 minutes!

Play the game right here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=50665

Tags: #animatedgif, GameJam, gameplay, Ludumdare, luvShape

Being the complete Ludum Dare noob that I am, I didn’t realize minor bugfixes were allowed until this morning! As such, I fixed a bug that prevented the player from changing states while boosting. Now combos are easier! I also updated the game description with some pro tips:

-Use a controller
-Blinking is reckless
-You can change states while blinking
-Killing an enemy knocks back enemies of the opposite state
-Combos end if you lose your blink chain or if you take damage
-Use a controller

Play Blink!

Go and play it now if you haven’t! Be sure to leave a rating with your score/combo

 Play it here

### The Game ###

GeoShift is a 2D platformer basically. But there is a shift To the rhythm of the background music, the world performs shapeshifts. And there is more. You can control the speed of the music to change the rhythm of the world to solve platformer puzzles.

Want me to play and rate your game? Leave a comment!

Stream!

Hey!

We’ve been working on some improvements around our game.
I hope you like it. Here is a link to our entry http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=44628
Come and leave your feedback about it.

gl hf,
Team BSOD

Hi all,

I’m one of the programmers of Team Fumiko and would like to speak about our game.

What it is:

When we heard about the theme, at least me wasn’t that happy, but we soon came up with two concepts matching the theme. The first one was about a wizzard who shifts the faces of others on requests by others and it would have been your duty to choose between different shapes of heads, ears and so on … the other one was Aeons Rest.

Aeons Rest is an action game with 3D isometric camera. You play as a hero who has to fight through multiple trials to proove he is worthy this title. You are placed on a magic shrine on a floating isle and the first thing you see are other floating landmasses that drift towards you until they crush into your start. Then the trial begins and fearsome enemies change into existance ready to fight you.

The game is designed around the theme of a shapeshifting level, which we focussed on primarly to get right.

What went right:

We had two modellers and one animator who were producing some really highquality low poly meshes and animated them, therefore we had a multitude of really goodlooking assets for worldgeneration.

The world generation and transitions between each trial came out very nice in the end, which took me some time to accomplish, although.

We hadn’t found any really gamebreaking bug right now, which for the timepressure is a really good outcome, i think.

We finished the game in time and had a lot of fun.

We got some really awesome feedback from the comments.

What needs improvement:

We used most of our time on the world generation and forgot about the gameplay a little bit, so the generation looks awesome, but the fighting and jumping could need some improvement.

For next time we will try to get an additional programmer, so we can get more polish and features in our next game.

Some of the assets didnt made it into the game because we hadnt enough time adding them to the game.

Next time I would like to start with a bigger codebase, so i dont need to programm basic systems like a thirdperson character controller again.

We used Unity Cloth simulation on our enemies which lead to big lags on the webGL version, so it had to be disabled on it.

In the end I’m very happy about what we achieved together and am looking forward to the next Ludum Dare we can enter together.

I am from the learn as you go school of game design. Unity Tutorials, Forums and Stack Exchange make up a significant chunk of my base knowledge about code but I don’t like to copy and paste, I make sure that anything I put into my game I know how it works. What I love about LD is that it forces me to try new things and in the process learn new things. Unfortunately the time restraint means the understanding new things becomes more optional especially when a lot of the new things you learn come with some complicated maths. Game Jams are not a good time to come to terms with new maths, but it brings me to another thing I love about LD, having to think your way around a problem. In a lot of ways Game design is the best and most abstract puzzle game I have ever played.

In LD35 I ended up in this spot a number of times and enjoyed my solutions to my problems. Sometimes it effected games mechanics. As an example when I was programming my Ship’s shooting mechanic. Because my ship had a variable speed the trouble I kept facing was the ship could out run the shot. It looked terrible, made the cannon look weak and also was problematic when it came to being chased by enemies. So I came up with an elegant solution

The cannon fires backwards. 3 Birds with 1 stone.

Another problem my shooting mechanic faced was aim. The ship in my game can rotate 360 degrees try as I might I couldn’t get the projectile to leave the ship in a line that looked correct. It would go in a straight line or come of at the wrong angle and it looked and played awfully. It was a maths problem and there was probably an elegant solution I was missing but I was already behind and I didn’t have the time to experiment until I found it. So here is how i solved my aim problem.I cheated!

A. I created am invisible game object that was the child of my Ships core and placed it about 20(unity distance) behind it. we shall call this game object Margret.

B. As a result it would follow the same rotation as my ship like it was on a spoke

C. at the point of firing 2 things happened

1. a projectile was fired from the ship
2. a new game object was spawned at the exact spot Margret was

D. The script on the projectile that made it move would take the game object dropped by Margret as a target and move in a straight line towards it while at the same time rotating itself to face it. It also meant I could have them destroy each other if  they hit Meaning the game didn’t become littered with bullets.

There might be hundreds of simpler solutions to this, some using more obvious code I didn’t think of or elegant solutions I don’t know how to do. I have described the way I code to people as hanging up pictures by nailing string to the ceiling and right now it works for me.

But this LD I found a creative way to cheat my way around something I couldn’t work out how to do the right way and if i hadn’t been doing LD probably wouldn’t of needed to but that time constraint really makes you think.

So if you read this thank you for indulging me and please play my game

Shift Commander

And if you have already played it please check out the Post Jam Version on Itch.Io as I have taken on a lot of the feedback in the comments on board.

https://cynicalmonkey.itch.io/shift-commander

Tags: #LD35 #gamedev #indiedev, itchio, postjam

This is my first LD, I didn’t even thought that I can make a game in 48 hours, but I made it and now you can play it also on android!!! 😀

The Game

View post on imgur.com

–STAR BUDDY–

A space traveler crashes on an alien planet and finds a shape-shifting friend named Buddy. With your new found companion, you must make your way trough a strange land to find your lost ship parts, while avoiding the local wildlife.

Be nice to Buddy, he’s all you got.

Thank you for checking out our game. We hope you love it!

Become a demon and challenge your friends in this fighting game.

Not only can you brawl like crazy, but shapeshifting your enemy to exploit his weaknesses is key to the victory.

Find your partner and follow the way to the battle :

Hellhound Battle Master Tournament – Rise of the Morpho Ray

Requires two players on local.

Feedbacks and comments are welcome.

Every Ludum dare I typically pick some new game genre to make and I’m slowly working my way in to genres I like to play myself. I would say that Fylgjur turned out to be the best one I’ve made so far, even if the votes don’t say so in the end. I learned a lot from the project and will be doing some more updates to it soon. Anyways here is how the compo went for me.

Time Breakdown 

0-1 Thinking of an idea and then planning it out

1-2 Making sprites and getting the base project setup

2-3 Getting basic player movement finished with a static sprite

3-9 Sleeping

9-15 Making animations, tweaking health code

15-19 Made weapon animations and code + first enemy

19-20 Fixing movement & attack bugs

20-24 More weapon code & animations, mostly spear and scrapping bow

24-28 Adding score and spawning of enemies

28-34 Sleeping

34-40 Making enemy bird fly in a pattern and not just straight to player, made sound effects

40-44 Tutorial level, music, UI

44-47 Added skeleton enemy with animation and code

47-48 Playtest, build, fix, rebuild, fix, rebuild, fix, rebuild, fix, rebuild

I think I managed my team pretty well and I only had to cut small sections off of what I had planned. I didn’t waste a lot of time on assets that did not get used but there were a few. I have a shield with blocking made but no reason to block since it was designed to stop arrows, but bows never got added. I had a few ideas to make damage popups and fruit hanging in the trees that you can hit to collect as health, but no time. I ran into a few bugs that nearly made me pull my hair out because they made no sense but they were resolved thankfully. The timeline is probably 80% accurate but it’s all a blur at this point.

Updates to game will be in next post!

I decided to make a racing game and program physics for a mariokart-esque racing game.
I’m thinking about pursuing development too!, play it here

Who doesn’t love job interviews?

Wait… no. Damn. That’s an awful way to market my Ludum Dare game.

Welcome to my job interview simulator.

No, that’s still awful. Think Jordan… think.

Want to spent several minutes talking to a pixelated green blob, in an attempt to get your dream job as a professional shapeshifter? Of course you do!

Of course they do. I bet the readers of this will click the link below, play The Professional Shapeshifter, and then give it a 5 star rating in every category. Yes. My marketing is perfect. Infallible.

Play The Professional Shapeshifter.

Then give it those sweet sweet stars. Lots of them. Muaha.

Tags: funny, interview, job interview, Perfect Game Marketing, Professional Shapeshifter, shapeshift, shapeshifter

Wow, we’ve done it! Don’t Look at Me still needs to be polished, but it’s here, and that’s great! Ludum Dare was a wonderful and exciting experience – I will never forget that feeling I had when we submitted in almost the last minute

As for the game, it’s a bit pshychedelic, but that’s the point, and I hope it communicates the mood it was intended to communicate. Give it a try – see what it means to live in an insane, constantly shapeshifting world. Any feedback would be GREATLY appreciated.

Well, this was my first game jam.
And I want to share a bit of this experience with you.

I meant this IS my first game jam. Playing other people’s game and seeing people’s reaction to mine happens to be the best part of it.

Creating

I always feel uncomfortable sharing something I do. Because there is infinite possibilities of doing things better. And I love creating but I’m not a specialist in anything, I just love the entierty of it.

Having a deadline and a theme is great for me. It allows me to work more efficiently. Well, I could have easily done my game in time for Compo submission if I didn’t sleep a lot and do other stuff… but anyway I kinda like the urgence and the intense focus.

The Jam

So, ShapeShift! At first, I thought of squares, triangles and circles (and maybe a cross…) But then I thought too many people would think of that. I guessed a lot of people would do a hero with transforming powers, so I looked for interesting angles for the theme. After looking at ancient stories of Mythology and all the uses of metamorphosis in art through the ages on wikipedia, I told myself: Maybe the story of a dog who has been transformed into a man? Or a character that could switch between male and female?

I liked those weird ideas, but it was ambitious. I knew I had to keep it simple. Especially since I’m doing this on my own. And I never really finished a game…

After a looong family dinner on saturday night, 20 hours had passed. I had to make a decision. I set up for squares, triangles and circles. But what’s the gameplay? I thought first of a rythm game. The shapes would shrink and you would click on them when they reach the center of the screen. But for my placeholder geometric assets I choose black, white and red as colors. That made me think of Seven Nation Army’s video clip from The White Stripes(although ther is no square). So I had to make the shapes grow from the center instead of shrinking from outside. I just liked the mood it made.

Ok, but then what’s the gameplay again? It could still be a rythm game, you would look at shape  on top of screen and see the incoming shapes. And click the good shape at the right moment . But… Putting stuff above the screen was really annoying since the visual effects were making you look at the center. So, I had to put the information to the center. And again, it had to be simple. So the gameplay changed from being a rythm game to a reflex game. And I felt it matched to the arcade style of the game. You have an instant visual reward when you do a good input, you die instantly with a bad one. You restart instanly with another input.

That was working, so I made new shapes to be a bit more pretty. Then I implemented the scoring system and started a health bar. diminishing increasingly through time, that you can refill with your good answers. This would make the gameplay or else there would be no challenge… But the first real bugs occurred. Bad shapes started popping where they shouldn’t. And then an atrocious visual bug that was destroying the mood… The gameplay wasn’t there, the visual was corrupted. And there where only 24h hours left, if I inteded to submit in time for the Jam. After multiple breaks and code rewriting I decided to sleep on it.

It wasn’t looking good the next day and I started thinking: well, maybe next ludum dare I’ll try again… But I finally managed to make the game work. And guess what… the visual bug had dissapeared too! There are some small pleasures in life! After this quite overwhelming moment, I focused on adjusting the gameplay and trying to add stuff to make it cooler. I was loosing myself and then a voice in my head said: Only 4 hours man! I spent half of it repeating square, circle and triangle in my mic to get the good sound… And did a quick beat using premade tools in one hour. Then render the game, setting the page making some screenshots. And we’re set!

In the end, I’m really happy I made something. It’s not perfect. A lot of things could have been done better. But it’s done and people can play it!

The After Jam

I could have got to sleep at 3Am but I stayed up and went to bed at 6. I had to see what other people had done.

I find the rating system really cool, encouraging people to play game and play the one that are least rated. I look up at other people’s game in a humble way, trying to look at the positive. And I find the people’s reaction to my game awesome. It’s encouragement to sharing and that’s why I write this.

Thanks everyone!

My submission to ludum dare: Trisquircle  (yeah the title is quite original, I know!)
I didn’t put it anywhere so here are the tools I used:

Gamemaker

Krita/Aseprite

Audacity/Garageband

Tags: arcade, post-mortem, psychedelic, reflex