Hi !

After receiving several feedbacks about my LD entry, I’ve listen and made some improvements. Here is the list of the changes :

• Where the controls of jumping, pushing and shifting shapes were all tied to the same button before, now I’ve separated the two. You can still jump and push through with the up key, but you’ll “shift” shape with the “Shift” key ! Convenient, no ?
• Maybe it’s a little hard to guess which form is next before shifting while trying to juggle your way to the exit, I’ve added on the UI a box telling you what’s the next form before shifting. I hope it will prove you useful !
• Many told me that the 3rd level is wayyy hard for what it is. Well, fear not ! I’ll add soon some levels to fit in between level 2 and 3 to ease the pain of learning how to approach the several new concepts I introduce, so expect them in a near future. Other than that, many people complained about the thigh spaces at level 3, so I’ve cleared up a little bit of space for you ! It will be easier, but will still be a challenge.
• I’ve added a game title logo ! I love Voxel Art, so I’ve decided to stay in the theme and made a full logo in voxel just for you, check it out :

So, if you want to see the improvements and play my game, well head right there !

Tags: improvements, post mortem LD35, Shifto

This LudumDare, I thought it’s the perfect opportunity for me to explore C++ for the first time. So, to ease things up, I decided to only use a text console as output in input for the game and I knew the game/core mechanic had to be simple in order to finish it before the 48 hours deadline. My idea was to create a turn-based game, where the player simply had to move to a goal, while avoiding enemies by changing your appearance, which is simple and can easily be implemented in a text console.

Time went by quickly and I am glad, that I have produced something, that can be considered as a game in these 48 hours. Due to lack of content the game turned out as a puzzle game, but if I had had more time, I would have tried to make a rogue-like game by adding:

• More content (enemies, items)
• Limited vision, so the player cannot see the whole level. This prevents, that the player can carefully plan for the whole level, leading to more spontaneous decisions
• Procedurally generated dungeons/caves

Also I didn’t have enough time to implement a terminal library, so the player ends up typing commands instead of just pressing keys.

What the LudumDare showed me (again), which is pretty obvious, is to keep the idea simple and implement the core mechanic(s) quickly (don’t waste too much time on unnecessary things, like too much optimization) and I am looking forward to hear possible improvements and critique from you.

PLAY IT HERE

Tags: C++, console, postmortem, terminal, text-only

Completed my 1st Ludlum Dare and thought it wen’t pretty well.   A few thoughts:

Things which went well:

• Using github pages to host it (free, easy)
• Using Phaser; I’m even happier now as it’s a pain to download to play
• Coming up with ideas for all the potential themes

What didn’t go so well

• Not having used Phaser before in anger
• Weak typing; oh the anger when I was trying to use physics on an object which didn’t support it
• It being the same weekend as an awesome F1 race

I tried to keep a diary of what I was doing … you might notice it’s not as accurate on Sunday.

Saturday

02:00: Theme released
06:30: Awake – read theme, realise I don’t I have any good ideas for Shapeshift
06:34: Look at what others have created in 4 hours; get depressed
07:15: F1 Qualifying about to start … but I’ve decided on an idea
08:21: How do I collide hundreds of items in Phaser?
10:15: Discarded the original control idea, and now (with bitmaps) fighting Phaser to enable physics
11:51: Basic mechanics are working – wondering about using dynamic shapes rather than atoms
12:19: Restructured code and now javascript is doing stupid things
13:10: Basic gameplay working, need to figure out scoring
14:19: Decaying and config of most things working … how do you ‘win’
17:11: Scoring working and lots of tweaks, giving chain reactions. It’s starting to feel like a game
18:11: It’s a game! but its got a memory leak
19:18: I’m happy with the general gameplay, although I now need to fix the bugs
20:55: I’m triggering a Webkit crash on iOS; can’t figure out how to avoid it. Pondering making a score screen
22:48: Been playing with new, smaller, graphics but I seem to prefer my placehodlers eek! Done for the night

Sunday

06:53: Awake, down on my computer. F1 race on TV (double win). Makea list of all the enhancements I’ve got plannd
07:22: Awesome F1 race … more than a tad distracting
09:31: Highscore table done, graphics done – time to do menu before sorting out sound
11:25: All the screens done – I don’t like them, but there done. Now sound
13:32: Got the music planned, having a break before I dive in and record the final version
15:07: Music sorted and key sound effects done; all that remains is tweaking, testing and the boring bits
15:53: Got bored trying to make checkboxes for sound etc .. gave up and had a break
18:30: Going to bed for a powernap
20:00: Awake, and trying to figure out what I can start which I can finish; settle on tweaking
21:50: I’ve had enough – submitting it

If you want to give my game a go to see what I made: Helium-4

You can play it here!

Have you found yours?

Tags: 35, 3D, henkan pachinko, japanese, LD35, Ludum Dare, mosaic, pachinko

 Play it here

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.

### The PostMortem ###

Well here we are… and I dont know where to start.

It was our first Ludum Dare as a team and for two of us the first game jam ever. I participated only in MiniLD#65 so far. So we are quite unexpierenced when it comes to planing and working as a team, which can defently be seen in our game. So let me start with the bad things.

What went wrong:

• I can only speak for myself but i ate and drank way to less. I was so focused in programming and trying hard to get things done that i completely forgot to eat and drink, i remember that moment when i realized that 8 hours just passed by with me not leaving the chair a single time. This is the reason i had to stop Sunday afternoon because i was so tired, hungry and thristy that i couldnt concentrate for more then 5 minutes anymore.
  • Defently going to set a timer on my cell phone about 2-3 hours intervall to take small breaks in the next Ludum Dare J

• A big loss for us was the fact that everyone had to work on Monday, even though we entered the jam, because we are a team, we only could use about 48 hours instead of 72

• The level design:
  • We kept the level design as one of the last tasks and that was a bad idea, especially for a platformer game
  • The difficulty was a bit to hard I guess, I did most of  the puzzles and I think the reason why its so hard, is the fact i tested this game so much that i got really good at it and solved every puzzle with ease. I personally think a platformer should be hard to play but in the focus of a game jam where people need to test and rate this game, its been a bad idea to make it that hard, that many people didnt finnished it and maybe rated our game with a pinch of salt left  😛
• The mechanics:
  • We tried to give the player control over the pulsing effect, which didnt worked out that well. While the slowdown effect needs to be used to solve some of the puzzles the speedup hasnt any use despite from lower the waiting time to adjust the pulsing cycle. But none of that felt right and we didnt really came up with a better usage of these features

What went right:

• The communication:
  • From the brainstorm to the finished product our communication was always perfect. At least in my opinion. There was no time where somebody didnt know what to do next or how a detail is going to work out in  the final product.
  • We had that very clear vision of this game and couldnt wait to see how everything combined is gonna work out
• The learning factor:
  • You learn to make games by making games. Thats how it is. And i learned a ton of new stuff this time.
  • One of our programmers hasnt made a single game before and isnt a professional programmer neither is he working in informatics, its just his hobby. And i guess he even learned more
  • Our artist did such a great job adapting these simple shapes to three amazing background themes
• The fun factor:
  • Even though it was a pain. And yes it was a pain. I was busted and ruined and whacked and broken-down after this marathon BUT I WOULD DO IT AGAIN. And I guess thats what Ludum Dare is about. At least for me. Its about the fun and joy and the passion and love to make games

Thats it from me ladys and gentlenerds. Have a good time and good luck during the voting

See you next Ludum Dare

Developed in HTML5 with phaser

Play and rate here.

Thank you.

All that has not implemented will gradually add.

Hi everybody !

Following the general opinion concerning our game, we made Ludum Metamorphosis easier.  We also allowed the game to be rated in categories humor and innovation.

Have fun

**************************

Salut tout le monde !

Suite à plusieurs avis nous avons rendu Ludum Metamorphosis plus simple. Le jeu peut également être noté dans les catégories humour et innovation dès à présent.

Bon jeu

Play Ludum Metamorphosis

For The Wewelsburg Experiment we recorded quite a few sound effects to give voice to all the Doctor’s transformations and to create a stormy ambience, but we didn’t have much time to work on the game’s soundtrack so it consists on a single track.

We just uploaded it to sound cloud in case you want to listen to it:

It’s a simple, happy and upbeat chiptune piece, composed in the free software LMMS and using the Nescaline plugin which mimmicks the NES sound chip. We’d love to hear your impressions on it!

You can play and rate the game (and the music 😉 ) following this link.

We hope you enjoy it!

Get to the live stream right now !

Here is a walkthrough I did of my 48 hour solo competition entry. I know the performance varies on a machine to machine basis so this video shows how I see the game “as intended”.

Enjoy!

(But please go play the game if you like what you see 😀 )

Hi there!

My expert recommendations for those who is interested in what to play:

Cult Quest

Very simple one-button game with cool graphics and nice dynamics.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=9271

JaJa’s Bizarre Transformer

Hilarious game about crazy man who is shooting bullets from his big mouth and kills strange things on small arena. Bizarre art and nice old TV screen effect included.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=55414

Genius Loci

Great quest game about shifting the environment with interesting graphic style and atmosphere.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=18480

Extanation

Nice handpainted cyperpunk-style graphics. But unrelated to the theme.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=87914

Flattened

Minimalistic game about dimensional shifting that confuses your mind from the first sight.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=8370
And here is the game about me: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56318

If you want to show your game to me, post the link in comments.

Tags: Eggplants love

This time there was a longer concept phase with drawings and stuff. I was aiming for a puzzle, and being solo on this, I wanted to participate to the COMPO, but I wanted a bit more polish, so for the first time I chosed the JAM!

I was aiming for a very different art style, but looking at the clock and the time it would take, I decided the game would be about a computer & an AI.

The art style and effects are inspired by my old CPC 464 with a failing green screen. It was my first computer@10 and I remember myself coding a sh**ty text adventure.

The beast Amstrad CPC 464 @1984, before the floppy disk era.

The first day was very hard for me, I was supposed to work with a programmer friend but he couldn’t participate so I had to do all the code by myself and it was painful 😀

One of the puzzle “code”

I recorded some voices by mic but didn’t include them. So it was an interesting experience, I think the puzzles suck a bit maybe you’ll like them anyway!

If you wanna play this little game :
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=29477

PLEASE Chose the standalone windows version in fullscreen for best experience!
Thank You !

Thanks to everyone who is playing my game! lots of great feedback, and very useful.

If you haven’t tried it yet, A Soul of Clay is a escape the room style game with an alchemical setting. Check it out if it inspires you!

Play A Soul of Clay Now!

View post on imgur.com

PLAY BattleMath

At start, I intended to try making something traditional for this jam,

Because I just finished “Witcher3” last month, so I decided to make some melee combat theme game. And I just have a set of digit models at hands, so I added hands & feet for them and skinned the mesh with blender.

There’re only a small set of animation clips to make, (4way walk + run, player attack, player evade), I made these clips in Unity with my own Skele plugin.  (A shameless self-promo here 😀 )

Although I used Navmesh for AI pathfinding, but didn’t drive them with transform but with Rigidbody, as I expected to make some collisions and I worry that frequent state changes would be too error-prone. Also a nasty gotcha of NavMesh took me some hours to crack.

I’d been playing with the PandaBT from assetstore for a little while, its examples are quite interesting. From the perspective of programmer, I like it more than RAIN, but RAIN has a better UI and debug interfaces.

But during this jam I felt that my AI scripts should keep more high-level, I’m not that familiar with the BT syntax and when things got messy, it took extra time to debug. I think I need do more experiments with BT later.

The player’s control & state transistions took longer than I expected, directly resulted in I cut off extra attack modes for player. It took quite some effort to tweak the physx.

This was the first Ludum Dare that I attempted as a team. I was joined by LD newcomer Tom Jepson who did a great job of coming up with the story and writing all of the dialogs, as well as helping to design the game.

We decided to make a point & clicker as Tom is a writer and we wanted to be able to evenly split the workload between us. Neither of us are any good at art so we decided to go for a walk in the woods and take some photos to use as scenes (most exercise I have had during a ludum dare).

We ended up having to cut things a bit short but we are both happy with what we ended up with.

Don the battered hat of a hard-boiled, chain-smoking, tough-as-nails private eye – as he grills the local inhabitants regarding a recent murder, along with their secrets and vices,

in

Greenwood P.I.

Glyph Morpheus — my solo Jam entry for LD 35 — is getting a mobile port!

It turns out a lot of people made “change the shape to get through gates” game, but so far I think it’s the only one that:

Response has been extremely positive (play for yourself and see!), and I’ve really enjoyed the other “shape gate” games I’ve played for LD35. So with a little bit of work on the UI, some extra features (including lanes), progression, and difficulty tuning, I think it’s going to be a fun mobile title.

Man. After a long string of bad Ludum Dare entries, it feels so good to have one I can be proud of!

They are ready.

Hello guys! WolfBit has updates, yay. Better collision system, AI born to kill and bicentennial bug fixed.

We will continue updating the game. If you haven’t played WolfBit, you should :), check it here.

WE MUST GO TO THE WOODS.

WE MUST GET RID OF THE DEVIL.

WE MUST STOP THE BEAST.

Download Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here??, well, here.

Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here (or WAYAWAYDH) is a bizarre mix of top-down stealth and point-and-click adventure. You play as a shapeshifting thief trying to steal from the (possibly evil?) rich people of Sanctuary Bay. You’ll need to impersonate the members of the Rump family and fool the guards if you want to infiltrate the house and open the vault.

So the postmortem. This is the first time I’ve ever written one of these, which is appropriate given that this is the first time I (or my teammates, for that matter) have participated in a game jam like this. It was an interesting and really fun experience, though there are definitely some things I wish we would have done differently.

What went wrong:

• Lack of sleep! I stayed up 36 hours straight, and my teammates got minimal sleep over the first 24 hours. This really came back to bite us as we were much less productive than we should have been due to not sleeping. Next time, sleep more often, but for less time.
• Getting the mechanics together. Because we had a few different mechanics to worry about, I started by building them in separate projects. Unfortunately, I had a hard time integrating everything (probably due to lack of sleep). Each component was playable individually, but things weren’t put together in a truly playable state until Day 3.
• We had too much ambition. We wanted to make something a little bigger than we were capable of doing in 72 hours, so we had to scale back at the last minute. This is something we’ll have to remember for next time.
• Controls… In the chaos of trying to get things simply working, I put a lot of actions on somewhat random keys. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and I didn’t get a chance to change them to something that’s more standard for these types of games.

What went right:

• Level design! I was really happy with Hunter’s design for the house, and the way she used actual blueprints as a basis. I also really liked Chris’s tiles, which made it feel a lot more like an actual home.
• I did the concept drawings of the characters, and I’m really proud of them. *arrogance increases*
• The overall concept. We were worried about the “shapeshift” theme, but once this idea started coming together, we found that we all really liked it. We plan on having a post-jam version up in a couple of days, but we’ve also been discussing completely rebuilding it as a full game. Feedback so far seems to be mostly positive, particularly regarding the general concept.
• The fun! We had a lot much fun making this, even despite the stress that came with it. And while it didn’t come together perfectly, we think it’s a good start. We all learned so much during #LD35, both about the technology we were using as well as about the process itself. The feedback we’ve received from the other LD’ers has been invaluable, and one of the best parts of this whole experience. Everyone else’s games have been incredibly impressive as well.

I think that’s probably good for now; We’re already looking forward to participating in Ludum Dare 36 this August, as well as continuing to work on WAYAWAYDH and our other projects. If you haven’t already played and rated it, please do so!

Hi there, ive been so happy with the incredible cool things u all said about my game, which was think from the beggining to work on mobile devices… ive been trying to make it easy and fun to play in mobile, but as it has 5 buttons on desktop/web version I am testing many differents way to controll it. Here is the latest and the one who i think fits better, also i added a bounch of other things like secret levels… but if the game is hard no one will ever discover them

this is what i got so far

swipes to move the shape (up, down, left, right)

link to compo entry:http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=90316