FIRST:

Neon DX is a fast paced puzzle game with some arcade game inspirations. You could say it’s a Tetris clone, we see it as a Tetris child 😀

Its only core mechanic is as simple as that : reproduce the shape on the right thanks to a morphing shape on the left, as fast as possible.

OUR SCOPE:

We were 5, and none of us had any graphical skills, so we decided to create a game without any complicated asset. As active people with agendas, we also decided to make a game so simple we could sleep well, and end before monday.

The idea came out naturally and then we came up with a playable version within hours. In fact, it’s so simple we’ve had all the time in the world to polish the game, practice photoshop, and learn how to make a working leaderboard that keeps all recorded scores in memory… We’ve even had time for playtests!

OUR EXPERIENCE:

-> The scope was so little, we didn’t put any pressure on our shoulders – compared to previous jams. That changed our mood completely. We slept 6 to 8 hours a night, we ate well, we took time to eat all together… It really has been a cool relaxing jam.
-> In usual gamejams, we often make the mistake of trying to make something too big, and we end up sacrificing gameplay, assets, animations, for the sake of time. This time, we could do the exact opposite: we added gameplay, graphic elements, sounds…  Man, it feels SO much better to add things than to remove them.

OUR CONCLUSION:

-> Taking a really small scope (like really really small) is very cool in jams.

->  A polished simple game will make you feel better than a good concept badly put to life.

-> It seems SO mutch better to show in a resume something that works than something that is broken.

’till next time, LOVE!

PS:
play it here:
http://bit.ly/neondx
See your score here:

http://vindesf.fr/neon-enjmin/leaderboard.php

PPS:beat us! please beat us!

Play the game.

That’s our 9th Ludum Dare, so we decided to make something challenging this time. We’ve tried to create multiplayer action-horror-shooter thingy with two characters trying to kill each other. One is a werewolf (short-range attack, wide angle of view), other one is a hunter (long-range attack, small view angle and viewing distance). And yeah, that was pretty challenging indeed for some reasons, such as:

1.  Networking
   We’ve made our first network game for LD#34. It was quite primitive, peer-to-peer game for two players. But it proved that our team can handle network-game-specific issues and make network game at least playable. This time we decided to go further and create server which would interconnect all game instances into pairs. That is still quite simple client-server architecture, but it required lots of time to implement and some knowledge of websockets magic.
2. Dynamic shadows
   Our game is based on libgdx engine which is quite simple and, of course, doesn’t have any built-in shadow support. So, shadows were made using bunch of black triangles, dozens of math and sorting obstacles by distance, from farther to closer. Looks pretty realistic though:
   
3. Collisions detection
   
   Characters should not go through trees, right? Libgdx has built-in box2d engine support, but for such simple task it adds so much overhead to code that we decided to make everything on our own. That required some math too, and sometimes leaded to funny bugs such as trees making you stuck inside them and tear you apart. http://cs8.pikabu.ru/post_img/2016/04/24/9/1461512759117025283.webm
4. Soft torch beam effect
   It may look simple. But inside it carries some OpenGL vertex and fragment shaders magic. One of us spent 5 hours or something making this effect look properly and be configurable too. This soft-beam torch effect could be also achieved with gradient transparent bitmap, but it would be less challenging and less funny to make.
5. Balancing and small details
   After basic game mechanics was complete, we decided to add some more features to make game better balanced and more interesting to play. First, we’ve made a wolf jump over the trees to compensate hunter’s advantage in attack range, and then we’ve added traces to our characters to help them find each other in dark forest.

After all, we are completely happy with the result and we hope you’ll enjoy playing this. It’s hard to find opponent sometimes, so be ready to grab your friend and play with him over the Internet. We also have page with game statistics here: https://catinthedark-dashboard.herokuapp.com/

and Telegram chat for everyone who wants to receive notifications about active players waiting for opponent: https://telegram.me/joinchat/BECxPgbnSIAUB3XsqAfHIg

So, our Ludum Dare entry http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=27523

Hello!

We just want to thank everybody who has rated and commented on our game, and to give the word so that others rate it too!

The game we made for this LD is Sneaky Purple, please consider playing it 😀

Play it for this cute little spiky sneaky purple monster, it won’t thank you, but I will for him!

Tags: LD35

(I had to look up what “Post-Mortem” meant because I was so confused at all the blog posts with it in the title. You better be grateful!)

Soulshifter is a game about killing enemies and stealing their forms (sounds morbid, I know). The enemies come in waves out of portals, and you must survive a set amount of waves (based on difficulty) to win. But that’s not all Soulshifter is. Soulshifter is a game about competition, about teamwork, about challenges, and about new experiences.

Me, Erik and Justin worked harder on Soulshifter than on any other game we’ve ever made. I programmed things that I had no clue how to program before we started. Justin made fantastic art in a style he had never tried before we started. Erik learned he was a way better musician than he ever thought he was before we started. We learned that we were a better team than we thought we would be before we started. Soulshifter, and by extension, Ludum Dare did and meant so much more to us than we ever thought it would.

Of course, we didn’t get everything we wanted into the game, but when has anyone ever began a Ludum Dare and finished with everything he wanted originally plus all the things he thought up along the way? We got a game we were happy with in the end, a solid base that could, and will be easily expanded in the future. We got a game that we were proud of, too.

The feedback we’ve gotten has been so wonderful, and everyone  has been so nice. We honestly can’t thank you all enough. Even if you left us a bad score, you will have shown us what we need to improve on next time, and we’re just as grateful to you too. We’ve had so much fun playing other people’s games, also, and it’s just made us feel even stronger that Ludum Dare is a great community of people that we want to meet and compete with every single time it runs.

TL;DR: (What a nasty word, how about this:) To summarize, our time last weekend and the following days after was amazing, we all enjoyed the competition, and all of you, the community. We’re happy with what our game became, and you’ll definitely see us next year. Happy game design,

– Ben, and everyone else at Toasted Games.

Tags: 2016, ben collings, dare, erik larson, games, justin davidson, ludum, ludum dare 35, Mortem, Post, post-mortem, postmortem, soulshifter, toasted, toasted games

Let’s try something new, shall we? Rather than making a long text-based post explaining how I created the crazy cut-out effects in Hidden in Plain Sight, I figured doing a live-stream on Twitch would be easier to understand.

So for those interested, make sure you jot down this date on your calendar: I’ll be streaming this Thursday, 3:00 PM EDT, at twitch.tv/japtar10101. Don’t worry, this stream will not be very technical! I may be a programmer, but trust me, I only created one new shader throughout the whole project.

P.S. I’m also streaming today, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101, to show off our development for Not a Clone, a game featured in our October 2014 challenge. We’ll also be streaming again at 7:00 PM EDT today at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace, this time playing your games!

I have got 55+ votes and a lot of sweets comments ! Thank you all !

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=22158

(You can play our entry here)

(Looking for games to try and rate, please post yours on a comment)

The games I am going to show on this post are focused on innovation. Maybe they are not perfect, we all know that innovation is risky but extremely gratificant.

However, it is interesting to see games like this. I personally love the innovation in videogames, even if they have flaws. It is a brave way to discover something new that may help other developers to improve their games, and who knows, maybe they inspire completely new mechanics.

So here they are: some entries of the LD35 that I consider higly innovative.

Just Roll With It (Try here)

This one is a classic move-rocks puzzle game, but with a twist: it is specially designed for playing it with Oculus DK2 and Omni. So, if you own both of these, go try it right now! I tried it on web since I don’t have Oculus neither Omni, but the game overall is funny and has good graphics, so it must be a great VR experience.

play (Try here)

A little arkanoid type game. Gameplay is a bit conventional, a classic breakout game, so, where is the innovation? It is on the “brick” animation. Their moves are based on a song, ANY song you import into the game. So yeah, mechanic it is not different from the original one, but the generated sound wave really amazed me.

Cloud Sculptor (Try here)

This one has not an objective, nor a conflict. So it is more a “toy” rather than a “game”. Nothing wrong with it! I enjoyed the experiment, maybe it needs to be a bit polished but i found it relaxing and interesting.

Snakoban (Try here)

Snakoban is a minimalistic game, with what I think it is a new point of view of the old Snake game. Your objective is to touch the green pixel of the level by growing yourself, but you have to be careful with all the “sand” bits of the puzzles. Its mechanic is really really original, so that is why I included it on this post.

Inner Maze (Try here)

One of my favourite entries of this Ludum Dare, here the scenario changes its shape depending on your heartbeat (well, not you real heartbeat, but the character’s). So you have to move if you want to keep things moving! More to the point, depending on the character’s emotions, some elements of the environment will reveal.

Here is where this post ends. I know there are more innovative entries, but I prefered to post some of those who aren’t as known as others. And, to say the truth, some of the other innovative games I found were promoted on other posts I wrote, and I didn’t want to repeat myself.

But maybe you know some more. Would you share them? Write on a comment!

Tags: innovation, ld, LD35, Ludum Dare

It was super fun LD, and after a bit of rest I’ve decided to keep going.
I think Shapeless Escape can be a decent platformer material, may be not quite competitive on the market, but at least it will be great for training purposes.

Thank you all for great comments and valuable feedback. As a first step towards greater game, I’ve made a post-LD version with patched 3rd level and ability to drag the boxes. No more rage over the box that stuck in the corner!

Also, here’s a small sketch for one of the boss fights. Do you like interesting and unusual boss fights? I surely do.

When one wants to murder a wizard. It’s best to chug everything that looks like magic.

Cult Quest

Subject 26

Sluggy’s Tiny Adventure

Keep up with the ongoing series with this [Handy Playlist]

If you Enjoy the Video and want more be sure to subscribe! I’ll be taking more submissions throughout the LD35 voting period so don’t be shy! [Use this Handy Form]

Tags: bears, Larry Chupacabra, Laryr Does Ludum, LD35, Video Showcase

The Idea

I’m thinking about making this game into a 3D fps with the unreal engine

I’m looking for some feedback on this idea!

Finally got around to editing the timelapse video for Nightshift  Hope you enjoy!

Next up, I will edit the trainwreck of a first episode of let’s play your LD games. As many of you (five people that were there) know, everything that could possibly go wrong on a stream did go wrong, but it was fun nonetheless, so we’ll be trying on a slightly more powerful machine next time. But, submissions are still open, so:

ADD YOUR GAME TO OUR LET’S PLAY LIST

Tags: Let's Play, timelapse

If you aren’t watching Ludum Dare To Believe, what are you DOING with your life? lol

At 13:50 they play my game:

You can download/play/rate it yourself here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=20860

Have fun! If you do a Let’s Play, Tweet me at @BPOutlaws so I can check it out! Follow me for updates on my games, about to wrap up my last Ludum Dare game for release:

– Jeff

Tags: 2D, game, gamemaker, jam, LD35, Ludum Dare, review

Hello everyone

I want to present you our 6th LD game and 4th game made with godot engine.

We have had tones of fun inventing, creating, programming, designing and testing it.

The last part is presentation. I’m not so good at presenting something but I want to tell you some anecdotes.

My Idea on Sunday was, I wanted that the player loses clothes when he got hurt. (a joke perhaps nobody would see!!)
On Saturday night we had all the player animations and design ready.

So we let him lose first the hat, than the robe. (player has three hearts)

While testing we noticed, the dead animation used the hat.

This dead animation was so cool, we don’t wan’t to change it.
What piece of clothing can he lose now? The underpants?

Finally we did it! We were so tired, the whole process took us 4 hours!

We’ve added an other joke, find it out be your self.
You can find our game here Wizard of Shapes

thank you for playing, commenting and voting

Tags: anecdotes, godot, presentation

We’re streaming on Twitch at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace, playing your games. Check us out!

We do prioritize on those in the chat first, so join in!

This is a long shot…. lol but one of the features I wanted to add to my game I was simply not able to because of NOT KNOWING HOW!!!  In fact I spend way too long and almost ran out of time trying to figure it out.  I figured I would be able to figure it out after the JAM but I still can’t.  If you use GAMEMAKER Studio and you’re bored then I have a quick challenge for you….

How in the world do I make my Swedish Fish retract!  In my game, once the Swedish Fish touches the textured blocks he shrinks back to normal size.  I had to do that because I could not figure out how to get his tail to retract back to his head.  Try out the game to see what I’m talking about!!  If I could get him to retract then that would be just SOOOO COOL!!!  You guys are all my heroes and this entire experience has been amazing!  Thank you for even playing the game and being such a supportive community!

Fin!

I am planning to change the player to look better. Which style should I use?

Left: Semi-Real (Proportionate)

Right: Cartoon (Unproportionate)

Please leave a comment 😀

Well here we are again, another LD, another Postmortem. I have to say I made a few changes this tiome around and they really seemed to help. The theme chosen was one I actually upvoted, so that was nice. I was really happy with the theme this time around and it felt really good to kinda already have an idea of what I wanted to do. I originally thought about doing a traditional platformer or a tower defense game. I’d never done a TD game before so it would have been a nice challenge. I think it was on the last day of voting that I thought about doing a puzzle platformer like the game Escape Goat. Anyways on with the Postmortem.

What Went Right

Let’s start off with the good stuff first.

1. I felt confident with the theme this time around. Last LD I was in a very bad place and really couldn’t think of anything to do. I find this ironic as there were two themes last time! I think I was feeling the effects of being burnt out. But not this time!

2. Was able to brainstorm an idea pretty quickly. It took me less than an hour to work up what I wanted to accomplish with my game.

3. Very happy with the art I created. I honestly believe this is my best pixel art. I an truly proud of my player character especially. I don’t normally do people well.

4. More confident with Unity. This was my 4th time using Unity for an LD and I felt much more confident with it and using 2D with it. I plan on continuing to hone my skill to hopefully make better games in future LDs.

What Went Wrong

1. Took too long to get something up and running. It was sometime in the afternoon on Saturday when I finally got something working. In hind sight I should have done the art for the player and the ground and then got them working.

2. Puzzles took too long to make. These took a majority of my time on Saturday and on Sunday. I can only imagine how long it took the people who created Escape Goat to create all those levels!

3. Collision issues between player and ground. This was the bane of my game for the entire LD. The player both human and mouse would get stuck on the ground for no reason at all. It wasn’t like they were getting stuck between 2 block, no they were getting stuck in the middle of a block! Very weird.

4. Rushed at the end for Sound and Music. Because the levels took too long and trying to figure out why the player was getting stuck I hurriedly put in sound and music. I was only able to get music for the titlescreen and the win game screen. Normally I have music throughout the game.

5. Poor time management. Normally I have enough time to put in everything I want but with the problems listed above and poor time management I wasn’t able to get some things in. I really want to work on this game post compo as I believe its one of my best games to date and one that is the most fun. I would like to expand on this.

Well there you have it. You can play & rate my game here. See you all for LD36!

I’ve gone over the code for Shape Struggle, and optimized it for performance  On my machine, I can’t get it to drop frames in the latest post-compo build, 1.1.0.6.  The thing is, my laptop is pretty high-end (2.8GHz Xeon E3-1505M, 64GB RAM), so I’m not sure how well it runs on older machines… I need testers!

>>> Play and Rate Shape Struggle <<<

I figure my optimization tricks might help other developers, so in brief, here’s how I did it:

1. Controller object:  I knew even before the compo ended that I needed to set up a controller object to optimize the performance of the up to 500 instances of oEnemy that I’d have active in the game.  But the code in the controller object from the 1.0 build was far from optimized.  I refactored and streamlined the code, eliminating redundant conditional checks, and pulling code out of loops to make them as tight as possible.

   I also pulled some Step event code out of the two most complex objects, oSquare an oPentagon, and put it into the controller object.  Doing so enabled me to write some of the code in the controller so that it runs once for all instances of oSquare and oPentagon, rather than once per instance.   This makes a huge difference in the amount of calculations necessary when there are hundreds of instances active.  No matter how many there are, there’s only one calculation performed.

2. Simplified bullet object.  At maximum firepower, the player fires 5 bullets per shot, one shot every three steps.  At 60fps, that’s 100 bullets per second.  That’s 100 creation events per second.  I thought I should limit the number of bullets, and also I wanted to limit the range of the player’s weapon, so I put a timer in the bullet object that destroyed the bullet instance after 1 second.

   Potentially, I might have optimized this by implementing object pooling, so that rather than creating and destroying bullets, I would re-use the instances so I wouldn’t need to keep creating and destroying them.  But first, I tried removing the timer, and found that the game plays and feels exactly the same, so that timer code doesn’t matter.  Normally setting a variable and then decrementing it doesn’t take a lot of CPU.  But with up to 100 fewer creation events every second, and 100 fewer timers to decrement every step, it adds up.

   Object pooling might yield still more performance optimization, but simplifying the objects as much as possible first before making such efforts is smart.

3. I also removed the collision check from the bullet object that checks for collisions with the wall, and put it in the wall. There’s only 8 wall instances, so 8 collision checks vs. up to 100 each step means a substantial savings in calculations.

Tags: csanyk, LD35, Optimization, post-compo, Shape Struggle

An eye to add to the game 😛

WOW ! +60 votes for Shapeshift for Cheese !

Thank you very much for all your positives comments on http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=22158

I’m over 60 votes ! it’ s fantastic !

Don’t forget you can play at the postmortem version (no bugs and better dialogs system) by downloading this game on

http://adipson.free.fr/ludumdare/35-avril2016/SHAPESHIFTFORCHEESE.zip

Tags: 2D, adventure, Adventure Game Studio, AGS, cartoon, point-and-click