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

Now simple games time!

Body KEy

Addictive gameplay, difficulty increases with every level, very entertaining!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=36629

Highway Carnage

Simple game about making car disaster on the road.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=58828

Fluffy Cookies

Good game with nice art and interesting cooking mechanics (Windows only).

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=90036

Neon Level Switcher

Geometric game with simple but addictive gameplay.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56482

BlowRider: Legends

Cooperative game about crazy wheel resize, split-screen included.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=90397

If you want to show your game to me, post the link in comments.
And here is the game about me: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56318

Tags: Eggplants love

Hey everyone,

I am about to start playing and rating games over here.

Feel free to tune in and submit your game

I can’t believe we actually managed to get something submitted.

It was a crazy 72 hours, but all of us at Shatter Point are really proud of our game Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here??, which you can download and play right here.

WAYAWAYDH is a blend of top-down stealth and point-and-click adventure. You play as a shapeshifting thief that must lie their way through the home of a wealthy (ciminal?) family and break into the vault before time runs out.

Though we know it has its issues (we’ve learned you make a lot of strange design choices when you’re sleep deprived and trying to get a game finished in 72 hours…), we had a lot of fun making it, and we hope to continue working on it in the future.

We’re looking forward to playing everyone’s games, and we hope you will check out WAYAWAYDH and let us know what you think!

Hey everyone! So this was my third jam (and only my second completed) and I decided to do a 3D game despite my last Ludum Dare attempt where I’d just visualised something far too complicated to finish in the time available. In contrast I think this one went well! I ended up going in solo which meant this was my first real attempt at modelling and texturing. It’s all a little primitive but it fits with the art style I was after. Being a programmer most of my art looks, well, kinda bad!

Managed to get it finished with 30 minutes spare after some last minute bugs decided to show up. A little panic but thankfully the binary gods were looking down on me! Check it out on the link below and let me know what you think!

Play it here!

Looking forward to 3 weeks of playing some awesome games! See you in the next Jam!

Hey all. Really excited for playing everybody’s games. I hope everyone had as good a weekend as I did.

I just added a small update to mine to fix a typo and make the intro more readable by slowing it down. I hope that’s okay with everyone, if not then see the page for links to the original submission too

Find it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=87890

There are so many games to play that it’s tough to decide which to rate and comment on. If you post links to your games in the comments, I’ll be sure to rate and provide some feedback as soon as possible. I try to make sure I provide useful feedback and criticism in all my comments.

If you’d like to give me feedback on my game, MODE_SHIFT, when you have a minute I’d really appreciate it: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=13891.

Thanks, and I look forward to trying all your games.

There was a game-breaking bug in the post-compo version of ShmupShifter. I fixed it.

Play it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=55226

Also, keep an eye out for an even more improved final version in the next couple of days, with lots of polish and a few new features.

Unfortunately our build had a MASSIVE bug, which we had to fix but the good news is: We did it! Remember kids: Always remove your event listeners. It can save builds.

You can now properly play our game:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=55917

Hey everyone! All right so I got my game on and also added new music so check it out!

http://omarhuseynov011.github.io/NeoTrap/

As per tradition, I put together a timelapse for my game, Hidden in Plain Sight. New to this timelapse is a super-reveal that I was also giving a tutorial on how to use Unity to make VR applications to a Hackathon going at the same time as Ludum Dare. Not to mention all the Unity questions I had to answer at the site despite needing to work on my own, decidedly non-VR-related project. So yeah, last weekend was absolutely crazy for me, and this video is proof.

Haven’t tried it yet? Have a gander:

HELLO GUYS!!!

we’re working on a itch page, so you can download the game properly. (some people are having trouble from dropbox download)

ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56307

and itch page:

https://folztarg.itch.io/tangram-cookie-factory

I’ve uploaded a timelapse to youtube how I developed “Shape Escape”. Enjoy it 😉

Play it here! (And don’t forget to vote.)

3 consecutive days really can end up with the guy, or girl, and I was already in another jam, before that (it was LOWREZJAM), and I forgot the deadline

The experiment of these three days was just this very young demo of the game, I consider demo because unfortunately I didn’t done the end of level
Today the last day I had to make a trip and lost 8 hours :(((

|| Talking about the game now ||

Altered Beard is a game made to honor an icon, and a friend of mine.
Here you control Beardanu, a peaceful citizen who decided now distribute the blow to see how it is. and precisely at the time he decided to do this, the city is invaded by aliens. Thanks to the power of the majority vote, Beardanu can become president to kick the ass of aliens.
Entry link!

Tags: altered beard, alteredbeard, Beard Anu, Beard Game, beardanu, gillenew, Supreme Beard, SupremeBeard

I finished my Ludum Dare entry with only an hour to spare, you can play and rate “Polytopian” here:

Ludum Dare 35

So, how did it go? Well I think it’s one of my finer Ludum Dare projects, I prepared for it pretty well, and I’m quite pleased in the end result, both in looks, gameplay and audio.

There’s quite a few bugs which have slipped through, and I spent a good chunk of time solving others too. The mechanic is unique in a few ways, but after a few minutes of play you can clearly see my main 2 inspirations, Quantum Conundrum and Portal, which if you haven’t played, go pick up now! They’re great games.

The first day was spent a little on a different idea (that wasn’t anywhere near as good), and then on getting the main mechanic working. I spent far too long going about it a different way, but eventually settled on the way it works now.

Second day was almost 100% bugfixes and small tweaks, There’s a good number of problems that arise with a system like this, and yeah, not all of the issues were solved. Determining when to use which dimension’s physics is harder than it might seem, as well as managing the multiple layers and culling masks to make raycasting work well. Animation issues, camera issues, and a few issues with puzzles. At the end of the day, I made the soundtrack which you can listen to here:

I was busy in the afternoon of Monday, but I managed to fix some more bugs and get started on the levels in the morning, when I returned, I settled in and finished the rest of the playable game, as well as the title screen, fixed a few more bugs, and added the checkpoint system. All-in-all I probably spent 40 of the 72 hours on the game.

While I’m never really happy with anything I make, I think I’ve done a good job on this, given the time alloted. As much as I hate how buggy the game can be sometimes, I did all I could. Any more time spent on fixing bugs, would have meant less gameplay, and I think that’s pretty sparse to begin with.

This has been one of the most fun Ludum Dare’s I’ve ever participated in, I feel it’s brought back my love for creating games again, and I’m highly considering expanding this into a full project. I’ll be sure to post an update if that’s the case.

As always, it’s been a fun time, thank you Ludum Dare, and see you again in August!

Here is timelapse of my perspective of our development process.

The Game didn’t turn out quite as wanted and some of the mechanics are unreliable but we are overall happy with the result.
Lizard Pope

View post on imgur.com

Scientist clicker is a clicker-like game.
You incarnate a scientist, his role is to discover all the evolution of life thanks to a brand new machine.
We implement a lot of features so you can play without get bored !

View post on imgur.com

You can buy equipment to help you to go faster.

Also, when your work start to be recognized by other scientists, they want to join you !

View post on imgur.com

The game is entirely in C++, with the SFML graphic library.
This is our first LudumDare, and we are a group of five students.

Play Scientist Clicker

Available on Windows and Linux.

Hello everyone,

This time, I’ve opted for something rather unconventional for Ludum Dare. I tried to design a board game over the weekend.

Ejderhalar

Link To Game Page

It was Saturday morning. The competition had already begun. I woke up. I took a look at the theme. Shapeshift. Great, either I had to find an artist or I had to make a game about squares turning into triangles. I decided to take a shower and try to come up with an idea.

It was not until I fired up Unity3D after the shower when I first thought about making a board game. I’m a big fan of board games and I have a decent collection of them, too. At first, I thought I could design a game on the table first before I implement it with Unity3D for everyone to play on their computers. Therefore, I closed my computer, took lots of game pieces out of my existing game library and got to work.

Ejderhalar was made over Saturday afternoon and evening combined. I just sat next to my gaming table trying to figure out how I can shift the shapes of game pieces and make an interesting game in the meantime. “Istanbul” is a really good board game that includes a mechanic where you stack tokens on top of each other, only to leave them behind when you’re walking through a grid-like structure. This mechanic inspired me to put my own twist in it and I came up with the creature-like game pieces in Ejderhalar. When it was night, it was clear that I was not going to open my computer just to try to code a mediocre point and click interface for the board game in Unity3D. I stood up and played the game against myself a dozen times instead.

Sunday was spent with playtesting. I called a couple of friends who were available and I arranged meetings with them to play the game. The name of the game came up from one of my friends, who thought that the movement of the pieces resembled a dance of dragons. “Ejderhalar” means “Dragons” in Turkish.

I played 6 games with 2 different people before coming back home. The rules were set in stone in my head by that time. I just needed to write a proper rulebook. I spent all evening and night to create decent illustrations for the examples in the rulebook. There were two hours remaining on the Ludum Dare clock when I submitted the rulebook into the system.

Ejderhalar is a 2-player abstract area control board game about an ancient dance of the dragons. Your goal is to have a token on 3 out of 4 control points on the board before your opponent does. The game has an original movement mechanic that allows players to carry out long term plans.

I know it’s hard to come up with the energy to test a game jam board game, but I’d really appreciate it if you can play it at least once with a real opponent. Even if you are not able to play it, please write a comment on how you feel about the game. I promise a “play, rate and comment” in return for every comment below my game entry.

Thanks for reading my post and for taking a look at Ejderhalar.

Arhan Bakan
https://arhpositive.itch.io/
https://arhanbakan.wordpress.com/

We’re pretty happy with the result of this LD. Hope you guys like it!

Did you already play my game? No? Then play it right now http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=91656

Well, this Ludum Dare(35) was my fifth one so far. Five game competitions and I haven’t changed my style a bit. I’m still using Java with Eclipse for code, GIMP for my graphics. Well, maybe I changed my style just a little. This time I added sound to my game, a first for me. I made the audio using LMMS, an amazing program which I found out about recently. I’m super happy with the way my background music turned out, and I can’t wait to make more music for the next Ludum Dare. Unfortunately I was not able to finish my game at all due to time constraints, however.  In the beginning of this competition, I wrote up an “ideas” list. I listed types of games, game themes, and different meanings for “shapshift”. I then picked some of them at random and ended up with “over the head puzzle/exploration changing the shape of other objects (as a lycanthrope)”. It wasn’t until a day later on Saturday evening that I actually decided what the goal of the game would be. To that point all I had was the background music, the graphics, and a very basic game engine that let the player move around on platforms. I was very busy on Sunday and didn’t really get much of anything more done until Monday, when I madly tried to make my game… a game. What I had in mind was a game where you traveled around the mysterious world you were in finding polygons of different shapes and sizes. You would then have to bring them to “puzzle areas” where you would collect them all. You would have to figure out which pieces went to which areas, and then you would have to fill in the puzzle area shape with the polygons. Sort of like a tangram, but instead of only making a square there would be lots of shapes all over the place to make. Then the real challenge would be that you could change the shape of your polygons by moving their points around. You couldn’t add or remove points, but you could move the existing ones around, so a diamond could become a square and a trapezoid could become a parallelogram. As you completed areas you would unlock more, and stuff like that until you completed the big puzzle and beat the game. Well, anyway, that was the idea. The game turned out far less complex than that. In the end, all you can do is collect shapes on a single level, then they’ll warp to the single puzzle area where you can arrange them to make a square. When you do make a square, nothing happens, you can just be happy that you made a square. And that’s the tale of my game. I think the graphics turned out pretty decent, and the music as I said I am really proud of, but I just didn’t have the time to finish the code. I did run into several large bugs during the process of making the game which I did not expect and took up very large chunks of my time(hours of it), but even without those I’m not sure how much better the game would have been, as my idea was just too ambitious to accomplish in 72 hours even if I did have more time. I always enjoy the Ludum Dares no matter how my game turns out though, and I’m already having fun playing everyone else’s entries.

If I could figure out how to post pictures, there would be a picture of my game here. But alas, I cannot.

Woohoo, I’m now an Author and can add pictures!

One of the two screens from my game.

I feel like I should also mention that I would not be posting this if there wasn’t a glitch that made me have to post something for my profile page to show up. Silly website. At least it finally got me to say something about my work, normally I just post my game and remain silent.

Here be a time lapse of me makin’ my game: Widget Workshop. Stamp widgets according to the specifications and make it to the next day as a Magna Systems Corp. widget-making wage earner. Check it out here.

I still haven’t put together a time lapse; I’ve been busy playing and rating. But I still want to write a post mortem to elaborate on my goals and express what I feel I accomplished.

Within an hour and a half of the beginning of the compo, I settled on the “caterpillar lifecycle” concept:

The goal was to create experientially different moments of play during the different phases of your caterpillar life. As the design sheet above depicts, an important early thought was creating a sense of freedom and openness when the player emerges as a butterfly. This was accomplished by providing wildly different controls after the player emerges from a cocoon.

(The player is immobile as a cocoon, but has the freedom to move the camera — something they couldn’t do as a Pillar. Being given a brief opportunity to scout the map is useful, and it serves as a cue for the player to make the control shift more intuitive.)

The loop was complete, and roughly balanced so that total population was dependent on player actions. Neat.

I hang out in the IRC chat for a few before some kind soul yells at me, “SLEEP!”

I wake up early and tweak a few things, then get to planning the next sprint.

This basic life-cycle was SO successful in providing experientially unique moments of play, that I implemented alternate forms in the next sprint:

I didn’t know exactly what these other forms would do yet. I just gave them names and drew them to help spur creative thought. During implementation, they changed a million times before I settled on these three:

Agrobug: eats other bugs, leaves a trail of food behind it when moving quickly (clicking). Emergently attracts other bugs, creating food (eggs, cocoons, etc) for itself. Playing the agrobug feels pragmatic. You’re constantly moving forward, but turning requires you to click (and drop food). Spamming his movement causes him to revert to a cocoon, so motion is deliberate and calculate.

Fastbug (Zipper): fast-moving egg-collector that can morph at will. Useful for when there is a bunch of food around, but also a large number of competing insects. Like the Butters, he is fast, but his controls aren’t very friendly unless you remain in constant motion. Controlling the Fastbug feels restless. Almost agitating.

Fatbug: An inedible, egg layer. He’s ridiculously slow and his controls are unwieldy, making him a pain to play, but that’s okay! This discourages players from using him prematurely, as his only real system utility is saving the player from loss conditions (no mates, about to be eaten, etc…).

It’s about this point that I really started to feel the theme. Morphing completely changes the “feel” of the game, despite the fact that the underlying ecosystem remains the same. Player actions affect the distribution of bug populations.

It’s getting complex.

Before taking a fairly long break, I time-block the last day of development with three major goals in mind:

1. create “levels” to introduce the complex game mechanics,
2. provide a sense of progression in the existing “endless” mode,
3. improve art and add sound.

Aaaaand…go!

I wrote up a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish (“Become a buttefly”, “Last 3 generations”, etc) and started writing level controllers like a madman. I made a simple helper message to provide context for the player: “You want to be butterfly.”

Then something beautiful happened.

In the minimalist environment of the game, with few other cues, this simple message was hauntingly engaging. I trusted it. It told me how I felt. Why should I question it?

A large part of my motivation so far had been attempting to control the player’s emotional response to mechanical changes. This form of exposition had unbelievable synergy, and I ran with this for hours. Helper messages got simpler, more bug-like in perception. Simultaneously simple and open ended, they spurred thought. Mood became everything, and story mode emerged.

But there’s still time for more!

Mutation Mode (Progression via Adaptations)

4 hours left. No time to think. I know what I want to accomplish. I don’t have time to question plans. I create a data object to hold names and descriptions of various mutations and begin writing what they do before lifting a finger to actually implement them. I’m sure this will be my downfall.

3 mutations to unlock the alternative morphs, 3 cool down reduction mutations, 5 speed boost mutations, and 10 “unique” mutations (2 for each bug). Here’s a sample of some of the ambitious mutations I chose to throw at myself:

– “Grabbing Claws — grab eggs [as the Butter] and carry them while holding the LMB!”
– “Explosion Pouch — when the fatbug dies, it blows anything nearby into tasty bits!”

Believe it or not, I managed to implement all of these (and visualize the mutation when hovering over an heir) with an hour to spare. My old friend crunch, he’s good to me.

Alas, I’m behind schedule. I anticipated having 4 hours to spare at the end to polish graphics and add audio, but there’s only an hour left. I open up illustrator and begin frantically replacing all of the art assets — all 7 sprites. 😛

Before visual update.

After visual update.

Done.

10 minutes to spare. Polish. Tweak helper messages. Panic. Merge control objects for level 1 and 2 to make it a single, longer level. Find bug. Panic. Fix.

TIME!

Finished product:

This Ludum Dare, I worked with scriptwriter Gwenhyver Davies (@Gwenhyver) to create a story based game. We used Unity to program the game, pen and paper to create the artwork, which we then scanned in and edited with Gimp. The sounds we recorded ourselves were created with Audacity.

We came up with lots of good ideas that I might make later on – this was a really good theme – but for the game jam, we went with Critter Creator, a story and point and click style game where you create a critter to help you in your lab. Each decision you make changes the critter’s personality – be careful!

It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. I hope you enjoy playing it here ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56155 or on my website www.edgeofcode.com/critter-creation/

Comments are appreciated!

We have finished our small game: Realm Shifters. At first we had a lot more ideas but we are happy how much we could actually get into the game.

“Mighty, the dragon, Berserk, the Viking and Coward, the Cow are walking in the Enchanted Forest of the Autumn Elves. Three body but one shared mind. They are collecting Magical Orbs to shift to the Abyssal Realm where they can gather the Soul Orbs to fully charge all of the Ancient Runestones to open the Really Dark Purple Vortex of Darkness. You know. Because reasons.”

In Realm Shifters you can:
– Collect orbs- Shapeshift to different forms
– Shift between realms
– Energize the Ancient Runestones
– Open the Vortex of Darkness

> Play Realm Shifters! <

Tags: Abyss, cow, Crystal, dragon, jam, LD35, Ludum Dare, Orb, Realm, Shape, Shift, Shifter, untiy3d

I learned a lot this LD, and was able to finish my game in 48hs. A game in which you change shapes to overcome obstacles as fast as you can.

The thing is, most of the feedback I got says it’s too hard. And that’s because it IS in fact really hard. And I will change it, but before that, I dare you to play it. Love infinite runners? Love hard, reflex-based games? Come on, play it!

LINK

Experience shapeshift.

http://gamejolt.com/games/the-king-shift/142159

I actually finished my second game in vanilla Java during this LD, and I’m really happy!
I really like how it turned out and that I managed it! It took some time so I had to settle for the jam, but I learned a lot of new tips and tricks!
Hope you will play it and see how it turned out 😀

Play it here!

Backstory;

You are “The Chameleon”, a famous criminal notorious for shapeshifting into other people by killing them. You have been prisoned because “The Boss”, which is your biggest enemy, wanted you gone. Now you want your revenge! Your goal is to shapeshift into every character (20 people) and to kill “The Boss” living in the nether! This is not so easy, because everybody hates you for your ability to shapeshift and steal identities.

Another intense Ludum Dare for me, but I think this is my best Ludum Dare game ever. I was able to put almost everything I wanted and learned new things.

Play it/Rate

After few comments,

I’ve been notified that the UI wasn’t clear enough,

and thus the game “seems” like bugged.

So I worked 10+ more hours to redesign the UI, and fixed a critical bug.

The game is about collect resources and spend them to collect more resources.

It’s a little bit complicate, and some feature need to play for a while to get it. (reach level 2 or 3)

Hope you like it.

PLAY HERE

http://giphy.com/gifs/gamemaker-indie-developer-ludem-dare-35-h400imZQWxXjy

This was my second Ludum Dare and marginally more ambitious than my first entry. I have to say that pushing myself to try new things and not be scared of taking on new challenges resulted in an entry I’m super proud of!

Things I tried for the first time:

-Animations

-Physics Objects

-Enemy AI

-Player and Enemy states

If you want to play my short game you can try it here

Hello guys!

Check out the added web version of the game (needs to load a bit after clicking)
or Download the Windows Version Here!

PLAY HERE

!

I didn’t realize that we had a-whole-nother hour to “submit” our games, so I threw together this title screen yesterday at zero hour for my game, Mike Rand in Fantasy Land.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I ended up not using it for the voting icon though because it got cropped funny and looked terrible, but I thought I would share it here, anyways.

Tags: ShamelessPlug

Wow! Unbelievable, but… I really finished my first Ludum Dare entry, even if I started late.. And.. it was fun indeed, with the voting now proving to be even more fun. Its absolutly fantastic to see the many different ideas and takes on the theme.. So.. I’m in, again, next time 😉

6th participation and 6th game. I managed to find an original idea on the “Shapeshift” theme and really happy with what I came with. First time I really took the time to compose the music, and the result is pretty satisfying!

Take a break and try a run! Give your best and try to pass the 1,000,000 mark!
(And leave a comment, so that I can play your game as well!)

Listen and Shift – Compo Entry

Now that I’ve had some time to rest, I hope to be able to write coherently about the dev process for TT:TTT!

I’m happy to say that the release is a complete experience. The gameplay is simple, and many of the elements are simpler than I would like (the shooting in particular), but the meat of the game is the tree/weed/tentacle monster and that came out as well as I had hoped.

The first piece I tackled was the tentacle mesh. It’s simple enough, each node is a conic-section. The base of each node is a circle of vertices, with a given radius, orthogonal to it’s length, and the top is a circle orthogonal to the next node’s length. Or more simply, it’s made up of increasingly smaller circles pointed at random angles connected together with straight sides. The final node gets a point, and it’s done.

Creating a tentacle in real time is a simple matter of traversing the node list and increasing the size and length of each over time. When the length exceeds a certain value, a new node is created with a random orientation and zero length and radius. Only the final node in any tree has it’s length increased, but their widths continue to increase always. Over time it becomes a big lump of a monster.

I finished them off by adding a sine wave input to the radius to create the pulsing effect, and colored them based on the node size.

I spent all of Sunday unsuccessfully trying to get the fallen pieces to be a connected rigidbody chain, but couldn’t get it to work out well. Sunday night I ditched that effort, and had each node break off separately. I should have let go of the chain physics earlier, because it left too little time to complete the gameplay.

The biggest missing piece is effects, and it’s hard to tell when the gun is firing and what if anything it’s hitting. I’m using a new renderer in my engine and my old particle effects system doesn’t work with it yet. I had been trying to think of ways to convey hits and firing better, but ran out of time and ended up making a mad sprint just getting the gameplay rules and minimal UI in place.

I hope those that play it enjoy the experience. I would consider this my most fun game jam game yet, and am seriously considering further work on it.

Link: Tentatively Titled: Tentacle Terroir Terror!

Thanks for checking it out!

My compo entry for LD35, “Pacifist Hill”

Check it out here

(yay, got a gif to work in my post)

Let’s take the translation of the Kuru Kuru Kururin’s rotating stick, make it morph in several shapes with special powers, put a Metroidvania-style map with locked doors and traps and then dress it with mythological statues and Eye of Crom-style painting!

Finally, after hours of hard work, we are proud to present Kuru Myst!

Here is the game page!

The Core can be found here. The following is a collection of my thoughts on the process of making this game in 48 hours, though as I write it, it feels like it is becoming more of a description of my game.

This was my very first Ludum Dare, and so, I was incredibly excited in the weeks leading up to it. Now that we have made it through, I would like to reflect on the 48 hours I spent pulling my hair out.

FINAL THEME VOTING

During the voting for the final theme, ideas were flying through my head, but the one that really stuck in my head was Companion. No matter how much I thought of for the other themes, my brainstorming continued to go back to that single theme. Once the voting closed, I stopped thinking about ideas. I decided to just cool down and wait for the results. When PoV revealed to us that the theme was going to be Shapeshift, I was slightly upset, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. After all, the theme is only one voting category. So I decided to go through with making a game following the Companion theme.

BRAINSTORMING

Everyone knows that when you start to brainstorm, you get so many ideas, I mean, that’s the point after all. For this, though, it was a bit harder, because I couldn’t use every idea. If I tried, there’s no way I could have finished all of them. So it became a process of elimination. I really wanted this to be some sort of procedural dungeon crawler, with a 2.5D tileset. I shut myself down though, thinking that there was no way I could write a system I was happy with in a short enough time. So I decided to completely change the level format, making it a procedural platforming game, which makes it really hard to get across that it is supposed to be a dungeon crawler.

Moving on from that, I knew from my time thinking during the voting period that I wanted the player to have a robot companion, so I spent some time expanding on that. I wanted everything in the game to revolve around this companion. I knew that the only way the player should be able to improve their character is to improve their robot companion. I spent some time coming up with different attachments that your robot could have, and eventually decided that a reasonable goal would be to make three attachment types, each of which have three unique attachments you can build.

DEVELOPMENT BEGINS

First things first, I needed levels. So I started to write a system for creating procedural platforming levels. The first build allowed me to specify level width, level height, a platform size range, a platform distance range, and how many platforms I wanted. So now I had a sprawling empty level. After some time spent tweaking to make sure I could actually make it through various generated levels, I added in the ability to move past the first level. This was when I got my first “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” moment. When I made it to the end of the level, it correctly spawned me back at the beginning with a new layout, but I immediately noticed that there were way too many platforms. As I moved along, it became obvious that I had forgotten to clear out the platforms from the previous level. From that, I decided a good addition to the platform generator would be the ability to specify how many paths I wanted in the level. After an hour or so of tweaking, it was done. I did some more level generation testing, until I found numbers that I was happy with for the levels being created. The final steps for platform generation was to add platform movement, which was as simple as specifying a random movement range and speed, and then bouncing the platform back and forth. With that, it was time to move on.

ATTACHMENTS

Attachments are, in my mind, the core aspect of gameplay. Everything I made this weekend tied into building these and attaching them to your robot, so you could get some sort of boost to your character. During the brainstorming, I came up with nine unique attachments, separated into three attachment classes: Attack, Defense, and Utility.

Attack Attachments

All three of the attack attachments (gun, sword, AOE) did the same thing in slightly different ways. The gun would do a moderate amount of damage to a single enemy within a moderate range. The sword did a lot of damage to a single enemy within a short range. The AOE did a small amount of damage to multiple enemies within a large range.

Defense Attachments:

The defense attachments (heal, shield, thorns) had a bit more variety to them. The heal would restore some amount of health every second. The shield blocks all shots coming from behind the player. The thorns would deal a small amount of damage to any enemy that damaged the player.

Utility Attachments:

The utility attachments (jump jet, booster, gatherer) were the most fun to write. Jump jet just enabled double jump. Booster allows you to sprint. Gatherer gives enemies a chance to drop double parts.

On top of all of the effects of attaching the attachments, I made it so you are able to level up or disassemble attachments. In the build that I finished for the comp, most of the leveling was really poorly done. I wanted disassembling the attachment to give the player a permanent stat boost, so that the player would have to decide between keeping the really nice active ability, or gaining permanent bonuses.

POWERUPS

I wanted there to be some sort of trade-off in the game, so that the player wasn’t just left stacking their stats and collecting more attachments. So I thought of a system where, once your robot companion had three attachments of the same class, you have the option to deconstruct your entire robot for a really overpowered temporary boost, at the cost of losing all of the attachments that were on your robot. I never got around to creating functionality for this, and so, once you equip a third attachment of the same class, it just does it automatically.

WHERE’S THE CHALLENGE?

So now I had a lot of mechanics for the player to mess around with, but there wasn’t much of a challenge to the game. This is because there weren’t any enemies. The only thing is your way was your skill with maneuvering platforms. So I really needed something for the player to fight against, so I dropped some red blocks while generating the level that would shoot at the enemy if they were in range. And that was that. Some sort of challenge.

DAWN OF THE FINAL DAY: 12 HOURS REMAIN

It’s safe to say that, by this point, my brain was mush. Luckily the game was also mostly to where I wanted it to be for LD. I spent my remaining time cleaning up code and making a main menu, writing a rather lengthy How-To, which made me realize my game just wasn’t intuitive enough if I needed to write something that long. I knew many players wouldn’t read it, but it was there. Honestly, my final hours felt a little wasted. I drew a few sprites, but that was it. I just couldn’t think straight by this point. I didn’t even manage to get a player sprite drawn. I tried, but I couldn’t make something that I would be happy with as the main focus point of the game. So once the submission hour hit, I put my game up, and that was it. I was happy with my progress. I was tired as hell. But I had finished a game in 48 hours.

LESSON LEARNED

Most of this is likely common sense, but seeing as it was my first ever Ludum Dare, and also my first ever seriously time-constrained project, I learned a few things from it.

1. SLEEP. Looking back on this weekend, I know that I probably wasted more time being mindlessly sleep-deprived than I would have getting 8 hours of sleep a night. Sure, 16 hours is a large chunk of your development time, but I was feeling like death as the comp came to a close, and I continued to feel like death through the next day. Seriously, I’ll be sleeping normally during the next game jam.
2. Energy drinks are a no-no. Sure, they were helpful this time around considering that I wasn’t sleeping, but that crash you get is awful. It hurts your development a lot. Just drink water. Or tea. Or something, just stay away from the energy drinks. Avoid the crash.
3. Try to get rid of all distractions. I was so very tempted to just open up movies or something on one of my monitors, and sometimes I did, but when I did, I started to slow down with my code, because I kept getting distracted by what was going on. Tying into this, don’t let your roommates throw big parties the first night of the comp. Drunk people wandering through your space definitely doesn’t help.
4. Decide on one fantastic core concept, and stick with that. Seriously, if you have a really awesome, unique core mechanic, people will notice. I tried to make too many features in my game, and because of that, many of them weren’t fleshed out all that well.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

I’ve received a decent enough amount of positive feedback for my game, and because of that, I have decided to continue developing it. So there will be a lot coming, maybe soon, maybe later, I’m not sure, but I know it is coming. Some planned features for the future:

• Making the switch to the 2.5D tileset system that I initially wanted
• Implementing standard RPG progression
• More attachments!
• Multiplayer
• Boss battles
• Some sort of actual tutorial. Or just introducing mechanics naturally
• Better artwork, of course
• And more!

Of course, the build here at LD will stay as it is, but over on the Itch.IO page, expect many updates! And please, if you feel there is anything the game needs, let me know, and I will jot it down, and you will likely see it in a future build. I can’t wait to see where this goes, and I hope you will join me for the ride.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post-mortem, and have a lovely day

— Syldarion, excited game developer

The ragdoll physics in my entry “Werepenguin’s Escape” worked out so well that I just had to make a montage of it in action:

Be sure to check out the full game! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=21630

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!

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!

Ludum Dare 35 just wrapped up and what a whirlwind weekend it was! For this game jam, the creators of Shear Madness, Sebastian Karolkiewicz (@Murder_Punch) and Dan Lance (@DanLanceGames) got together once more to bring you Mission: Decomposition.

This is the third game jam game by Dan and Sebastian, and their fourth collaborative project of 2016. In this process we have learned a ton about fast-paced game production and the process of making a (somewhat) completed product in just one weekend. The making of Mission: Decomposition was both smooth and stressful, but was ultimately a ton of fun.

When I say “somewhat” complete, I mean that. It’s a game. You can play it. You can win, you can lose, you can have fun (hopefully). Thing is, it’s missing a lot of pieces. Things that are critical to gamers, like communicative UI, a rules screen, number of lives, goals, things you want to see. All missing. It’s a compromise that we made in the time crunch. My advice to developers who want to get into a game jam is to pick one or two priorities – beautiful artwork, responsive controller input, complex mechanics, lots of levels, one or two smoothly functional systems. Just make a short list of priorities and make your entire design process about them. I would assert that “Mission: Decomposition” holds art and complexity as its priorities, and compromises on UI, clear rules, and perfect controls and collisions.

All of these things can and will be addressed in the future, but from a learning perspective, it felt good to try and tackle something much more ambitious in this weekend than the last game jam. “Shear Madness” is about a simple system and an automatic variety of visuals, and we wanted to do something much different. Keep an eye out for some of these updates as we continue to build them into “Mission: Decomposition”.

Ultimately, we’ll both take the knowledge we’ve gained from all of our game jam projects and find our priorities when we approach more larger, long-term projects in the future.

Lastly, a big shoutout to the Ludum Dare community. The community is extremely talented and has been immensely supportive. It’s really inspiring to see developers coming together like this to produce so many excellent games.

Thank you for playing and for motivating a couple of indie devs with your ratings and comments! We’d love to connect: follow Dan (@DanLanceGames) and Seb (@Murder_Punch) on Twitter!

The Ghosty Ghost can be properly healed now! We fixed a bug that prevented the healing orbs from coming back after restarting the game or retrying due to game over.

Play it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=87699
And thanks to everyone who played it so far

Swing on by to watch and or submit your game for me to play with my Eye Tracker: https://www.twitch.tv/mikewarexgr/

beta now available for ANDROID , currently testing touch controls

my entry for ld35 compo

ANDROID LINK (apk): android link from google drive

Play this game and rate, if you haven’t played it yet

ChickLife – press here to play

After the ludum dare submission hour ended a good handful of people still uploaded their game, …  late. How is that possible?

but it really doesn’t fit to doom image.

You can play and rate my game here.

Play A Soul of Clay Now!

My Ludum Dare Jam game is a Escape the Room style of game. Hope you will check it out!

A mouse was born !

DIRECT LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE POSTMORTEM VERSION OF THE GAME :

DOWNLOAD THE GAME SHAPESHIFT FOT CHEESE

Play and rate my game at : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=22158

Tags: postmortem

    seen = scrCamSees(objPlayer.x, objPlayer.y);
    if (seen) {
        with (objPlayer) {
            var wallpaper = instance_position(x, y, objWallpaper);
            if (instance_exists(wallpaper)
                    && wallpaper.image_blend == image_blend) {
                other.seen = false;
            } else {
                scrShapeshift(false);
            }
        }
    }

Go play!

The current highest score is 111, set by FloatingGhost. Can you beat it!

Play Game

For those who enjoyed playing our little game, here is the awesome soundtrack to remember

Download Do-od soundtrack

Play HERE

A bit later than most of the other jam entries, but it seems like a good time to write this anyway.

Not super happy with Shift.  Kinda feels like it’s mediocre in comparison to my previous entries, and it wasn’t fun designing it, certainly in comparison to the previous entry I was the lead coder of, The Adventures of Cactusman.

Things done right:

1. Keep it simple.  Shift has very few gameplay mechanics, which makes it easy to code, maintain, and upgrade.
2. Quality > Quantity.  Shift only has four test chambers, but each one has a unique soundtrack and adds SOME new element to the testing experience.
3. Programmer art is okay.  For the most part, the models had been made on-the-spot just so I could rush to implement them, and even during the final polishing run, it didn’t feel like new models were needed.  It IS supposed to take place in a lab environment, after all!

Things done wrong:

1. The music.  For the most part, I was responsible for making the music, and I personally am not too happy with how some of it turned out.  I threw it all together in a bit of a rush during the final polishing hours in the last day, and because of it, I wasn’t able to safe-guard against any ‘assimilated elements’ of other game soundtracks I’ve overanalyzed recently.  This means that there are a few tracks that have moments that sound infuriatingly like Undertale.  I’m so sorry, LD-goers.
2. Puzzle game.  Yes, puzzlers are cool, but test chambers are hard to design under NORMAL scenarios, let alone building an entire game AND chambers in a 72-hour period.  Most of the chambers felt a little mediocre because of the fact that making up good designs was very difficult.
3. Late release.  I should’ve started releasing it TWO hours before the Submission Hour started, so I wouldn’t have scraped through in the last THIRTY SECONDS.  No joke, I nearly missed this LD because of my crappy internet connection.
4. Main menu.  I’m not super happy with the main menu at the moment.  The level select screen is okay, and the control screen gets the job done, but the main menu itself is just…lacking.  Plus, nobody will understand the “Made with love by: The 006 Cooperative” thing under the logo.

All in all, not super enthusiastic about the product available for the moment, and ready for some more R&R.  At some point, I’ll probably return to rate games, maybe starting tomorrow, but right now, sleep is mandatory.  Have a good week, Ludum Dare-goers!

Here is the itch.io page for my #LDJAM entry ;3 [magic button]

Looks awesome imo XD

Why not give it a try? It even has highscores!

Hope you all enjoy~ c'(^w^c’)

Tags: entry, gamedev, jam, LD35, ldjam35, pixelart

You sir, you are the most bravest man in the universe thanks to your awesome moustache. But that dumbfaces are trying to cut it with his real and sharp dumbtongues, avoid them and DESTROY them with your moustache and other powerful costumes. How long can you stand up feeling your moustache below your nose?

Try my ludum dare entry and vote for Moustaches vs Dumfaces 

(Click on the img)

Are you brave enough to be moustached?

We made a walkthrough for our game Almost Robot.

Feel free to watch, play and leave comments.

Join here

For now, game was available on webplayer.
Now you can download it too! We have published a build for Windows and Linux.
We are looking if we can publish it for Mac and WebGL, too.

TRY IT HERE!

this is my first time i made a competition like this, and it was an amazing experience, I almost get mad at some point and I finished to upload just 3 minutes before compo ends. After that I realized that we (compo entries) had 1 more hour to upload the project, so I make builds for OS X and Windows. I couldn’t make for Linux.

I’ve tested a lot of great games that could be amazings hits on stores like AppStore. And the mos awesome thing is that compos were made by one person in such a short time.

Cheers to all of u great developers, and thanx to the people that make ludum dare. Think I’ll be participating in te next one, and the next, and the next after that.

ps.: sorry for my English, I’m from Argentina. Luckily I have google translate 😉

Rate my game…

OR THE KITTEN GETS IT!

RATE HERE

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