A musician, a business administrator, an architect and a programmer. Not really a gamedev team; just a group of close friends looking for fun! And now we here to share the experience we had on the creation of Keysmith’s in a hurry!

We’ve met online at talk.gg just a few minutes before the theme announcement. At that moment we had already set a roadmap for the game development, as the following:

1. Theme brainstorming
2. Mockups and game name choosing
3. SGDD writing
4. Game assets and scenes creation
5. Game programming
6. Game sounds and musics inclusion
7. Game publishing
8. Post-Mortem writing

As soon as they announced the theme, we’ve started the brainstorm. Monsters, food, spaceships, rogue-like, quiz, game board, popcorn and a lot of crazy ideas… Until we finally got to the key-idea: to shapeshift keys for npcs that would tell a single-line story about why they needed a key. So this was the first mockup, made on flockdraw:

1º Mockup for Keysmith’s in a hurry!

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing the game features and drawing the interface. Later we moved to draw.io for a better mockup:

3º Mockup for Keysmith’s in a hurry!

With the mechanics and interface defined we could start thinking about the name. We’ve came across a lot of ideas. From the ok ones (Keymaker; Keymaster Legacy; Keystorm) to the awful ones (The Insane Adventure of the All-Keys Maker; Lord of the Keys; Keymberly!). In the end, we’ve picked the name “Keysmith’s in a hurry!” mainly because how it sounds. Also, no game has ever been made with that name.

Next step: writing the SGDD. [SGDD stands for Short Game Design Document, a development documentation method for small-size games. Original article, in brazilian portuguese: https://goo.gl/wNf46h]

We did it collaboratively using Google Docs:

For demonstration purposes we’ve reviewed and prettified it before posting here. During the jam it was a little messy due the lack of time. [PDF version is available at https://goo.gl/KoKu2U]

Assets & Game Scene.

With the assets and scenes in hand, it was time to make a game of it. Make the static become dynamic. At the moment we started programming, we remembered to turn Chronolapse on: https://goo.gl/S89bY3

The game was all scripted using MonoDevelop. Meanwhile the soundtracks were being created with Cubase. Also we’ve included sounds on buttons and made some improvements on the UI:

Our game on Unity3D.

Finally, a few minutes before the deadline we’ve published it!

Click this image to play our game!

Time for a well deserved rest before start writing the post-mortem!

Game Specifications, Experience and Feedback

Mechanics

It’s a game about resources management. In summary, each round the player needs to read a order description (to know what kind of key he needs to create), choose the material he wants to use for each part of the key and then click on the shape of the key they want to add to the key table (where the key is assembled). After the key is delivered, the next customer comes in and the next round starts. There’s a time system, but not so useful as we couldn’t implement it further; it only resets the current day startistcs every day. The statistics are currently the only feedback the player has for the customer’s opinions about the keys created.

The game targets computer web browsers, and all the interaction is made through mouse clicks on several buttons from the gameplay screen. It’s a simple and functional game, but due to it’s linear gameplay, it gets boring after five minutes.

Aesthetics

We’ve focused the aesthetics on something reminding middle ages. All assets were based on this premise. So you see medieval keys, hear medieval coins and listen medieval songs among the game. The game is all in one screen because we had not much information beside numbers.

Story

We’ve setup a short background story just to let the player understanding why was he clicking all those buttons. As you can read in-game, the backstory is:

“Descendant from keysmith masters, you are currently the best keysmith of the region. Besides being recognized for your excellence and tradition in the manufacture of keys, you were recently knighted by the king, for creating the key that saved his kidnapped daughter. Now you need to race against time to meet the demands from your old customers in addition to those who are curious about your work and sudden fame.”

Technology

We’ve developed the game on Unity3D, but decided to export only to WebGL (HTML5), so our game is basically a web browser game. The best thing about HTML5 is that anyone with a uptodate web browser can play it. Besides the game engine, we’ve used a lot of great and modern tools to make this game exist, as you’ve read above.

What we’ve learned

One of the first things we’ve noticed is that not everyone is prepared for the Pomodoro Technique. We used it on the first day, but not everyone could stop their work on the intervals. So we didn’t use it on the following days. But we’ll definitely try it again on the next jam.

Having an SGDD as a development guide helps a lot. Once the game tasks are defined, we just need to follow the list!

Our strategy of using controllers+events on the programming was not perfect; we still had some scripts referencing others directly. We’re already studying new techniques for that.

The Bad

We all agree that it took us too long discussing the game ideia. Besides that, we needed to change tools (for conference and drawing mainly) several times, due to the lack of functionalities or for not working on some members computers. We should have tested the tools in group before starting.

At the end of the jam we didn’t complete the programming task list from the SGDD: there should be a feedback message for the player to know what the client thought about the key. We’d do it through a message box that would slide down from the top of the window (you can see it being implemented on the timelapse video). But it was cancelled due to the deadline. We also missed the game over conditions, that was already defined on the SGDD. And also a few fixes, like disable the Deliver button if the key had only one or two of the three parts and disable the Discard button if the key table was already empty.

We’ve spent some time to share assets. Using a shared folder on Dropbox would accelerate our work.

The Good

The best part was the laughs! We laugh a lot! That was enough to make that time count! But we also liked alot our teamwork. So much effort put on it!

We’re all proud we could make the random customers orders work; to see the different combinations of keys with only a few assets; to try out those techniques (Pomodoro and SGDD) and know it works; to see our UI design being so much appreciated when we had no one to focus on the art.

All this gave us a very pleasant experience overall.

Tags: post-mortem

Man, time flies when your having fun. 48 hours are over before you know it. Anyway, I had a lot of fun creating Shape Running for my second Ludum Dare: Ludum Dare 35. So here is my Post Mortem.

What went well

• Creating a quick proof of concept. At first I wasn’t too happy about the theme. Coming up with an idea for a game usually isn’t my biggest issue. For me the main question is: “how am I going to make this fun to play? (in 48 hours)”. So I always draft up a quick proof-of-concept to determine whether I believe enough in the idea to commit fully to it. I time box this activity to two hours max: if within two hours I don’t believe I can make it fun enough, I abandon the idea and try the next one. Fortunately, this time I could continue on the first idea I turned into a proof-of-concept.

• Time management using Kansan Board: I love using Kanban for managing time and tasks. At all stages of development I have a complete overview of tasks that still need to be done, without being distracted of the ones that I’m currently working on. It also helps allocate time: how much time are you willing to spend on a task if there are still 10 waiting?
  

• Graphics and Sound. I’m really happy on how the game turned out looking and sounding. I decided to allocate extra time to graphics and sound (especially music), because I like to deliver a complete and polished experience. The graphics are actually quite simple (lots of primitives), no texturing, but the use of shaders and image effects (bloom and motion blur) really help them stand out. The music was created using loops in GarageBand which is a blast to use.

What didn’t went well

• Second mechanic: the game basically has only one mechanic: change shape in time. There is no strategy or variation whatsoever. In particular, you can’t become any better at the game once you finish it. So I really wanted to find a second mechanic, but wasn’t able to find one that actually added to the fun. I tried sideways movement and acceleration and actually went and prototype both, but my implementations just weren’t adding to the fun. And in my opinion that means that if they don’t add to the fun, they take away from it. So one mechanic it is, but if anyone has any suggestions for an extra mechanic, one that adds (strategic) depth to the game, please let me know in the comments of the game (or this post).

Link to game: Shape Running

Hey you! Do not forget to vote in my game Run Rainbow Run and have fun! (^ – ^) v

Post Compo version 1.1 of Hungry Blue Fox!

* Added 2 more levels (Still a bit short on time D: )
* New and improved animations!
* Tightened controls (Jumping works better!)
* Added nature sounds (Credit: klankbeeld @ freesounds.org and gnerkus’s idea)

Entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=61896

WebGL Link: https://tharemo.itch.io/hungry-blue-fox-post-compo-11

Yeah, someone made a gameplay of our game, and he was AirAssassin15! He has lots of cool stuff on his channel, including some other gameplays, so go check it out

Here is the gameplay. By the way, we want to thank this youtuber for the video, really, thanks a lot!

Tags: airassassin15, gameplay, henkan pachinko, LD35, Ludum Dare, youtube

Click on the image to play!

Hello everyone, Luka here from Kuality Games. Here’s a small post if you’re wondering how we made the environment for our game, Mushroom Muncher. I will be focusing on the texturing part that I did, by just explaining the basics.

Base/White-box:

First of course, we started off with the basics in Unity. Our designer Rafael set up a basic white-box of what was to be our main level in the game. Since we had time constraints because of the jam, we simplified things and decided that our level was supposed to be an arena where enemies would attack the player infinitely. This also reduced the amount of level design we had to do, as well as art assets. At this stage we had the basic level layout and overview of object scales/sizes.

First white-box of Mushroom Muncher arena.

Texturing:

Most of the environment work was done through texturing. I decided to try Substance Designer for the first time and first thing we did was prepare base materials for our environment. Plan was to finish up materials at first and then apply them to the environment meshes that we would model, in Unity. This approach can be different of course, from the traditional “Model it, Fix the UV, Texture it in Photoshop/Gimp”. It didn’t seem like this approach saved a lot of time, but it did give us a lot of control and flexibility in terms of randomizing the look of textures in the game. By using substance materials, I was able to easily blend textures together and instantly randomize the look of Stones, Rocks and Dirt as well. So once the base materials were finished, I started to blend them together in Substance Designer and also exposed a lot of values that made it possible to edit materials in Unity, here’s the example of this:

Procedural texture properties (Unity’s Inspector window)

Here we can see couple of options where we first start off by choosing the surface (Ground or Cliff for example) and then we can start tweaking individual properties. You can see the example of this at work below:

Randomized Rock material – clean.

Rock material – with dirt.

As you can imagine tools such as Substance Designer in this case can be extremely powerful, for both big and small projects. I would recommend any game developer to try them. Here’s another example:

Stone- clean.

Stone – with striation.

At this point base materials were done and they were ready to be used in Unity. Learning and preparation took most of the time, but it was worth it as at that point I could produce random and unique texture for our environment in matter of minutes.

Sculpting/Modeling:

This part was rather simple. Our artist Jenny first sculpted the base rocks in Zbrush, after that moved them to Maya where the low poly meshes were made and some Zbrush decimation errors were fixed. As a last part, she UV-mapped the rocks and exported them to Unity. Applying materials and assembling the scene was done in the game engine.

All of the base meshes we used in the environment including the ground sculpt.

In Unity:

After the meshes were prepared, we had everything ready in order to assemble the arena in Unity. Even though we had the ground sculpt prepared, we had to scrap it and go with the flat surface in order to avoid some of the gameplay problems we were having and particles intersecting with the ground. There could have been much more done about the ground, but in the game itself ground texture tiling wasn’t that visible and it didn’t make much of a difference in the end. We added some extra props quickly in order to make the arena a bit more interesting as we were running out of time.

Shot of the arena from the side.

Conclusion:

It was very interesting to work with Substance software for the first time and approach things differently, that is why I would recommend this to any artist/game developer out there. We did face some problems such as these procedural materials increasing the loading time of our game significantly, but that was due to bad optimization of these materials by me in Substance Designer itself. Even though optimization can help, these materials can still be quite heavy so that is something to consider.

In the end what we managed to create in three days still looks nice and doesn’t mess around with the gameplay, so I would consider that a success. If you have any questions feel free to ask on Twitter: @KualityLuka. You can also find us on Facebook.

Cheers.

Tags: environment, jam, LD35, MushroomMuncher, mushrooms, substance, unity, unity3d

Let’s talk about the characters of Realm Shifters.

All 3 of them share a single humanoid avatar. At first it seemed a bit weird when the cow started walking around on two legs but the end result became really funny! 😀

Realm Shifters – cow

We used Unity for the game and man, it’s model importer is quite powerful! If the target model has the more-or-less correct bone hierarchy, it automatically maps the bones of the target rig to the humanoid reference avatar. If it’s not correct, you can still configure it manually. Our dragon guy required some manual setup like this and still got into the game in no time!

View post on imgur.com

Okay, it’s not AAA category, but did the job. We really enjoyed selecting and putting together the final characters. Being only 2 programmers on the project we had.. hm.. let’s say limited artistic skills, so using a shared skeleton greatly reduced the time required to get our creatures moving. This technique also made it possible to try out multiple versions and choose the ones we liked the most.

View post on imgur.com

There is great potential (e.g. platformer moves, melee fighting) in this approach but we found it too buggy and complex to implement these extensions correctly within the given time frame so we kept only the animations and basic controls. We shifted our focus on improving the atmosphere, juiced the scene with sound and visual effects and some nice particle systems.

> Play Realm Shifters! <

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

Right, so a lot of the comments/criticism that my entry SHAPE.SHIFT() has been receiving was geared towards the game’s brutally unforgiving difficulty and whilst pretty much of it is my fault (I didn’t make the holes bigger, I should have increased the gap between obstacles, The player moves too slow etc.), it is still possible to get a pretty good score (A friend of mine managed to get 110 points and someone who rated this got 160) so I figured I might as well write up a quick guide with some tips and tricks on how to get good scores in my game (i.e. not die every time)  .

Top and Bottom Holes

When an obstacle with either a top or bottom hole appears, the best position to be in is to move towards the edge of the screen.

Top Hole

Bottom Hole

Middle holes are generally more tougher to pass through because of the somewhat pinpoint positioning needed but as a general rule of thumb, the position you’re at when the game starts (i.e. don’t move yet for a few seconds) is the one you most likely want to be in when attempting to pass through middle holes.

Middle Hole

Moving From Hole To Hole

Once you get the hang of positioning yourself, the next tricky part is learning how to move from hole to hole. Whilst going from top to middle or bottom to middle or middle to top/bottom is relatively easy because of the short distance, going from a top hole to a bottom one (and vice-versa) is pretty tough because of how slow the player moves but the one golden rule I’d like to give out is that as soon as you pass the previous hole, start moving immediately towards the next one (ideally just after you hear that ding sound when you score some points for passing through a hole) although it does require some split second timing (i.e. not too early/late).  When a shape switch is required when going from hole to hole, what I find works best for me is to move straight into position then switch shapes at the last possible minute just before entering the hole.

Anyway here’s a small gameplay clip of me getting 280 points in the game using these techniques (ironically my personal best although what you didn’t see were the number of time I died trying to record a good run).

If you haven’t tried the game yet, you can do so by clicking here (And if any of these tips actually helped you in getting a good score let me know )

Get it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.indgaming.altruism

View Original Entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=24878

I added the much-needed checkpoints that everyone talked about. Along with touch controls, a different guide for those controls, and some other minor fixes.

The Golden Sphere is the result of 72 hours of work by a three man team. It’s a jump’n’run game featuring a narrator including voice acting.

Let’s look back at how the game was created, what went well and what didn’t work as planned.

Making of

Our Weekend started on Saturday at 8 o’clock in the morning (Ludum Dare was already running since 3:00 am in our time zone) with the discussion of game ideas. We first weren’t really happy with the theme but after a few minutes we came up with the idea we now implemented. As we knew that the first idea often isn’t the best one we looked for more. The best we could come up with was that you are a frog and can shapeshift into a prince. You would then have to infiltrate a castle without getting noticed. Obviously the first idea was better so we took it: you can shapeshift into a human, a wolf and a turtle, each of the forms has unique abilities. Those allow you to solve different kinds of puzzles / platformer elements.

The rest of Saturday was spent implementing the engine, doing artwork, level design and narration writing. On Sunday we recorded all the narration which took several hours. So much monologue… In the evening we tried to create some music but failed horribly. It was Sunday midnight and we didn’t have any levels implemented in the game and only about three existed on paper. The engine also still needed a lot of work to be done. Our goal was to be done by this time, instead we had virtually nothing playable. Oh well, we would need to spend the Monday as well on the game. The lectures at the university had to wait…

The Monday was mostly spent with implementing the levels in the engine (writing tons of xml, so much fun…) and teaching the narrator when to say what. In the end the narrator took about 1000 lines of code, one fourth of the whole engine. The last level was done at one o’clock in the morning, two hours left until the deadline. By the way we still hadn’t come up with a name for our game yet. Unfortunately we didn’t have time for a proper play through as we still had to fix some bugs. And yeah, we still didn’t have any music. We had a few sound effects but no music. So we gave up with trying to create it ourselves and let the computer take over. Thanks to Abundant Music we were able to add music in the last minute. It was somehow depressing that the computer created better music than we were able to but this just means that we have to practice more ;-). We opted to let the users vote on audio even though we didn’t create the music ourselves as we spent a lot of time doing the narration which is also part of audio.

After we uploaded our game and the deadline was over we were able to play the whole game for the first time. And as you can imagine a few small bug fixes followed shortly after. At four o’clock on Tuesday morning we were done, but luckily, so was our game.

What we want to do better next time

• Create our own music. The music we now have is good but our own would “feel” better.
• We didn’t have any playable levels until Monday morning. Plays into the next point.
• Have the game almost finished way earlier so more time can be spent hunting bugs and improving the game experience.
• Include the bear in the game.

What went well

• Idea turned out to be better than expected.
• We have about 20 minutes of game play. Or much more if you haven’t already played each level a thousand times.
• Our goal before the jam started was to made a game with a narrator. It worked out pretty good.
• The visuals of the game are – at least in my eyes as a developer – pretty nice. And we have a nice shader for the mountain lake.
• We were able to turn the missing bear (cut due to the limited time budget) into an ongoing joke.
• We finished the game on time (later than planned but still within the deadline).

Conclusion

Although we first didn’t really like the theme I think the game we made this time is my best Ludum Dare game so far. Most things went well but took more time to complete than we first thought. But that’s always the case. We were able to adjust the scope of our game early enough to be able to still finish it. The feedback so far is great and we already thought about making the game bigger and better. Coming Summer 2017?

If you got curious and want to play the game: there you go!

Tags: LD35, post-mortem

Fylgjur V1.1 TEASER

I worked a bit on the game this weekend and managed to get the start of a combo system in place. Now I just need to make all of the animations and I can release V1.1, so here’s a teaser!

Play Fylgjur

Our Ludum Dare 35 experience was riddled with problems from scheduling to programming and even to brainstorming. We had a HELL of a time brainstorming… In the end, we came up with ‘So You Think You Can Science?’ (SYTYCS?), a top down shooter/roguelike featuring no less than 3 playable characters.

The Team

The main team behind SYTYCS? was myself (programming/design, @morrilet), Jeremy Helsel (programming/design, @JIHlucky7), Josh Ruffolo (music/sound, @jruff7) and Jasen Helsel (graphics). We also had some help from our good friend Matt Carollo (@trip_yuh), who stepped in with some sound effects toward the last half.

The Idea

Brainstorming, for us, started at around 8 or 9 PM (depending on your time zone) and it took us a solid couple of hours to settle on SYTYCS?. Josh wanted to do sounds for a sci-fi game, I wanted to make either a dark and gritty story or a racing game where cars transformed into humans (I still think it’s a genius idea), and Jeremy wanted to make a roguelike. We ended up switching our idea back and forth between a gritty story game or a goofy shooter. In the end, we went with the shooter, because that’s simply what we knew best. The first idea we had for the characters was a porcupine who shot his quills, but with the addition of Lemmy (the bee-shooting bear), we swapped the porcupine for a cactus. We just didn’t want two animals, and for us, Lemmy was the more interesting character. The porcupine was replaced with Francus (pronounced Fran-sus), the cowboy cactus. After that we were trying to come up with an idea for a character that wasn’t carbon based, and our tired brains settled on a hairdryer wielding, you guessed it, a smaller hairdryer. Thus, Cordulator the maniacal hairdryer was born. We also all agreed that it should be sci-fi themed, so we decided that the setting would be an infinitely deep space ship run by an alien mad scientist and guarded by his alien henchmen.

The Process

We ran into issues at almost every step of the way. Firstly, this was my second time using github and my first time using it with more than one other person, so we had a few scares during development. Secondly, I’d never worked on a project with this many people, and planning was soon recognized as a big issue. All of us have jobs, and some of those jobs are at odd hours of the day. This made keeping everyone working together difficult. In fact, on the last day, we almost didn’t have any overlap where all of us could work together to submit it. Some people even left work early and rushed home to finish. The whole thing would’ve taken even longer, too, if it weren’t for some scripts I had lying around. Because of this, we didn’t have to bother making a camera or 2D navmesh agents. This was also the first time I’d actually used a procedurally generated map in a game, and the first time I’d programmed shooter AI that did more than appear, point, and shoot.

Submission Hour

We went right up to submission hour and came in hot. We were in a mad dash to get sound effects in and build. To make matters worse, every time we built, we had a new issue. Once, no sound effects played. Another time the player spawned in with no health. Every build, new problems. In fact, the build we ended up submitting had horrible UI scaling problems and didn’t play gunshot sounds. These bugs and others wore heavily on all of our minds for the rest of the night and most of the next day. We hadn’t intended to release any updates, but we couldn’t live knowing we could’ve done better. We released an update to fix the menu resolution and sound effect problems. A day later, released an update to fix wall sticking.

Final Thoughts

I think we all learned a lot this time around. We certainly have a better handle on working in a large group and I feel pretty confident in my ability to throw together AI, which was entirely alien to me for a long while. Next time I think we’ll probably scale back a bit so we’re all less stressed out. Also, we’ll have to manage our schedules a little bit better. I think, all in all, that this was a fantastic jam for all of us. We all got to do what we wanted with the game and I feel very proud of the game (and the characters) that came out of this jam.

You can find the original build of ‘So You Think You Can Science?’ here.

If you’d rather check out the updated version, you can find it here.

Go ahead and give our game a try! We’d love to hear what you think.

Hello there!

Here’s a new post to talk about last week-end. Indeed, and as always (or nearly always), I definitely HAD to take part to LUDUM DARE!
As some of you may know, the 34th LD turned out pretty well for us, so Lullaby decided to team up again, and to renew the experience of Jamming. Now it’s been a few days since the end of the Ludum Dare 35, and it’s Post-mortem time!

And if you want to play our Game, Kitsune, it’s over here!

Ludum Dare #35 : “Shapeshifting”

For this Jam session, we were the same team of three : Louis Denizet (Prog/Assist. GD), Benjamin Baldassini (Music Composer), and I, Mathieu Clavel (Main GD/Art). But this time, it was a bit more special : I was alone on board, Game Design-side. Louis was moving to his new living-town during the week-end, so I had to take care about all the Game Design, documentation and Art during his absence. He would get all my work when arrived at his new place, and start to code the game.

So let’s enter into Kitsune development. First of all, what is Kitsune ? Well, look down to learn more 😉

A (new) Game Designer challenge!

This time, I decided to go for a new game design method. I took my old Game Design Document format and put it in the trash. I needed something more efficient, that Louis would be able to understand “crystal clear” without us communicating in live by Skype or telephone. The ideas would be illustrated by a moodboard with keywords, expressing the proper DNA of each feature. Then, I’d list efficient user-centric lines that would need to be checked one by one in the TODO List.

Example of Moodboard illustrating 3Cs

And now it’s time to actually make things happen (…again)!

Then, it was a go for the “production” part. The graphic part went good, and even faster than during the last LD. I had a really precise view of what I wanted : Japan, Old-fashion Theatre set, a fight between Good & Evil. Classic, but definitely working In the same time, I made a first prototype of the game in order to help Louis get a precise idea of the 3Cs (that he would custom/improve later).
Talking about Louis, he finally managed to get some time in the weekend, and started programming over my first prototype. I polished art, hand-made animations and documentation during the week-end, and was informing Louis about where exactly we were in the project, as he was in the train to his new living-town. As stressed as we could be with just a beginning of game and all the DATA done, I kept on iterating on the design, and Louis started programming and making feedback on the design again at the first second he was back at home…
Unfortunately, I was working on Monday, so I just closed and shared my files Sunday at night, and went to bed. At the same time Louis was still working, it was kind of a Relay race !
We were looking at the timer, and were only starting to make Level Design and still improving the Altars behavior and rules. The tutorial part went particularly good, as Louis had kept the experience of our previous entry concerning that part. We finally made some adjustments, and the game was cooked.

The goal of this LD35 was to create a game with a great experience concerning the Mood and Gameplay (that we wanted nervous, timed and fluid, cf. Moodboard), and I think that we’re pretty close to that today.
We won XP on organisation, and creation and adaptation of processes. We produced something, and lived a unique (and I think non-reproductible) experience. Ludum Dare style.

What went wrong?

Since we don’t have any result yet, I can only make suppositions. On a production-side, I think that the word that could describe our week-end is “cahotic”. When I was doing stuff for Ludum Dare, Louis could not, and when he could, I was working or getting a bit of rest. It cost us precious iterations steps on the game, and we have been lucky that the final product ended so well.
The release was a problem too, though. We had no time in the first few post-release days to look after our game, and came back to it only around Thursday. So we started to vote for others and get review only around Friday. After these reviews, I think that I’m able to tell our weaknesses on this project :

• The game isn’t playable on Web (Windows only). Again. And it’s still a thing that Web-playable games will get more exposure as you don’t have to install them on your PC.
• The fact that the game has a “Die & Retry” gameplay is totally assumed, but can make some players fly away.
• Level Design balance is still one of the last things we do, and I think that it should change for the next time.

Actually, thanks to all of you guys, we have a lot of good and constructive feedbacks on Our Ludum Dare page, so I invite you to go and read them
Anyway, we’re always waiting for more and more feedbacks, so hope you’ll like it!

Cheers

Mathieu, aka Ekilibr

Just wanted to let you know that a post-compo version of The Great Biohazard Escape – my point&click escape room adventure about a scientist infected by a deadly virus that gives him the ability to shapeshift is now released.

This version has now a more catchy outro, an auto save game option, newgrounds medal and includes all (or at least most of) the remarks I got in the comments: bug corrections, a new icon for change screen and some text hint changes.

I hope you’ll enjoy it!

So I’ve seen 40-50 aweseome games.  But only 1 or 2 stood out for me (Note: my game is not one of those xD).  Part of what I like about LD is that I think of it as a showcase of random game elements put under magnification goggles.  You get to see one game mechanic in isolation — which you can learn a lot from.  I have a theory that the more constraints there are in a jam the more creative people get.  But I could be completely wrong.

LD34 for example had LOTS of games that felt like they almost invented new genres / core mechanics.  Maybe the theme in LD35 wasn’t very restrictive?  Do you guys disagree?  Do you recommend any games from LD35?

The game I ended up with for this LD is perhaps something that neither I nor any of you expected. Questionably related to the theme it turned out to be a game all about listening, as well as a test on your patient. Many have pointed out that it is difficult to understand what is happening, but maybe that just adds to the atmosphere. I mean who wouldn’t be disoriented in a completely dark room?

So if you haven’t already, try it out here!

Tags: darkness, headphones, jam, LD35, light, sound, soundscape

me again! improving gameplay on iOS and also adding new features. Also visual improvements, flashing lights warting and lot more stuff suggested by you all.

If you havent played the original game in the compo entry , link below:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=90316

little demo working on iPad

Hi everyone, just uploaded a short gameplay video of my entry ‘Court of Talis’.

You can check out ‘Court of Talis’ over here:  http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=63291 

Tags: gameplay, LD35, Ludum Dare, video, youtube

In my game you collect shapes in the real world by walking to them with your phone. In the original version it required up to 600 m of walk to get your first shape. Perhaps a bit much.

So I’ve added the option to try my Shapes Outdoor game with shorter walk distance. Your first shape can now be collected within 100 m of walk, and you only need to collect 3 shapes to win the game.

It is still possible to play the original difficulty if you rather like to do so.

To the game

This was my 9th solo Ludum Dare! In the past I’ve made, in order: Ethan’s Bike for LD 25, Consumerism for LD 26, 10 per for LD 27, One Kingdom for LD 28, Ordained for LD 29, Silence … Noise for LD 30, Blob for LD 33, Spaceman 34 for LD 34, and, finally, Monster Village for LD 35.

Over the events, I’ve noticed improvements in

1. Attitude
2. Programming Skill
3. Self management

However, what has stayed the same is

1. Art Skill
2. Music Skill
3. Anti-patterns

Attitude

In terms of personal growth…

I entered Ludum Dare 25 as a self-conscious, anxious developer. Here are a few quotes from December of 2012:

• “I am going to be attempting to make an entry for the famous LD!”
• “I’m a VERY new code writer”
• “I am a bit guilty because how how AWESOME other people’s submissions are”
• “I actually just jumped in with a ‘YEAH THIS IS GREAT’ attitude, and no thought is a bad thing for design”

Underlying these words was this attitude:

• I don’t want to be seen as arrogant for entering the Ludum Dare
• My game sucks, and someone is going to tell me “get out”

This attitude was constructed from my own circumstances in life, and, as a seasoned Ludum Dare-er would know, is not how things are.

Ludum Dare is a community where everyone rapidly develops a game to the best of their ability, and then gives constructive feedback and encouragement to others for their own games. Ludum Dare is a community of learners. When you are learning, there is no “arrogance,” just people sharing their thoughts about each others’ games.

Now my attitude towards Ludum Dare is:

• Let’s make something
• My game sucks because I’m learning
• Look at what other people made!

This is vastly different because it is geared towards learning and looking at what other people made to get new ideas. Learning works best when you aren’t afraid to try.

Programming Skill

I can implement features a lot quicker than before. I have more to say about this under “anti-patterns”

Self management

At the start, my usual routine was:

1. Let’s make an MMO
2. Oh god this is too much
3. Let’s make a decrepit skeleton of an MMO
4. My code is too messy, I’m going to give up now
5. Submit

Now:

1. Let’s make an MMO
2. Let’s scope down to the basic mechanics
3. It’s too small now, let’s make it a tiny bit bigger
4. Finish the scoped down version from step 2
5. My code is too messy, but I have some of what I planned done
6. Submit

You can see that the start and end points are the same, but the middle points have seen a significant improvement.

Art Skill

Compare Ethan’s Bike with Monster Village: it is the same. This is because I focus on programming far more than drawing, and I have not put much effort into improving my art skills. I blame laziness.

Music Skill

Half my games don’t have music, and some don’t even have sound effects. This is due to focusing on programming.

Needless to say, if I ever join a development team, I’ll definitely be a programmer.

Anti-patterns

For all of my games, there is a “PlayState” class that essentially holds the entire game. I’m aware that this is bad design, yet, in the interest of implementing features quickly, this is what usually happens.

1. I have my game planned out
2. I made a few flowcharts and diagrams on how this is going to be implemented
3. Well designed part of the code is implemented
4. I need to implement the rest of my code now
5. I didn’t plan for how a few features were going to be implemented
6. Mud ball

This is a large improvement over my first game, which was

1. Start making game
2. For every feature
3. If it is data, make a “Thing” class
4. If it is an action, make an “ActionManager” class
5. Go back to step 2 until everything has its own class
6. Cobble

A humorous example of this was the all powerful PercentManager class from Ethan’s Bike:

package com.horsentp.ld25;

public class PercentManager {

public PercentManager() {

}

public boolean calcPercent(int stat) {
boolean percent;
if(stat>=10) {
percent = true;
} else {
percent = false;
}
return percent;
}
}

As time goes on, and as I make more stuff, I get a little better at ensuring good design principles, but the PlayState-mud-ball problem persists across all of my projects.

I believe this is due to “quickly implementing features.”

I believe that if I take a step back every time I see a mud ball forming, and make some design changes right then and there, I can avoid the point where my code becomes so messy that I abandon my project.

Type of games

I noticed that most of my games in Ludum Dare and outside of Ludum Dare have the following gameplay elements:

• Management
• Platforming

and I attempt to make this gameplay

• Fast paced
• In depth

Obstacles

But “in depth” usually becomes “why is this so complicated” (See One Kingdom). “Fast paced” becomes, ironically, “slow paced” (See Ordained and Silence … Noise). Over time I have become better at making games “fast paced” (Blob and Spaceman 34), but less so with in depth games. A major reason for this is likely player feedback. Most of the games I make that attempt to be in depth end up being confusing. They’re confusing because there aren’t a lot information sources for the player to use while playing the game. In an attempt to make the game less cluttered, it becomes more confusing. GUI programming and design as well as gameplay design is what needs to be worked on to improve a game’s “understand-ability.” Not surprisingly, bad GUI programming is always because of  mud-ball style PlayStates.

Other notes

• I drink too much coffee during every Ludum Dare
• I feel like I wrote beautiful code until I get a bug that takes 4 hours to fix
• I always implement animation, but I don’t have the time to make them

In conclusion

1. Thank you for reading
2. Patience is key
3. Beware mud balls
4. Keep making games so you get better at managing mud balls and yourself

Hey everyone!

It’s Brandon again. Just wanted to go ahead and let everyone know that we have an updated, post-jam version of WAYAWAYDH?? available to download RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW.

This version includes bug fixes, updated controls, text boxes that aren’t horribly disruptive, some new artwork, and more of an actual progression system (you’ll unlock each form one by one, then go to the next part of the house). In general, this version just matches our original concept a lot better.

We’ll be continuing to fix up this version, while we also consider reworking it as a future project, so your feedback is important to us.

Please check it out and let us know what you think!

Ludum Dare 35 saw not only my first submission, but indeed the first game I’ve ever put out.

I wasn’t too happy with the game, it has a few problems and I’m sure I could do better – but nevertheless I’m proud of getting something out there in the small time frame.

I have to say, I’ve been floored by the level of positive feedback and encouragement I’ve received. The LD community has been very welcoming, friendly and kind.
So thanks everyone. Thanks for welcoming a newcomer and thanks for the encouragement.

I’ve posted an in depth write-up of my first LD experience over on my blog. The gist of it is, this is awesome.
I’m very much looking forward to more game dev, and my next LD!

New version of A Tale Of Shifted Shapes is out now!

By annoying popular demand, you can now exit the game slightly easier! Along with that some gameplay aspects were tweaked. Enjoy!

Twist. Turn. Repeat. Twist. Turn. Repeat.

PLAY IT HERE! – FORGE RAMPAGE

Well, I don’t know how, but putting Hidden in Plain Sight on GameJolt has led to a lot of Let’s Play videos being posted. Take Level Joy’s video, for example, who was taking a break from the Dream Machine, and was really impressed.

Anyway, without making this post too long, I put the rest of the Let’s Plays in a list below:

• Natergamez believes the game is a metaphor for looking into yourself to find the truth. I feel a Post-Mortem is imminent.
• Edward Harley struggles to find that one button.
• BreadHeroDan‘s NSFW commentary is reminded of the secret sense in the Legend of Zelda series.
• LAWRENCE OMEGA discovers the power of zooming in.
• Jacelolz NSFW commentary celebrates his graduation with this game.
• Robboberty is fascinated by the game’s secret (developer note: it’s a bad joke).
• Moleman1203 can’t stop saying how clever this game is.
• 1ghugh1 seems to enjoy this month’s indie game.
• ~Michelangelo~ claims his eyes feels funny after playing.
• aWalkThroughLife, as its username implies, made a simple walkthrough for the game.

Hello guys!

Is there anything better to do at a Sunday night than coding new features for our game?

Sure there is! And that’s… playing WolfBit 

Due to players’ requests, and the “keyboard-heavy” nature of our game, we added support for both AZERTY and DVORAK layouts.

Those who have ol’ QWERTY can continue twisting your fingers in tension…. muahaha.

PLAY WOLFBIT

WE MUST GO TO THE WOODS.

WE MUST DESTROY THE DEVIL.

WE MUST GET RID OF THE BEAST.

Just uploaded a vid describing a bit about my entry ;b

If you would like me to play yours let me know ;D

I could also record if you would like ^^

Tags: game, jam, LD35, platformer

Hey folks, please read my post mortem for Shifter here.

Don’t forget to play the game here.

Follow me on twitter @sP0CkEr2

Dragon Road – Is the game on Itch.io

My original game for LD35 was named Shape Shuffle.

Please comment anything doesn’t work.

And comment any and all suggestions for the game.

This was my second Ludum Dare, and I really enjoyed it.  My game turned out way better than my last attempt.

I may have taken the theme to literally and actually created a game where you change the properties of the shapes and match them with other shapes.

I learned quite a bit from this experience, such as the importance of messy code, but also the importance of a user friendly interface.  My menu is admittedly a tad messy, and after receiving several complaints about usability I added the option to click on menu items with the mouse.  Hopefully this helps.

I hope to continue this game and have posted it to itch.io here: https://paradxil.itch.io/shape-shift

If you care to rate my game please check it out on itch.io or on the Ludum Dare page here: http://ludumdare.com

As a way to better understant The Matter Realm I give you the 3 pages’s script of the game. It took about an hour to write (I was in a train) and it contains the plan of the game.

It’s written in a combination of french and (bad) english terms with my awful handwriting…

If you haven’t play it, the entry is right here.

Thanks everybody for your feedback on Shapegrammer. I’m happy to report that it has been mostly very positive, but there’s also a recurring complaint: the difficulty level is very high, and that can be frustrating. We want our game to be a challenge but also an enjoyable experience for everybody, so we’ve just added a “post jam” version with a difficulty selector.

Press LB on the controller or Tab on the keyboard to switch between RELAX (new, easier mode) and CHALLENGE (basically the same as the original version). They have separate high scores and leaderboards. We also increased the top scores list to 20 names.

Hopefully now everybody can enjoy the game without being too frustrated, regardless of their skill level. The Relax mode is the default, but if and when you feel ready switch to Challenge and try to get the top leaderboard spot! 😉

You can find the new version on the Ludum Dare 35 entry page. Have fun and thanks for playing!

I’ve just written up the post-mortem for my LD35 game SHAPE.SHIFT() which you can view by heading straight to my blog.

To see my previous post on how to get a good score in my game (because apparently it’s ridiculously hard), click here and if you haven’t tried the game yet, give it a play/rate by clicking here.

Also, I’m looking for more games to play/rate so click here to submit your entry and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.

Tags: LD35, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, unity

Howdy fellow jammers,

While I’m at work on cooking up a postmortem post for you to feast upon, you can check out and rate Aether Crypt if you haven’t already. If you’re fond of ambient stuff, a big fan of metroivania style games, a platformer addict or a chemistry nerd, you might enjoy giving it a try. Here’s a couple of screenshots to give you a taste of what you’re in for.

Have a good one!

Tselmek out.

Tags: bugfix, jam, LD35, ldjam, postmortem, screenshot

Hey guys,

I’m currently streaming and rating Ludum Dare games right now at http://www.twitch.tv/thesemo and you’re more than welcome to join!

I’m not taking submission though, because I still have 20 games on my list from my previous stream. See you there!

Hello devs!

After a week reading comments in my game I feel better with it. As I wrote in the description, I was really frustrated for lose 1 day and half in this event, and I couldn’t make all I was planned. But I can see you like my game and that makes me happy

I had planned to implement 2-3 levels more and maybe another transformation + some “enemies”. Some of you told me that u would like to play more levels, do you think that I should develop it for a future release?
Thank u all!

If u haven’t played it yet, you can do it and rate it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56826

PLAY AND RATE IT HERE

First and foremost let me thank all of you who voted and commented. We have not received that much feedback for any of our previous entries and this makes it really feel like we progressed since our first Ludum Dare a year ago. And now for something completely different: I added an Android port to our entry page. I did not expect it to be that easy but we did not have to change anything big (only fix a small UI scaling issue and check for touch input as well). Obviously the screen design is not perfect for mobile games and personally I’d like it to also support portrait mode but at least all of you who prefer to play on their mobile device can now give it a try. Have fun and keep the feedback coming

Tags: android, LD35, port, potion shift

In the game you are a shapeshifting shape, there are enemies that come from the sides of the screen and you have to defend yourself. You can become any one of the three different enemies at the same time. When you are a certain shape then enemies of that shape won’t try to attack you, and you won’t be able to attack them. You must use this skill to try and survive as long as you can (score based on how many enemies you kill).

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=51564

Hi there!

One week in, and judging by the reviews, it seems like nobody has managed to beat our game yet.

We thought people would think elsewise. Still, we think the difficulty level is fair.

We are curious to see someone finish it, would love to see a video or a screenshot of it being beaten.

Anyway, this is our game:

And all you need to do is get to the top and defeat the annoying wizard:

May the wooden path lead you to victory!! 😀

   Link Itch.io                                                              Play / vote

Credits:

-Eduardo Garcia / Design and Developer.

-Pablo Erices / Art.

-Paulo Gallegos / Music.

If you like puzzle games, you’ll like my LD35 entry “The Materialistic Shift”. Have a look-see here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=52238

My fourth Ludum Dare and it was a fun one. I had actually been hoping that the shapeshifting theme would win through but when it did I promptly ditched the idea I had for it (a magicians’ duel between Peter Lorre and Vincent Price which would have been way too complex…) and started from scratch. After a morning of dithering, I decided to stick with what I know and make a simple platformer with a player character who could switch between three forms.

Good stuff:

• The dialogue. I’m pleased with how the cut-scenes turned out and it’s gratifying that many reviewers have said they really help give motivation to proceed through the levels. This is what I do for a living so I’d have been worried if this aspect had fallen flat.
• The eagle. The hunter’s eagle form is pretty cool and I sort of wish now that the whole game had used this flying mechanic.
• The arms. I decided to mess around with physics a bit and the result was some OTT arm-swinging that makes the hunter look as if he is freaking out for the whole game. A happy accident!
• The music. I’m quite proud of the two little tunes I put together.

Bad Stuff:

• The platforming. I personally like the sensitivity of the platform controls but nobody else seems to, which tells me that I must have gone wrong somewhere. I think perhaps it’s a little too twitchy.
• The level design. Slapdash and pretty awful. Some are too easy, some too hard. None of them really make best use of the shapeshifting mechanic.
• The hare. The hunter’s hare form is a bit pointless. Basically it’s just a faster, jumpier version of his human form but without the ability to shoot mystic balls.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to make and as always I learnt a lot in the process. I’m learning even more from playing and rating all the other excellent entries.

Click HERE to check out the game. All feedback greatly appreciated!

Here are my notes how LD35 went:

SAT. 16.4.
5.55 woke up, checked the theme. Shape shift! This is exciting, I have one idea already.
7.00 left home
8.00 at M3.
11.00 Basic design is there and concept for the basic gameplay! (sketch here) It is going to be a cellular automaton styled dodging game. Grow and withdraw cells to adapt to environment. Checked lists and arrays syntax for Unity. Explored the oblique frustum technique for camera, Decided not to use it because directional lights behaved oddly with it. Could not preview the lights properly in the game-window.
12.00 Gameobject modelling and texturing.
Learned about Kaomoji (Japanese emojis), seeked out an unicode font to support them.
12.23 There is something dodgy in the salad from the gas station.
13.00 Unity adding objects to their layers and adjusted the lights for background and game objects
14:00 Limited Key inputs to single strokes, was getting multiple inputs from key-presses.
14.52: Have made a grid generator that adapts to width and height parameters, varying rows and and columns.
15.30 This is how the prefab-workflow worked from one way to other and back!
16.17 Keybinding guide textures are shown within the grid. 3D-text objects in Unity.
17.00 Keybindings actually work. Right object reacts when key is pressed.
17.29 Objects spawn at right coordinates based on the keypressed. Problem! 3Dtext shows through the objects in front of them. How do I fix this? There is one solution and tutorial using custom shaders and by generating a font-map. Quick try for it. …. and the tutorial is from 2012 and Unity has changed quite a bit from that, cannot install the custom shader as instructed. If I try the mobile-diffuse shader, then there is no this issue, but lights look worse. Meh. I let it be and then polish it away later if I have time for this… Or, HA! If I disable the text if there is an object in front of it! yeah.
18.44 Grid texts are shown and hidden as they should. No more shining through issue. Cell objects have now random rotation and scaling, looking more lively, and they can also be deleted. Next the big challenge: checking adjacent cells.
19.58 After a break, back at code: Checking one above and below are easy, but sides are harder. issue is that that I made the cell locations with list instead of an array. More complicated to check these. But I can live with this. First we make an parameter to the objects that tells if it is a border object and then we don’t have to check it’s sides. Feels bit like bubblegum solution but it works. Another thing would be make smoking of algorithm based on generation parameters, but that gets overtly complicated. Also checking functions that returns values.
21.00 Mystery bug. For some reason ,cube spawning doesn’t work anymore. And solved: issue was that i used if instead of else if when checking grid occupation status. And there is an array overflow somewhere, but why?
21.22 Start to be tired. Issue was using = instead == with boolean comparison that caused an always positive result.
21.42 The core logic that you can only spawn cells next to existing ones works!
22.00 After spending a day making a keyboard controller, it feels wasted, this game would work intuitively with mouseclick+raycast. Actually the controller idea sucks, even though it seemed fun at the beginning. It just doesn’t feel similar that to typing words. Mouse controller would be more intuitive and make this easier to translate to mobile.
23.00 Added particle emission to the player cell cubes. Looks cute.
23.25. Cell logic for isolation. If the cell is alone, it transforms to yellow, and return to green when connected to other cells again. Expect that sometimes it doesn’t, why?

SUN 17.4
00.36 Cell spawning and exit now has a scaling. Looks better, but did it stupidly with a script instead of curve controller. But I don’t know curve controllers, I know simple algorithms… but this took too much time. Stupid bugs of later our, tried to code an S-curve with to continues scripts that didn’t work out, but well, it’s good enough. Now, how I can get an isolated cell to die?
1.00 Old good parenting issues. What was the right way to reference game object’s parent. It was don with transform, yes, I’ve’ solved this before, but it was very syntax specific. I have a reference somewhere…
1.33 Break, and problems were solved from approaching them from different angle. Feels like a bubblegum-spaghetti code, I hope I don’t have to touch that code afterwards. But it works. I’ve been working on polish, but now it is more fun to work with. There is still no core gameplay. And there is bug with counting the number of cells active. Ah, it doesn’t clear itself -solved.
3.12 Add exception that even if the cell is alone, if it is the very last cell of the player, it cannot die. And checks that that the player cannot accidentally kill himself by removing the last cell. There is way to do it by isolating two cells at the same time, but this is good enough. First enemy is done.
5.26 Enemies collide right and cause damage. Score and energy meters are added. Environment has reference objects that tell about movement forward. Fixed an collider issue by removing them from all unnecessary objects. New problem: UI text scaling. It stays the same regardless of the resolution, so the one I’ve worked with looks like shit when changing the window size. How throughoutly I have to solve this? This also messes with text locations. But mainly, now a screenshot to Twitter and then some sleep at the comfy sofa of M3.
5.50 Too exciting to see what others have made! I should sleep.
11.00 And up! Coffee and Jam On!
Decide to work on release resolution, no need to worry about scaling or text locations.
12.32 Stupid architecture bug: Each grid objects calculates global game mechanics, and there is 30 of them. No wonder it can feel laggy. Part of that is essential, part is not. Should I clean it up? Or trust that the it is not too heavy, it’s only 30 of them at max.
13.00 Cleaned up flicker that happened at spawning – it arrives at full scale and then goes to small and starts to scale up. Solved it by spawning them far and only the bringing them to the scene. Issue is with the algorithm, if you spawn and withdrawn quickly before it has finished it’s animation and new object is created, there is flicker. Could the new object inherit the scale of the killed one? nah, this doesn’t really matter.
13.29 Game over state gets triggered for some reason when first object gets spawned. Why? I fix this by adding a timer where a game over state is not possible during very first seconds of the game.
14.00 Game over works. There is UI text for it, and background overlay and slowday of the game movement to make it look nice. Added time based score in score, but it has to be conditioned that it doesn’t affect after game has ended.
15.30 Modelled few enemies to replace the mockups. Now simple animations! Let’s refresh how they were done in unity with bones. Took a while to remember that you have to parent mesh to bones and not the other way around. And after you sorted out the vertex groups, then the rig worked as it should. I’ve never imported animation loops from blender to unity by myself, but let’s see, it cannot be that hard.
17.23. Nope. This animation importing just sucks. Tutorials talk about using fbx, but it seems to mess either scale or rotation in animator. Solved with it with using older ascii-fbx format, and removing all-actions check, and import checking loop time variable, and using exactly the right animation in animator (why does it import multiple?)
17.29 The way I did these animations was way too complicated considered what was needed. Would’ve been faster with rotation scripts. But well, it works, and I needed to refresh these skills.
19.30 Few more enemies. For some reason, texture colors look off. WTF? ah. model material inheritance.
21.18 Hour of despair. Looks like I cannot make it. We’ll then time for audio. I have idea how to hack levels inside. Feeling frustrated that the animations have caused so much troubles, and wasted so much time with them even though they are so simple and irrelevant.
22.25. Basic sound effects done: Lesson: use only one audio player to play all of them, odd bugs when I tried using multiple audio sources.
23.25 My favourite music generator is down! (http://www.abundant-music.com) I just and just can get it working, but saving doesn’t function, I can’t download! no! There must be others using this as well. Used http://www.earslap.com/page/otomata.html generator instead. hah, kind of suiting, that one is based on cellular automata as well and fits the Japanese themed look of the game.

MON 18.4

00.12 And animations work so easily using .blend format directly instead of fbx.Why didn’t I check this before.
3.55 And it is done! Towards the end, I cared less and less, bugs appeared, bugs stayed. There is one level that doesn’t finish, but it doesn’t matter because it is almost impossible to complete anyway. But it is a game. There is challenge, score, beginning, looks good, and sounds alright. Yay!

Submitted 7 minutes before deadline. With a screenshot. Phew. I made it. Ludlum Dare 35 completed!
One hour to browse what others have made and and I can take the first bus to Helsinki.

Features added on the week following the Game Jam:

Added level loading and made 5 levels of increasing difficulty.
Noticed that my planned support for levels with different sizes of grids did not work as intended (would need way to save cell states outside grid objects and then reparent them). Went around this by using a same large base grid on every level, adding limiter objects that turned key-grid items on and off. This allows making levels that inceease in size from small to bigger but other way around there would be issues with cells left in cover. Good enough for this jam game. Next time, I’ll use different scenes for levels.
Made animations to start on random frames so that the scene looks more lively.
Subtle particle effect with trailing sub-emitter to the background to increase the feeling of movement.
Figured out how to add curve controllers to scaling. So easy. why didn’t I google it before. Now the score text pops when score is gained. But you have to fiddle with the text-field pivot and the logic is bit unclear. Sometimes it goes to side, and it is bit unclear how to control it.
Polished the levels, so many bugs on object locations, movement speeds and directions. Should not have built over what was left over from last minute rush but made the levels from scratch. And issues left over by how I thought to make the level loading first, but it works good enough.
it is possible to win the game! there is victory screen.
Something fixed the odd issue of one sound effect not playing . Not that I complain, but it would’ve been nice to know why that bug existed as I tried to solve it with so many ways.
could not make the berry to spin nicely around itself. Probably about 3D model pivot, but it shouldn’t be so. Fixable maybe by adding a parent object, and spinning that, but well, later, right now after the last minute rush, the prefab-hierarchy is broken so adjusting it right way would be cumbersome.
added a very gentle glow as post processing -image-effect.
There is odd level restarting bugs left, I assume it has to do with time slowdown.

Post Jam thoughts:

Find a way to make gifs about the game feed. Other than recording screen with phone. Crucial part of the social media.
a way to add existing cells at the beginning of level would be nice.
It is allright. Game started as UI test. There is something fun about using the whole keyboard, eventhough it is clumsy.
And that whole crowded-artery metaphor is nice. Originally thought the story as “cyber-weapon cells delivering targeted medicine to hearth of an cyborg, intelligently avoiding the countermeasures it deploys” , well, the visuals are quite different, but crowded and stressed arteries as roads full of beings is a ok thought.
Same with playing with grid based cellular automata, thought this kind of gameplay might not suit it well. There is encouragement in score mechanics to keep many cells out, but in practice, best method of playing is kind of 3d-snake, stay small and nimble and you fit to move through the labyrinth, and only expand when you need that power-up. This is not so much fun, as growing big. For nimble snake controls something else would work better.
Something like this would work on large mobile. The right positioning of grid clicking is tricky but solvable. Count clicks by the cell “face” location instead of bg-grid if there exists something above or below. Doable. But what would be the right gameplay?
The open hectic level of the compo entry is in a way more fun than the cramped smaller levels I made for the polished version. This mechanic works on larger areas. Maybe more gathering. Or leveling up the individual cells and tracking their development to something speciaö
Weapons/special skills loaning from Bestfiends / candy crush styled pop-ups? Could there be freemium potential, fun enough? nah.
It is difficult and clumsy considering how fun it is now. Basically how it turned out is kind of 3d-maze where figuring out the depth takes learning.
Make a clear tutorial. People don’t realise how to use the keyboard. And now the start screen looks so crowded.
Make the first levels easy, not for your own liking.
I’ve made generic timers so many times now that I should make a generic class for that single purpose.
Feeling confident with unity skills again. Back at the fresh memory how to make 3D models and animations from Blender, get them smoothly in unity and make a nice basic gameplay prototype.
Keybindings for non-us/scandinavian keyboards would be nice.
Lessons learned: focus on core gameplay. The juicy polish is nice touch, but more puzzle-type levels would actually be better. I know that work better when it is pretty to look at, but it took so much time. Then again, I was just rusty, right now, I could make the same things so much faster.

In our always-up-to-date playlist below, we now have the following games exported:

• The Combinator: Video, Game
• Shapegrammer: Video, Game
• Slime Quest: Video, Game
• Monster Jumper: Video, Game
• Turbo Transform: Video, Game
• Bortman: Video, Game
• Parts Needed: Video, Game
• Cliff Shift: Video, Game
• Geomorpher: Video, Game

(You can check our entry here)

I like to write posts promoting some entries. To be honest, I find it that this edition has a really good level overall, for the moment I haven’t found any game that had a rate less than 3/5. I am really enjoying it, and here are some of the games I played and I like the most.

I am looking for more games to play, post yours on a comment!

Party at the Knightclub

Abduckted

Sunshift

Triangles Say Yip

Project G.R.I.L.L.

Have fun!

Tags: entry, ld, LD35, Ludum Dare, promote, recommendation, top

Every game needs THAT .gif!

Play it here right here!

View post on imgur.com

Play Here

You can solve math with brute force now.

I’ve released a post-compo version of Shape Struggle.  It’s quite improved!

Changes:

• Player speed is slightly slower to give you better control.
• Game is zoomed out 0.75% to give player more room to see.
• Enemy and power-up spawn location/timing tuned to make game more interesting early, more balanced later.
• Keyboard controls re-done to include mouse aiming.

post-compo download

entry page

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

If you haven’t played it yet I would really appreciate it if you rated and commented on my game!

Play Now!

The Challenges:
Originally I had hoped to spend the entire weekend making a low poly 3D game. However, I had the following time obstacles, most of which would separate me from my computer.

* Homework! I had to write an Android App and an Essay before Monday.

* Local event I wanted to attend on Saturday morning.

* A prior engagement spanned the entire day on Sunday.

* I hate Mondays.

Despite these challenges I still manages to create something that somewhat resembles a game. Woot!

The Good:
I felt like this Ludum Dare was a success and here are some reasons why

* The Concept. I’ve been wanting to explore a game that takes places through simulated text messages for a long time and I finally got started on one.

* “Story is King!” Story telling is a skill that I am trying to develop and my game definitely tells a story.

* Humor. I am glad I was able to work some humor into my game. I try not to take this too seriously. 😛

The Bad:

* Art. I didn’t have an artist so all I had was my rudimentary Illustrator skills. The phones don’t look interesting at all and I think that detracts from the overall appeal.

* Story Paths. A couple comments mention how linear the game is. Alright, I admit that Chapter2 is entirely linear with no possible deviation. So it could’ve been more interesting.

* Writing. I wish I had more time to write more interesting dialogue and more interesting endings.

The Future:

Overall, I’m happy with how this Ludum Dare turned out considering the circumstances. I’m not promising anything but my plan is to keep working on this game for a couple of weeks. I hope to make the story longer, add more effective dialogue and make the visuals more appealing.

Accept the challenge. Body Key is a hard difficulty game.
Within a minimalist environment, change of geometric shape to overcome levels.
Each geometric shape has a specific skill that will help you solve the puzzles.

I admit that the controls are hard to understand at first, but a little patience and practice you can correctly use the controls and feel challenged by levels.
This game has twenty levels with a generous tutorial.
Basically you should go to the portal at the end of each room.

Each portal has a geometric shape.
To pass through the portal your body must have the same shape of the portal.
To arrive to the portal, use the skills of each geometric shape that you have.

>>>>>>>> PLAY AND RATE BODY KEY <<<<<<<<<<

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I will pay you $1 if you can beat my entry, Photagogue. No one has been able to finish it yet. One person did make it to the end, but he didn’t manage to kill the last dino. Can you be the first one to kill all the dinos and make it to the end? If so, I will seriously pay you $1. Only the first person to do it will get it! I will need proof that you beat it though, so if you could record yourself playing it, that would suffice! c:

Update (4/26/16): YinYin beat it, and got $1!

Hi everyone~

I enjoy reading everyone’s post mortems, so I felt I should add my own to the mix. My game was Evolution Dungeon, a small roguelike adventure.

What was intended: I wanted an RPG that used DNA/evolution for advancement, rather than levels or experience points. This was my interpretation of the theme (as your characters inherit better genes, their appearances change). Of all the LD games I’ve made, the actual gameplay for this game is closest to what I imagined. There are three genes which contribute to characters’ abilities in battle using a rock-paper-scissors like relationship. When an enemy has been defeated, you can merge one of your character’s genes with the opponent’s. The merge averages each color’s points.

Things that went well: Level progression turned out pretty well, although there is a pretty steep penalty for leaving a level before it has been played out.

I’m happy with the maze generation algorithm. For the amount of time I had to work on it, it generates a pretty nice variety of floor plans and features. It’s not a great algorithm, but it should be a good base for one.

The basic process is this:

1. Initialize a 32 x 32 array of tiles. Mark each tile as a wall. Then, carve out a small room in a random location on the map. This will be the starting room. Finally, for each wall in the starting room, mark a doorway.
2. Pick a random doorway
3. Pick a random feature (hallway, square room, ellipse room, junction)
4. Determine if there is enough space to build the feature. If there is not, go back to Step 2.
5. Mark the new room and a new doorway for each wall in the new room (except the doorway that currently joins with an existing room)
6. Repeat from Step 2 until a set number of iterations have taken place.

Since each doorway has an equal probability of being selected, the generator tends to clump rooms in a blob (such as in the two illustrations above). Given the modest 32 x 32 canvas, this is probably okay. A probability distribution that gives higher weight to doorways further from the starting point may spread things out a bit. I’d also like to have more types of features. The maze generator took up a lot of my 48 hours as it is, so I should be glad I got what I have working.

What didn’t go well: The art is very dark. The main reason for this is that I had planned to include dynamic lighting. But I ran out of time to add light sources.

As a few people commented, it’s not immediately obvious how to advance. Since each gene (red, green, or blue) is strong against one other color and weak against another, one strategy is to have each character specialize. The lack of power-ups makes this strategy hard to employ in early levels. You can only regain health by being reborn. You often just need to take whatever you can get.

Another popular comment–control. The multiple character mechanic was inspired by a game called Exile: Escape from the Pit. That game had two movement modes. A “battle mode” let you control your party’s characters individually. Otherwise, you could merge them all into one tile and move as a group. That seemed like it would be too clunky in this game, given the frequency of battles. Designating one character as the leader and using pathfinding may have been a better solution. This might have simplified control transfer, too–since it’d be a non-issue for general exploring.

Moving forward: This was one of my favorite LD games to work on. Although I don’t think it’s my strongest entry, I think it has more potential for further development than other games I’ve put together. In particular, there are currently no special moves. The three genes merely affect the probability of hitting an opponent, and certain visual features (claws, tail, horns). There’s some opportunity for more variation in the characters, as well as the environment.

We read through all the feedback we got so far again and translated it into a list of features and fixes to address it all. You can find the annotated list on our blog.

If you have not tried it yet: Play and rate our game here

Tags: LD35, potion shift

My house will be empty for an hour, so like any rebellious teenager, I’ll be live streaming again, since the last one was so much fun. If you’ve already submitted your game, chances are you’ll have it played in stream.

Otherwise, you can submit via the form you’ll find on my Dare to Play comment, but I can’t guarantee it.

I plan to stream for an hour or so, at around 14:30 GMT today  NOW!.

My Twitch is Kappa_Barsavi!

I’m sorry for being so lazy with links, on mobile and the college has banned the Ludum Dare site.

EDIT: I am home.

Here’s the list.

Here’s the submission form. I will play your game, but I can’t guarantee to play it on stream, since I have a stockpile already submitted, and I only have just over an hour to stream.
Hope to see you there!

This is my evolved LD35 game.

Thanks for the support on the video. I’d appreciate it if you commented on how it is in the video. I will take all suggestions into account. Goodbye.

Hello everyone! This LD35 is awesome to geometry style games 😉

Im trying to create challenging games. But sometimes seems it should be a little easier. Anyway, hope you will get a some part of fun!

You can play my music-step arcade here

Hello everyone,

We finally had some time to record a play-through of the first couple of levels of Just Roll With It, using just the Omni and Oculus Rift DK2. The game is designed to be played entirely without a controller, mouse nor keyboard… just you and your human-sized hamster ball. Check out the video below and come play the web-port if you don’t have a DK2.

Just Roll With It

https://www.twitch.tv/kappa_barsavi

Come say hi!

Hello guys,

This time, we failed to deliver a properly finished game. You can play it here if you want to, though: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=46262

So it was important to us to write a real Post-mortem and to think about what happened in our team during this last LD.

What went right:

• The team was incredible and has kept its motivation intact ‘till the end
• We took the time to chose a game according to each member’s tastes
• Sentsu and Hibouch managed to deliver a lot of high quality graphics and musics within only 3 days
• We keep our concentration ‘till the end, even when we figured out that we were out of time

What went wrong:

• It was bad idea to make a physic-based game: it takes too much time to configure and it asks a perfect mastering of the physic engine, which was not our case. We underestimated this difficulty.
• We didn’t take the time to think about the code structure for the core mecanics. It was a mistake that made it really difficult to merge everything together. And some mecanics weren’t fully functional because of that.
• Globally, we badly organized us. And as a result, some graphic elements which needed a certain amount of time to be integrated were delivered too late and couldn’t have been properly integrated. We should have taken the time at the beginning to organize us and to prioritize the tasks to fulfill.

Conclusion:

Despite the fact that we could release a fully finished game for this Ludum Dare, we still believe in its potential.

We grew up as a team, we have gained skills, and those mistakes we’ve made will not be reproduced in our future projects.

About the game, we are sill working on it. We are currently refactoring the core mecanics to have a working base. With that, we will be able to fix everything, to create new components and it will be easier to design new levels. We hope to deliver a post-compo version soon.

If you’re interested in its future, you can follow our Twitter (@angrysquirrels_) or our blog on Tumblr, where we post weekly dev logs

See you soon guys !

Hello Friends..

i made a post Ludum Dare Version of my shapescalation entry.
It’s a harder version because you dont’t have infinite lifes, only 6.
But if you make a bad decision and can’t complete the level (and did’t got killed yet) you can restart the level (esc button) without loosing a life.

New features:
– score system
– life system
– game over screen
– music and sound toggles in main menu

furthermore i made a lot of my code completely new because the old code architecture wasn’t handy enough to scale up the game to 100 and more levels.

Next features:
– a little score popup when merging shapes
– game music will be reproduced and elaborated with better instruments
– better lighting
– successive unlockable level select menu
– highscore table /-storing
– mooooore levels

shapescalation.0.8.8.2_win.zip

shapescalation.0.8.8.2_mac.zip

have fun!!

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

Hello everyone, Andrea Di Bartolo, member of exhuman development team here! i’m glad to say that  Exhuman could be something more than a LD Jam game, the fact that we managed to include so much content in so little time give us the right confidence to keep going on with the development, we are already working on it, starting with balancing and better animation/control system, this is the first step for making this a real complete experience with compelling and fun gameplay!
I want also say thank to each everyone of you who took the time to try our game and leave a comment with constructive feedback, we truly appreciate this!

On my side, since i work on the aesthetics and design of this game, i want to show you a little teaser of what we could add in the future:

Unique Bosses!

I’m sorry that at the moment i have not so much more to show, but… stay tuned, we got this!

(For those of you reading that don’t know our game, here it is: Exhuman if you try it and rate please be sure to leave some feedback to us, is really important for keep developing in the right direction!)

BUMLI

Hello. I making remake Dizzy for android.

Link:Play in Google play apk

Briefly about the game:
Bumli is an alchemist and just starting their adventure with weighing potions. Just as the right amount of collected funds for the component to heal his master, the evil wizard spreads all over the world his pennies . It turns out that not only us magician playing tricks but all the inhabitants Gymsoya . Our adventure begins in the laboratory , where he attacked us wizard .

Tags: #gamedev #ld31 #pixelart #ld48 #jam #game, apk, arcade, Dizzy, game logic

On request and for rating purposes i’ve added a zip extractable version and webbased version (although the webbased version seems to run slow-mo)

Check it out here

Haven’t you played ChickLife yet?

Then click here and play it right away, and please rate and leave comment. Thanks in advance.

https://www.twitch.tv/bbytb

If you haven’t played MODE_SHIFT yet you should give it a try, let me know what you think, and post your high score. We’re pretty happy with the game, and would be interested to see how well people can do at it. Any ratings would also be appreciated.

Play MODE_SHIFT

If you didn’t played my game yet, it’s here !

Be sure to play the updated version, it has a lot of changes !

Hi folks. Have you tested my game? Not yet? I have 51 votes – good enough. Recently I did a post jam version of my abstract 3d puzzle game. There is now another gameplay which is really different, regarding the previous. If you have played with my game which I posted as a jam project, you could try this one – more levels, more features, more joy… I did only a standalone package for Windows. I would like to read some feedback so as to increase its interest. Don’t forget that this game is still under development. I wish you the best. Thank you ++

BrainRequired is here

Sorry, I had to make a Gif !

Trisquircle

Tags: hypnotic, ldjam, psychedelic

I have updated my game hosted on itch.io under the Post-compo web link. I have added UI scaling and it should be all good now. You can play it at the standard resolution in the browser or full screen it for maximum enjoyment!

PLAY FYLGJUR

Hi,

We had some busy time lately, but we finally can work on our title. We fixed some minor bugs and improved the inventory, so now you can see, which filters are active and which aren’t (original version is playable and you can figure out which are active, but it’s hard :D). We also added downloadable versions for Linux and Mac.

Play The Mystery of The Colorful Glasses

We have some plans about the game for future:
– new graphics
– new quests (more complicated and longer)
– new interactions (e.g. with walls, books)
– music and sound effects
– more story

So basicly we have to start from the beginning, but at least we have most of the mechanics implemented.
Wish us luck, give a feedback and – if you want – follow us to keep updated.

Natalia & Tomek

Check out the game here! c:

Well wait no further!! Go and play it now! 😀

PLAY

Or check out my post compo version, just uploaded a new update today!

You can play/download it on GAMEJOLT

((Downloaded version works better!))

I tweet much about game development over on Twitter in case you are interested.

@ZpeedTube

^-^

Last time, I posted a list of Let’s Plays I’ve collected for Hidden in Plain Sight. Apparently, that wasn’t enough, because there’s suddenly more online. This time, there’s a lot of international people who’ve played it, so this list contains a lot of Youtubers speaking a non-english language. Thanks a lot for everyone who’ve played the game so far (we have over 50 votes, now)! I enjoy reading and watching every single comment about the game. Without further ado, our highlight by TheRoamingOcelot (which has some NSFW language) had a special message to us:

The rest of the new Let’s Plays are in the list below:

• MrWaterboy is disoriented. In a good way.
• Pixno loves the music to the game (dev note: it was composed 2 days before the jam for a Unity course we were planning on teaching).
• gameface is struggling to comprehend dimensions within dimensions.
• CraftClone2 takes one step further by removing himself in the Face Cam in his Let’s Play.
• LegendWolfGaming howl’s to the moon for the game.
• I confess, I do not know what language αʑεяʞaη67 is speaking, but he definitely looks like he’s having fun!
• Another foreign language I do not recognize, but Drafilud shows how this game is played like a boss.
• Lenerd Gaming is another Let’s Play that, I apologize in advance, I’m not exactly sure is English. Perhaps it’s German?
• McDaod 2.0 shows a quick walkthrough to the game

If you want to check out the previous list, check here: ludumdare.com/compo/2016/04/24/lots-of-lets-plays

We did it again, folks! I’m buried in a mountain of great games, and figured I’d take a few minutes from trying to dig my way out to write up a post-mortem for my Ludum Dare 35 entry, Robot Escape.

This was my 5th Ludum Dare, and all-in-all I think things went pretty well. After finishing in time for the compo in LD34, I really wanted to do so again, but circumstances conspired against me this time around – oh well. I’ll explain in the “What went poorly” section.

What went well

• First and foremost, I had fun, and made something I’m pretty proud of.
• The core mechanics of the game – restricted lines of sight, and reconfiguring yourself to get around different obstacles – worked out really well, both on their own and together.
• I’m getting really comfortable with my Ludum Dare tool-chain. In the past I’ve always lost some time farting about with Unity’s quirks, but this time everything went pretty darn smoothly.
• In the same vein, a lot of what I spent time on in LD34 served me well as techniques I was able to reuse this time – in particular, I was able to just drop in the two-camera setup for an “authentic” retro feel I developed that time, and (as predicted) my level loader from that time around was clean enough to reuse – although my level-loading needs were a lot simpler this time around.
• I experimented with keeping my code a bit cleaner by having a lot of my entities be pure C#, with only a handful of MonoBehaviours responsible for interacting with Unity. I’m not sure I did it well enough to be a reusable approach, but for a game like this it worked really well.

What went poorly

• I started really late. I have the nasty flaw of being a gigging musician, and the band always seems to find ways to need my time during Ludum Dare. This time around, we were playing a gig out of town on Friday, so I completely missed the theme reveal and didn’t make it home until about 4am. I took a look at the theme as soon as I got home, but didn’t seriously start the clock, so to speak, until around 11am on Saturday. (The gig went really well – it’s only a “went poorly” item from a Ludum Dare perspective.)
• I lost another two hours to a power outage on Saturday evening. Thankfully, I didn’t lose any work as I’ve got a UPS for my computer. It wasn’t a total loss, however, as I took some time to do a bit of planning on pen and paper by candlelight.
• I didn’t get the controls right. This seems to be the biggest pain point people raise in the comments on the game, and I agree – I had planned to take some time to tweak them, at minimum, and ideally make them configurable, but I didn’t make it there before the deadline.
• I wanted more/tougher enemy types, but only had time for two. Similarly, it would have been nice to have a bit clearer feedback about when the enemies were firing on/hit the player.
• It took a concerning about of time for this game to actually be fun – any beginner’s guide to Ludum Dare tells you to make sure your core idea is fun as quickly as possible, but mine didn’t really get there until pretty late on Sunday.

A more detailed run down of the jam follows below the break – but if you don’t want to read that, why, you could always give the game a try and let me know what you think!

Saturday

Like I said, I didn’t get started until around 11am on Saturday. As always, I started with some time brainstorming around the theme, coming up with this mind-map:

The abandoned CGA look.

It took a long time to turn that into a more concrete idea for a game, and I spent about 7 hours between the brainstorming and coming up with a rough design. Before I actually got working in Unity, I took some time to mock up the basic screen layout and some idea of the sprite aesthetic. At this point, I was thinking of going for a 4-colour CGA-inspired graphics style, like I used in my first Ludum Dare entry, Smugglers!

Seeing this mockup made me abandon that idea, and I switched over to using a 16-colour “EGA” palette instead. For the rest of the weekend, I had the idea in the back of my mind that I could pretty easily implement both palettes, in an awesome nod to the games of the early 90s, but I never got around to it.

Saturday night – just a single-mechanic prototype, really.

Around 6:30pm, I actually got down to coding. Saturday was all about getting the line-of-sight mechanics in place – I implemented all the different sensors that ended up in the game, including the sprites and the code behind them. I think this was a big reason why my game didn’t end up “fun” until so late: I spent the whole first day polishing up one mechanic, and as a result didn’t get any sort of challenge – or win and lose conditions – implemented until well into the second day.

Also on Saturday, I implemented the level loader, and mocked up the UI. There was no navigation between levels, and barely any functionality tied to the UI, but having those in place early on made fleshing them out easier later on in the weekend. My last commit clocked in at 2:17am, wrapping up the day by adding the different sprites for the four sensors and making the UI show which one was active.

Sunday

I slept in way too late on Sunday, and didn’t get actually get down to being productive until around 11:30am. If I was smart, I would have moved right into adding the enemies and win and lose conditions – so naturally, that’s not what I did. Instead, I spent the first 6 or so hours of the day implementing the sprites and logic for the different chassis and tools, and the UI for configuring your bot. This was a bit of a gamble, as there was nothing for them to do at this point in development, but thankfully my design choices ended up being perfectly workable. By this point, it was abundantly clear that I wasn’t going to finish the game in time for the compo deadline, so I probably slacked a bit thinking I had a lot more time than I needed. That wasn’t really the case in the end.

Sunday night – actually a “game” by this point.

After that, I finally turned my focus on making what was, up until this point, just a prototype for a line of sight mechanic, into an actual game: I implemented the two enemy types, the basics of both enemy and player fire, and rudimentary win and lose conditions. At this point there was no hit point system, so getting hit by an enemy laser was an instant kill. My commit at 10:58pm says “Add enemies: this might almost be a game soon” – I kept working on enemies and the combat mechanics until 3:22am, and by that point the thing most certainly were a game, albeit a very small and buggy one.

At some point during Sunday I also took a short break to spend some time working on the music – I didn’t finish, but came up with a first draft of the music that ended up appearing in the finished game.

Monday

I started Monday feeling a little bit down about my prospects for finishing the game in time for the jam deadline. There was still a ton of things to do, and I didn’t get started until after 10am. Thankfully, I managed to get a lot of things done incredibly quickly. Roughly in order (timestamps are for the final commit in that area):

• Hit points for the player and enemies, and polished up projectiles – 12:29pm
• “Hearing” in the enemies, making the silent chassis have a point – 12:47pm
• Powerups to enable different parts –  3:07pm
• Navigation between different levels – 3:32pm
• Rubble, making the off-road chassis have a point – 3:48pm
• Status messages at bottom of the screen – 4:45pm
• Actuator and probe functionality, including door, switches and terminals – 5:36pm
• Sound and music – 8:17pm
• Win, lose and title screens – 8:17pm
• Game balance – 8:33pm
• Level design – 9:00pm

At some point in the day, I also axed the grid lines on-screen. I don’t remember exactly what inspired me to do that, but I think it’s a nice improvement in the visual style, and it was super easy to do: the lines were always just another image overlaid on top of all the sprites, so it was just a matter of turning that image off.

… and finally, the finished product!

Just like in the last Ludum Dare, this time around the very final minutes were a mad dash to design levels. I had put some thought in ahead of time to how the progression of levels was going to be structured, but (apart from level 1) they all were thrown together at the last minute. In fact, level 6 was designed – in its entirety – between 8:55 and 9:00pm.

At that point – well, at that point it was the jam deadline, so the game was as done as it was going to get. If you’ve made it this far, you’re obviously pretty interested in my little game, so why not go take a look at it for yourself? I’d love to know what you think!

Check out Robot Escape here.

Tags: 2D, final, jam, post-mortem, postmortem, unity

Seeing as a lot of you are having trouble with my LD35 game SHAPE.SHIFT() (because of its supposedly challenging difficulty), I’ve decided to put up a (WebGL build for the time being) slightly easier post-jam version that’s more forgiving in terms of distance between obstacles and the time needed to react to them but should still pose a challenge (Of course for rating purposes/bragging rights, the original “super hard” version is still available on the embed link on the main game page as well as on the itch.io and GameJolt pages).

In other news, my game currently has 59 votes and could probably do with some more:

Anyway, if you have yet to try out my game give it a play/rate by clicking here. You can also check out the post-mortem for the game by clicking here and to see my previous post on how to get a good score in my game (which mostly applies to the original version), click here.

Also, I’m looking for more games to play/rate so click here to submit your entry and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.

Tags: 3D, endless runner, LD35, postjam, unity, unity3d

Wow! Liborio has 80 votes! Thanks guys with all our heart!

We’re very grateful for all your reviews!, thanks a lot! We’re going to review more games happier than ever.

You can try the game here We recommend that you try the standalone version, it has better graphics. ;D

EDIT:

Thanks to Randomise User for the review!!

This is the game I made for Ludum Dare 35. It’s a metroid-inspired platformer, where new shapes unlock new areas. You can check it out here. Please comment and vote. Thanks!

I introduce, for those that haven’t seen it yet, my game. FriendShift Madness!

What went well!

Compared to my other submit, I thought this one was a great improvement !

• Way more entertaining concept.
• Has the silliness some ludum darers like.
• Has a better art style. (Not graphics, I still sticked with 2D. The building, altought, are 3D, giving it a nice mix).
• More polished and fluid gameplay.
• Less stress during development.

What went, sort of not well.

• Game lacks a proper setting.
• Game lacks some more particle effects.
• Not much diversity in terms of difficulty.
• Little replay value.
• Could’ve developed the concept a bit more.

No game is really perfect, I understand that. But we always have to point out our mistakes and things we failed to add, this attitude helps it so the next game we make becomes even better!

Rate my game and I’ll help rating yours (fairly, of course).

SEE YOU ALL IN NEXT LD.