Ah yes, my sleeping pattern is a little wonky right now :/ So it’s time to post up the obligatory after jam thoughts!

You can play Steam Heart ‘ere!
Or you can watch a playthrough if you want right ‘ere!

Dawn of the First Day

So waking up at 5am, I found out the theme was ancient technology which wasn’t any surprise considering the previous results. In a way I’m somewhat glad it was something broad/setting than a gameplay mechanic, as it allows me to create anything I want and set it with-in a universe based on the theme.

(Beta sprites/HUD As you can see it originally had a timer and only two switchable weapons.)

So in my head I fancied making something I love which is run-n-gun games as this jam was a little more relaxed without the ratings. I really fancied making a tribute to Treasure’s classic Mega Drive games and this jam was a great excuse to take some time out to do so! Anyway the first thing I did was to sprite up some characters, get a basic movement/shooting engine down. Originally the setting was set in a Arabian styled world, however when I came to spriting the enemies, they came out looking, rather Steampunk…

(Not many enemies to battle, I focused more on those delicious bosses! Yum Yum!)

So with that, I just completely changed my vision in my head, which in the long run I guess kind of worked, as it made designing the end bosses a lot easier and less time consuming. However I did have to re-sprite the main character as the original didn’t quite fit, however it didn’t take too long!

(Why do they always wear their goggles on their head and not around their eyes?)

Once that was done and basic engine was finished (with enemies, restarts, power-ups, the whole guff) I started in creating tile sets and building the first level. Actually a lot of time went into making the tile sets, I went through a couple of changes. It was gearing towards the end of the first day and I decided to get some sleep, the next two days were going to be tough.

(The tile set/colour palette for the destroyed city. Made of orange cheese!)

Dawn of the Second Day

So after having roughly six or so hours of sleep, I jumped straight back to it, I finished up the tile set and was well onto my way of creating the first area! Making and designing short little sections followed up by a boss is how I like to start my morning.

(This was the first area, look at those lovely explosions, mmm retro-explosions)

I actually spent a lot of time on the end boss on the first section, as I wanted to somewhat re-use its AI and destruction triggers for future bosses. After making the first section I knew then I wouldn’t have a “full game” ready in time as I somewhat planned. This is when I thought it’d be best to make it just one level that gave a taste of the past glory days of Treasure and Sega. This is where I decided to make some different areas/mechanics in the same stage so it wouldn’t all look boring and monotonous. This is why you see the blimps attacking in 1-2, the sewer parts in 1-3/1-4 and the whole town destroyed at the end of the stage.

(I utterly love boss fights. Tis why I based this game on Alien Solider/Gunstar Heroes)

In the first day I managed to create the first four bosses. I was aiming for 10-12 or so bosses but I just knew I couldn’t achieve that at the current level of polish. It was at this point I knew it was best to make good and interesting fights, other than cheap short ones. It feels better when you explode something up when it’s been a challenging and fun fight.

It was closing up on the second day and I just needed some rest. I had a long way to go the next day and I just knew it’d I’d create things better if I had some sleep.

Dawn of the Final Day

After a wonderful 5 hours of sleep, I woke up at 4am, made a curry and got back to finishing off this game. (Actually in hindsight I should of woke up later and not had that curry, I was somewhat lagging towards the afternoon and pace just went right downhill.)

Basically the last day was spent on finishing up the levels, so it had a nice end of to the stage, not too short, not too long. I did envision a part where you’re chasing the blimp on an anchor but I just didn’t have the time to put it in. >.< I did however add in a cutscene half way through the stage, I just wanted to show off that they is somewhat a story, even though it’s never resolved in this game. It was around this sleepy point in the afternoon where I decided to create music as I tend to make better sounding tracks when I’m dozing off oddly. Plus it re-perked me up into finishing off the game

(Added in for extra cuteness! Cheekily used Dynamite Headdy for extra lulz DAC files :3)

In the last half ‘n’ hour of the jam, I created the menus, intro cutscene and ported it to windows and flash. When that submission hour popped up, I clicked submit and went straight to bed. I felt I’d deal with bugs in the morning. (There were only a small handful I found which were fixed easily, *sigh*)

After Thoughts

This jam was so far my favourite one as it was so relaxed as there wasn’t any ratings to worry about. (Even though I never care about them, except trying to make top 100. It’s always been about what can I make in under 72 hours and having fun!) I have nothing much to say about this jam as it’s just been super fun making bosses and seeing lots of explosions. In hindsight, I’d prolly shouldn’t of had that curry and got more sleep. I think I could of added a couple of extra bosses if I wasn’t so laggy towards the end.

(Sad we didn’t get to see more of Mr.Genericsteampunkmonopolyman.png)

Overall though, I’m actually rather happy of the end result, it makes a lovely change considering the last LDjam was terrible for reasons.

Anyway it’s now time to start playing and rating others games. I hope everyone had fun jamming! Can’t wait until next time.

-Joel

The Mighty Stick. Ok. That was great. So i’ve got many thoughts about future of my game. Perhaps i should continue my work and add the multiplayer mode and more features (like other planets, more variants of using the stick, messaging with the Morse code). It can be a long way to release the game but if there is more feedback i’ll continue making the game. It’s not a No Man’s Sky clone. There aren’t eighty billion planets with nothing. For now it is only one. And your mission is to survive because there isn’t any oxygen in this world.

It will be awesome if you play the game and leave the feedback for me. It’s really important. It will help the game to exist after the Ludum Dare.

Play here:
ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=62494

And some new screens:

Whenever I’ve taken part in Ludum Dare before, I’ve tended to get bogged down in messing around with art and sound.

My games often look ok, but are a bit shallow. This time I decided to take things as far as I could in another direction.

I’ve been wanting to make a simulation of the Neolithic revolution ever since reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens last year. So this LD was a great opportunity to finally make a start.

The game simulates our transition from hunter-gatherers to settled, agricultural societies and the rise of trade and social classes.

I decided early on to just focus on creating an interesting simulation, rather than trying to give the player agency, or making it fun. As a result it’s probably a lot more fun to work on than it is to play! (Sorry about that)

I’m pretty happy with the results. Sit back and watch the simulation and you will see hunter-gatherers migrating around in search of food. Eventually some of them will master agriculture and, without the pressure to migrate to find food, they will settle down in one place.

Settlements will trade with one another, food-rich people giving it to those that are starving. Hunter-gatherers soon become attached and dependent on these settlements, or are outpaced by their growth.

The trading of goods sets up class divisions between the rich and the needy, and eventually ruling classes spontaneously arise in the centres of your cities, with preferred access to traded goods. They become surrounded by slaves.

The ruling elites then stop farming, and villagers forget their hunter-gatherers survival skills. Elites start producing culture and use that to maintain their influence.

And all this happens (for better or worse) without any input from the player. The few rules I’ve put in interact to create emergent cities and social strata.

Play Nineveh

There is lots more that I still want to add… things like livestock, different crop types, proper construction using wood and stone production, droughts, plagues, horseback riding.

A little of self promoting.

Play Betty! <—–

Tags: 2d unity, Ancient technology, C++, LD36, self promotion, unity

My little arcade physics game which plays in ancient Egypt can be downloaded over Itch.io if you dare: https://tocogames.itch.io/the-get-up Here is the jam page: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=44878

Description:

You are in ancient agypt, keep your slaves from getting stoned, up high they go through physics!

Someone needs to get those stones up there, since you are in charge you can grab your slaves to do it. But beware physics are at play here. Someone needs to keep putting wood in front of the stones so they can keep on rolling and nobody gets crushed. Keep everything in balance and you are good to go to get real high!

Being a cathedral builder isn’t that easy… evenmore if some devils tries to destroy it.
Build a compact and wonderful cathedral avoiding pilgrims to get killed and you may earn a divine approval !

———– INSTRUCTIONS ——————————————-

1. Use Left Click to pick a block then Left Click to place it on the ground
2. Click on Devils to kill them !
3. You’re ready to to build a wonderful cathedral !

———— PLAY ——————————————————

Web (Game Jolt)
Download (windows)

Have fun  !

(N.B. : we may upload a post jam version in a few days)

———————————————————————–

TEAM
Augustin Grassien (anabir) – Game design & Art
Valentin Birembaut (arfak) – Programming
Benjamin Lefevre (benjaml) – Programming
Theophile Loaec (thomaslean) Sound Design & Music

Special thanks to :
Liptick for some help on game design
Deadslug for his divine voice

Well, turns out that I can’t finish the game on time again. For the fifth time in LD.

I underestimated that making assets (especially drawing) really took time. I really should work on how to create things faster.

At least this time I gave it a good fight instead of just messing around and surrender before a day.

See you later on the games — I’ll play some and learn from them.

Hi !

my owner threw me in the trash and now I will be destroyed ! please HELP !!

I’m too old for this s*** …

Too Old to Run LD36

Whew, the event is over! This is the first time us two release a game, so some advice and crits (or pure flattery) would be welcome 😀

Check it hout here —> http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=84374

After a few complaints, I changed the font and adjusted the font size on the majority of text element. From my point of view the readability is significantly improved.

Here is a comparison of the different versions:
old:

and new:

I hope the charm of the game isn’t lost. If you haven’t tried Mad of Steam yet, here is the link.

A post mortem will follow soon.

Is it just me or we can’t put note anymore on games we played?

Hello guys!

This is my third Ludum Dare!

Do you wanna go into my ruins? As always in my case..it’s another short game u^^

You can play it here

The first Atari’s Asteroids game was released in 1979. I have a feeling that it’s code was much cleaner and better than ours is. So what are my thoughts?

The last LD I and my friend participated in was the 32nd. That one was catastrophic in a sense. We weren’t able to think of a good interpretation of the theme and when we figured something out, it was already a day off the limit. Also we were trying to use our Java 2D framework/engine/whatever called GabeNgine and it really didn’t go as we would’ve liked. After that, until now, we haven’t really felt about doing anything. But this time I got an idea quite quickly and my friend had a kind of non-lazy period, which is a bit of miracle 😀

View post on imgur.com

My original idea was to make a platformer game with the Asteroids somehow connected to it, but later we’ve decided to go full on with some Asteroids interpretation. And it turned up to be a really good decision. It quickly became our favourite game amongst all our previous works. It’s not really that original, you control a ship and try to survive in waves of destructing asteroids all around you. Sometimes an annoying enemy shows up. Ideal for rage quits. But the greatest thing about it are the graphical effects. We’ve come up with a nice little shader that makes everything SO much cooler and it’s also causing the “ancient” look of it. Also the particles. My friend is a bit crazy about them, but this time it wasn’t a bad thing, because he ported his awesome particle engine, hence we can have awful tons of particles (with almost no performance impact).

At the nights, the code was turning into a monsterous blob as always, but we’ve done worse. But I was anxious while dealing with sound and packing. The 4 years old Paulscode Soundsystem won’t simply work with newest LWJGL and JOAL’s natives are a bit hard to pack. Anyway, I managed to do it somehow.

Well, in the end, we’re happy about the result. It always can be better, but I’m satisfied. We will appreciate if you try it and we are looking forward to your feedback. You can try it here.

This temple takes you to solve the case of the unknown tablet to find each of the codes inside the dangerous room.

View post on imgur.com

Play it Here(Windows) <—–

We had fun with the Jam thanks!

Members:
GamesTimes(Kramchay) – Art, Programming & Sound
Kerhut Csaba – Programming

We barely made it and it’s even far from finished… lots of levels are yet to be imported to Unity… but the concept’s there…
Kindly check it out, boys and girls! Hope you enjoy this little game of ours… We plan on finishing this btw so watch out for that if you liked the game

Here’s the link to the page: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=64207

This is my entry for LD36, my fifth game!

Traanimus (from transfer + animus “spirit”) is a game about exploring a lost dungeon with ancient device that lets you swap the souls of objects and purge ghouls. Solve the puzzles to find the end of the dungeon and get the treasure in this first person game.

The game turned out to be too big for me to complete for the compo,  but I still made it in time for the jam. I use a similar concept to the game I submitted for LD32, Material Exchange, but this game is more fleshed out.

You can play Traanimus here.

Hey, test your wits in our unforgiving puzzle game and say what you think: Mr. BigCash

—–> Play “Mr. BigCash” <—–

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=98870

This half-finished game was made solo by me, except for 1 font and 1 music track. Currently only crafting / building is in.

I seem to always take on more then is reasonable and fail to finish, well, at least I’m not alone in this XD
This game was supposed to include some plot, and enemies in addition to the building/crafting, but I didn’t have time to add those. I thought this would be simpler then it actually was.

I never intended to invest too much in the art, as you can see I have zero animation skills, my modeling is so-so for simple stuff, and I barely ever used textures at all, most models have just flat colors. the poor player never even got a face, is this a horror game? lol

The part that took the longest was the world structure, saving it to file, and loading all the correct models to the correct place.

Making the crafting system was especially fun, I tried to find a way to skip all those searches needed to find a correct recipe, and I think I managed to do it well ^^

I managed to do the search in one go, with no loops, using a hash table,  if you wanna know how just ask

I’m not really satisfied with what I managed to get, I feel like it was a miss. as without a goal and enemies people are not going to pay any notice to my game despite all the very hard work I put in.

I think for next time I’ll definitely hook up with some artists (for art and sound), as I feel the need to handle the art really prevents me from finishing the game logic.

thanks for reading if you bothered to get this far ^^

Tech and I had a blast making this, even though right at the last two hours I had to totally change the game from an exploration-based one to a wave based arcade game, because the mechanics were sound (especially the combat mechanics), but the world had no time to be built, unfortunately, but that is a project for the future.

So check it out, if you would! The world’s most ancient technology is fire, and with flame we enlighten. So join Mr Knighy Knight (not actual name) on a quest to keep his Flame from dying, using his magic fiery spears of justice.

Yeah. Let’s go with that.

-Polyrogue (Taha)

Hey Nerds! SmartWilliam here, the guy that made this game look pretty! I’m very happy with this, it’s my first Ludum Dare entry and first serious attempt at video game art.

I’m pleased with how it turned out, especially since Me and Poly both started a little late lol. Yeah I had a blast doing all the art for it. I wish I had some more time to refine the player character, but That’s what Ludum Dare is all about! Now I need to regain some sleep, Ludum Dare messed up my sleep schedule.

-SmartWilliam (Sam)
You can play Ig-Knight here! Thanks. We look forward to playing your entries. May even stream some individually.