Windows, Mac and Linux builds are in.

Here’s a GIF for good measure:

Play it here!

Tags: animated gif, build, desktop, gif

Click the image to play ARTYS

I probably should have posted this earlier, but i forgot.

My game is all finished, you can play right here if you would like to.

Ancient Robot Wrecks Peaceful Town

Any feedback, positive or negative is appreciated. Thanks, I hope you all had fun this weekend!

View post on imgur.com

Temple 36 is a 2D Platformer Action Puzzle Game that leads you to solve the riddle in the temple in order to complete them.

Play it here <—-

This was made for the 3-day ludum dare jam with a team.
Members:
GamesTimes(Kramchay)
Kerhut Csaba

#ludumdare #ludumdare36

Is it down for anyone else?

Hey all, I just want to start off by saying thanks to everyone who made LD36 possible, it’s was a blast and I’m very glad that it happened.

The game we ended up making is called “Something is Wrong with this Museum”. It’s a story-led platformer set in a museum in the future. Check it our here.

The picture above is me and my teammate Jack doing a fistbump. No? You don’t see it?

This was my third Ludum Dare and Jack’s first. The first LD I did was as a compo and it was an absolute mess, I really don’t see how I could do compo anymore after having worked with an artist twice now. I have so much respect for people who pull off the compo.

The way I like to game jams is… unhealthy. I was working for around 20 hours a day which, as much as I enjoy it, is of detriment to the game. In the UK the jam starts at 2am. There’s no way I’m going sleep having found out the theme and it’s really just a slippery slope from there. Whilst I might have had 80% of the game mechanics done early on that morning it always leads to that inevitable slowdown afterwards and trying to fix bugs made when tired is a nightmare when you are still tired.

At 2am on the Monday as I was going to go to bed, I found I was looking at the game and finding it boring, and decided to create an entire new mechanic instead of going to sleep. To add a new mobility skill to the game, I created an ender-pearl inspired idea, where you threw a ball and teleported to where it landed. You had charges of the ball that only recharged when you “unteleported” back to your old position.  I spent the time I should’ve been sleeping making animations, sound effects and programming. What a waste of time. The mechanic was interesting but not right for the game we created and by 10am it was gone and I was now redesigning the levels back to not using the new mechanic.

So what did I learn from this? Get some goddamn sleep next time, especially before making big decisions.

The next thing that sticks out in my mind was communication and our workflow. Our workflow in certain areas was amazing and in others sorely lacking. The speed at which Jack created the character sprites and I animated them was pretty amazing. However we really fell down for the rest of the art. Jack had never done art for a game before, and I failed to explain what was required to import it into the game without problems. Lots of time lost cropping and chopping, hampered by the many layers on photoshop. At 10pm on the last stretch, 4 hours to go, and I start importing the cutscenes and realise we never actually spoke about how they needed to be formatted… If I ever lead another jam team again I will try to outline guidelines on how assets should be made before we start making them.

Finally, having looked at our game the day after the jam ended, I think we crucially missed out on getting external feedback on the game during it’s development. It’s hard to show it off when you’re working from home but we should have sent it to some friends or at least got the cat to play it. Our opinions on game design differ a lot. Jack is a story person and I am a mechanics kinda guy. There wasn’t a middle ground between the two games we saw in our mind’s eye but we somehow made it. We also missed out on how bland the walls in the game look. The red wall is almost painful on the eye which is a shame as problems like this could have been fixed if we had asked for other people’s perspectives.

All in all, regardless of all the negatives, this is the best jam game I have made to date. It has more content, feels better to play, and is just overall more professional than my previous attempts. If you look through my previous entries you can really see the astonishing level of improvement each time and I look forward to improving my skills even more!

Thanks for reading and thanks for making the community what it is!

Joni

I have uploaded a new version. It does not have any significative change (because it is a Ludum Dare entry), but I have fixed some messed up collisions. I have modified the player’s physics too, now it has a smoother control and it is less slippery.

Why don’t you give it a try? I will really appreciate it! Also, any feedback will be welcome! Play it here

Tags: Ancient technology, fantasy, LD36, ldjam, Ludum Dare, Ludum Dare 36, yggdrasil

Hi,

It was my first participation to a Ludum Dare and it was a lot of fun.
I wasn’t well prepared since I was not sure I could participate until friday.
It’s the reason why I failed doing something for the compo and posted my project to the Jam.

I first wanted to make a platformer game and spent the first day on the engine programming (using SDL2/Opengl).

Then I made a first sprite and that take me all sunday morning !

At this point I admit I panicked ! I really don’t thought I could do it in time. So I switch to another project.

And I know it was a mistake. Even if their was some hard work to go, the game was running.

If I took the time to think about it, I would probably end up with a solution to modarate my ambitions on this project and finish it in time.

So I switched to a puzzle game project and almost done it for the compo but wasn’t satisfied yet by the details.
I decided to take some extra time to implement a menu and make some art and published for the Jam.
And here it is :

It’s not  as appealing as I expected first but I’m happy with the concept and the gameplay. It’s a puzzle game based on Conway’s game of life where you aim at cleaning the board in few moves.

I would be glade to have your opinions and critics about it. I’m considering doing more levels if someone is interested in it.

I already learned a lot participating of a single Ludum Dare ! But, for the next one, I must train my skills in graphics, sound and music. And I will focus on one single project, I promise ^^

(Click to play Write Only)

I’ve been really neglecting the ludumdare.com posts this time around – no “I’m in”, no “I’ve submitted”… But I did submit my game, “Write Only”, on time, and there is now even a post-jam version!

The game is a cover-based top-down 2.5D shooter about robots in the distant future who are fighting over a sacred artifact from their creators – a 3.5″ floppy disk.

Combat in progress

This style of combat is one I’ve been wanting to try out for a while, and would like to incorporate into a larger RPG. With many additions, of course – smarter enemies, grenades, melee combat, maybe some stealth mechanics… Any feedback or suggestions welcome! The main criticism so far is that it is too difficult, so in the post-jam version I toned down the enemy rates of fire and some other things, and introduced health pickups.

You can play and rate Write Only here. I look forward to playing your games!

Tags: 2D, jam, LD36, ldjam, Let's Play, letsplay, Ludum Dare, playthrough, video, youtube

Sorry for yet another post on the matter. It seems the comments that I’ve given aren’t appearing under the corresponding section. Is it a bug? or is there a quirk I’m not aware of?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

ps. working on a postmortem

Tags: comments, feedback, friends, given

What a ride! Making Time Travel Selfies have been so fun and so exhausting!

Let me tell you about its crazy development. Our team was comprised of a game designer, a coder, a 2d artist, a 3d artist and a musician.

Our main goal was to make an unpolished game in 48 hours and spend some hours from the last day tinkering it. The main reason was that we needed to keep on working in our main project (A Rite from the Stars). That takes us to our second goal: make a really different game. A Rite from the Stars is a 3D point and click adventure based on a mystical tribe. So we wanted to move away from that.

The idea of taking selfies of ancient pieces of technology in ancient times sounded appealing, so we started working right away.  Our game designer began studying score systems  from photography games (like Pokémon Snap, Afrika, etc) while our artists started choosing the theme (Ancient Greece) and assets. Meanwhile, our coder hero started to make a prototype of the Movement System (quite simple) and the Selfie System (a bit harder, because he had never done anything like that).

Characters concepts

We took a popular culture image of a scientific (Maurice Moss) and disguised him like a Greek. But it had to be a very bad disguise because the game is a parody.

After this, we decided to integrate the score system into a Facebook mock-up called Fakebook because it sounded so logical. Social networks are the common habitat of selfies. So the selfie would be scored by amount of object in frame, distance to the object and angle. Bonus points for extra pieces of ancient technology and NPCs in screen. These stats would be showed as Fakebook emotes and comments from users (we included ourselves and other members from Risin’ Goat).

Fakebook in all its glory

The problem was that creating Fakebook took a lot of time from our programmer. He spent almot a whole day doing it. Although we finished, this reduced the amount of time we had to test the score system. Anyway, in that picture you can appreciate that, as the character is blocking most of the Greek Fire behind him, comments are being harsh.

So, in addition of taking selfies, we added a small stealth system. Basically, if a Greek NPC sees you with a cellphone, you alter the past and the Space Time Continuum gets destroyed. This made the game more interesting as limits the time a player has to take a selfie.

The End of Time!!!

The musician composed music based on the “Zorba the Greek” movie.  That was not Ancient Greek Music, but it sounded Greek enough for a parody game like ours. The voices for Mass and the NPCs were made by him too (even the female ones).

We finished the game on Sunday and polished it on Monday. We had a last time issue with the screenshot  management in the build, but it was solved and the game was uploaded in time!

An advice for our future selves (hopefully Ludum Dare #37!): bring more programmers or design only one complex system.

PLAY IT HERE!!!

Hi guys!

Kill the Homo Erectus to collect DNA and get new weapons!

Play here! (web)

PS: My second jam alone and much more satisfied 😀

Twitter: @larkkkattack

Alien’s Curse

I started by writing and doodling ideas in my notebook.

After getting general idea of gameplay I began constructing muenu panels, characters and items using my already existing scripts.
Few adjustments and fixes and my gameplay prototype was ready. It didn’t differ much from the final game:
Platformer with mouse aiming focused on fighting with AI.

Day Two:

First I needed to choose game’s style. Quickly I realized that I can’t make decent looking hand drawn sprites in that short time.
I couldn’t make vector graphics matching ancient theme, so I decided to use pixel art.
My first idea was to draw ancient Greek architecture and sculptures as enemies.
It looked pretty nice but I couldn’t find natural sky color contrasting with it
(I must start making colored doodles, my color picking skills still aren’t dependable enough.)

I decided to switch to drawing characters, drawing and animating player sprite was much easier than doing tileset.
I looked through my notes and found good fable idea for pyramid expedition game.
After searching for reference images I started doing tiles again, this time it turned out good enough.
I drew few details and tile varitaions and went to sleep.

Day Three:

Drawing the mummy wasn’t very difficult, although I spent some time on research of slow walking animation.
I spent next few hours on polishing sprites and modifying scripts.
Then I started recording sounds (I put a thick coverlet on a small table and recorded under it).
I practiced making music the day before jam, so I didn’t struggle with it as much as in previous jams.
After having all assets done (about 9pm) I started making maps using my unity custom editor.
And then I realized I didn’t test game on target (WebGL) platform.
You know, what’s coming: bugs. Two hours left and two game breaking bugs to fix, it gave me a lot of stress.
Fortunally one of them happened in my previous game, so I only needed to check few files.
Second was my syntax error: I wrote (value<-0) in my health script.
It worked in the editor, but as you probably know some crazy stuff happens when you build Unity3D projects, so it didn’t pass.
I published my game half hour before jam deadline with feeling of relief.
The game turned out better than I excepted and I got a lot of ideas for tools, games and things to practice.

Tools I used:
-Unity3D
-Gimp
-Piskel
-Audacity
-Bosca Ceoil
-GifCam

What went wrong:

-I wasted too much time on graphics
-I started doing levels too late

What went well:

-Adding tutorial makes big difference, I didn’t get any comments like: “X didn’t work”, “I didn’t know what to do”
-Fable wasn’t as bad as I expected

Key Takeaways

-Instead of chaotic testing of different kinds of graphics I should put all possibilities as soon as possible and choose the best one in first two hours
-I should work on levels from the beggining and make them easy to update after adding new content and changing scripts
-The game has only three levels and tutorial and still nobody is complaining about it’s length;
I think that one of the challenges of making game for LD is showing as many game features as possible in shortest gameplay time, since most of people spend only few minutes on playing each game.

It is probably the longest text I’ve ever written in English.
Sorry for my bad writing skills and thanks for reading.

Game Page

So my main Post Mortem is over here: http://moongate-games.co.uk/blog/2016/8/31/ludum-dare-36-post-mortem

But for those of you who are short on time etc then here’s a TL;DR version for you all.

How I feel it went:

It went much better than my previous ones.

What went well:

Pretty much everything from having a well structured internal system, to proper planning and having trial features that worked more or less perfectly right off the bat.

What could have gone better:

Bug fixing is really the only thing that could have gone better from this, I basically spent too much time fixing what turned out to be something really simple because I didn’t step through things properly.

What have I taken from this:

Trying out new ideas on how things are done etc results in some really good and fun things.

Mental health is really important when doing something like this (or just in general really.)

Any variation of the swing music genre is really good to code to.

Conclusion:

Things went really good, not much went bad, need to improve on bug fixing skills and that’s it I think…

Tags: LD36, ld36 post mortem

First things first. A huge thanks to everyone who played and commented the No Man’s Clay!

I thought that the game is too easy, but as I understand, no one was able to get The Cube. And this is my fault – it was not possible to restart the puzzle, to try different solutions.

So, I release an update. To restart with the “wheel” object, just interact with the square slot:

Using imagination and luck, you can get all of these beautiful shiny thingy (and unlock the multiplayer, and taste The Cake, of course) ^_^

Hey,
my name is Kai and i made a little walking simulator called “The House on the Right”. Now i made a little video post-mortem. If you want to play my detective walking simulator then here is the link- http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=55091

Hi everyone!

This was our first Ludum Dare. It’s crazy to see how great some of the games are. There’s a lot of things we didn’t get around to finishing, like animations and sounds. I’m just excited that we finished something playable.

Leave us some feedback and tell us what you think.

Ancient Temple Escape

Tags: Ancient technology, jam, Ryst, unity

Summary or TLDR

What Worked:

I had hardly any trouble with my chosen tools: Android Studio / Intellij IDEA, libGDX, Ashley, Box2D, Gimp, Blender, EnergyXT.

I am confident that my theme ideas and gameplay plans were okay.
The player would recruit people to push a brick, until they got mad at you and rebelled.

What Didnt:

I got stuck for a few too many hours with the characters force movements. I got in a muddle toward the 2nd half with the AI. I didnt give enough time to graphics or music or sound designing. No text or gui or title or menus.

I didnt get the game near to completion within the compo OR jam deadline.

Here are progress screens in an imgur album.

PostMortem

The ancient technology was to be Heirarchy. The player would attract a following with loyalty, and maintain it for as long as possible. (+100xp)

The interactions would work this: The player would enlist the warrior, creating loyalty. The warrior would enforce the worker it sees, out of loyalty, and turn on individuals that rebel. The worker does the labor out of loyalty, or to avoid warriors wrath. (+200xp)

To get a measurable score, i’d measure the workers progress with the task. (+50xp)

My idea was to have the workers move a huge stone, like one from a pyramid. I’d measure the distance of the stone, before the workers and warriors rebelled. (+150xp)

Tools:
Android Studio / Intellij IDEA
Most pleasant experience ive had with a graphical IDE, did not seem too heavy, but lots of formating ease and assistance along the way. (+250xp)

libGDX
Before the LD i was thinking maybe ill target android, and i saw someone mention libGDX.. i had a little look and dove in, i had some cram sessions the day before the LD. It seems very capable for making games. (+500xp)

Ashley
I saw libGDX has a component system called Ashley. It may be a bit complicated for a newcomer, It made a lot of sense to me and i enjoyed using it. The components i made and used: [AI, Model, physics, position] and systems: [AI, Model, Physics]. (+200xp)

Box2D
Im familiar with Box2d, no surprises here. I disabled gravity in box2d so the physics would be like a snooker/pool game. (+50xp)

Blender
I was happy with how the scenery (plant, rocks, cracks in floor) looked. i followed the guide to export models as fbx and run libGDX’s convert tool, the magic worked and they loaded in the game. (+50xp)

My first hiccup was the motion i wanted out of my characters. i knew that initially there would be no friction so they would roll or float like in space, i had the characters bouncing around like balls. I got stuck tweaking the code for this and i hadnt solved it after a couple of hours of attempts. (-2 lives)
The solution I chose was to give the people a stop-start interval, as though they were taking individual steps. It brought character to their motion. (+200xp)

My attempts to make some vector art also did not pan out. besides the environment, the models didnt make it beyond their initial placeholders. (-1 life) That i didnt find the time to develop this side of the game is disappointing. I had hoped to get some animations going as well, it seemed straight forward within libGDX, but i didnt have the models or the actions designed to try it out. (-2 lives)

What i take away from this ludum dare:
Writing java and targetting android has been a valuable experience. (+2000xp) Seeing the game run on my tablet was fun. (+10xp) Teaming with 1-2 others would make finishing more achieveable, three heads are better than one. (+250xp)

Total XP: 4010xp