Loveapple Games proudly present our entry, Scaleshifter. In this game the goal is to collect DNA to evolve increasingly better scaleshifter abilities, enabling you to zoom deeper and deeper into the natural world.

>>> Play the game here <<<

Day 1

The first day was mostly spent brainstorming. That includes inspirational activities, like the consumption of Bratwurst in the Saturday market.

One of the first things that came to mind is to do something with zooming and change of scale. It appears almost no-one in LD was doing that, so that seemed really interesting. The scale change would have to be more than a gimmick though, and form a central part of the game mechanic. There had to be a reason for the player to keep shifting scale.

We thought up a lot of crazy stuff, such as zooming into a maze shaped like a Hilbert curve, climbing into a fractal tree, going into the human body, or something like Katamari Damacy.

Day 2

The goal in the second day is to have a first prototype running, and start on the sound effects. We settled on shoot/pick up game mechanics that involve zooming: zoom in to collect items, zoom out to navigate and shoot enemies.

One inspiration that got us started on the visuals was a "zoom effect" shader we found on Shadertoy. We spent a little too much time on making the WebGL shader zoom exactly in sync with the sprites. The shader code was bad and required a complete rewrite. Shader code can be quite a b*tch to get right. But the day ended with the zoom visuals working!

We also did the first batch of sounds. To make the audio sound more natural, we use multiple almost identical samples for each sound effect. Sadly we couldn't use LMMS this time, so no music. We did not get it to work on our PC, and on the tablet PC the buttons and text were too small.

Day 3

On the third day the whole game still needed to be programmed, but this was fairly straightforward. One challenge was efficiency: the number of sprites grows exponentially with the zoom level, so there were thousands of moving objects, even though only a fraction of them were visible at any time. We had to optimize the game engine some, though it needs more optimization still.

We already had some sounds so we quickly got sound in the game. Meanwhile we did three more batches of sound effects to improve and add to the sound.

Sound effects

Sounds were mainly vocalisations or involved hitting things around the house with various objects. Failed attempts at enemy death splat sounds included dropping ziplock bags of water into the bath and hitting cushions with wooden spoons. A long bout of recording screams got me worried that the neighbours would call the police – but that didn’t happen. That worries us too...

We also sourced some sounds from JFXR. All audio was mutilated (sorry, post-processed) personally by us using Audacity.

We used a creaky old smartphone for audio recording. For eating food sounds we used poor man’s apples (carrots).

But the carrots went downhill a bit by the time the ratings system was working.

Can you spot the sound made by hitting this radiator with this cat litter scoop? You might also hear a kind of faint cello sound in the background, with doppler effect. As far as we can tell, that was a passing car. Looks like the house is just a massive sound box.

Have fun and let us know what you think!

I'm finally publishing my entry's post mortem... this time around I've just been too busy with school to write it earlier. PLEASE check out the timelapse video for a quicker look at the process (it's way more concise):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNvqXLZVTE0

Making GAIA

You can play Gaia before reading if you like!

Tools:

• Unity
• GIMP
• SFXR
• blipseq

Overview:

So I began with the intention of using pixel art in my entry and decided on making a platformer based on the theme. I was actually busy for the first four hours of the compo but I figured out a general Giant Earth Beast concept to work on when I got home. Yeah it kinda sounds silly but it was great pixel art practice :D

Clouds seemed like the way to go with creating the levels... and I came up with a mechanic to sort of push the clouds back and forth to manipulate the level. Turns out this was really problematic for platformer logic because it created some awkward physics :( I spent a whole lot of time tuning the movement but even now it's still wonky. The problem was trying to have the clouds drift across the screen over time while the player jumps along them.

So clouds ended up being a sort of trampoline thing you can get through levels with. This took a lot of time to get right cause I didn't do it right the first time.

Thoughts

The Bad:

The #1 complaint by far has been movement and getting stuck/not understanding the jump mechanic... I just didn't have the platformer experience to make collision work the way it should have with the moving clouds in the initial release. I made it a bit better within a day but it's definitely Gaia's weak point. The concept itself could have been better, I felt a little limited by the clouds. I even avoided making enemies of any sort and the gameplay suffered. You can never playtest too much.

The Good:

I did my best in the art area for the time I had. The effects and animations were greatly improved since my last entry (which was my first attempt at pixel art). I'm ridiculously proud of the music for some reason... I was able to put it together very quickly with blipseq. I've barely attempted music before this Ludum Dare. It plays in the background of the timelapse above if you want to hear.

Conclusion:

All in all this has been an awesome (my sixth I think?) LD38 and I've learned a lot from my entry's problems. The games I tried have been pretty awesome and I'm anxious for Wednesday's results. Feel free to comment any questions or thoughts on this post. Thanks for reading of course!

Sorry for the long post D: see you for results!

Entry | Twitter | Itch.io | Game Jolt

Good day!

This jam was cool test of our team's skill in a short time. We got a lot of positive emotions and feedback. Thank you to everyone who supported us with votes and comments. It remains quite a bit before the contest and we need your votes!

PLAY

And remember, nothing is impossible, so just DO IT!

Play and Rate Us https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/deep-bottom

Thank you to everybody that played my game and got it to 21 ratings <333333

Bombs, robots, explosions, jet fuel and destructible terrain! :dizzy_face:

If you like Lunar Lander and tower-defense type of games, check out Twin Jet Miner - a fast-action game where you need to protect your asteroid base from evil robotic diggers :robot:. Build walls, place turrets, drop bombs and never let red robots reach the purple door.

Also, don't overuse your twin-jet too much. It easily gets overheated! :scream:

Play Online: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/twin-jet-joe

Your Planet: Too Big is a series of puzzles where you're tasked with making a big world smaller. You do this by dropping a finite number of bombs, where each bomb can remove a contiguous set of matching terrain.

I have to say this was an incredibly simple yet fun idea, I just lost almost an hour on this - @agee1981

:sunglasses: Vicious Brainstorming

The compo starts at 9PM for me, so I usually draft out a few terrible ideas and go to bed. Then in the morning, I choose the one that, upon reflection, seems least ridiculous to attempt given the constraints of the compo. :stuckouttonguewinkingeye: This time my game ideas seemed extra terrible, so I just kept writing down these awful, awful bad ideas, until I popped out a few that were actually interesting. Thanks to @McFunkyPants for that advice.

Really good game, and one of the best use of the theme I’ve seen so far! - @david-cookie

:poop: Predictable Physics Are Hard to Predict

Using a continuous physics system to control terrain movements meant that it could be hard to accurately predict what would happen when you made a move. If you didn't wait until everything "settled" before making a move, you might even get different results from play to play. I think moving to a deterministic system isn't the solution - instead I should have tried different types of gameplay. An endless/waves mode might be more forgiving.

Sometimes it was a bit difficult to figure out how my change was going to effect the shape of the planet overall… - @spaceman

:sunglasses: Sound Effects

I recently got a Tascam DR-40 handheld recorder, because a) new gadgets are fun, and b) I wanted better sound effects. I made a list of sounds that I needed and ran off into the backyard to start crunching and dropping and touching stuff. Unfortunately it was a windy day, and I’m still lacking a windmuff (which I now know is a thing), so I moved into the garage. And surprise - there’s a lot of fun stuff to bang, scrape, and clang in my garage. Foley is fun. I liked making native sounds much more over a traditional retro sfx generator. Dumbells against dumbells make some awesome clanking.

The sounds are pretty good! With a little polish this could easily turn into a full game. - @flaterectomy

:poop: Music

I only had enough time for one song, and I shoved it into the main menu because, you know, it kind of sucked. I really should have set aside more time for music. Its absence in-game was particularly felt by many of the players. Part of the blame was simply I'm out of practice; I should have written a few songs beforehand to shake off the rust. But also I just didn't leave enough time in the schedule for it.

However why is there only music on the title-screen? Imo the game would’ve greatly benefited from music during the gameplay elements. -@elzach

:sunglasses: Day One Prototype

The idea I chose had a risk associated with it, which was what if the central mechanic wasn't fun? I settled on a theme and rolled out a working proof of concept on Friday night. That was a first, and it felt great! Especially because the concept worked and was interesting, that's a great motivator to continue.

Interesting game mechanics. -@arcticmattekar

:poop: Fell Into Some Rabbitholes

I spent four hours chasing down a bug that turned out to be a known Unity issue, spent a few hours on another bug that was of my own making, and realized after banging my head for a couple more hours that I used an older Unity Download Assistant and was not even on the latest 5.6 build. After such a great first day I was optimistic I'd have a submittable game by day two, and then could spend day three polishing and adding juice. But I failed to follow @McFunkyPants "three strikes and cut it" rule, so I was coding right down to the wire again.

The colors of the planet are a tad dull. I could imagine a more comical look for the game, alien portratis while chatting, for example. And more detailed landscapes with structures like houses (landmarks), boats, tractors, animals. I would suggest to use a “fantasy” weapon like a big laser instead of bombs in this case. - @zorg

I look forward to the next compo!

Play Your Planet: Too Big here!

Hey everyone,

Although I hate doing this, this weekend just gone has been the only time I've really had to rate and review other people's games en masse. Consequentially, we're short a few ratings to make sure that we qualify!

We'd be really interested in seeing how we scored, so please head on over and give Critter a look! (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/critter)

Hopefully, I'll have some time to get around to doing a post-mortem tomorrow, but in the meantime, why not help a critter out? Just look how happy you'd make him!

D'aww, he's practically jumping for joy. Who wouldn't want to look after that little guy? :3

-Skruffye

Finally, had the time to write this down. Bad timing with the final exams in school. Anyway...

We did it

We took part in our first Ludum Dare and also published our first game! It was amazing to see years of work gathering experience and learning lead to a pretty small but awesome game! If you haven't already, you can check it out here: A World in a Jar

The Process

I and @Traincraft finally had the time to participate at our first Ludum Dare (and didn't forget about it). I took my PC and got together with him for 3 days.
We were quite excited, started planning out some ideas for games, prepared the Twitch streams and updated all our software. Then it was finally time (which was 3 AM for us). Ludum Dare started.
About 2 hours in we had a pretty good idea of the game and started working. Me mostly doing design work and @Traincraft mostly doing programming work. We mainly used Unity, Aseprite and Visual Studio, because we already worked quite a bit with these.
After only the first day, the game took shape. After the second one, the entire core was done. On the third day, we polished and added more content.

What went well

Time Management
We nailed it! We had a working game after 2 days and then could expand it on the 3rd day. Thanks to our JSON-based approach to reading game content, it took nearly no time to add 200% more content to the game. We even had time to add little details like particles for putting down soil. A small detail, but really adds a lot to the mood.
Game Design
According to the feedback, we are receiving, we have a pretty solid gameplay. While the descriptions and puzzle elements could have been a little bit better, they already seem to work quite well.
It definitely helped that we didn't close down on one idea. By changing and tuning the gameplay on the way whenever we thought is was necessary, we ended up with something uncluttered and fun. For instance, we initially had planned for money to be a component of the game, but eventually decided against it because it simply didn't add anything.
Graphics
I was quite a bit nervous about this. I don't see myself as a great artist, but for some reason, people seemed to like my pixel art in the game. I'm really happy to see this worked out so well. Especially since I had limited time.

What didn't go well

Theming
We had some ideas in mind, but we were completely caught off guard by the theme. We never thought "A small world" would win.
So we essentially stood there for half an hour with no idea what-so-ever.
Timing
Sadly, we didn't have a lot of time after the judging started since we had final exams in school. Really bad timing, but that shouldn't be a problem next time.

Conclusion

Had lots of fun. Will definitely be back next time! :grin:

Only 283 left! Everybody play!
Check out this tool by @avavt to find games that need help placing in Ludum Dare 38!

Tiny Invasion needs some help! not so many votes. comment and I would love to try out your game and leave some feedback!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/tiny-invasion

My game, A Relatively Small World, has an original guitar soundtrack, which I think sounds good on its own, but you should try listening to it (or playing the game) while also listening to RainyMood, a website that plays rain sounds for concentration. It's quite relaxing.

Hey guys! This was my first time competing in Ludum Dare, so it would really mean a lot to me if my game could get placed in a couple categories. I've got about 18 reviews for each category so far. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/bitverse

Thanks in advance for playing my game!

If you're suffering from the same problem, post your game here and I'd be happy to play it.

Whats up? the sky? a cloud? is it a bird? is it a plane? no? not superman either? ok.

im just trying to waste as much white space as everyone else before they ultimately tell you to play their game :wink: so play it! (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ragdoll-wars) and make that thing in the sky a decapitated limb of some form or another.

what a beautiful world.

PS. check out SHARE THE LOVE and vote on games that need more votes first! http://vatcss.info/ld38votes/

I took the time to extensively comment my entire game. I ended up with 885 lines of comments (wrapped at 80 characters!) for 1,570 lines of code. The code is pretty good for a 48-hour game and might give you a starting point for writing your own roguelike.

Topics covered:

• Python 3 in general
• Scene management
• Efficient drawing with BearLibTerminal
• Level generator with BSP trees
• Strategies for storing and using data
• Flexible system for simulation and AI
• Using pyglet for music and not graphics
• FoV using recursive shadowcasting via clubsandwich (post-compo)

The main objective of the game is to keep an ecosystem in equilibrium using GUN, LIGHTNING and METEOR.

So basically there is 3 species in the game which is the Slimes, Rabbits and the Rhinos. If one of the three species’s became extinct then it’s game over.

Comment down your game and I will play it and rate it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/statera

We weren't too sure how this was going to go; neither of us have made games before and neither of us are in touch with our artistic side, but we did it! And it even works™ in a browser, on Windows, and on a Mac! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/tiny-planet-big-universe

Neither of us have touched Unity outside of this jam. We learned everything we needed to learn during the event. SO while the game itself may not be super impressive on the technical level, and while there is quite the spaghetti monster hiding underneath it all, we got the game out there.

What did I learn? Images + UI = way bigger pain than I anticipated. A large chunk of my time was in making the images work with the UI, which slowed down feature work.

Was hoping to have had a high score page finished, either locally or to a remote server, didn't have time. Was hoping to support mobile input, didn't have time. Was hoping to have time for changing the difficulty over time, only got to that partly.

All that being said... We pushed a game out there. Basic as it is, it's out there. Check it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/tiny-planet-big-universe

My game is about saving the planet, and is my second participation in LD (First one was LD36). I think this LD went quite well compared to the last one, mainly because during this LD I had more time and had a good idea of what I was going to make very fast.

The thing that didn't go as well is that I didn't test my game enough to see if I had done/balanced everything correctly. But overall I think this Jam was a succes.

Please give my game a go, Its playable in the browser so no downloads necessary. Comments/feedback is always appreciated.

Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/earth-quest

Thanks ;)

I thought I would share some stats from my game Micro-World Defense!

First off, lets have a look at my ratings so far:

So, it looks like we have between 23 and 27 votes. Obviously, my game isn't very numerous, as that has the least amount of votes, while the graphics are the best part, with 27 votes, which is equal to the overall rating. After looking at this, I assumed I only have had 27 downloads, right?

Well, lets have a look at my itch.io stats, as it should show me some more specific analytics.

Huh. So I've had 62 views, and 37 downloads. This was pretty interesting to me. Because I didn't have a web build, I only get about 60% of viewers to download my game. But what about those 37 downloads? Did 10 people not like my game enough to leave a rating?

If anyone else has some interesting statistics from LD38, or has some insights into my statistics, I would be interested in seeing them!

I know this is so last week, but I finally have more comments now!

The game in question: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ant-forts