Ok a velvet-like table full of cool stuff. Great!
But then these cool peeps. All multiply wonderfully playing in fours and threes.
Put on this brick-like wall STUFFED with cool. Supah great.
My vote hurdle is just a few jelly beans away. ~ Luv ya <3
Michael Wilson and James Lloyd of @ponywolf partnered with Scott Meyer from @mutatedsoftware to create a multi-player deathmatch entry titled Flat Earths.
We are petty fracking excited about how it turned out, both from a playability and visual polish standpoint. If you haven't, stop reading this and grab a controller (and a friend or two) and give it a shot.
This was by far the smoothest LD I've worked on. We made some rough sketches pretty early on and had a prototype (for single player, no bots) working in just a few hours.
This is our first try at putting shaders into our workflow, and we really come up with something fast and simple that looked interesting. Without the pixel-y look I think this game would have not gotten as much attention.
I didn't have much confidence that AI would work in this game at all, but for a few minor issues (see What went wrong?) the bots are a huge addition to the game and lets anyone pick up and play--and hopefully return with a few friends.
We got PS4, Xbox, Xbox One, Steel Series and some old school Game Pads AND Keyboards all working on both PC and Mac... Some are better than others, but all in all you should be able to scrounge up a decent 4 player setup with thrift store quality controllers.
Much of the physics are fairly rigid bodies, but the characters (built in Spine) are hooked up with a pretty loose "follow" function. This gives the game a feeling of just being on the edge of control, which we really liked.
We didn't get as much text into the game as we wanted, but the descriptions and tweets we done for the game all have a great tongue-in-cheek tone.
We got stuck in the all too common trap of trying to fix bugs on one system while dropping a few new maps and scoring features on another system which led to more bugs, and so on and so on. We did 3 or 4 patches in that last 4 hours and still messed up the timer and scorekeeping in the final game. On first blush you wouldn't notice, but the scoring isn't quite correct.
The characters and their aquatic rides don't have enough visual differentiation to make it easy to find who you are after a respawn. An easy fix, but we were too busy on showstopping bugs to re-visit this in the last few hours.
Scot did some incredible work to make the bots functional, but again the time didn't allow us to tweak them to make a single player experience that would be a consistent challenge. That said, just the fact there is AI in there at all is a huge win.
I personally wasted a bunch of time trying to get local LAN support working that could have been used to make the game better. I almost always give up on a feature in LD games, and I should have given up on this sooner.
GIFs of the game with scanlines on look pretty messed up, and (unless you are at least 1080p) captures are equally dicey.
Again, I am super-proud of the team and we were over the moon (that is also flat) when we saw a group of four from Stumpt play a few round on their Twitch channel.
https://youtu.be/cq9ScVPrmsI?t=15m52s
This Ludum Dare’s judging is ending pretty soon, and we couldn’t be happier with the response we’ve received for Petty Puny Planet 38, our simulation-but-not-really choose-your-own-adventure-esque game. Once that’s done, we’ll be more than free to further update the game with some of the feedback we’ve received! :smile:
We’ve got lots of things planned and discussed to further expand the customization of the planet, and the interactions you can have with the game. More choices, more branching, more events, more endings, and some other stuff that could turn each playthrough into an even more unique experience.
However, with all these events planned, we’ve also talked about user-submitted choices and events. So, if you were in charge of adding new stuff to the game, what would you add?
As in, would you like a choice that made your people spend a century bowling? Would you like an event where aliens invade the planet? Would you like an ending where the people evolve beyond comprehension and leave the planet to make their own planets? Do you just want to add a moustache and a monocle to the planet? Anything goes!
Basically, we would love to see some suggestion and ideas coming from you! Anything goes, from events and endings to features or just cosmetics. We will discuss them over, see which would be fun to add, fill in the blanks, and hopefully add them to the game. You can go as far as to suggest actions you would like to see together with the kind of stat bonuses they give and even what kind of cosmetic picking the action would show in the planet!
We’ll credit you, of course. :stuckouttonguewinkingeye: We’re not planning on getting any monetary gain from the game, if it helps keep your mind at ease regarding these user-suggestions. We want to keep this project as a constantly evolving free web-toy that everybody can always look back too and expand upon.
As such, if you would like to see some of your own ideas on the game, head over to the comments (of this very post) and make your suggestions there! No need to follow specific templates, forms or anything like that, just make any suggestions you have to your heart's content! Of course, we recommend you to do it after you give the game a try. :wink:
On behalf of our team at Whales And Games and everyone else that has jammed with us, we thank you for all the support and feedback you have given us during this Ludum Dare edition. The feedback we’ve received this time around smashed all our expectations, and we’re really thankful to all of you!
Now then, onwards with your suggestions! :whale:
In the first week I only offered the Flash version on my site (tinyworlds.org), later on also the HTML5 version. Generally there is to be said, that people seem to prefer HTML5 (didn't want to believe Flash is dead :P). However the higher percentage on itch.io can also be partly attributed to traffic from Twitter.
Also, as many of you may not know yet, you can also publish flash games on deviantART! I released some games before on there and in terms of views & comments it has been really pleasant! Your game needs to fit in the deviantART community tho, for it to work :)
But back to itch.io!
As you can see, I got a lot of traffic from Twitter, mostly due this Tweet:
I was able to pull additional people in trough the #screenshotsaturday hashtag, who were actually not looking for LDjam games. Also notable is the fact that the Tweet carries itself mostly trough the visuals, the text only directs the viewer to the game.
Here are some statistics on how the tweet performed:
There are a lot more impressions than engagements, but the rate is still really ok for me.
And here are some statistics about when I got the views (itch.io):
The huge spike comes from the day I published the tweet.
If you're game is visually simple and interesting enough and/or humorous, Twitter might be a great place to get some additional views. In my experience other developers are generally really supportive & will retweet your game upon release, if they like it enough.
That's it for now! I hope you found this useful :)
If you want to do me a favor, please play my LDjam game and leave me a comment please:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/just-another-pocket-universe
Just 1 away in all categories except Humor and Mood, Humor is 5 away and Mood is 3 away. Please, i would like to qualify for at least 1 category.
Was the ratio of rated games to ratings always that bad?
Or is it just the new sorting thing being influenced by comments? I didn't comment on about half of the games I've rated.
Hey friends!
I'll throw my game, The Time of our Lives, into the ring for all those who have a minute to play, rank, and (most importantly) leave feedback. It's my first Ludum Dare and I would love to get as much feedback as possible so I'm more prepared for the next one. I'm certainly happy to return the favor for anyone else wanting another set of eyes!
It's playable in-browser.
Thanks a million and enjoy!
-Tyler
King of Tiny Mountain was my third time participating in the Ludum Dare jam, and I think it's the happiest I've been with a LD project so far.
Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/king-of-tiny-mountain
I wasn't able to start working on the game Friday evening, but I did have time to think of ideas. I knew from the start, based on the theme, that I wanted to do something where the entire level fit in the screen. Initially, I had thought of having the game take place on a cube-world with warps taking the player from one side of the world to the other, and with the player able to freely rotate their view.
Ultimately, I decided against this for a couple reasons. One, I thought it might end up being too complicated to implement quickly, giving me less time to work on the level deisgn that was going to be the focus of whatever project I made. Two, I felt that having a single-screen level that you could rotate the camera around would be a bit to similar to my other current project. Third, if I made the camera static, it would give me a chance to try out an idea for a control scheme I had had recently: if the player doesn't control the camera, you can have a 3D game with both Twin Stick shooting and jumping.
So I deicded to make a 3D platformer with twin-stick shooting where the entire game world (containing multiple levels which get unlocked as you play) is visible on screen at once.
I made a plane in Blender which would contain the entire game world. I then started modelling out a test area, and got the movement and shooting down, as well as a few basic enemy types. I also put in collectible items and doors which could be opened with those items. I then did a second pass on the test area and turned it into a proper first area of the game.
By the end of Saturday, I had basically sectioned off the plane to make room for the second and third levels, and the mountain where you'd fight the boss.
The next day, I had planned to show gradual process of the map being filled in, but I ended up pretty much doing a first pass on the rest of the level design within the first hour of working, so by the time I took another screenshot, it looked like this:
At that point, what remained included sound effects, feedback effects, victory text, and, of course, the boss itself. I also tested and tweaked the level design and added an effect to let you see a translucent image of enemies and the player when they're hidden behind objects.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how the idea turned out.
http://feedback.ld.intricati.com/?event=9405&uid=16102&refresh
How do I only have 33.5 votes, it makes no sense. I voted on almost every comment.
Hello everyone, team Insecure Shark here!
We just uploaded, a brand new, post-jam version of the game, that contains some bugfixes and small gameplay changes. Due to problems with mouse controls, we removed items "weight", so now controls should feel much smoother. Other changes include several sounds fixes and few extra tasks.
We still need at least 5 ratings for each category, so come and check out our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/our-cramped-little-world.
Tomorrow, assuming I am not sick, I'm hoping to do a big final stream for all the folks trying to get their games the last votes they need. Join me at 4pm Eastern on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPY6adDEbEbx4CoxiVsAb1w I'm on Twitter: @OccultSoftworks
Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/atlantis
This is my last big update for LD38. We've worked our butts off to get one last big update for the folks who really enjoyed what we did this jam. The original jam version is still featured prominently for folks. If you like, shoot us some feedback on the new version, it's absolutely immense, full patch notes here: https://itch.io/t/75895/patch-notes
If you enjoyed the game, and think we should make it a full thing, please let us know. We're still a bit on the fence... hoping we do well enough on the scores to justify it.
Everyone likes to see these, so here's ours for this Jam:
I'm going to be doing a big super postmortum of my efforts this jam and hopefully get time to do analysis of several games' analytics in the coming weeks.
Thank you all so much for the encouragement, community, and great fun. I've met a ton of really cool folks, played a ton of really cool games, and definately became a better dev for the experience. Here's hoping for LD39! (I'll be doing a Metrics post to pool info from folks after voting concludes.)
How did this happen? xD
Play and rate SUNLESS, a puzzle-platformer about turning on the sun
Only 5 votes left! :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/sunless-our-gamejam-2017-entry
Hello everyone!
So, some of you may know we created Cubic Explorer, our Ludumdare 38 Game. Right now we need more votes to complete our 20 votes quota. So I think I will be playing a lot of games tonight so I can give feedback and also hopefully receive more :smiley:. I hope we can receive feedback in return as well.
If you decide to leave a comment and also review our game, I promise you will get also feedback and a vote from mew. I guarantee that I will comply with this agreement :handshake:
Some of you may not know, but we used a custom framework for Unity called MaruGen.
The main concept is that you take a start graph, then some basic rules on how this graph "expands", and after some random iterations and generations, you will get a more complex graph that will represent your space (or game mechanic)
I personally created this framework for my master's thesis, using elements from another framework created by Joris Dormans, named Machinations, Mission-Space and Micro-Machinations.
You may want to read about it in his free doctoral dissertation "Engineering Emergence":
https://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/Publications/Dissertations/DS-2012-12.text.pdf
Some of you may know him for a game he recently created called Unexplored on Steam. I believe he uses some of these concepts in his game. And, of course, I want to be able to get his main ideas of how to generate spaces and mechanics and apply them into a useful, computational tool.
After I finish my master's thesis (I have to present it in about two weeks :fearful:), I want to to keep working on this tool. Now, you can get the initial implementation of for Cubic Explorer by visiting the source code in the LDJam page. But I want to actually use it in a more professional way, so I plan to use it in a project Glitchy Pixel is currently making (check out http://www.glitchypixel.com.co for more info :wink:). Hopefully the tool will improve and get better.
In the near future I plan to put it somewhere more visible, like in Github and maybe an asset in the Unity asset store? It would be a free tool of course, but I need to get my head around it so it can work ok and maybe people can use it as well.
In any case, I hope that I can make it more stable and usable in the near future, and maybe a true game concept can help it develop further. I've already fixed many things in the tool, and also tried to make it less arcana in the code os its easier to understand.
Well, if you got through all of this, thanks for reading! And I hope I got your attention on the tool. And I would thank you even more if you could play our game here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cubic-explorerCheers, and have a good one!
Shrinking Space a game about helping your friends get everything they need to escape a forever shrinking planet!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/shrinking-space
So the voting days are nearly over, time to rate just a little bit more :)
Check out my entry if you haven't:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-raiders
Thank you all for the feedback!
Smaex
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planets-of-zoltcon
I just need 4 more votes in order to get ranked. This is a WebGL HTML game with about 10 minutes of play time if you make a beeline for the artifacts. Here's the latest version: http://ludum.daretogame.net/zoltcon/
Over the last few years, quite a few of my friends have participated in Ludum Dares, and I had always loved the idea of taking on that challenge myself. So when I found out that Ludum Dare 38 was going to start off, and that one of my friends, Vanilly (Who's did the fantastic art for Tipping Point, which you can find here http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/04/22/tipping-point/ ), showed interest in it; We quickly set about acquiring the help of @WMMSounds for music, Subtank for art assistance, and Martyfun for help and assistance. I was enthusiastic (In fact ecstatic) to give this a try, not only because it would be my first Ludum Dare, but it would be my first game period! After 72 hours we were exhausted and mentally drained, but it was built, saved to dropbox and itch.io, and posted to the Ludum Dare site.
I present to you, Samhain: Fly Away Home (Link Below)
*You can play Samhain here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/samhain-fly-away-home-1 *
Now that the dust has partially settled, I've been able to unpack some of my thoughts about working on the game, as well as some times that I would have liked to give myself, and I'll certainly hope that I'll remember next time. Hopefully some of you that are budding game developers like me will heed their caution or at least share in the camaraderie of making these mistakes together.
The first thing that I would have loved to tell myself in advance, was to keep scope in mind at all times. After discussing with the team, and scrapping our first idea (A 3d small planet resource management game). We had decided on taking the theme, and expanding it into the idea of the world of a bug inside of a small back yard.
Now that doesn't sound too crazy, right? Well it becomes a lot crazier, when you realize that I had initially suggested and envisioned a three level platformer, with 1-2 bosses and a charge move for the beetle girl, Anna, that would be able to break through terrain and damage enemies.
That's... A lot, right?
It was a tall order, one that as I worked into the night I soon realized that it would be too tall of an order, and wouldn't be possible to implement all of that. Now luckily for us, the ideas that we had kicked around could be scaled down if need be, and thus three levels became one, and 1-2 bosses became none as we began to focus on a fun atmospheric platformer. I was lucky to have the ability to do such, but had I envisioned a game who's core mechanics required more work, it very likely would have crashed and burned. From this I learned: Game design scale is kinda like picking a recipe. Pick one that's going to work with the time you have, don't go making that slow cooker beef stew when it's already 5pm.
The Other lesson I would really want to stress to myself while working on this, would definitely have to be Prioritize. Now, for the most part, I knew right away that there were certain things that would need to be done to have the game work. The character has to move, there has to be enemies, there needs to be a beginning and end to the game, terrain has to have hitboxes, all the general things. What surprised me in execution though, was just how many steps would be required to accomplish those goals. Movement had seemed easy enough at first, but when the world geometry was implemented, and the collision mesh put in, I quickly found out that Little Anna couldn't walk up hills! This was also the first time that I had attempted to write a player character state machine, and the process of reasoning through the concept took me longer than I had thought it would at first.
In addition to this, some things slipped right by me. I had almost forgotten to do things like creating a title screen and ending screen, transitioning the game from one screen to another. This was after I had already created a game state machine which didn't like the idea of leaving the scene that it was in.
Had I prioritized better, more time could have been spent on those elements instead of things like creating random movement for snowflakes, or trying to make Anna slowly sink down when she died in the ice water. All of these were nice little touches and polishes that were an extension of something that already had to get done, but they ate up their own chunks of time too. All of these small missteps on my part lead up to a feverish workload right in the last few hours of the game jam as I struggled to push the game into a final, playable state.
I'm looking at you, snowflake.
Now, some of those elements of polish gave me a lot of insight, and I learned a lot from them. In that respect I'm glad that I did them. However, I'm pretty sure sleep deprived me, 2 hours before the deadline resents everything that I'm saying even now. Prioritize: You can expand upon that idea once everything else is at least started.
Overall though, is Samhain a perfect game? Not by any stretch, but even as I look at it, with it's janky flying controls, and lackluster ant AI, I can't help but look upon it with a certain fondness, not unlike an apprentice carpenter looks upon their first wobbly chair with poor back support and smiles. Now that I have a Ludum Dare under my belt, I'm looking forward to LD 39, and getting to try something new. Though hopefully this time, with a better understanding of what you can do in 72 hours, and with a much stronger idea of what needs to get done first.
This is my game, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
Only 2 days left in the voting, and TARJECTORIES only has 7 votes! :(
Are YOU a bad enough dude to play my game and leave a rating and comment? I'll return the favor!
Game link is here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/depth
