Here's the obligatory "I'm in" post! I'm hot off the heels of completing my first commercial, albeit small, game release and I'm itching for something new.

This is my 7th Ludum Dare in the past three years and I'm pretty excited for it. I'll once again be using my custom C++ game engine and its recently added WebGL support alongside Visual Studio 2013, Photoshop/Illustrator CS 5, Notepad++, FL Studio 12, Audacity, and maybe a few others depending on the type of game I decide on.

Good luck to all and remember to have fun!

Hahaha I wish :P

This will be my 7th LD (I think)

Custom Engine : https://github.com/hamfirst/StormBrewerEngine Custom Pixel Art Tool: https://github.com/hamfirst/StormSprite Audacity FL Studio Visual Studio 2017

I finally finished my entry! I got really distracted this Ludum Dare with other things, but here it is!

You can play it here.

Hi everyone! We decided to talk a little bit about our LD40 game, how was the experience, and what we want to make for the future.

We're a group of 3 people. @jpiolho, @grlira (Programmers) and @SaraFilipa (Artist), with the exception of @jpiolho it was our first Ludum Dare, but first time in a group for all of us. We just woke up Saturday morning and while we had breakfast we just threw silly ideas around, I don't exactly recall how it was but we ended up deciding about an old lady having too many cats. Having cats is nice but as you have more, the more you have to do clean up and take care of them. Early on we decided that the cats would be pooping and peeing around the house and we'd need to clean up after them and later we came up with the idea of having friends coming over for tea parties.

Screen from early in development

There wasn't much game design involved as none of us are good with that sort of thing so the game just kind of evolved as we added more and more things. One of the first challenges was to decide how we'd make the movement style, we ended up going with free look without being tied to a top-down grid like movement. This wasn't so easy as we didn't really know how to do it make feel good in Unity but in the end we got something we were happy with. The lack of game design was a problem, especially when it comes to the losing condition, we only thought about it at the last day and it had to be put in a bit at the last hour. Making the game was a bit like assembling a puzzle, initially it didn't look like much but once we started adding graphics, especially the house, it suddenly started making sense and looking really good for us.

We thought big and we didn't have time to add all the features that we wanted to. These include things like cat pee, upgrades with prestige, a bigger house, more types of cats and old ladies.

Our artist wanted to say a few words about creating the art for this game.

@SaraFilipa Regarding the process of creating the art for this game, this was my first time making (and animating) pixel art, even though I had previous experience with illustration and vector design. But I’ve always loved pixel art (being a gamer since the 90s), and wanted to challenge myself. I made a lot of newbie mistakes, such as using the completely wrong software and not being very wary of the different proportions, and of course I didn’t have time to fix anything.

And finally some screenshots of the build we did for LD40:

As for the future, we're looking into continuing this game and develop it further and finish it properly. It was quite fun for us and we're definitely coming back for the new LD.

@SaraFilipa thank you ALL for playing (and rating, and commenting) our game! And of course, thank you so much for all of the lovely compliments and constructive criticism on the graphics, which is what I worked on. But since finishing LD40, I’ve been making some research and educating myself and for version 2.0 of Kittea Party, you can expect: - 100% redesigned character sprites and animations; - New background art; - New (and a lot bigger) map; - New and updated UX/UI; - New logo + title menu + new game over / victory screens; - Some cut-scenes and illustrated instruction screens

For a teaser, here is the concept art of our main character and cat lady overlord, Gertrude:

Link for our game entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittea-party

I haven't participated in this jam. But I played a few games, even though I wasn't able to rate. I really liked one of them. :smiley:

So, if you have nothing to do or are looking to play a game, here it is :point_down:

Oversize Load (by @quadtree)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/oversize-load

Please play and rate this game, it has less than 20 ratings.

Im in i bet noone gives one but idc just a little post to let you all know

Haven't participated solo in a couple years, gunna see how this turns out. I'll be using Unity just like most people. Nothing more to say really. Its going to be exhausting.

Yo homies, entering the compo this time around. Using Unity and... who knows yet? Probably 3D stuff with Maya. If I go 2D it will be with PyxelEdit. Cheers, jammers :)

So i've decided to combine the 'Card Game' genre with 'Platforming'. I have very basic card, hand, and deck code working with a couple of test cards working (forwards, backwards). A quick video of it in progress can be seen here https://twitter.com/BradLSandford/status/987530304360472576

Tomorrow will be the bulk of the coding work including getting a base set of cards working (movement, jumping, weapons) and also working on basic enemies and environment stuff. Trying to find the right balance between platformer and endless runner will be interesting, almost tempted to go down the roguelike route.

I overslept a bit so i haven't made as much progress as I wanted too. Ive polished up the test environment a bit and got collision and jumping working along with some behind the scenes deck stuff. A video of it in action can be seen here https://twitter.com/BradLSandford/status/987717402849955840

Next up im going to work on basic enemy AI (think goombas from mario) and some more behind the scenes deck management code.

There's a lot of discussion about changing the way LD is scored, most of which involves adding additional layers between a game and a final score. This irks me, because as game designers, we should know better than to add additional friction between the user and what their desired outcomes should be. IE: Play Games, Get Score. Doesn't get better than that... simple information is highly compressible and easily learn-able.

My modest proposal: Don't change the scores. Instead, incentivize participation in the voting phase and being a good LD-Citizen both during and after the jam.

Reward users for going the extra mile with badges below their names, colored usernames. And allow the rating of feedback. A [<3] is great for passive posts but it encourages users to post fluffy or watered down comments. Instead, allow users to rate the feedback being given, and open up user awards for "Best Feedback". Have some kind of persistent score from jam to jam, and give us access to our analytics so we can see our numbers.

42 minutes avant le début ...

Bonne chance à tous ! :wink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uME02Tb0n18

Hey Guys! I'm kinda swamped in Contractor-Land, I had a number of clients show up out of the blue and I've been doing my best to keep my head above water, but I've forgotten to really dig down and do some LD Entries and I'd like to rectify that.

If you like, post your game, and I'll do a video or longer-form analysis, critique the entry, and provide some suggestions, sort of like what I did with LD38. I'll be doing these in the couple days of free time I have this weekend between crunch sessions. (If I get an overwhelming number of submissions: I will do my best!)

All I ask: If you like action shooter games in space, Give my game a go down here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/detritus

Tech Valley Game Space live-stream at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace starts now!!! To have your game in consideration for playing and judging, you can sign up on the form below:

goo.gl/forms/zQAhArQG3Lfp2imS2

As the form already states, we do enforce a Code of Conduct in our live-streams. As such, we do reserve the right to cancel streaming and rating a game for any reason.

Thanks for everyone who played DETRITUS! And grats to the winners! Already looking forward to November!

• Overall: 122nd
• Fun: 104th
• Innovation: 569th
• Theme: 429th
• Graphics: 71st
• Audio: 290th
• Humor: 379th
• Mood: 158th

I'm really pleased with slime escape's scores! Massive improvement on pixel world's scores, for sure. Next time I'm aiming for sub-100 in 4/8 categories :grin:

I'm particularly impressed with my score in graphics, since I'm a programmer with very little skill in anything artistic...

Thank you so much to everyone who played the game!

We're going to try and make this one as our team's fifth Ludum Dare. A member of the family passed away this past thanksgiving and we are a little unsure if we can commit to the full jam, but we really want to try.

Team: Programmer, Artist, Designer, and Audio Engineer. We're possibly going to be joined this time around by a Junior Programmer, and a UI Designer for a few hours as well. If we get too much overlap we may shard off a group to make a second game.

Production Tools:
Unity 2018.3 or Unity 2017.4f1 depending on how stable 2018.3 ends up being.
Blender 2.79
PyxelEdit and Aesprite 1.2.7 w/ Cintiq
Audacity 2.2.2, FL Studio 20, & A bunch of instruments we have in the house.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Substance Painter / Substance Designer
Unity Collaborate for Source Control and Distribution

Prototyping Tools:
Shadron 1.3.2 - Shaders
Pico-8 & Pixel Vision 8 - Mechanics Testing
More Notecards and Graph Paper and Origami Paper than you can possibly imagine.

I won't have an internet connection and I'll have MAYBE 3 hours free over the whole weekend, but damn if the theme is "Making Connections" I have to do something! Seriously who submitted that? That has to be one of the best themes to make it to the final round I've ever seen :joy:

This was an interesting jam, we were down our usual designer so the hat ended up with me. We've made it a point since LD38 to spend extra time in pre-production, getting everyone on the same page, and establishing a set of guidelines for us all to use, and I'm not sure we would have finished with the workload we had if we hadn't done so. I wanted to write this post to give folks some helpful advice as they look to the future, and hopefully someone will find it useful and avoid our mistakes!

What We Did Right:

Here's all of the stuff I think we did well! There's stuff to improve on after every jam, but we've managed to get a lot of stuff here down as a team.

The very first thing I defined was our Unit Sizes, in Pixels. This was rigidly enforced from the very beginning. It meant the artist didn't need to go back and resize things after the fact, once an Asset was done, I as the person in charge of integration (More on this later) could rest assured that it was correct, process it for Unity, and start using it.

We spent extra time Friday night getting everyone on the same page about what exactly we were making. I laid out the mood, what kind of mechanics I was looking at implementing, and what I was hoping for. We went as far as doing some light worldbuilding to make sure everyone was completely on-board with the project.

I spent the week before the jam doing warm ups, researching, getting re-familiarized with the API, and reading... so much reading. I felt very on the ball this jam, which was a good feeling I don't normally have.

When figuring out the game, we took time to figure out what the strengths of everyone on the team was, what people were comfortable doing, and what our tools and engine were best suited for. Everyone was busy 100% of the time, nobody finished early or late. Everyone had a list of things to do from start to finish. Our communication was much better as a team.

What we Did Wrong:

And the stuff we did wrong... Some of it is just endemic to it being a jam. Kludge and rush jobs happen, it's the nature of the beast, but there's a lot we could have done better.

We had our Artist install Unity ahead of time, and used Unity Collaborate to make things easier, but her lack of familiarity meant we had to have someone hand-integrate every asset for her. This is one of those things we'll need to fix by sitting down between jams, and doing some light training.

I broke my own rule here and waited to do a build until the last second. The first build is always the roughest, and if I'd been doing it nightly like I usually do, it would have taken 5 minutes instead of 40.

All of the new goodies in Unity's 2018.3 Beta were too hard to resist, but it resulted in a highly unstable Editor, and complicated the build process.

We are so used to working as a team of four that when one of us can't make it, it throws off our groove. I scoped as though I still had our Designer, but he couldn't make it this time.

I spent way too long on the character controller, sorting out physics quirks, that the animations and gameplay (And AI) suffered due to neglect. I need to better budget my time and not get bogged down in that.

I'm just not very good at it. I can make either totally braindead and uninteresting enemies, or I can make superhuman terminators. I can't seem to find the sweet spot...

What's Next

I'm gonna do a Design Post-Mortem because I want to talk about some of the decisions that went into the gameplay, even if we didn't quite reach our full desired gameplay loop. I think folks will find it interesting.