Here's the Nano Crawler for the game and I've got under 12 hours to finish. I've got the viral worm modeled and the procedural generated terrain done. Think Ant Man meets Moon Patrol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMT1BAEia8A

I can't seem to upload any decent quality GIFs so this'll have to do! Trailer for "Fuel"

Download from Itch.io and let me know what you think!

ITCH.IO LINK: https://kdizzle87.itch.io/fuel-a-ludum-dare-38-game

LUDUM DARE LINK: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/fuel

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/Kennycreanor

So I've finished my game and am super proud!! YAY! Check it out! Fair warning, really unbalanced :P

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$17266

We are polishing and balancing (at least trying to..) our game. It's still called Quanta Blast since we haven't figured out a better name..

Here's a fresh look of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4uO3OVkjyk

So many nice games around!

Meanwhile, we have some protein upgrades:

And full gameplay footage with a kinda atmospheric soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vutLQAzZNo4

Game is almost finished, so see you soon guys :smile:

My game may get disqualified for my use of a public domain map of Earth - I thought that was probably fair use and within the rules, but I'll let other people decide. By Sunday morning I thought there was no way I could really get anything playable done, but decided to push through - and I'm glad I did! I made a thing!

The best part is watching the time-lapse - seeing the first quarter of my time that I basically ended up throwing away, then seeing the rapid progress right at the end -- anyway, this was fun.

Thanks @pov!

My sort of awesome game game that was indirectly made by other people (I used a lot of free stuff...) https://3xclamation.itch.io/martian-defense-

A small teaser for the game we’re making #LDJam

A game about exploring and collecting within a small world. We’re finally at the point that we are satisfied on the visuals which is why we want to show it off to the world!

"Achievement [word goes here]" is not the final name, if it wasn't obvious enough.
Yesterday, I implemented the main mechanic; Achievements!

I couldn't think of a good idea, so I decided to replay some old games.
There was this game with a blue elephant where you collect achievements. That's what gave me an idea.

Anyways, I'm probably almost done with the game, but I still need to add more achievements and populate the world.
And probably improve the graphics, if I have time.

A wild GIF appeared!

We will not finish in time, but we had a great time this LD! Happy 15th everyone! ~♥

We've been crazy busy so I didn't post any updates yesterday, but I wanted to show what the game looked like on Saturday night (tumblr link).

All day yesterday I updated the graphics with Noah B's animations (what a huge difference) as well as adding tons of little tweaks like checking the direction the character is facing so that she doesn't pop enemies backwards, lining up platforms the way we want them, etc. But tonight is the finale! I'll get some last minute touches in tonight after work - I'm excited to upload this thing. :)

Cute Intro Screen!! Finishing some minor touches!!

Can you collect all 24 achievements??!

There's always next time though...

Just finished, and only 12 hours to go!

Unfortunately due to unforeseeable circumstances the other half of this two man team was unable to attend the last two days, so I've just spent the last 5 hours pumping out... acceptable... graphics to replace the swarms of blank white circles.

The gimmick this time around is a completely wrap around world, which gets smaller each time you take damage. When combined with traditional bullet hell mechanics this makes for a frantic and tight experience, that only gets tighter as you continue. Here is a screenshot of a later game situation.

Can't wait to get up tommorow morning and apply some much needed polish(and hopefully come up with a better name) before final submission.

We published our game "bless you".

It's a silly physics game about helping a villager in need by find some objects and dragging them around.

We decided to participate really late, let's hope we do better next time !

PLAY HERE

Thanks you !

Audio is in. Flower system is in. Feeling no time pressure now. Just going to see how much different kinds of flora I can make by abusing the systems I already have. Maybe going to do some particles.

Man I love particles.

In case you are wondering, Ghandi Mode means nukes constantly fall from the sky. It's my sudden death.

It's an old civ joke where a bug would cause Ghandi to try to nuke everyone. (http://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-in-civilization-1653818245)

Please, give my game a try!

-> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$25604 <-

I upload some screenshots of the menu and ingame. Programming is almost 100% finished and I'm currently working on the ingame art (still not implemented, as you can see from the screenshots).

Introduction:

Main menu:!

Ingame:

Game over (one of the several possibilities):

During a process of symbiosis:

By the way, there was a little change in the music selection (sorry, Pachelbel...). But Mozart is still in!

Slightly Angry Max (shooter) went live on itch.io - https://takusan.itch.io/slightly-angry-max

This was exhausting and great at the same time. Learned a lot, and I will definitely be back (with a better game) next time, maybe in compo and not in jam. Game definitely needs some balance tweaks, but it works and plays quite well. Now let's see what others made and why my game sucks :D

Cheers!

background for 2nd location

It's been over a year since my last Ludum Dare and none of that time was spent better preparing. Here is a recap of what went right (I'm sure something must have), wrong, and the lessons I may have learned along the way.

• Code: GameMaker Studio 1.4
• Pixels: Photoshop
• Sounds: Bxfr, Audacity

When the "A Small World" theme was announced, I was actually kind of surprised. It was one of the themes I actually voted for in the finals and yet I had no ideas pre-lined up. “I’ll do something involving a small planet that you run around.”, I had thought. Instead, I had an idea for an abbreviated version of Risk (or at least what I believe I remember as being Risk, since it's been a while); just played on a much smaller board. This idea later evolved into something that I’m not entirely sure how to label. In my mind, I think I was envisioning a simplified, turn-based, 1v1 MOBA-esque game. Each player attempts to control a board with a hero, defeating the opposing base as the end goal.

What went right:

Persistence/Changing Directions – It is hard to abandon something that you’ve invested time into. About 20 hours into the Dare, I was incredibly unhappy with my project. I had made good headway and encountered very few headaches. Unfortunately, my game was not working. And I don’t mean that in a technical sense. It wasn't fun to play. It felt pointless, so I felt pointless. I was ready to quit. I took a nice long walk, stretching my legs and my mind. I then came up with an idea for a direction that could use some of the work I had already created. The change provided new motivation. In the end, I still don’t think my game works, but I’m proud for not quitting.

Prioritization – Typically, I'll have a bug or design flaw that I know needs to be fixed. Something important like, you can't get to the game from the main menu. However, because I think it's something I can knock out quickly, I keep putting it off while I figure out how to animate individual blades of grass. Then suddenly it's 15 minutes before I need to post and my blades of grass are animating but you can’t get to the game from the menu. Or I gave up on the grass because I became distracted by some other creep and still no menu fix. This time around, I found myself scope creeping every now and then, but I consistently checked my punch list and if I was working on something that wasn’t on the list, I'd stop and re-prioritize.

Animation – I chose to do virtually no pixel animation this time around. Instead, I animated with code so that I could still add some "flair" but save hours of pixel work. Some of the code animations were more than sufficient, I think.

What went wrong:

My Health – I came into the weekend slightly under the weather, an injury to my hand, and due to not sleeping well, I was nice and tired. But I didn't care. I was so pumped for the Dare that my excitement was kind of curing my ailments. And by curing I just mean masking. As a result, I didn't proceed with my health as an utmost concern. I'm already feeling and will continue to feel the consequences of these actions for at least the rest of this week (and probably 3 more after that).

Music/Sound – I need to spend some time, post-jam, learning the necessary tools so that my learning curve isn’t eating into my schedule. As fun as it was playing with some of these tools, I have nothing that users wouldn't immediately mute. In the end, I just left it out of the game. I'm not really happy with the sound effects I chose to include either.

The Idea/Design – Coming into LD38, I had planned to spend the first night dedicated to design and planning. Really hash it out and have a good roadmap for the morning. About 6 hours after the theme was announced, I had created a mockup in Photoshop and had a basic working prototype – I even had a basic schedule for the next two days. I went to bed thinking, “Wow, I’m really moving. This is great.”. As I mentioned above, I didn’t feel the same 14 hours later. Not every game idea is going to be a winner; I just need to figure out how to recognize the duds a little sooner.

AI – My previous experiences had not prepared me for the type of AI necessary for the type of game I was trying to make. I ultimately made a judgement call to move on to other tasks and leave, what I am calling “Stupid AI” in place.

Closing thoughts

I’m really not happy with my final game. I have my “if I have time” list, but I don’t see myself continuing work on Small Kingdoms. Ultimately, this isn’t the type of game I want to play. I think if I take away anything this time around, it’s that I need to make what I like – something I’d have fun playing. Oh, and I don't like hex grids. It’s been a blast as always and I’m looking forward to the next Ludum Dare. I think I’m going to spend some time in between brushing up on my music and 3D skills. I really want to try something different next time.

I’ll be posting a time-lapse of the making of Small Kingdoms later this week. In the meantime, you can check out my entry here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$15171

Every game has details that need to be tweaked to feel right, especially in the character controls of a realtime game. I always leave some time for this.

But this time I really set myself up with a vast multi-dimensional search space by having weird gravity, jetpacks, roller skates, rockets with explosions, and a ball.

Here is where I ended up:

Considering the level of risk I had Sunday when I woke up at noon to a couple of feedback emails saying the test build was not fun, I'm pretty happy with where I ended up.

Does everyone else have these experiences of going to bed Saturday thinking it's great and waking Sunday to a dawning horror that rewrites all priorities?

I did a lot of ripping and tearing of things in the name of finding the right feel. During the course of the compo my control set for the movement went down from 4 keys (WASD) to two keys (WS) to one key (W). Making the player automatically travel clockwise was an important choice, because it reduces the control complexity and hides a few warts with how it feels to teeter right on the lip of a sharp angle in the smooth terrain.

Eventually I had the control feeling good (to me at least!) but then the problem was "how do I force the player to have fun?" The ball is there to serve that purpose, but it was just not FUN. Hitting the ball with rockets was too hard, and the results of headbutts and splash knocks to the ball were wild and unpredictable, there was no sense of agency.

The key to unlocking Sunday in the final stretch was the realization that I was looking in the wrong place for the problem. I was tinkering with the rocket physics, and falling into the difficult hole of projectile velocity inheritance in fast-moving shooters, which is a known unsolvable problem. I was messing with the explosion knockback parameters, and had stubbed out a special code path for direct rocket hits. The list of things to investigate was getting LONGER not shorter, and I still had no screen transitions or sound.

But eventually I realized that most problems on my list were all coming from the same root cause: the ball was too bouncy! It was really that simple. You can go into the mode select screen in my game and try the "bouncy" mode, I left it in the game to gape at how random it feels when the ball is bouncing all over the place.

After I removed the bounciness, the ball settled into the nooks in the terrain, and made advancing the ball a more direct and predictable result of your actions. Suddenly the game component felt reasonable.

More tweaking could have produced a better result, but that baseline did the trick and from there I just whipped it into an actual GAME and synthesized a few sound effects.

I fixed one last bug with about 10 minutes to go, and put my pencil down.

In the end I doubt the game forces you to have the fun that is available, which is a shortcoming. But I'm happy enough that there is some fun to be had, and hopefully the game at least invites you to have it.

Biggest mistake: As soon as I played after release I realized matches going until 10 way totally wrong, and it should have been 4 or 5. I cannot believe I made that mistake, it's so obvious.

To be honest, i using particles for the first time at all. This LDare shows me new and new things. I'm so happy! :nerd:

Much of the progress I have been making was in code, but I do have a title screen

The light in the end of the tunnel is shining brighter than ever, our Game is on it's way to greet you guys. It feels like days have passed by since Rasmus told Isak "What about bacterias? Isn't that an great idea?" and Isak responded with "meh". Maybe because it was like two days ago but anyways. Everything that's missing are some sound effects, let's get to work.

Join us at Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/glaze96

Just wanted to show how the game evolved in just a few hours of having artwork :) Pre-Art

Regeneration

Added Creative

More gameplay. Those colored blocks (placeholder art) actually alter the attributes of the microbe you're inside, and changes propagate upward (to the parent, to the parent's parent, etc)! eg: Increasing microbe health increases their size, and the map itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2khkCHcb1U

Oh, and you have to be smaller than the thing you try to inject... so you can also change your size!

Gah, so much left to do! No shleep for me. Only 11 hours until submission! Need moar arts! More bubbles! Ability to possess enemies and play as them! INFECT THEM WITH SO MANY BACTERIOPHAGE, THEY E'SPLODE!

And... a win condition! That's probably important.

I should probably also consume nutrients or something.

We have got a splash screen! Still polishing things here and there, it was the first LD for the three of us, I'm really happy with the results so far, we managed to move from scribbles on a notepad to something that is coming to life and making us laugh a lot :D Countless pizzas have been eaten in the process...well not by @Jabba, he's more into his Tokyo food :)

No time for gamedev this weekend, got work to do (and some rest too) :(

Will start working on a proper "full" game also, so I'm kinda with a lot of stuff in my hands. :P

Still, good luck for everyone taking part! :) Looking forward to play the games! :D

I'm seeing a lot of tiny planets and cool mechanics.. and here I am with a platformer about bees, larvae and giant chickens! Give it a try! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$17327

Best of luck to everybody who's still jamming!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_96HohardM

11 hours to go!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njtPdAwp1yA

Watch the development of the game live here: https://www.twitch.tv/pixel_maniacs

Hi everyone,

In Place Them All, you are a planet owner who must place 8 different tribes by assigning one field to each of them. Choose carefully if you want everyone to survive, because the different tribes will not go easy on each other.

You can find the game over here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ld38-place-them-all

Have a lot of fun and thank you for your interest ! Good luck for all the entrants !!! :D

What if you could explore a world so tiny that quantum effects start to take place. In "Quantum Frustum", you can. You have the help of a beam of light, but your journey will be strange and disturbing.

You can now play on Windows, Linux and Osx, let me know what you think of the concept. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/quantum-frustum/

I couldn't get the game done for the compo (rl stuff got into the way and didn't want to pull an all-nighter), but that didn't stop me from enjoying the weekend. Anyway, here is the game released as a Jam-candidate.

You can find my game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/to-kill-a-planetingbird

Things I learned this LD: - Start from the core gameplay first, this way you have more time for finding out the actual fun in the game. - Spend some time learning the tools you are going to use, even though they look self explanatory at first glance. - Remember to eat & sleep

T'was fun!

I assume other people get this feeling as well. You've spent all weekend, and I mean all weekend (excluding a little time for sleep), working on a game. You get to the end and you feel both a feeling of motivation since you see how much you've improved and a feeling of distraught when looking at other's games. The quality of the games that come out in LD is astonishing, to say the least. I want to be able to make games at that level.

For me, LD gives me tons of conflicting emotions. This is part of the reason I love LD so much. It motivates me through both giving me a platform for practice and feedback while also letting me see how much farther I have to go as a game dev.

As for my game this time. Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$16562

I don't know if I'll succeed in finishing my game. At least I have ants going out from the nest, gathering the food,going back home and a winning condition if you gathered enough food within the given time.

http://i.imgur.com/c71zOgr.gifv

This is already a huge accomplishment for me, but these are still missing:

• a start menu
• at least one soundtrack
• a lose condition
• the first tutorial level
• some levels or some random level generation
• itch.io submission

I don't know if I will be able to post the game to itch.io, if I don't have enough time I'll stick with the good ol' GitHub pages without any graphic apart from the game canvas.

P.S. seems like "I don't know" is my personal LD theme :sweat_smile:

• Wow, this weekend was insane.
• My first attempt with unity using 3D.
• My first attempt with MagicaVoxel.
• A lot of eathquakes (Chile had a earthquake swarm this weekend), which gave me some troubles to sleep.
• A lot of problems with Unity physics (as always)
• A lot of time lost, working into stupid things, which should be priority.
• Once again, I've changed my mind in the middle of development. Because of that, I had to go for Jam.

But I'm happy, even with all those things, I would say that this is one of my best games ever made for Jams. I'm really proud of me.

(I really need to start think small for the next one... hahahhahaa)

please, check it, and let me know what you think.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$15261

Nathan has been wanting to take part in a Game Jam for quite a while – so when we saw that the Ludum Dare game jam was about to take place – and they were celebrating their 15th year – we decided we would give it a go this time.

Amazingly, as we are busy most weekends, this particular weekend everyone cancelled on us and we had an entire weekend to ourselves – we took this as A Sign and resolved to definitely try to make a game in just one weekend. We have never done this before so we thought it would be a great challenge and possibly fun!

The first step was to vote on the possible themes on the LDJam website – these had already been posted by other users and game jam enthusiasts. The actual theme of the competition would be announced at 2am (UK time) on Friday night while we were sleeping. We were hoping that it would be “Keep it alive” as we’d thought of a really great idea for that – but when we stirred in the night and checked our phones we discovered that the actual theme was Small World.

We tried to go back to sleep and hoped we’d dream up a really good game idea before morning. We had a brainstorming session as soon as we woke and talked about what Small World could encompass:

there are already games out there already featuring small worlds that are fought over because they won’t fit everyone on

small world can also mean child-sized things

small world theory where everyone turns out to be connected to everyone else – could we make a game about that or would it just end up being too massive?

then, we had the brainwave that small world could also mean – microscopic!

That idea really got the cogs turning and we came up with superbugs – a game where you’re in a science lab and peer through a microscope at viruses in a petri dish. The aim of the game would be that you have to kill them off with combinations of drugs before they grow too big and become Superbugs – and resistant to ALL drugs. We’d start with a few simple levels , where you just have to kill one virus with a drug of the same colour. This would be scaled up to many viruses – some needing multiple drugs and others needing colour combinations to kill them off.

As Nathan, our developer, is halfway through his first course on Unity – we thought we’d make the game in that. It seemed like a good way of testing his understanding so far!

Our first prototype was one petri dish containing the viruses – but it wasn’t very interesting and did not need a lot of skill. Also it was difficult to animate the viruses and get them to interact with each other. Then Nathan came up with the idea of hexagonal cells – like a beehive – where each drug would affect the cells around the target one. This would make it into a proper puzzle game. It also allows for drug colours to be combined to make the other colours needed.

We didn’t have any access to sounds – so Nathan did the sound effects himself and recorded them to put them in the game.  I especially like the “pop” as each virus explodes as it is eliminated by the correct drug combos! One of the hardest parts of making the game so far is working out how to automate the production of each level to ensure that it is still solvable. They do it with Sudoku – so it must be possible!

Check back in a few hours for part two, where we’ll show how the game turned out and how you can play it!

When I first read the theme "Small World" at the theme voting, I thought in making a circular world again (just like my last LD game). However, everybody is gonna do that! So, after a 2-hours brainstorming, the 2 first hours of the competition, I came back with the game idea.

I love the aesthetics of Besieged. All levels show a small village or a small campsite merged into a white-ish background, creating a very cool mix of white emptiness and green alive. With this mixture, you have the feeling that the whole world is just that small portion of green you are seeing. I love that, and I would like to try something alike.

After deciding the aesthetics, I had the feeling that a board game would fit well in this style, where the tiles kind of merge to the background. With a board game in mind, I decided the base rules, which are based on Zombicide: multiple missions, swarm of enemies, climax during the gameplay, varying missions, etc.

All set. A board game inspired by Zombicide and Besieged.

And as usual, even before the theme voting phase, I decided that this game would have something technical that I haven't developed before. LD#30 was behavior trees, LD#31 was flocking algorithm, LD#32 was circular world and complex behavior trees, and, finally, for this LD#38 I wanted to give more time to animations - not the animation like in sprite sheets, but the animation effects like moving a piece, spawning an enemy, changing scenes, etc...

What went right?

1. Although the game is not very good, I could finish it, and that was the biggest achievement this time. Sure, other Ludum Dares I worked as hard as this one, but this time the schedule was very, very tight - 3 hours to end the competition I was considering giving up because it missed so many things - but I could complete the base project scope that I have decided at the beginning.

2. There were, impressively, very few bugs during the development, even the A star algorithm I could code in minutes without any problem. Most bugs I could fix in the last hour.

3. I could do some cool animations and developed a nice animation scheduling (see below for more details). The animations are not perfect, but they were fun to implement, in special the enemy spawn and enemy movement are very cool!

What went bad?

1. Very, very tight schedule so that I could barely finish the base of the game. Everything went as I expected, but who wants to barely finish something?

2. Unbalanced and not fun, again. This is the problem I find in most of my games. I dedicate so much time on the mechanics (usually a bit complex) and the visual that I don't the time to make it good. I should probably focus that on the next game.

3. The game provides a few visual feedbacks only, but the player don't have much idea of what is happening within the combat, or the player can't even track the pawn actions properly.

4. No music or sound, but that has always been my Achilles heel.

5. I implemented a great customization system in which I can add new pawns, enemies, tiles, maps, or event different goals very easily to the game, but I only had time to create one map. If a jam game have lots of customization and lack of content, the customization was just wast of time.

6. Developing a board game is really hard. I expected it to be complex and take a lot of time to code the game rules, but it is really hard to change and tweak how the rules work and interact during the development. If I will ever implement a board game for a Ludum Dare again, I will keep the rules very very very very simple.

Technical details

Some details of implementation:

The board game logic is completely independent from the visual and the user interaction, which made things really easy later. When the user select an action, the game (visual) asks the board (logic) for more information and render things. When the user perform an action, the game sends it to the board, the board perform and compute everything internally and returns a list of events that occurred internally. For instance, if the user attacks an enemy, the board returns the events pawn attack, enemy defense, enemy damaged, enemy killed, etc...

This messaging system is really great for board games, in special because I wanted to animate all actions, one by one, sequentially. Each message have a different payload, which is used to update the visual object properly. You may see the messages while playing the game if the developer tools is open.

Animations are trick to do. The problem with animations is that you must wait it to finish in order to continuing the operation of the game, thus, making its operation asynchronous. However, as any asynchronous system, other things are happening while the animations are working, such as the user clicking and moving the mouse everywhere (which causes a bug on buttons, don't know how to solve that yet). To create this system, I added a job function attached to the scene, which can create multiple jobs and run that in parallel.

The job functions receives the duration of the job, the delay to start it, an update function which will perform the animation, and a complete function which is called when the job finished. Moreover, the programmer may stop every job at any time.

At last, I just want to recommend the Affinity Designer, it is a wonderful software for vector drawing, and it save a lot of time with the automatic exporting. I used it together with the Texture Packer and a small script to make the sprite sheet. It was really efficient: I save the document; the Affinity Designer export everything to a specific folder; then I just click export sprite sheet on Texture Packer (I only have to add new sprites if I create new ones); and run the script (I have a console ready to execute it), and done.

Images

After 3 days of hard work, I've finally finished my game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$26457

Thoughts:

I am honestly very proud of myself for completing this. This is my 3rd time participating in Ludum Dare, but it's the first time where I actually felt like I had created something which was fun.

What went right:

I think what I did right this time as opposed to previous times was that I cut out a few of the unnecessary features on the planning stage. Content like homing rockets and complicated bosses are fun to think about, but take forever to implement and generally really aren't worth it. I really got lucky here in that I didn't make things too complicated or this game would have taken much longer to program.

I also spent a lot less time actually writing code and a lot more time testing my game to see if it is balanced and fun. Overall, I think I made the game slightly difficult, but still playable. I spent around 4 hours in total just trying to balance out the game.

What went wrong:

The graphics really weren't that great. I had originally planned to collaborate with an artist friend of mine, but turning his art into digital graphics suitable for games. On the bright side though, I learned quite a lot about GIMP and fixing images. After a few images, we just sort of gave up on trying to make the graphics look nice and I just drew a few quick images in GIMP. Sorta explains the discrepancy in the art style of certain objects, if you've noticed that.

I also tried my 'hand' at making a font out of my own handwriting so the text would look handwritten, but in the end FontForge just gave me a bunch of errors and produced some funky-looking overlapping font. Teaches me to learn to use my tools before an event :P.

The last thing I messed up was actually with the game engine I programmed before the event. Unfortunately, apparently I made some of my collision detection algorithms O(n^2) or something, because my game lags really bad once there are around 50 bullets or so on the screen. I also messed up the preloading of images. Apparently my game doesn't always load images before using them, which sucks because then the player will just see blank spots rather than the correct images. I still haven't figured out how to get images to preload and use loading bars to track the progress... would really appreciate it if any of you in the comments told me how.

Closing thoughts:

I was pretty satisfied with my performance. My friend is going to get a drawing tablet next time so he'll be able to draw effectively on computers. I still have a few things to fix in my game engine and other things, but overall I'm pretty happy about how I have done.

I didn't really liked theme. As i had no idea for game I decided to make shooter about protecting something. Then I realised, that Internet lets us comunicate with others very quickly. This make's world seem small, so I made game about protecting Ethnet plug. I hope you like it! It is neither beautiful nor advanced or polished, but it's mine :D To be honest I hope, I will make better game next time! I should have made this post when I was uploading, but I had no energy for it, but who cares :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/internet-shooter-protect-magical-device

P.S sorry for my broken english :)

Hey so I've been ignoring this bug for a while now and can't figure out what it is. These sprites of my player just won't go away. I can't select them, they're not in the Hierarchy, disabling everything in the hierarchy still keeps them there, restarting does nothing, they don't show up in other scenes but show up in the game... it's a mystery!

Has anyone else come across this before? Neither UnityAnswers nor the Brackeys Forums could help sadly :(

I've never used Unity so I don't know what I'm doing wrong! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

This has been my first Ludum Dare. And not only that, this is the first time I have actually "finished" a game. So, I want to go through everything now and write about what went well and what went not as well.

If you want to play my game before you read on (maybe you should do that, this post could affect your opinion), just go here: https://ktak.itch.io/little-space

What went well:

Game got finished

This is really important for me. I managed to stick to an idea and didn't throw in the towel after one day.

Game is mostly playable

Here's the thing: I wouldn't call my game "fun" (more on that front later), but it is playable from start to finish. It has a win-state, something that you could call mechanics, a lose-condition... all that "good stuff". And maybe there are people out there who think this game is fun. :D

Soundtrack

This was something I knew I would have fun making. Composing as well as playing guitar have been my hobbies for almost nine years now and going into this I knew I wanted to record something for my game. And since I love improvising tracks like this... Yeah, I think you get it, I'll stop now. :D

Graphics (well, they're passable)

Yeah, the game isn't really what I would call beautiful, but this is the best artwork i made for anything ever. I know, this doesn't mean much, but it's a big improvement over previous attempts. I'm not really good at drawing but this showed me that I can improve even at an activity i thought I was really really bad at. Again, not great art, not at all, but I made worse.

You could argue if all of the points above are really positive, but I think in these areas this game is a improvement over my previous attempts to make a game. Of course, not everything went that "good", so...

What went not really well:

Bugs (and knowing my engine)

I decided to go with Construct 2 as my game engine, because its the engine I tampered with most. But since I never actually completed a game before, I had a lot of moments where I would just go "How do I do that?". I learned quite some things about Construct 2 and how it ticks, but that wasn't enough. This game still has some bugs that I don't understand. But I will continue to look through the code (ehm, events) and try to understand what is going on for the love of... And speaking of bad code:

AI (or lack thereof)

The citizens in my game are not the smartest people around. Maybe because I didn't really now how to implement the kind of AI I need for this game. I eventually got them to work, eat, sleep and relax as much as their needs would allow, but their pathfinding is just baaaad.

Idea too complicated / Didn't focus on fun

This is the biggest problem I had. The entire first day I thought, that I had at least solid mechanics, but the game wasn't fun or challenging. This is why I made this weird thing where you need to destroy asteroids before they destroy your buildings. It's something I made to make the game a bit of a challenge, which it did, but I'm still not sure if this makes the game more fun. I should have taken more time to think about this.

Conclusion

Little Space: something weird/10

Ludum Dare: 10/10, would jam again

And I will. This has been so much fun and I'm already pumped for the next one. :D

I just finished my second game for this competition! Not for Ludum Dare in general, but for Ludum Dare 38. The idea we (@olf09 and I) had first seemed OK, but after 1.5 days of programming and creating graphics and music, we noticed a slight problem: The game wasn't fun to play at all, so we decided to stop.

Things we did wrong: * Not designing the game fully before starting * Planing very little time for the idea (after ~2h we wanted to start creating) * Creating a game that doesn't give the player many different actions, and that was not very challenging to play

I then went on to think of ideas I could create alone in the 24h I had left. I came up with my new game World Tetris and now even have some time left (I only spent about 7h making this game!).

Don't underestimate how much time you can save with every minute of planning and designing!

ye

So there's a bit less than 10 hours left and I'm finally getting somewhere artwise. I spend way too much time yesterday trying to get something decent and I feel like I wasted precious time fiddling on the visuals.

Here's my progress :

http://i.imgur.com/Ag3kZmF.gifv

(light will move slower in the final version)

I still need to finish animation, add scoring and special scoring tiles. And UI. And Sound. Well, damn.

I added bullets to my game! It's almost done, and pretty quickly given that I started last night because I scrapped my old game.

Couldn't sleep (literally), so I added one extra feature which I didn't manage to squeeze in in the 48h period.

Individual openings on the nest can be opened and closed

This new version is linked in the Updates section of my LD page.

Moon Dash was a hell of a game to try and make in 48 hrs; the spherical gravity was a true pain to get working and, even still, could be vastly improved upon. Looking back I would have gone for a simpler solution, probably more along the lines of my original idea with a "block-y" planet that had 4 directional gravity rather then full spherical.

Towards the end I spent a lot of time that wound up being wasted on trying to implement a fancy ship-flying level transition, I scrapped it when it wasn't yielding results at 30 minutes left in favor of a simple alpha transition.

I also spent too little time on the sound and music, I would have rather spent more time on it and made something much nicer than what I published, but given that I've never worked with Bosca Ceoil before this so I was worried I would waste precious time.

All in all I think the game came out too simple, I would have loved to add more mechanics or expand the gameplay a bit; but you do what you can in the time you've got. I can't wait for LD39 and hope to take what I've learned here and make an even better entry next time!

What I've learned * Spherical Gravity is cool but sucks to build * Spend more time on sound, it makes a difference * Simple games are really simple, a little bit of complexity can make for a lot more fun * Animations are a pain to get right * Box2D likes to break the JVM, a lot

Here is a timelapse of the game being made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3VdZSuWSgc

OK! It's done! It's finished. That's ignoring the few pesky bugs, of course. That said, they're not too much of a problem as they seem quite rare... and I hope they stick that way.

I'm happy how everything has turned out really, considering I have only been able to work on it for 3 hours or so due to school, school work and GCSE revision.

All in all it's been a fun experience, and I look forward to returning to have a better go in the Summer.

Good luck to those still busying away!

~Wolfie

Gameplay video from my game: https://takusan.itch.io/slightly-angry-max

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

Why i cant upload the game? Or, how it works? I cant make it to do stuff!

(i am propably retarded)

Thank you for help ;)

I finished my first game ever! Before that all I had built was Unity prototypes.

https://jorjordandan.itch.io/bubbletoy

What went right

SOUND - I was really happy to be able to build a full game, with a soundtrack, lots of sound effects (which are all just me recording into a mic and then pitch shifting it), with all the menus like a pause screen, win conditions, six levels, even an end game screen! Music took four attempts, but my final attempt - via sequencing at beepbox, left me with a pretty cool little 8-bit soundtrack.

I'm fairly proud of how bubbletoy sounds. I also think it's fun, but since it's intentionally unintuitive, I don't know if anyone will spend the time learning the slight differences in the way the different glorps handle.

I feel like I did the exact opposite of most people on Ludum Jam - I spent an hour coding the mechanics, no time at all on graphics (except UI) and then basically just tried to polish the heck out of it. I also like the concept.

What went wrong

I think the game is not really visually interesting enough or engaging enough. The little character things I made (I called them glorps for some reason) were just a combination of unity primitives, and I think that will be a big turn off. Also, I think "unintuitive control" is somewhat of a cop out for a game. It's an attempt to do an end run around the expectations for a video game. Maybe everyone should build one once, and then never again. I'm not sure if the game just seemed fun to me because I built it, or if it's actually fun. I had fun playing it with my wife.

End of the day

At the end of the day, I was really happy to just build something and put it out there. I don't know if anyone has played it, or if anyone will, but I'm really happy to have built something complete, and fired it off into the unknown.

This has been my most enjoyable game jam to date!

When the theme was announced, immediately I had an idea for what I wanted to do, and just started getting to work: Put a gun turret on a spinning circle and hit targets.

I fired up GameMaker, and got right to it. I took a simple approach. I wanted the planet to be generated procedurally, so I wrote a simple script to randomize the radius of a circle that I drew to the screen, then wrote a bit of code to turn that circle drawing into a sprite, so that GameMaker would provide me with a free collision mask.

I knew I needed the planet to spin, so I added a bit of code to set a random rotation speed. I wasn't sure what range of speeds to use, so I took a guess, and then tweaked for a couple of iterations, until I had what I felt like a min and max that were not too slow or too fast.

At 9:36, I tweeted a .gif screen cap of my WIP, consisting of a spinning world, floating in space, and nothing else.

Next, I got to work on the player turret sprite. This didn't take long at all. I just drew a grey circle and squared the bottom of it, then extruded the base a bit so that it would leave no gaps on the bottom due to the curvature of the planet surface. Originally I drew it in a vertical orientation, but once I felt happy with it, I rotated it 90deg clockwise so that its angle would match GMS's built-in 0-angle. Then I created an object for it, and added a bit of code in the Planet object, to create a Turret instance and position it at the edge of the planet. Tested it, and it looked right.

Then I added code to make the turret spin around the planet in sync with the planet's rotating sprite. Easy. But the turret sprite didn't change its orientation, so I added some code to keep the turret's image_angle in sync with the planet's.

All this was very easy to do and went smoothly, I didn't have any problems, and it felt good. Everything worked pretty much on the first try.

Then I drew a gun sprite, and created a gun object, and wrote a little code that updated the gun's position every time the Turret's position updated. Next, I added some code that allowed the player to adjust the gun's elevation. This was more complex, since the sprite itself has to rotate as the planet revolves, but I figured out a simple approach to do this and it worked, again on the first try.

Next I made a Target object, which is basically a Turret with a bullseye painted on it. I added some code to the game to put Targets at random angle-offsets from the player, so that they would be distributed about the planet.

Next, I created a bullet object, and added code to the game to control firing the bullet. The bullet starts with an initial velocity that can be adjusted by the player, so I added code for adjusting the gun power and firing. Then I added code to give the bullet gravity in the direction of the center of the planet, and a little bit of friction so that if the bullet ended up in a stable orbit, it would eventually decay and crash into the planet. Added collision Events for planet, player, and target.

Playable proof of concept was complete a little after 11pm, just 2hrs into the jam. I felt very good about how quickly it was coming together, and how easily.

Next, I needed a few controller objects to handle a few things: level clear detection, level resets, displaying the dashboard, developer cheats. The dashboard was easy, it just draws text to the screen. Since a lot of this text is gamestate data, I decided to use the dashboard object to store this data. This meant that the dashboard object eventually became complicated and important. The two most complex objects in the game ended up being the dashboard and the planet.

In the bullet object, I added code to the Collision(Target) event to check whether there are any more targets left, and if not to display a Level Up object, which increases the game's level and spawns a new level. There's quite a bit of complexity in here, as well. I'm destroying the planet and player object and re-creating them anew, so that the procedural randomness in the planet generation will take effect. Also added collision detection for Bullet-Player, so there's "suicide" and a way to lose, so I added a "Game Over" object to handle that. Very pleased, I went to bed around 3:30AM.

Day 2

I woke at 9:18AM Saturday. After I got this much done, I thought about where else I could take this concept. I decided not to try to implement an enemy that can shoot back, because I liked the laid back, relaxed feel of the game, and felt that it was enjoyable enough to just leisurely shoot at targets. So I decided instead to try to make a 2-planet level. Not wanting to screw up what I had, I created a second room to use as an experimental space for two-planet levels.

This is where things started getting tricky. There were many assumptions buried in my Planet object, where it assumes that it is the only instance of its type in the game. These assumptions lead to a great number of problems when I added a second planet to the room. All the targets that spawned appeared on one planet, leaving the other bare. I figured out that this was because the second planet "steals" all the Targets when it updates their position during rotation. I had to update the bullet gravity code to set the gravity_direction to the location of the nearest planet, not the planet. There's also a bug (which I left in, but may yet fix) where the strength of gravity is set by one of the planets, and not the other. Most of these bugs were simple to track down and fix.

I had to take a break around 4:30pm, and returned to the project around 10pm. I had a "Win" screen, so the game had an ending. I figured it was almost completed, and just a bit more work to tweak and test and polish and the game would be done. What would I do Sunday? I had so much time.

At this point, stuff was starting to get really screwy. I was noticing all kinds of weird glitches, and it was taking some effort to sort out what was happening. Most of it was crashes due to referencing variables that didn't exist, but should have. Most of this was due to various logic errors that I hadn't caught, and was referencing a variable in the wrong context. GameMaker's error messages are less helpful than they might be, for this type of problem, so it took a lot of investigation to figure them out. And they kept happening. I was moving code around to put it in a place where it more properly belonged, to fix issues I had noticed, and this was creating new problems.

By 1AM, I had a Title screen, the design of which I think is inspired. I'm really happy with it. It tells you everything you need to know simply, and introduces you to the core gameplay immediately.

I ended up working until 6AM Sunday morning, but I fixed almost all of the problems. Along the way I had done extensive level testing, and polishing. One of the things I did that I think was smart was to adjust the position of the planets in a 2-planet level so that the average of their positions is the center of the level. I also added the explosion effects, which added a little bit of "juice" to the game, and made near-misses less frustrating. I also randomized the planet color, for more variety.

Sunday

I slept from about 7AM until noon Sunday, then got right back to it. More testing and more debugging followed, until I felt it was ready to publish. I received some feedback very quickly from players who had experienced a strange bug that I could not replicate. I ended up fixing it after I realized it was caused by using Draw functions in the Create event. The last thing I did was add "Googly Eye" mode, unlockable after first playthrough.

And that's that. This was my first jam where I hit 100% completion on all goals. I'm really satisfied w/ how it came out. I really enjoyed working on the project. Hope you like it too.

Play and Rate TARJECTORIES

A quick gameplay preview for our game! :D So excited. The team is working really hard and trying our best to improve the overall game feel. :o

My first game jam... atleast I will be able to finish the game. Now, just the powerups remaining. This is how "Island Guard" looks now:

Finished the snow globe creation menu

It's been almost a decade since I built a crappy little side-scroller shoot-em-up called Paint Rider. That was the first game I ever made. Paint Rider was made back in college on what would have been a particularly uneventful Spring Break. I was too broke to go anywhere and too stir-crazy to not do anything, so while my friends were off at Panama Beach, Cancun, and Cabo San Lucas, I was holed up in my shabby 1-bedroom duplex apartment, learning how to create a video game.

In many ways, that Spring Break was my first Game Jam. I had one week to build a game start to finish, using only the resources I had readily available (which back then, wasn't much, seriously, I don't think a lot of programmers understand how much tools like Unity has sped up the process). Building game was completely new to me, I ended up learning a lot about games, but even more about programming. I don't know if I still have the source code for Paint Rider, but I've definitely retained the experience.

Jump to 2017, I had been wanting to get back to those roots. I needed a break from the daily grind of professional programming and wanted to do something fun. Like a lighthouse beckoning from a distant shore, I saw the announcement for Ludum Dare 38 the Monday before the event. I was saved. I immediately signed-up.

What Went Right:

Twitch Stream - I ended up streaming the whole weekend and it was a ton of fun. The first night, I got some really great theme ideas from Twitch chat and ended up going with a theme of scaling and puzzles. We began brainstorming more about the general idea and came up with a game where you (the player) could scale themselves or the object/surroundings. Due to time constraints, only the object scaling was developed, and it ended up being a pretty neat concept came.

Theme Choice - The third-round theme votes were already going on when I signed up. I originally wanted something darker in-theme, up-voting "Death is only the beginning" and "Reincarnation". I had a good idea for a Lovecraftian themed city-management game where you were the mayor of a town that had to sacrifice "tourists" without getting caught. Was a goo idea, and I may re-visit it, but when the theme of "A Small World" was announce I was taken aback. I didn't plan on anything around that theme, which in hindsight, was probably a good thing because I ended up with two game ideas.

What Went Wrong:

Art and Assets - I'm not a * great * artist, at not least digitally. You give me some paper and an ink pen, I can make some really great drawings, but I'm crap when it comes to 3D or digital art. So, with the exception of the main "Win Cube" (more on that below), most of the assets came out plan and geometric. Also, because I was streaming the whole Jam, a lot of viewers really wanted to help me with the project. They wanted to build art and assets for me and get involved in the Jam. However, because I wanted to do the compo, I was forced to tell off quite a few people (with the exception of Retrio2054, maker of the "WinCube"). I'm thinking now it will by fun next time to do the 72-hour with a team of people and create a really fun and good-looking game.

Compo Rules - As I said before, I ended up using Retrio's 3D model for the final build. I didn't have a clear understanding that I had to work solo for the compo and I loved the look of the model so much I had to add it. However, since it was added last minute, I've opted the game out of any graphics prizes. Since it's only one asset, hopefully, I am still able to submit as Compo without being DQ'd.

Closing thoughts

Game Jams are fun, and this one has taken me back to that college Spring Break. I had the most fun brainstorming with the 20-something viewers on Twitch, all bustling and churning with ideas for a game. I think now I will continue Game Dev streaming, which allows me to do something creative and fun with my free-time, something which I was seriously lacking. I hope I get to do more jams moving forward. Everyday I've been waiting in anticipation on a ticket announcement for next year's Train Jam. I'll definitely be streaming Ludum Dare 39.

Thanks everyone for your support.

Twitch Stream

Play SmlWhrld

Four hours of sleep is enough, right?

Normally, I'd say no. Except I have to work all day today, which would leave me maybe an hour for last minute polishing before the deadline. Knowing myself, probably not gonna happen, so I'm calling DNAPet done.

It's...playable. There's a lot of balancing that needs to be done. There are effectively no animations, just simple coded things like flipping sprites to keep it from being toooo static. But there's simple sound effects. And background music! I've definitely learned a lot with this project, and really that's why we do these things, right?.

Need to write a proper post-event blog entry. The good, the bad, the new. Later though. Hoping to carry this motivation into the other projects I have in the works too.

In the meantime, DNAPet is "done" and ready to be played.

My first LD over and done with, and i think it went pretty decently, despite a general lack of sleep this weekend. There were a few starting hiccoughs including an unsaved unity scene that went tits up (noobtip: don't remove a canvas object while the game is running)

All in all, while the game itself isn't the most amazing thing ever, it has a concept, with just enough depth and strategy, and truth be told most of it just kind of fell into place as i created. I had very little in mind before I started developing. Unfortunately the code bears the marks of this, and is an unstructured mess, even for unity standards.

The Art assets are fairly simple, but some of the details didn't scale well, so I definitely could improve those, and there's some layering issues on some of the tiles.

The primary takeaway from this I think, is more planning and stucture for the next time, but all in all the experience was quite enjoyable!

See you all for the next one!

So we tried to do something new this time and go for an atmospheric story thing, instead of the usual arcade/puzzle games we do for jams. Pretty happy with how it came about - I think we nailed the atmosphere we were going for. Would love to work on it some more, but office beckons.

Meanwhile, here's an end of the world gif from the game:

Link: Glass Houses

Will do a full post-mortem later. (Record for least number of bugs in any of our jam entries!... I think)

Can't wait till the site is updated to start playing other games!

I'm still finishing some details, polishing art and gameplay.

The final result will probably me messy, since it's really hard to balance a strategy game in less than one day.

The cube thing will probably not work 100%, because of limitations of using phaser, and my own fault for taking this weird direction.

Hi guys, i'm back ! I just publishing this post to tell you guys I have made some Updates in my Game. Some Players told me that they haved some troubles to proceed with the game.

So I added some things to make my game more compreensive and playable.

If you find some bugs, or anything like that, pls let your comment in this post. Doing this, you will help me to let my game more cool than before.

Thanks for all who played my game and helping me.

link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$16811 :joystick:

Hey folks! :hand_splayed:

We're running the stream on Facebook from our real world gathering in Minsk :flag_by:

CHECK THE LINK: https://goo.gl/nE5SAk

i made boss batle, now there were only simple things left

Managed to crash Unity completely.

So the project is coming along, but guess we are out of submission entry this time. We definitely progressed quite a lot over this weekend but still far away from finishing due to unforeseen circumstances.

LD was a fun time to enter and compete, but sill much must be done and also study some more.

Cheers everyone.

p.s: Lots of interesting projects bookmarked will try them out.

Hackathon donts: a major rework a few hours before the end😂😂 I wasn't happy with the composition of this scene, plus we polished the graphics a little more... it actually improves the overall player experience, filling the quality gap we had between our 2 gameplays.

I took part in the Jam and in doing so I created a full game for the first time! Here it is.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-glass-marble-tour

It's a simple game about two people wandering around, well, a small world.

This was my fourth LD, and my 3rd time doing the compo. Overall I think things went well, though there definitely were issues (forgetting how Unity does assets...).

What went well:
I ended up primarily putting together pieces of what I've learned from other LDs and coding I've done between jams for this game and building off of them. As a result, I didn't need to spend too much time learning how to use completely new features in Unity and had a playable after only about 10 hours of work. This allowed me to have much more time to polish up the UI and balance the game. I ended up attempting to implement some of the ideas I'd gotten from reading some game dev articles about creating difficult decisions for the player and building a framework for the player to build a story on. I think that overall I succeeded at that, though (as with any game made over a weekend) more balancing would undoubtedly be beneficial.

What could have gone better:
I am slightly disappointed that I didn't really get to learn a major new system this time (Though since I also had other events happening this weekend and eating into my LD time, maybe it was a good thing). Specifically, I would have liked to try to get sound working for my game; I think it would have added a lot. If I do continue working on the game (and I hope to) sound will likely be one of the first things I try to implement. As far as specific errors I had trouble with, the biggest one was Unity's way of doing assets. If you want to read from text files, you need to specifically add them into your built project after the fact; they don't get included when Unity builds the project. There also were a couple instances where reversing the order in which I called some functions fixed a bug and I definitely don't know how. Other than that, it was mostly just general bug fixes.

Takeaway:
If you can, adding sound makes everything better. Other than that, getting a couple people other than yourself to try playing the game is immensely helpful. Not only do they find bugs you may not have found because you already "know" how to play the game, but it can also help show you what may not be clear to a player just starting the game.

If you want to give my game a shot here's a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$18756

Hi all! Love apple games is in for the jam! Team members: Boris, Val.

Tools:

• jgame.js (http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/jgame.js/) for coding
• tiny sprite editor, evolvotron for graphics (http://tmtg.net/tinyspriteeditor/)
• Audacity, jfxr for sound

Hey I forgot the blog was a thing! But yeah we're making good progress with our game. It's nearly done! We hope that you will all enjoy playing it at the end of the jam.

Cheers! -Stuck in a Lift Studios

My game called 'Too Small For Us' is now fully complete! Go play it, if you want! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$20840

The game by Alexandre Tanaka and I, Rain Climber, is now completed! I think!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/rain-climber

Both of us are doing Ludum Dare for the first time, so I hope we've covered everything necessary for judging. Included are GitHub source code links, itch.io download link, a video trailer, and a brief description. Controls are explained via ingame menus (gamepad should be supported!)

One thing we did NOT include (but is on the itch page) are screenshots - when clicking the Upload link on the blog interface, picking a file and then closing the dialog, I just get the same dialog again.

PS: I have attempted to add Mr. Tanaka to my Team as an Author, but nothing seems to happen after I click the Add To button and the confirmation. Viewing the game's edit page still shows no authors. In case I don't get a chance to correct this manually, his page is here:

https://ldjam.com/users/akiratan

We're glad to have been part of this and make something presentable!

We hope to do it again and do better next time!

Engine: Love2D
We're with the three of us

Second jam, second time the engine and assets were created from scratch.

I even voiced the units this time lmao!

We did a shelter-like game. Please check it out ;)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$15973!

Or go play it right away: http://murilo.codware.com/LD38/

The game for reference - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$18623

As always, Ludum Dare has been quite the challenge.

I completed the Compo track, 48 hours of complete isolation, alone and naked. Well... not so much naked.

It was a lot of work, crammed into a short amount of time. I put in about 22 hours total - Fri 3, Sat 11, Sun 8 hours respectively. I wish I had better endurance, but my wrists can't handle much more than that.

I've done Ludum Dare a few times now, and I think this has been the smoothest run yet. I'm getting a better feel for my limits, and making better choices that leads me to a completed game.

This time around, I spent more time thinking up front. I didn't just dive into making the first thing that popped into my head. I thought hard about what would be interesting, and THEN chose the first thing that popped in my head.

The idea came from some banter in the IRC room. Somebody (sorry, I forgot the handles) said the idea of Sim ant, and I thought, no smaller! So I countered with "Sim sperm". To which someone replied, "The greatest game ever conceived".

... Ugh, why didn't I go with the name "Sim Sperm", is it too late to change the name?

So the concept was easy enough -- The victory condition: impregnate the egg. The failure condition: To not be the single winning sperm.

I didn't think of it until later, but this technically makes it a racing game. ... with jizz...

Something I did well this time around, was that I concretely defined my victory and failure conditions, and worked backwards. That is, within a couple hours of the first night I had a game that could be won or lost. It wasn't fun yet, but it was something I could technically submit.

The tech I used to create Sim Sperm is something I could talk for hours about. It's a framework I wrote called AcornUI. In fact, this is the first time it's been used in a jam. Acorn is a game and application framework written in Kotlin. It targets OpenGL-based systems and can be compiled to either JVM bytecode or JavaScript. (And eventually LLVM deploy for iOS and console)

My framework doesn't have the visual tooling like Unity does, but it does support Esoteric software's Spine. This allowed me to create a weighted mesh for a spermatozoa and have the ability to blend animations for swimming. When the sperm turn, I mix the swim animation with the turn animation, giving me very fluid-like swimming. This skeleton style of animation means I'm not pegged to a framerate, I can have interpolated (smooth) transitions from one keyframe to the next. It's impossible to show with a gif, but here's the tool I'm talking about:

For the graphic pieces, I used Adobe Flash. I know, Flash is dead, but the tool is still what I'm most comfortable in to draw. I'm really not much of an artist, so I make due with what I know. I have jsfl scripts that create pngs, which get packed into sprite sheets.

The music was improvised on the piano. I actually did that early on when I needed a break from coding. I have a digital piano, but the process of recording to mp3 is a pain in the butt. I keep having either clipping problems or a high noise floor. I bet some audio nerds out there could help me out...

For physics I'm using something simple I wrote. It's no Box2d, but it's much easier to use. There are really just two parts to it, a controller that handles positioning, velocity, acceleration, rotation, and rotational velocity. And a SAT collision algorithm, that resolves based on minimum translation distance. There's no friction, joints, or anything like that. Someday I might get a Box2d implementation into Acorn, but for now, I'm happy with home brew.

Doing jams in my framework is the best way for me to discover friction points using it. Every new project shows me areas to improve. Overall I think this one went very smoothly, but I wrote several TODOs and FIXMEs along the way.

What I think I need to improve on for LD39 - - Spend more time in the creative zone. I very quickly got wrapped up in things like mechanics, physics, art, music, etc. In the end I was a little disappointed with the creativity. I thought the theme was cute, but in the end it was 'just a racing game'. I would have liked to be more innovative in the gameplay. - I need to learn or create better tools for content creation. The map was created by placing objects in Flash and writing a script to tell me their position/scale/rotation, but Flash really sucks for maps like that... It starts to get glitchy on you when you get more than a couple thousand pixels in size. - Don't add in a new game changing feature too close to the deadline. I added the immune cells (the green things that attack you) way too late. I like the idea, but they don't feel done.

The smol, orbiting garden simulator is finished!

Check out the submission page over at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/kumo.

Or play directly on: https://turbohermit.itch.io/kumo

We are making an Asteroid Colony building game!

Our game, Quantum Blast, is now called Quantum Catburetor.

Quantum Catburetor is a colorful and trippy bullet hell shmup, where the world is procedurally generated on the fly. What you see is the only world that exists - and if you go back, things are never the same. The world size/canvas also acts as player health - shrinking down if you idle or take damage.

We also got a badass song for the game by @MrJoshuaMcLean :)

Since my last post yesterday I barely could make any work. I feel sick with a maissive headache and being in front of the computer only intensifies it... Now I have 7 hours to finish but I don't know if that will be possible.

I would hate to miss this LD. It is my first try and me and my family invested a lot on it... Wish me luck!

The events triggered inside the metro tunnels. I'm planning to add a lot of them later. Right now I have : -Finding survivors -Marauders -Rats invasion -A strange hole in the tunnel. Those events can affect stations. For example when rats invade your farmers can't work. Marauders will loot potential resources your gatherers could take.

All stations have a different number of potential resources your people can find. You need to seek new stations when resources at your stations will be collected fully.

Pleease don't let me spend the night sifting through a zillion of llama frames to reconstruct our cut-scenes:'( For some reason not all computers can see the video scenes...pretty annoying :D

Too many llamas!!

I didn't finish in time but did have fun. Here is meh, silence, timelapse video that is probably a bit too long ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0j9dKzqDHA

Finally we have finished our Jam entry!

You can download our game from: https://fingames.itch.io/nt-virus or visit our submission page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/nt-virus

Hey guys, after some (some being not enough) sleep I put together the timelapse for my submission last night - Pluto.

Hopefully you find it useful. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koL37CVgbfY

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

Since more than 70 hours doing the games we could discover our limitations and fears, but you know, it was a pretty and incredible experience! My first time in this Jam will be something to remember all my life.

For me, I not failed, I won, I feel good at least :))

So here the link of my driver with gmk project! unfortunately, I couldn't export as .Exe, or make a pretty video haha!! Hope you enjoy!

Driver files: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7ULQA-7ampwNmNOZWVjVjdkQ3c GitHub: https://github.com/johny0911/GMTGHLD/tree/master

In Planetion you start as a small rock. You should upgrade your planet until it becomes an habitable world.

https://youtu.be/oQ_M2TWe36A GamePlay vid!!!!

I hope I posted correctly on the new ludumdare site..

At first I was (as always) with problems with the chosen theme. (Not knowing how to get out of the cliche).

I really enjoyed doing this game because i get out for my comfort zone. I’ve never done a graviade system like this, and usually my games are full of screen shake, and dash killing something.

I would also like to thank my girlfriend for helping me with the idea of ​​the game, and for the sake of comprehension, because I used a weekend that I would spend with her to spend in front of my computer. :p

I do not understand how the game will be played, but if you want, you can go play and comment.
If anything comes later for the vote, I ask you to also vote. 😀

HOW TO PLAY:

The game was very casual (for now), all you have to do is go to the planets, pick up the nectar from the flowers, and deliver to your hive. Among the planets, some bees that steal honey are flying from one side to another, you need to divert them so you do not lose the honey you are carrying.

Later, in a pos jam version, I will implement some things to attack other bees.

============ Controls ============

SPACE = UP

CTRL = DOWN

D = RIGHT

A = LEFT

=================================

About Audio

Unfortunately I could not produce any music in time. I’ll post a post-jam version later. =/

LINKS

• LUDUMDARE PAGE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$19904
• *DOWNLOAD (games jolt) – https://gamejolt.com/games/SpaceHoney/251821
• *FACEBOOK – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002306704481