POST MORTEM [link to postmortem – my blog]

POST MORTEM link

Tags: LD38, postmortem, youtube

Show me you're game - and I'll show you my favorites!

https://www.twitch.tv/morbidcamel101

It was a fun experience participating in my first Ludum Dare. @morbidcamel101 and I created this FPS in 72 hours. Check it out and leave a comment to help us improve the game.

LD38 Entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/destructo-island

Download Link: https://github.com/JohanOtto/Destructo/releases

Looking to spend some time on Sunday to review LD38 games. Please leave a link to your game in the comments and enjoy the rest of the weekend!

We had a blast creating the game and the positive feedback has been awesome so far. So many people have understood the humour we want to portray and its been encouraging that we have made people laugh.

If you haven't played and rated Freedumb yet and you are in the mood for some political satire, please do so by following the link below!

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

squeeches No... Not again... Have mercy...

So recently I called out to a "roast" of my entry to get some constructive criticism. Sounds like a strange idea to you? Well hear me out. I noticed on my last ludum dare that many people rate games just to get ratings theirself - and in order to maximize the "profit" they write really short and not really meaningful comments. But a big problem arises here - because most of us are here to learn and improve. I just wanted to tell all of you that my plan worked and I encourage you to follow my example. Ask explicitly for constructive critisicm and you will propably get some! Now I'm off to improve my entry when I find some time - based on the data I collected through the little "roast".

Best of luck - Anudin

After finishing adding gravity in part 2: Gravity of the simulation, man! , it's time to start simulating a world.

Basic solution is cellular automata-ish. We make each particle aware of its immediate surroundings, and decide if it wants to swap with a neighbor, transform into a different type, or do nothing. Simple enough right?

Given the available time we get @Flaterectomy to draw us a planet, and convert each color of that planet to a different type of particle on our simulation grid.

Let's start by turning all darker blue into water, light blue into air, red into magma/lava, and everything else to ‘static until replaced’. We also add some basic behavior to air; swap with any skyward non-static neighbors.

Looks pretty good already! We can make things a bit more interesting by having water settle; if there is air horizontally, try to flow there.

That's strange! Since we apply each change immediately we seem to be getting some weird behavior. Particles move faster left to right. What about if we predetermine behavior for the whole grid in one phase, and wait to apply those changes in a second phase?

Good enough! Now we want magma to erupt. To do this, we add a global ‘pressure’ counter. The higher the pressure, the bigger the chance we’ll convert one of the nearby air blocks to magma/lava. Each new block of magma/lava lowers pressure. To spread the lava growth more universally we add a low random chance for spreading; this prevents the top rows in the simulation from spawning all the lava before we get to the bottom bit. We also want the flow to appear to come from the core of the planet, so we decrease the chance of spreading the further out it is.

And there you have it, basic particle simulation! You could refine it by adding more cell types, make types interact (steam, fire, clouds) coloring lava- and water borders to make the volumes visually interesting, adding more exceptions, etc.

Now we want to add some inhabitants to this world. But how?

Continued in part 4: How to dunk minions in lava or play it here!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/indepth-virusoutbreak

When the next Ludem dare 39 does any one know when the version 39 will take place

If you are a fan of 'good old' adventure games, I think you may enjoy my entry. Simple story, simple graphics, not very long.

Try it if you like:

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/haven-the-small-world

I've played some games yesterday on live-stream. Here is the footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5x4fRX8yrw

congamoeba, the silly "friendship simulator" by @kev-adsett, @will-d, @nick-jacops and myself, explores the first steps of a much more ambitious concept - learning a completely alien language. In the game, the player imitates the cute noises made by their fellow amoebas, befriending them to the noble goal of forming a giant conga line of shared joy!

Whilst we're not anticipating that players will necessarily begin to look for meaning in these conversations, we were careful to ensure that there's some authenticity behind it. In fact, every line of 'dialogue' in the game is a deliberately constructed sentence, ranging from a simple "hi" to outright flirting. So even though the player's goal is simply to copy what they hear, we wanted to ensure the connections were all made in their own heads - no simple matching of colours or icons onscreen for us!

play the game

You can read a broader post-mortem by @kev-adsett from his profile, and please check out the game first if you haven't already! We'd love to get your feedback on it! From here I'm going to talk about how we tried to make a fun toy that anyone could pick up and play without needing instruction.

Firstly, showing all the keys used to play the game onscreen and having clear feedback when they're used. This is subtly extra helpful for a browser game as it makes it a little clearer why the game isn't responding if you accidentally lose focus.

Next comes teaching the mechanics of the game.

Our initial, somewhat naive approach was simply to allow players to make any sound outside of conversations, so you can remind yourself of which button is which in a stress-free environment. Thing is, we knew players would have to figure out what to do in the first place. People kept looking for meaning in elements of the game that had none (such as the colours on each amoeba), rather than spotting the simple imitation mechanic. We needed time to ponder this!

Luckily the LD Jam is 72 hours, which gave us a whole extra day after the weekend was over to use our colleagues as guinea pigs and iterate on the experience!

First we decided to unlock the player's ability to use sounds only when they first hear that sound. The first conversation in the game is just a single 'eep' - so there's only one button available to press, which will result in instant success.

This is followed by two phrases: 'eep'/'eep eep'. The latter, two button presses that hint at the imitation mechanic, as the player can only progress once they've 'eep eep'ed themself. From there we gradually introduce new sounds and longer phrases, the introduction of each acting as a hint that the player must now use it to progress.

The second major change was to add 'subtitles' in a strange, glyph-like language. We'd wanted to get that in anyway, as @nick-jacops and @will-d, our artist and writer, had already concepted it. I decided to keep the subtitle onscreen until the player begins making sounds of their own, before overriding it with the player's choice of words. Again this reinforces the imitation mechanic, making deviations more obvious - but critically, avoids mapping those symbols to the interface directly. Rather, it's up to the player to remember which key connects to which sound, and which sound to each symbol.

Obviously not spelling things out means there's some margin for misunderstanding - however the vast majority of players after these changes seem to 'get' the game and have fun with even the stripped down mechanics present, which is awesome! We'd love to hear more feedback, especially from folks who wouldn't self-describe as gamers, and are perhaps less familiar with the idioms of game design! Get your Gran to play it!

Hopefully the tiny experience we've created provides players with enough knowledge of our amoebic language's sound that we could follow up and explore it in more demanding situations - introducing meaning, or having the player react to text-only stimuli.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy our silly little toy!

So these are my 48 hours in 17 minutes. Enjoy :)

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/feed-the-anthill/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWeweueg9U

Say something

Got some spare time? Why not spend it playing Chroma?

There has been an awakening on the moon of Juovis... An army is rising, commanded by a strong force the call ‘The Guardian’ - Disciple of Astro.

He will use his army to destroy the planet Oarus, then conquer the solar system!

You, a complete badass, called to arms and fought the invasion, until they captured you, and locked you in a space prison orbiting around the moon.

Locking you up was a bad idea, and you’re thirsty for revenge.

In Chroma you’ll fight through hordes of enemies, to find The Guardian and kill him, taking back the freedom that’s yours!

DOWNLOAD

• Ludum Dare: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/chroma

Putting out an informal poll / feedback request Blob Shadows:

First the question (TL:DR version):

3D Playformers - Are Blob Shadows a Necessary Affordance?

What brought up the question:

In the feed back on my game, I had some mixed responses about perspective issues and lack of shadows. In doing some research I found that the fastest two default settings in the unity launcher disable shadows (ouch), this probably explained why I got mixed responses about shadows existing. Second, I did some searching and found out about Blob Shadows for 3d playformers. Always having a shadow projected directly below the character (IE from a directly overhead light source), seems to be an common affordance. Blob shadows originally came out of the limitations of hardware and we can now get much more accurate shadows. But that leads to the question, (in modern games) Are Blob Shadows a Necessary affordance?

Thanks for any thoughts and feed back you may have on this question.

As seems the custom, you can check out the game here: Glade in the Sky

To see the difference (shadows/no shadows) try both fastest and simple or higher graphics quality

6TH TIME!

As long as your game is on web or windows (under 100 mb) I will play it

Check out my game also:

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

And why wouldn’t they let you go out? Play Until Tomorrow to find out!

Tags: LD38

Try to not fall and push them all ! But be carrefull, they can take items too...

>>> Play One Push Man here <<<

LD game page: http://bit.ly/2pUP7Cl

In 2407 the government banned humans from violent sports. To quench the thirst for blood, some rich bastards created a clandestine fighting club operating on the artificial satellites junkyard in the Transjupterian sector. As the volunteer offer to fight was scarce, they began kidnapping people and hacking their brains with bionic accessories, turning them into dog fighters against their will.

I humbly beseech thee to give my game a play!

Description:

You are an alchemist, trapped eternally inside of your little potion-brewing kiosk - The Alchemist's Prison.

For all eternity, you are stuck inside of your own small world, selling magical concoctions to the adventurers, royalty and peasantry of the land.

Throw ingredients into your cauldron and brew them together, selling the resulting infusions to your customers as they request them!

Features:

• Randomly-generated customers with hundreds of possible sprites and hundreds of thousands of names.
• Each customer also has one of many voices and attitudes towards you as a shopkeeper!
• Eight different potions, each with a normal and large-sized variant.
• Each potion is made up of a combination of five or ten ingredients, and must be mixed at the correct temperature.
• An atmospheric ambient noise track that will keep you immersed in the game!

Don't forget to leave a comment if you enjoyed it or if you have any feedback for me! :)

Check it out here!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/fluorider We made an Actually Fun Game about brushing your teeth!

And why wouldn't they let you go out? Play Until Tomorrow to find out!

Hey guys, check out my first entry for Ludum Dare. You play as a little guy who’s trying to protect his planet. Enjoy and have fun!

The link includes now a newer version of the game, but also the 72h version.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-raiders

Smaex

*I finally had some time to port my game to the Web! *

And I wanted to take the time to share with you all my Ludum Dare experiences so far, here it goes:

This is my third Ludum Dare, but actually this is the first time I managed to "finish" a game. Well, actually it's not finished, not by a mile, I totally run out of time, but at least its playable!

My first try at Ludum Dare was LD36 and the theme was Ancient Technology, and I had to come face to face with fact that I can't draw. My idea was some kind of sideways Egyptian themed space invaders but I was so bad at drawing, I spent a whole day trying to draw a sphinx and I still failed. I can do this now: Still not very good and it took me 2h, but back in August the only thing I could draw was a pyramid △

So after my failure at LD36 I decided to learn Pixel Art, because the Internet said its easy :smile: (Spoilers: its not!) I started drawing tilesets, 2d characters, I mostly copied real pixel artists, how they draw eyes, how they do the shading. I have no talent to draw, but as with everything practice makes you better.

When LD37 came in December, I felt like, I'm ready to create some simple 2D platformer or something similar. And since the theme was One Room, I wanted to do a Super Crate Box style 2D action game. Unfortunately the character I drew, was not as simplistic as the one in Super Crate Box, and animating was really time consuming and hard. I tried to do a running animation which is something I never managed to do before. It took too much time, and at the end of day 3 all I have was broken prototype full of bugs, where all you could do was run and jump and walk on bullets. (totally not a bug its a feature!)

In the end I did not publish it because I was disappointed with myself and what I have created.

So when LD38 came, I took no chances and gone with the most simplistic idea I had. A small 2D planet where you transport goods from one landing pad to an other. Still managed to run out of time, but since I prioritized which feature I work on first, the core gameplay(flying/landing/damage/score) was working at the end of day 3.

I'm not satisfied with this game as it is, but the fact that I finally managed to publish something really makes me happy.

What's got cut: - Sounds - Music - A better scoring system (dependent how fast you are) - A game over screen (now its just restarts) - Visual Indications of the packages you are transporting. - Shadows for sprites. - ... and a lot of other things

I think next few days I will work on a post jam edition, because if I ever want to complete a game in time then I will need to know what it takes to do that.

Try my game

Hey!

I'm Riccardo and this is my first entry in a game jam, ever. It has been a challenging and weary experience, but most of all it has been a lot of fun.

High Noon Robots is the game I made with other 10 developers (yeah, that's a lot for a jam!), a competitive 1v1 split-screen multiplayer game with a western vibe where you have to shoot down your opponent in a small 3D spheric world!

If there is something I really love about developing software is that you have the opportunity to work with really talented people, and that's what I liked the most about this great experience: teamwork. Most of the team members that took part in the development are former IT students (except for the two terrific 3D artists :grin:) and currently we are classmates in a game development master at the Uni. For some of us this was the first game ever made, and for this reason it has been even more rewarding to produce a finished video game in such little time!

I hope you enjoy our game. Have fun and please, leave us feedback about what you liked and especially what you didn't like about High Noon Robots! :)

Links

• Download Game: https://roxxx88.itch.io/highnoon-robots
• Ludum Dare: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/highnoon-robots

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

Hi everyone!

We are happy to announce the Mac version of Dung Bettle has been released!

Can't wait to get feedbacks from the Apple community :green_apple: !

Windows friends, if you haven't tested the game yet, we also really encourage you to do so!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/dung-beetle

Here is a no-spoil gif to show what the game looks like!

If you have some friends over give our 1-4 multiplayer arena game Murder Mitosis a try :)

Project Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis

Follow us on Twitter and on YouTube

Since we can't filter/search/anything games, i would like to offer to anyone interested, that I PLAY YOUR GAME NOW! :) I preffer Browsergames though. You can check out our game (of course WEB-Version available) here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/teddy-the-tardigrade

// Edit: Just comment a link to the game page! // Edit: Every gamelink i have played will get a heart so you can follow the process

Here is the version Post-Jam :

Play it here :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-small-world-in-a-big-universe

A lot of bugs are fixed

Monsters on enemy planets

Conquer planets now! Click on them to send shuttle full of soldiers !

A lot of people said they liked the music i made for the game, so i decided to upload it in case someone wants to download it :)

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/hibernaculum

And download the soundtrack here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwGaMxEYpA7GWEdOVDF2QnNSY0U

Hope to get enough votes for my VR game to get a ranking :)

Play UFO GO HOME!

Didn't have time to adapt it for the Vive, sorry! One of my goals was to try out the Oculus Avatar SDK hence it's limited to the Rift for now.

First there was an idea of a little mouse on a little planet (you see that the title is ambiguous here regarding what is meant to be little). Here is my first drawing:

So far for the theme, but the game needed a challenge. Since people like kitties, I added a cat

When I decided to stick with the mouse idea, I started fleshing out the character

After scanning my mouse drawing (the one on the right side), I redraw the mouse in vector graphics and reshaped it a bit to look cuter (basically squeezed it in height a bit). I did this in a similar way for the other objects.

Then I did the coding. In Scratch this means moving a lot of blocks with your mouse. The rotating engine turned out to be not that complicated, in overall I needed just a sine and cosine function.

The sounds were recorded from common household objects and some were voiced by my little daughter. It turned out a cable reel made a decent sound for the well and I spilled some water on plants to get the watering sound.

After all, I got my game just in time for the Compo. I'm actually surprised, how much it matches the game design draft:

What do you think? Find the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/little-mouse-planet

Alright, so after judging nearly 50 games, it's time for me to crown my favorites so far. The following games have something about them that make me remember them fondly even after a week has passed since I first played them. These are Compo games only, as I didn't have time yet to work off my Jam list.

Carefulzilla takes the cake. It is a very innovative take on the theme, has a lot of humor and is fiendishly fun to play. Not much difficulty but definitely an experience to remember.

Space Hummus is a masterful example of how to present a game. It sets the mood with a comic intro sequence and lets itself out with another comic that gives proper closure. It has a funny story to tell and looks and feels amiable throughout.

Rocket Roller Space Polo is probably the most fun game I played so far from a gameplay point of view. Defeat up to four robot opponents in a sports game with gravity, rocket jumps and jetpacks.

Krilgor takes Game Boy aesthetics and some solid storytelling to create a fun and funny experience in the microscopic world beneath our feat.

Don't be fooled by its cluttered screenshots, World On The Tip Of A Ballpoint Pen creates an incredible sense of mystery by showing you a world uniquely foreign and strange. If only it wasn't so short.

D4rk And The Small Worlds is an arcady jump and run with a perfect difficulty curve, an outstanding chiptune soundtrack and a tough as nails and very rewarding boss fight.

The Adventure of Malvin is a fun, classic jump and run that features excellent gameplay, beautiful graphics and good level progression.

Dwelling is a cute and solemn experience about life and death. It takes a moment to get into due to its unique give/take mechanic, but it is rewarding for its wistful atmosphere.

I Want To Explore is a short and to be honest very simple game that won me over with its great 1-bit graphics and dense atmosphere. I wish there was more of it.

Finally, allow me to shamelessly sneak my own game, A Perfectly Lovely Expedition, into this list. It probably doesn't belong here, but play it anyway! :)

Link to the game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/thieves-its-a-small-world

POST-MORTEM

Idea

At the beginning of the event I saw the idea and I went to sleep, it was about 3 am. At the morning ideas came to my mind I was thinking that I see people around the world and I listened news about thieves that morning. oh! I thought, the world may be not so big to hide for a thief also.

I have played a game about thieves 20 years ago, it is called 'Carmen San Diego', it talks about a girl who is an important and intelligent thief. So you had to find it around the world and look in different places look for clues. I just thought that it will be an awesome game to get inspiration and mechanics too.

I wanted to make it simpler so I just thought about places around the world and you have to find where the thief is, so different cultures and people give you clues.

And I wanted random locations and clues but with sense.

Game development

I wrote a kind of database class, where I saved all the dialogs based on nationalities. The most difficult part was to create a path of clues randomly.

Clue algorithm I got it using a simple array. At the start of the game a city is chosen where the thief is. Then I create a random clue path and I order the clue path with a beginning and end city different.

What went wrong

• I took long learning and trying to figure out things, I should have had some learning first, before to try again, because I forgot a lot things about unity.
• I took so long coding the main mechanic that I didn't have time to add more content and dialogs.

What went good

• I finished it! with glitches but yeah. done.
• It is kind of basic procedural
• I liked the humor that I got in the game :D

You should try to escape the time loop. Pixel art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxUCRaUA0VQ

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/time-loop

I already did a small postmortem on my game, but after getting more feedback I think I have something extra to share.

I noticed that the game's feedback has high variance. Some thought that it's too easy, and some got stuck. Some thought it's too much content, while others thought it's short. Some thought it's deep enough, while some thought it's shallow. And I think I found some reasons for that. But not to spoil the game, I'll try to keep the analysis short and generic. Here's 3 ways to get variant feedback:

1. Break Conventions of a Known Genre

When you present your game as being of one genre, people will have expectations on controls, mechanics, goals, and theme. If you are not smart breaking conventions, people will feel uneasy.

My game feels like an RPG, but it doesn't stick to conventions. So for people who had certain "RPG expectations" felt that the controls, the mechanics, and the story was broken.

2. No Clear Target Audience

If you don't make it clear what audience your game would suit, you are going to get the wrong audience. Or you might get the correct audience but with the wrong set of expectations.

My game somehow, either through visuals or description, did not make it clear what it's purpose was. I found that younger audience did not get the game, while more mature people found it interesting. I should have done something to mitigate that.

3. Giving False Promises [MINI-SPOILER]

Maybe this one is not applicable to a lot of cases, but my game gave hints of things to expect, but intentionally didn't deliver on them for thematic reasons. For someone who doesn't like those thematic reasons, they feel like they were given a false promise.

I would never think my speedrunner friends would find this path in a game I barely made (version 1.0.1):

Though I had to change that in order to teach people how to kill stars. Because a lot of players were still confused.

But I loved their strategy, so I decided to keep it in a new way

Not so awesome, but I'll figure out how to solve that.
The old one was way more punishing, which fits perfectly speed runners:

But I am planning some other future updates before solving that

• Complete art rework
• Particles
• Maybe split stage into several screens, instead of one big map

What do you think about these changes (specially about the screen split stuff)?

Also NO ONE has found yet the two secret passages in my game, haha :rofl:

There is a special noise in game when you find a secret. There are two hidden passages and one explicit "secret" (this last one should give the clue that secrets do even exist).
One secret passage is somewhere before the explicit thingy, and the other comes somewhere after that.

Angry Worlds Game Page :joystick:

LD38 was my first Ludum Dare and my first game jam, and I wasn’t sure exactly how far I would get or what to expect, but I’m really satisfied with my final product. I entered the Compo, programmed in Python, and made all the art, animation, and music in the 48-hour time period.

My game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/seven-pillars

What went wrong:

Ideation:

This theme was not particularly inspiring to me, and I had a hard time thinking of anything beyond “doing x activity on a tiny planet.” It took me several hours before I came up with a solid game idea.

Animation scope:

At first, I was going to create around eleven animation sequences for the main character (eight attacks for each direction!), plus a crumbling pillar animation and a dynamic background. I quickly discovered that this was WAY outside the scope of what I could do in 48-hours, so I backtracked, made one attacking animation, and reversed the “jump right” animation for jumping left.

Distribution:

I didn’t have a good idea of how Python is packaged and compiled, and was unfamiliar with tools for this like pyinstaller and py2exe. Once the Compo ended, I figured that my game was essentially unplayable because it would require Linux, python, pygame, and git to install (whoops). A few days later, after a few hours, I finally figured out how to create a Windows executable. In the future, I’ll probably use an engine like Unity for easier distribution.

Sleep:

Jesus Christ. I need to learn to take care of myself.

What went right:

Visuals:

I really like how my game looks. The animation is smoother than I anticipated (I haven’t done animation since the DSi and Flipnote), and the overall theme and style is nice. I originally was going to make it darker, with a more serious, ninja-like character; however, I’m glad that I pivoted because the sword cat was more fun to animate.

Music:

I totally expected complete writer’s block for the music, but I managed to sit down with Sibelius and make the tune in an hour or two. It’s pretty brief, but it loops well and has some depth to it.

Fun:

I had an incredible time making this, and I’m planning on doing Ludum Dare a lot in the future. The community is great, problematic website aside, and I had a great time making this little game and sharing it with the world.

Live now - drop me a line

https://www.twitch.tv/morbidcamel101

This article was originally posted at levidsmith.com/world-fighter

Note: I had to remove most of the links because the Ludum Dare post editor is broken. It forces the browser to scroll back up to the top whenever the post is edited. I also spent more time than I wanted converting my Wordpress post into Markdown format

World Fighter, The Cosmic Warrior was my thirteenth game developed for the main 48 hour Ludum Dare game development competition.

Dylan, Joe, and myself got together at Panera on the Friday night before the competition for a Ludum Dare kickoff. We speculated about what the theme would be. In previous competitions, we could get an idea of what the final contenders would be based on voting in previous rounds. However, those metrics are no longer available, so it was anyone's guess.

My previous two games that I had developed over the past month were both collectible games. Note Chomper was a 2.5D Pac-Man clone that I developed for the MiniLD #73. Miner Madness was a platformer that I developed in GameMaker for GM48 where you avoid the bats and collect the gems. I knew I wanted to develop something for this competition where you attack and blow things up.

One of the themes that caught my interest was "A Small World". As with some of my previous entries, such as One Gunman, I knew I could take the theme and make it the protagonist of the game. I told our group that I was thinking that I could make a fighting game, with a character like Globey from Pee-Wee's Playhouse as the main character. He would fight other planets across the universe.

My original idea was a fighting game similar to Street Fighter II. The title is a play on "Street Fighter, The World Warrior". At first, I thought about just switching the words "street" and "world", but "The Street Warrior" really didn't fit when I decided that the environment would be space, so I decided to go with "The Cosmic Warrior". I had never made a beat 'em up game, so I decided to make the game similar to classic arcade games like Final Fight or Double Dragon.

For the player's character, I decided to make it green with blue for the facial features and hair. I tried adding a nose to my character by modifying the mesh in Blender, but then it really didn't look like planet so I kept the original sphere shape. I think Joe was the one who suggested using moons for punching, which I think turned out well. I modeled the planet character and animated the moon punching in Blender. I tried keeping the planet and two moons as separate objects in Blender, but that caused problems when importing into Unity, so I combined the three meshes into one, with three bones in the armature. I created an idle animation and a punching animation. I assigned one capsule collider to the planet character, and then a sphere collider to the moon used for punching. Unfortunately, this means that the moon "fist" collider has to be reassigned whenever the model is re-imported into Unity. I haven't found a good way around this yet.

The enemies are similar to the player's character, except they have a different texture. I tried making them look like Mars, with white hair to look like the northern ice cap of Mars. I made it so that each enemy could be destroyed with one hit. I had planned on having multiple enemies with varying levels of health, so that some would be more difficult to defeat than others. I also hoped to have a boss planet character, that would need to be defeated in order to clear the level. I ended up just having a counter for the total number of enemies and the player just needs to defeat all of the enemies to clear the level. I also wanted to have life bars displayed for each of the enemies, but time ran out before I could add that feature.

The movements of the player and enemies were handled with Playmaker addon for Unity. The enemies continually check to see if the player is a certain distance away. Once the player is close enough, then the enemy will move to the player's location. When the enemy reaches the player's location, it will start attacking. After each attack, it will check to see if the player is still in range, and move toward the player again if the player has moved away. Both the player and enemies bob up and down, which I think turned out well. It gives a bit of liveliness to the characters. I had to manually write the turning code myself, since the default rotation was not always in the direction that I wanted. I always wanted the player to rotate with the front facing towards the camera, so I had to take that into consideration in my rotation code.

I used the Blender Cell Fracture plugin again for making the planets explode. I put the explosion animation in a separate prefab. When an enemy is defeated, the enemy GameObject is destroyed, then an enemy explosion prefab is instantiated which plays the death sound effect along with playing the cell fracture animation. The one problem I still have with the Cell Fracture plugin is that you can't define what the inner parts of the exploded object look like, so it just appears to be random parts of the texture. There are lots of options for the plugin, so I probably just need to look into it some more.

I used Audacity again for the sound effects. I didn't try anything really experimental this time. I used the pitch modification to lower my voice and added a little bit of an echo. I used an envelope for the punch swipe sound. The one thing that I find frustrating with Audacity is that I think it should make the folder of the file that you opened the default when saving or exporting the modified file, because it wastes a lot of time having to dig through the directory tree to find your sound effect folder each time. However, it is a free tool so I can't complain. The Audacity source code is also on GitHub, so I could actually change this if I really wanted.

The music was composed in GarageBand on my MacBook Pro, as I have done in previous competitions. Again, I used my regular process of making a couple of melodies, then I changed up the instruments and made slight modifications and mixed the melodies together. I also made a slower version with fewer instruments for the title screen.

I made the starfield background using a tutorial that I found years ago when making my Earthball pinball game. I changed it up a bit to suit my needs. I left out the supernova stars to create a skybox background. I learned that the skybox settings are hidden in the Window Lighting settings, and it is specific per scene. I had to change the Environment Lighting Source to a solid color, since the starfield skybox source made everything too dark. I put two stars down as a guide on the ground texture for the bounds for where the player can move.

The game world is composed of a number of "blocks", similar to a street block. Each block has three enemies, which are somewhat randomly placed. There are two starport type objects, which I modeled and texture mapped in Blender at the last minute, which also form the bounding area of where the player can move. I had envisioned that these would be destructible and produce items, similar to the trash cans in Final Fight. The level could be improved by having an invisible wall that prevents the player from proceeding until all of the enemies on a block are defeated. I have a case statement that does add an invisible wall before the first block and after the last block to prevent the player from falling off of the ground.

I am happy with the game that I made for this Ludum Dare competition, but I don't feel like I learned or tried anything new. There are definitely things that I want to fix and enhance in this game. However, after three back-to-back game jams I've decided to take a break for a little while. I think I want to try a new game engine or new modeling tool next time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N7VFddmXwI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6mzzF8lJSM

Entry page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/world-fighter

Hey everyone. This was my first ever Ludlum dare and I tried my best to produce something worthy enough of being called a game. I found it great in the end (ofcourse, because this game was the only friend I had for 48 complete hours), but I'd still love to hear your thoughts and reviews on it, so I can incorporate some advices into my next Ludlum dare. :) Please try out my game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/last-breath

Thank you :)

7TH TIME!

As long as your game is on web or windows (under 100 mb) I will play it

Check out my game also:

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

I am very happy with the result of my entry and these days I worked hard to make a great update.

News:

• A good tutorial
• Renewed system to move the crew
• Buttons to change the speed of the game
• Now fuel has effect!
• The shots of the spaceship look better
• Improved spacecraft HP and crew HP HUD
• Fixed some minor bugs

Remember to try and rate the original game... and leave some feedback :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/limited-space

We like our Ludum Dare game so much. And we decided to develop it into the real game. I start making new concepts of enemy for it. Now I can spend much more time for it.

I just placed new enemy on screenshot with the game, and it seems that I have to remake all of assets.

Please try and rate our game =)

Come on, barbarian

Just a quick reminder that liberty is under constant threat in this small world of ours and you should defiantly play Freedumb before its to late... ps. Please leave your comments, good and bad, we are here to learn and every bit of feedback is appreciated!

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

Rate and comment honestly . I will return when at home

Check my game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-fleas-in-my-head

For those who asked, you can now enjoy the extended version of Spermicorn theme here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GMD93Y4d5I

and if you haven't already, give it a try here and rate us! We'd love to hear from you :)

Hello!

We are very amused by Larry Chupacabra who reviewed our game on youtube!

Watch it yourself:

https://youtu.be/MD3DwYwAtnU?t=16m8s

LD page:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/race-against-ferrum-gigantes

Play and rate <3

As announced earlier, we're reviewing a few LDJAM #38 entries in a youtube coverage. Thank you for all your suggestions. Check out the playthrough of the colour based puzzle platformer

Hopper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU2O59nTe_s&t=4s

If you are in the mood, you might also check out and rate our jam entry

Naughty Gnomes

Hey,

It is likely that the person who is currently reading this hasn't played our Ludum Dare game Chroma (in which the download will be at the bottom of the post) so I definitely recommend you give it a go before reading this. We are incredibly proud of Chroma, this game is a re-imagining of our Ludum Dare 37 game with all problems mentioned being fixed. Things such as poor level design, bland boss fights, dull environments has now been removed with this game.

Anyways, due to how much we enjoy working on this, and how proud we are of it, we have decided to turn this small prototype into a full game with up to 30 levels and an entire story. Once development on our currently already existing game Thermal Youngsters is finished we will completely move over to development on Chroma, adding new levels and features. The biggest flaw mentioned with this game was the poorly-implemented dash feature, which we do plan on improving. This was the first time I had ever programmed a dash move into a game so it was certainly good to hear so many people give me constructive feedback on it. Another mentioned flaw is the lack of character progression, which is certainly a problem. Throughout the entire game the only changes made to your character is the changing of weapons. In the post-jam game there will be several armors and collectibles that will make you as a player feel like you are growing stronger. We even considered that instead of the player starting out with the dash ability, there will be an armor that you collect that will give it to you.

In terms of more levels, we haven't planned out to much. We do know that there will be a set of levels for each moon, however we also want to add a bit more story elements to the game, without it just going from planet to planet. I have thought out the third level, I was thinking it could be some kind of giant cave set on the red planet, filled with blood bats and mazes. Overall we are excited for the future of this game, and we hope you try Chroma out if you haven't already...

DOWNLOAD

• https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/chroma

Everyone could use some more votes, so comment below your game and I'll judge it, please consider also checking out my game and good luck getting the votes you need! : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/angery-ships-only

Edit: Don't worry if I don't judge yours right away, I'm at school right now and won't be able to judge any games until I get home.

:flag_fr: Troisième vidéo pour les jeux Ludum Dare. Désormais les vidéos seront réalisées en "Off" parce que ma connexion ne me permet pas de streamer correctement sur Twitch. Mais bon, pas grave : ce sera en meilleure résolution du coup. :)

Comme d'habitude, partagez, aimez et surtout, donnez moi les liens de vos jeux pour que je m'y essaie dans une prochaine vidéo.

Bons votes à tous !

:flag_us: Now, videos are made offline, because my connexion does not allow me to stream correctly on Twitch. It's not a big deal because now, they will be on better resolution :)

As everytime, share and like this video but also, give me your game's link to try your creation on a next video.

Good judging everybody !

Link on Game Side Story : http://wp.me/p3gA2Q-wlX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7kQm26HXZA

The games on this video :

Kryp : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/kryp

My World : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/my-world-2

Antnator : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/antnator

Infinite Planet : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/infinite-planet

A World in Her Eye : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-world-in-her-eye

Afterbith : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/afterbirth

Psycho Paul : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/psycho-paul

A small world lost in a big universe : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-small-world-lost-in-a-big-universe

"I can tell it's gonna be a great game!" : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/i-can-tell-its-gonna-be-a-great-game

Tiny Planet Defense : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/tiny-planet-defense-1/

Finally, I can test games ! The two last weeks were difficult, but here we are ! If you want, you can also check mine ;) : World Tours

Due to the recent upheaval at the Imperial Court, the Emperor has demanded that a report should be written, to shed some light on the recent events concerning the small world of Morix.

The Emperor suggests that you try to govern Morix yourself, before reading the rest of this report.

Background:

The Morix colony is a turn-based strategy game, in which a young nobleman was banished from the Imperial Court by his older brother. He was sent to the small remote planet of Morix, to act as its new governor. Here, using the resources of his new world, he will extract raw materials, amass wealth and influence, upgrade the colony, and fight off (and/or bribe) marauding space pirates. Eventually, he will become powerful enough to be able to repay his brother for the injustice.

This is my sixth Ludum Dare, and my first time participating in the Jam instead of the Compo.

The Emperor approves of the following:

• Story - I'm glad I took the time to work out a story as my first task, as it gave the player a specific goal to achieve. At the same time, it gave me a contextual framework for all the other writing in the game, as I could frame all the other events, resources and NPCs in terms of how it helped the ambitious main character in achieving his goal.
• Participating in the Jam - I usually participate in the Compo, but this year I decided to participate in the jam instead, with the same restrictions as the Compo, but for the extra time. I really enjoyed having time to make some deeper gameplay, a proper story, and a more polished end result this time.
• Content - I am happy with the amount of content I managed to include in the game this LD, for instance a variety of gameplay elements and resources interacting with each other, a greater variation in writing, and two different endings. I also managed to implemented a good deal of reactivity: The NPCs addressing you differently depending on your reputation and social status, the random events changing if you become a criminal (or as a result of various actions through the game), and the different reaction faces of your advisor depending on the news of the round.
• Mechanics - I am quite satisfied with the mechanics I implemented. The interplay between the resources, the colonist allocation and the random events worked out pretty well, with the gameplay naturally evolving into three different phases: A survival phase in the beginning, where death could come swiftly, gradually replaced by gaining traction as you start to be able to buy upgrades and be able to take advantage of the positive random events. And then, finally get the feeling of power and stability, as you amass wealth and resources in preparation for victory. I also think I hit upon a good number of different resources, that behaved similarly in some respects, but also had unique uses to justify their separate existence.
• UI - I was pretty satisfied with how the UI turned out. It seems that the tooltips in particular, worked well in explaining the game mechanics, and I feel that I struck a balance between gameplay complexity and a simple interface. I also wanted to have tracked the colony upgrades in the UI, but I did not have the time to make the icons, so that instead became part of the end-of-game score.

The Emperor frowns upon the following:

• Scope - My scope ended up a bit too large. I had to cut a few features, like extra facilities and upgrades that would have given the player more control over the random events, e.g. the ability to assign colonists to defense, or to operate a radio facility, which would allow finer control over the probability of the random events. I'd liked to expand upon the mechanics even further, with a few more facilities, upgrades, and events for variety's sake.
• Early game - The early game suffered a bit from the cuts mentioned above. In the beginning, before you have built up a stockpile of resources, there is not a lot to do, except for advancing the clock, and hoping for some good random events, to be able to survive the pirate attacks. I had originally planned for an extra "game phase" in the beginning, where you would spend your first turns building up the colony. This would culminate in the construction of a space port, and mark the beginning of getting the "visitor" random events. Instead, I tweaked the pacing of the beginning, so that you have to balance your growth with being able to keep the pirates at bay. But the randomness of this phase felt frustrating to some players.
• Content - While I built a lot of reactivity and details into the game, I think I should have adapted this effort to the kind of event that LD is. The time spent on multiple endings, and creating a lot of subtle details that will only be seen after playing for quite a while, could probably have been better spent on improving the early game experience.
• Tool-familiarity - I made the game using Java and LibGDX, which is my usual tool set. But this time, I ended up spending several hours on Saturday, on experimenting with mouse-over, and drag and drop functionality. I should definitely have practiced more on using the UI-toolkit before the event itself.
• No music or sounds - Every LD I want to make some music and sound, but in most of them I fail to allocate the time for it. For sounds, I usually use BFXR, but I think I have to find a simple music tool without a daunting amount of features, much like the simplicity of Aseprite allows me to make functional pixel graphics. If you know of any such music creation tool, I'd appreciate it if you would leave a comment!

Conclusion

This has been one of my most enjoyable LDs so far. Due to the extra time from the Jam, I had time to experiment with some deeper mechanics than usual, to spend more time on the writing and story, and to create a user-interface that feels more "alive" than in my previous games. I've also enjoyed the post-LD gaming, I feel that I've played some real gems this time!

Somnium, Imperial bureaucrat.

To reiterate, an open position as governor of Morix can be found on https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-morix-colony

When I write feedback,
I also leave a haiku.
Why yes, that’s quite odd ;-)

8TH TIME!

As long as your game is on web or windows (under 100 mb) I will play it

Check out my game also:

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

Hi Guys and Girls, we would like to get some brutally honest comments on our game Freedumb. We are looking to improve our design skill and would like to hear about all the negatives of our project so we can avoid them in the future.

Please be honest and don't worry about our feelings, we are here to learn :) Drop some bombs! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/freedumb

Hi developers, I'm inviting you to play and review my game

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

Thank you! Good Jam!

Okay, so maybe I'm not gifted.
Whatever.
Here's a really terrible, tiny, and lossy GIF showing the process I used to create the art for my game.

First I drew the picture on a blank sheet of paper. I am by no means an artist or an animator (it took me a couple tries just to get the drawing in the video right), so I used minimal frames (by chopping up the images and moving the parts to create movement). Then I scanned them in and inverted the colors in paint.net (me image editor of choice).
The reason I inverted the colors in the first place was because it would be easy to remove the background using additive color once I had scanned the pictures in.
Additive color?
Additive color takes the color of each pixel and adds its values to the one below it. Because black has a value of zero in all categories, the black is not drawn and voila! You have a see-through outline.
From there I used myscriptfont.com to create a font from my own handwriting, and the art was complete.
Again, sorry about the GIF, the max upload size is 4 WHOLE MEGABYTES! (My gifs turn out to be somewhere between 30 and 40, by default)
Use this site to optimize your GIFs. It will take the filesize down up to 60%.

This is my second time participating in ludum dare and I would like some feedback on my game so I can Improve.

Thanks if you decide to give my game a go.

LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/earth-quest

Dear Linux Users,

I would be very grateful if you could test the Linux build of my compo entry: "Globe Trot". I know the Windows and Mac versions run ok...but I haven't heard if the Linux build works.

Here's the page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/globe-trot

and a direct link to the Linux files:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n84e05k0pgv5887/Linux%20%28Universal%29.rar?dl=0

Thank you!

• Tub of War.
• Ark Initiative.
• Murder Mitosis.
• No Minor Task: Party of a Lifetime.
• Libre.
• World en abyme.
• Holy Shit! A Spider !!!.
• Space Turtle.
• Abaddon.
• Universal Journey.
• Small Planets.
• The Z Axis.
• Shrinking Planet.
• Cowmets.
• rovR.

Continued from part 3.

Part 4: How to dunk minions in lava

Since we decided to run the simulation outside our Entity Component System (ECS) in part 3, if we simulate our inhabitants in the ECS they’d fall straight through our planet. So what now?

All we need is to give each entity a sensor that tells our inhabitant what is under its feet. By wrapping the logic of converting entity-space into simulation-space in a system we keep complexity local and it doesn’t leak into your other systems, We also get a sensor we can slap on buildings later. Great!

Next we start with the fun part ECS: adding components and system for each behaviour we want on our entities. Some examples: Don't worry too much about getting this right, just start adding!** - PlanetBound: Entity can ‘feel’ what is under its feet. - Gravity: Entity is pulled towards the center of the world, providing the sensor tells us the entity is currently in the air. - Mass: push the entity up when it is inside water. - Dolphinized: Entity shows dolphin behaviors. Does not like to be on land, that sort of thing. - OrientToGravity: Entity turns feet towards gravity. Nice for humans, dolphins don’t care for it. - Flammable: Kill the entity when it dives in to lava. (Ouch!) - Ghostable: Turn the entity to a ghost upon death. - Wander: Entity wanders left or right randomly.

ECS allows you to naturally grow your game. Reusable components mean saving time, which is great for time constrained competitions!

Continued in Part 5: Performance Persmormanche! or play it here!

Continued from part 4.

Part 5: Performance Persmormanche!

Uh-oh. Trouble! The browser simulation runs at slideshow speed. To be expected given the naive implementation. Besides going for a more technically sensible solution, how about we try to improve what we have.

First we start by freezing cells that don't need attention. Eventually we could keep track of a queue of cells that demand attention, but given the available time we decided to give each cell a sleep counter and skip the simulation subsystem for that cell if it is asleep. Things like dirt can typically sleep for multiple frames without affecting the simulation much.

What if we only run half the simulation each frame? We can double the simulation performance by interlacing; calculating all even rows on frame 1, all odd rows on frame 2, etc.

Luckily the simulation seems visually identical. Can you spot the difference? This pushes the game outside the slideshow experience. Still slow, but it will do!

Continued in part 6: Finishing touches, deck of cards! or play it here!

In The Wonky Wizard you have to shoot different types of enemies before getting swarmed. The entire game takes place on a on oddly-non flat planet as our interpretation of this editions theme, "small world".

You can Play and Rate The Wonky Wizard here!

Art

We found some pictures of small low poly planets and immediately fell in love with the look. Putting normal objects on a dis-proportionally small world makes everything look all weird and Wonky!

We used so called "Gnomonic projection" to project from a planar to the spherical surface. This projection has the property normals to flat plane become normals to the sphere, so that it produces a nice cartoonish look.

We developed a custom mesh projection script to project normal 3d models onto a spherical surface. This way we could use normal modelling techniques to create the models for the islands, bridges and props. Bending is performed in the editor so that we can easily build spherical levels directly in the editor.

Gameplay

In the Wonky Wizard there are 3 types of enemies and 3 types of spells. Each enemy is countered by one of the spells so the player can discover and exploit the advantages of each spell.

On a spherical level projectiles do not "fly straight" like in regular levels. The ice projectile's movement is corrected at each step by so that its velocity is tangential to the sphere. For the grenade the traditional directional gravitation was replaced by a gravitational force to the center of the sphere. In the image below you can see the "straight" projectile flying around the globe.

The trickiest was the beam spell. For this, we created a "spherical raycast', by doing multiple raycasts forming a circle.

Level

Building a spherical level proved to be challenging :). Unity's editing tools are not really designed for building spherical levels, so we created some editing tools to easily place, rotate and scale objects on a sphere.

To build spawn scenes and level logic we created a minimal level scripting system. The behaviour is created by placing invisible objects like checkpoints, triggers, spawners and enemy detectors on the level. These are then all linked together using a small C# co-routine.

Conclusion

We are very happy with the results. Our only regret is that we did not have enough time to implement a whole load of other ideas on our list for this game. But that might still happen in the future ...

Play and Rate The Wonky Wizard here!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographicprojectionin_cartography

I'm trying to make a barrel distortion shader for my current game project (in Game Maker), and I can't seem to figure out what's causing those giant pixels.

Vertex:
``` // // Simple passthrough vertex shader // attribute vec3 inPosition; // (x,y,z) //attribute vec3 inNormal; // (x,y,z) unused in this shader. attribute vec4 inColour; // (r,g,b,a) attribute vec2 inTextureCoord; // (u,v)

varying vec2 vvTexcoord; varying vec4 vvColour; varying vec2 v_vPosition;

uniform float BarrelPower; uniform vec4 u_uSource;

void main() { vec4 objectspacepos = vec4( inPosition.x, inPosition.y, inPosition.z, 1.0); glPosition = gmMatrices[MATRIXWORLDVIEWPROJECTION] * objectspacepos;

v_vColour = in_Colour;
v_vTexcoord = in_TextureCoord;
v_vPosition = in_Position.xy;

} Fragment: // // Simple passthrough fragment shader // varying vec2 vvTexcoord; varying vec4 vvColour; uniform vec4 uuSource; varying vec2 vvPosition; uniform float BarrelPower;

float rand(vec2 co){ return fract(sin(dot(co.xy ,vec2(12.9898,78.233))) * 43758.5453); }

vec2 Distort(vec2 p) { float theta = atan(p.y, p.x); float radius = length(p); radius = pow(radius, BarrelPower); p.x = radius * cos(theta); p.y = radius * sin(theta); return 0.5 * (p + 1.0); }

void main() {

//float xx = v_vTexcoord.x;
//float yy = v_vTexcoord.y;

float xx = v_vPosition.x;
float yy = v_vPosition.y;

vec2 point = vec2(xx - u_uSource.x, (yy - u_uSource.y));
float len = length(point);

float ran = 24.0*rand(vec2(u_uSource.w+xx,yy));

if(len+ran>u_uSource.z) gl_FragColor.rgb = vec3(0.,0.,0.);
else {

    vec2 cord = 2.0 * v_vTexcoord.xy - 1.0;
    vec2 uv;
    float d = length(cord);
    if ( d < 1.5 ){
        uv = Distort(cord);
    } else {
        uv = v_vTexcoord.xy;
    }

    vec4 c = texture2D( gm_BaseTexture, uv);

    gl_FragColor = v_vColour * c;

}

} ```

LD38 Entry : RoboLand

Play RoboLand on itch.io : RoboLand

Test: Signup for Closed Alpha

I didn't got time to work on the game post LD38. So, here I'm back with post updates and it's finally getting shape.

Just wanted to put a gif out there to visualize in one gif what our game is about: It is a simple idea. Eat to grow and never stop growing. You start very tiny and maybe you will get large enough to eat this blue ball called earth!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/teddy-the-tardigrade

Hey! This is my first Post here. :D I just uploaded my Post-Jam Version for my first Ludum Dare. I added a few things users have requested. (: I would be very happy if you would take a look at my Game (:

Game Desciption:

It's a Spherical Tower Defense Game where you try to beat the Aliens stealing your Earths Water!

ChangeLog:

• Added Background Music
• Fixed a bug where the UFOs spawned before completing the Tutorial.
• Shortened the Tutorial.
• Balanced the whole Game.
• Implemented Dreamlo to compare Scores between Players.
• Added Range visualisation for Towers (Spacebar)

Thanks!

Thank you all very much for creating such a cool Event! Loved my first one, definitly gonna join the future ones (:

I also gotta thank to all the People who judged my Game and gave me some Ideas for improvement.

Hope you like my Game (: Cheers!

One thing that I liked most about LD is the amount of streamers that offer to play our games online. Seeing the reactions live is the most valuable feedback I got on my previous games. Why aren't there that many this time around?

Seeing the comments and the ratings is good and all, but it's not as helpful when I'm trying to find root causes for why my game lacked in certain areas. Am I the only one who thinks so?

[shameless plug] ^@stanov's reaction after finishing Until Tomorrow (played at 4x speed). Shout out to @stanov and @morbidcamel101, the two streamers I'm aware of who streamed LD38 games reviews.

Pixel Art Timelapse

After my esteemed colleague @daanvanyperen already whipped out his coding timelapse last tuesday, I finally got around to finishing mine, which is of the pixel art variety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUGy9qTpZhU

Play Little Fortune Planet HERE

And a quick thanks to all of you who have already played and rated our game, it means a lot to us! :alien: Now that my video is done, I'll have some time to review games myself.

Do you detective? Then come and play our daft game Murder 38. We would love to know what you think.

Play - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-38

We'll be streaming Ludum Dare games on Twitch at 4:00 PST, come say hello! You can leave recommendations here, or in the Twitch chat (which we'll prioritize).

Last time we streamed we got to play a bunch of mostly dissimilar games that are all worth checking out:

Our Cramped Little World

Murder Mitosis

A Weeks Passing

Hamsterscape

ROVR

Miniverse

Who left this link to our game here?

So, me and a couple of friends made a survival/tower defense game for this Ludum Dare. The game is pretty simple, and I explain everything at it's itch.io page, so check the description if you go there.

Here is the link to the game's page with the download: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/goblin-assault

(Sorry for not having many screenshots to share. Although you can find some on the itch.io page, I couldn't find myself time to take enough of them :( )

Hi! I have a couple questions about the judging process that I'm not sure where to answer. So I'm just putting them here.

1. How can I tell how many reviews my game has gotten? I would like to know when I have gotten enough reviews for my game, and when I don't need to be stressed about getting a rating.
2. This one is not as related but I feel like most people are using Feedback Friends to find games to judge. I can't find my game on that site, even when I get rid of my username. I feel like this is hurting my changes of getting more feedback. Is this a me problem, or a Feedback Friends problem?

Thanks for reading. Any help is appreciated.

Hey guys!

Yep! As all my Ludum Dare entries, I had another big TO DO list out of scope because of time.

I think it wasn't an impossible scope for me, but some problems (as always) the first day with strange bugs fucked me all, haha

This TO DO list would be:

• Movement, this is really nice in editor, but it is fucked when I export the game, so sad :(
• Limited inventory.
• Rubbish zones, where you can drop one reource with a certain cooldown to free an inventory slot.
• You must pay a PAPER with a random resource in your inventory.
• Tutorial with some quests: go to each zone to learn their place, pick your first resource, deliver it in the first zone,..
• Modeling some buildings for delivery zones and resource zones.
• Modeling some houses, rocks, other vehicles with movement around the planet,... just for decoration or disturb the player.
• Add some particles like truck smoke, grass, visual feedback when complete/fail a deliver,...
• General improvement, like the Truck model, respawn system (of resources), difficulty in time, UI, main menu,...

What do you think about this, would you like to see this features/improvements in this game?

<-- Play and rate it here!! -->

Probably won't do a post-mortem for my entry, but wanted to at least give some level of explanation of what's going on. Cause I think it's awesome, even if it's not incredibly intuitive.

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

You should try to escape the time loop. Pixel art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxUCRaUA0VQ

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/time-loop

LD38 Entry : RoboLand

Updated with more levels and misc links.

Hey folks! Going to be doing some more game streaming tonight, come check it out!! If you're interested in having your game reviewed, there's a link on one of the lower panels to add your game to the list, and a link to my game as well. These have been very fun in the past, and I'd love to see you there!

http://www.twitch.tv/iron_leonem

This was my first compo and I'm really proud of what came out of it. Any chances I can get your feedback? Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/carefulzilla/

Compared to previous LDs, I didn't go for any crazy or complicated mechanics but rather settled for something simple and clone-ish (Space Invaders). The idea was I could spend more time on polish and less on the complicated mechanics and squashing the bugs in it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/small-world-attackers

The Good

I went for a 3D version of a space invaders type of gameplay. It was cool but not necessarily exciting. However, when I need to make the mothership flyby feature I discovered that was actually nicer to play because you could use the third person/first person switch mechanic pretty well. So I made that the primary game, and added a "classic mode". The lesson is: Thanks to not spending huge amounts of time on mechanics code, I was able to playtest more, find a better use of what I had, but still kept the original. More time means more flexibility.

The Not-So-Good

Even though I was going to have more time for polish, I used some of it on playtesting and adding the other mechanic. I also was getting a bit sick so actually went to bed early (11pm) and got up later than usual. My Mac also broken down - I usually use it for music in Garageband. I have a Ableton Live "Lite" version but am not very familiar with it. It worked fairly well after some messing around, but I didn't get the vibe so the music is sufficient but not that good I think. As far as polish I forced myself to do as much as I went, and not wait to see how much time was left in the end. It's still programmer art in a way, and I used the arcade setting as an excuse to keep it simple.

The Bad?

Don't know if there was anything really bad. I guess I could have tweaker the gameplay a little more but I'm fairly happy with the result.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/small-world-attackers

So a lot of folks have stopped in to say hi on my game sever, pop on over to the site if you haven't yet. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cardboard-cats-online

But on to the point at hand, if you are interested in how I made a mini-mmo in 72 hours, check out the video :smile:

So I recorded the whole stream and it was about 60 hours of footage. Turns out it takes a long time to render video of that length, so after compressing the footage in vegas... repeatedly. It finally is done. I am actually posting two different versions, since one is 40 minutes long but is slow enough you can see more fine detail, and the other is speed mode, so you can get an overview.

Short Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSg3K3H2pIg

Long Version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0KNjj1pSck

DISCLAIMER: The following is shameless self advertising in an attempt to get you to play my game. Due to lots of school projects, editing, and general stress of being a teenager, I came late into rating, so I have only rated around 20 games. So, I am promoting my own game in hopes of reaching my emotions to you. I want you to feel emotions, I want you to see the world differently after my game. That has always been my goal, for 4 years. (DISCLAIMER #2: The game itself is very bad, as I grew too ambitious for 48 hours. Anyway, hope you enjoy. I will be making a post-compo version over the next few months, and as always, shameless self promotion is shameless. Thanks)

Kanjo. Emotions

Everyone has them. Everyone goes through them. But what if they disappeared?

The game (more like a visual novel/interactable video) Kanjo was developed in 48 hours for Ludum Dare.

It is the tale of a girl and her quest with a young god to restore emotions back into the world. As her quest continues, she experiences more and more, and eventually realizes what it means to feel emotions.

MINI POST MORTEM:

THE GOOD: Graphics, Music, Story (albiet a story with a few plot holes that could be ironed out later) THE BAD: Gameplay (or lack thereof), replay ability, fun, theme THE UGLY: Basically the game besides THE GOOD

So got some free time? Want a story experience? Check it out!

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

And thanks. Thanks for playing my game.

As a former Analyst, I like to try and find unique and strange ways to look at metrics and data. I was going over the reviews to ATLANTIS (Shameless Plug: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/atlantis) and mindlessly scrolling thru my facebook feed when one of those "Timeline Wordcloud" things popped up and I wondered if the same technology that drives these posts could be useful for creating an "At a Glance" board from which I could gain useful data.

I saw the original tool didn't strip the capitalization from the data I provided, so it has a few places where a word appears multiple times. This was easy to fix with a few keystrokes. Next, I decided to remove some of the less useful words: Possessives, things like "It's", "And", "Get", and the like just aren't super useful without the context of the rest of the sentence, and the wordcloud takes that away... Finally, I went thru and fixed the spelling errors that cropped up across the document. I didn't get them all, this was just a for-fun experiment as I start cataloging feedback.

The result was this:

I'd love to see what other games' review clouds look like! I used the tools at: http://www.wordclouds.com/

I would highly recommend making one of these if you want a nice way of visualising the overall feedback of the game.

You can create your own here

(Also, you can play Planet Domination here)

Hey guys and girls, there is a bug fix incoming on Freedumb. Just fixing the self nuke error and one or 2 minor spelling mistakes. It will go live as soon as i have internet again, the hotel wifi is a war crime. The game is still 100% playable and working so check it out in the mean time (unless bad spelling offends you more than political satire).

This is, for quite some time, the first game I release that makes me feel somewhat proud (especially for such short jam). There are lots of problems, but I also find it quite enjoyable!

I did some minor updates, but nothing that changes too much from the original release (if anything, the Emscripten looks more like the original native)

Please, tell me your opinions: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/run-the-world!

The Emscripten build was tweaked to be playable with touch controls!

Hi there,

If you haven't played my game yet, please give it a try. It's a short, web-playable strategy game. You have to predict the movement and targeting of your enemy to succeed, but are you good enough to outsmart your opponent?

I would be really glad to receive your feedback on how i could improve the game and my game-dev skills in general.

Here's a short gif showing the general gameplay:

• You simply select the position you want to move to and accept it.
• Afterwards you can select a given number of tiles you want to attack.
• The damage and tiles you can attack are affected by your energy, each tile costs one energy and the damage equals the remaining points.

You can reach the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/djinn-duel

The web version is available here: https://corco.itch.io/djinn

>>> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/mf100-hack-the-jam <<<

If you are bored with gamedev or programming, game jams is a thing you need to try. In october 2016 I found my self bored with c++ madness. Suddenly, I found a blog post about great game jam, that will help you to re-think your skills.

Ludum dare is one of the worlds largest and longest running Game Jam events. Every 4 months, people make a game from scratch in a weekend.

Sounds neat right?

I though, I will have a try. My first LD (37), I wrote an RPG-kind of game:

It was my first experience of java game development, I was completely to game jams. Any way, I did a great job, and I was proud of my self, because I did compo first try. Things I noticed:

• Ascii art is great, but doen't fit game jams
• My java framework was buggy
• I did not have any clue, how to make music

But, what I enjoyed a lot, that I got new inspiration from the jam and the positive feedback from people. It was so lovely, to hear great words about your game!

Streaming

Till the LD, there is always a few streamers, that stream their development. When I saw that on LD 37, I thought, that it would be nice to try this. I wrote a small plugin, witch can be found here. Not the best code ever, and the idea is taken from Drunk Devs on twitch.

The plugin it self is a twitch chat bot, that displays all of the users, that had typed something in the chat, on the screen. And every 7-10 minutes happens a random event, that users can vote for.

The truth

My stream got 0 viewers :) Strange, isn't it? Also, my PC was not powerful enough. When the chat bot was active, my PC was lagging so much...

Another way to do this

Next LD (it will be in summer 2017), I will record a time lapse, and post it on youtube. Hope, that it will go better.

Wait, but what about LD 38?

Ah.. it was a complete fail.. First of all, in a few hours before jam, i found pico-8. I thought: "Well, I write a game-emulator, this can fit almost every theme..". I created a prototype console, and got to bed.

When the theme was announced (it was Small World), I though, that this theme is great for writing an emulator.

The first day went alright. But on the second day, I just did not know, what to do.. I mean, I run out of ideas. My game was not playable enough. There was not enough time to start another game.

I just failed.

By the way, game is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/mf100-hack-the-jam

END

Never start a brain storming before LD. Otherwise, you will fail.. Trust me. Next time, I will use lua + love2d for my game. And no ascii art!!

If you are bored with gamedev or programming, game jams is a thing you need to try. In october 2016 I found my self bored with c++ madness. Suddenly, I found a blog post about great game jam, that will help you to re-think your skills.

Ludum dare is one of the worlds largest and longest running Game Jam events. Every 4 months, people make a game from scratch in a weekend.

Sounds neat right?

I though, I will have a try. My first LD (37), I wrote an RPG-kind of game:

It was my first experience of java game development, I was completely to game jams. Any way, I did a great job, and I was proud of my self, because I did compo first try. Things I noticed:

• Ascii art is great, but doen’t fit game jams
• My java framework was buggy
• I did not have any clue, how to make music

But, what I enjoyed a lot, that I got new inspiration from the jam and the positive feedback from people. It was so lovely, to hear great words about your game!

Streaming

Till the LD, there is always a few streamers, that stream their development. When I saw that on LD 37, I thought, that it would be nice to try this. I wrote a small plugin, witch can be found here. Not the best code ever, and the idea is taken from Drunk Devs on twitch.

The plugin it self is a twitch chat bot, that displays all of the users, that had typed something in the chat, on the screen. And every 7-10 minutes happens a random event, that users can vote for.

The truth

My stream got 0 viewers Strange, isn’t it? Also, my PC was not powerful enough. When the chat bot was active, my PC was lagging so much…

Another way to do this

Next LD (it will be in summer 2017), I will record a time lapse, and post it on youtube. Hope, that it will go better.

Wait, but what about LD 38?

Ah.. it was a complete fail.. First of all, in a few hours before jam, i found pico-8. I thought: “Well, I write a game-emulator, this can fit almost every theme..”. I created a prototype console, and got to bed.

When the theme was announced (it was Small World), I though, that this theme is great for writing an emulator.

The first day went alright. But on the second day, I just did not know, what to do.. I mean, I run out of ideas. My game was not playable enough. There was not enough time to start another game.

I just failed.

By the way, game is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/mf100-hack-the-jam

END

Never start a brain storming before LD. Otherwise, you will fail.. Trust me. Next time, I will use lua + love2d for my game. And no ascii art!!

Tags: ASCII, fail, gamedev, java, libgdx

Hi guys !

I present you our game, a little strategic game

this game is not finished but the gameplay /design / music is jugeable here --> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/battle-ham

thanks for your feedback :)

Have Fun !

Hi, I just publish a walkthrough of my game Paper Traveller! See here:

https://vimeo.com/216635130

and the game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/paper-traveller

It's my day off! I'm going to walk the dogs then when I get back I'm reviewing games for an hour or so. Comment your game so I have some to play when I get back.

Make sure they are amazing though, I only want to play amazing games!

LD38 Entry : RoboLand

Fixed some bugs (more to fix)! Added more SFX for objects.

If you are a fan of ‘good old’ adventure games, I think you may enjoy my entry. Simple story, simple graphics, not very long.

Try it if you like.

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/haven-the-small-world

Here is a word cloud created from the 50 comments of feedback on our game so far (the bigger the word, the more frequent that word was used in feedback)!

Got the idea from @egordorichev. If you wanna try this too, this is where I generated it: wordclouds.com

Our game is a half retro visual-novel / half chaotic action-stealth game with an 8-bit / jazz mixed soundtrack, and our team was formed through Reddit :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

I'm really glad that it turned out this way :D I know there's much to improve - for now I'm keeping my game as intended for jam, and slowly working out the kinks for later release (which from what I see ATM will be very different)

:radioactive: * If you want to check it out --> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/slightly-angry-max *

And, of course, I'll definitely check out your project and give feedback (if I haven't already) if you leave feedback for mine :)

/End shameless self-plug, back to browsing all of your awesome games. Cheers!