this is NOT a game!

this is NOT a game!

this is NOT a game!

• this
• is
• NOT
• a
• game!

BUT IT IS!

(click there ^^ )

For our Ludum Dare idea we needed two models minimum :

An Alpaca and an airplane.

@juliaw sculpted the most adorable lil' alpaca (she showed her progress here )

so I went and modeled the airplane.

First day was modeling, I got the rough shape of the alpaca super early so I could shape the seat perfectly for it's woolen bottom.

After this I added larger details and 'all the important parts' except those I forgot til I came to wrap the model up

UVing sadly took waaay too long, but it wasn't frustrating, it was actually kinda relaxing and we talked a lot during that phase and got lots of other stuff done as well.

Baking and preparing the model for baking took some time as well, cause I rarely did it before, but my team helped me and it worked out nicely. I could go on with texturing and after I put down all the bigger colors I just played around with materials inside substance and made the color variations afterwards.

I rendered this one with I Ray inside Substance and was happy to find the clouded sky as an environment dome.

Inside of Unreal the model looked incredibly shiny and glossy, but we liked it so it stayed that way.

Oh, and here's the Sketchfab viewer, if you wanna take a look at the model

https://sketchfab.com/models/8afb7a61bfe245c889b53df6ca109fe1

Thanks for reading, hope you guys had as much fun and learned a lot, like I did this jam!

Cheers to @hati and @juliaw , my alpaca team, and the amazing team of Axetreme Armadillo , who jammed with us <3

Another Ludum Dare, and another game submitted… that makes six for me, but this LD was one that I will remember for a long time. So many highs and lows. Of course, we should begin at the beginning, but I will begin before the beginning if that makes sense.

The Week Prior To The Dare

I saw that the theme “The More You Have, the Worse It Gets” was listed in Round 3 of Theme Selection. Where did I see that before… oh, yes, that was mine! I suggested that! I entered that one and one other, and was surprised to see it make it that far, but there was no way it was going to make the finals, right?

It made the finals, but no way was it going to win, right? When I saw the theme announced I was floored! I felt pride, and nervousness because even though I suggested the theme, I have absolutely no idea what game to make.

Friday Evening

After about an hour working through some ideas in my head, I decided on a game where ants try to steal your food. My original thought was you go to a supermarket to bring food to your house and the ants steal it from there. I put together a basic game screen, some player and insect AI code, and called it a night at 02:00 Saturday morning.

Saturday’s Sinking Feeling

Not much sleep… I got up around 05:30 Saturday morning, got a coffee, and hit the computer. I decided that the house and supermarket concept was not good, and decided on a picnic theme… seems to make more sense. I fired up Photoshop and created a picnic blanket, ants, food plates, and a player.

Animation and gameplay was working, but I was just not happy with the game… it just didn’t seem fun to play. Also, for some reason, I spent way too long trying to get joystick movement and firing to work properly, so I am now far behind where I wanted to be at this point. It’s now late in the afternoon, and I have very basic game that is not fun to play. The combination of feeling incredibly tired and frustrated was a major demotivation factor. Somewhere around 17:00 Saturday afternoon, it hit me hard. I was so close to just shutting down Unity, grabbing a beer, and watching some television. It was so hard to motivate myself to continue, but I know that if I decided to bail out, I would feel even worse. I would rather submit a low rated game than give up and not submit anything. I took a bit of a break to regroup, and sat back down and worked on it for another 5 hours that evening hoping to put something together that was playable.

Sunday’s Revelation

I woke up Sunday still very discouraged. I sat down to start and all of a sudden, I was hit with a wave of creativity.

“A health meter! Yes!”

“Power-ups that attract the ants! Right!”

“Anthills! Highlights! A better playfield! Incredibly horrible music!”

I spent the rest of Sunday implementing these features, and after every one that I finished, I saw that the game was becoming more and more fun.

Submission time. It’s later than I like to do this (about 2 hours to the end), and of course Unity is giving me build errors! I rebuild and import everything and get it out with less than one hour to spare.

Development Details

I used Photoshop and Paint.Net to create the graphics. I am not a good artist, but I tried to create something that I felt was at least usable. The animation of the ants is very basic, but I think they work in this situation. I swap back and forth between two sprites. For the player, I created a few levels (head, body, and arm) and I animated each one through three arm positions. If you look closely, you will see a bit of a head bob effect when running. I created the bug zapper and bug bomb using Photoshop and placed a particle object behind it. For the bomb, I used a smoke effect, and for the bug zapper, the kept the particles tight for a glow effect.

For sounds and music, I used bfxr and Otomata. Since I lost a lot of time before, I really didn't have time to create and tweak the sounds and music much, so when I found something that worked, I used it. Given more time, I think I would have replaced some of that. I’ve been told that the music is a bit on the crazy side, and I am ok with that, since I wanted the music to reflect a high level of stress as the ants attack.

There are a couple of things that need some improvement. Some of the ant AI could be tweaked (although I do like the intensity). For joystick mode, I used 8 directional firing, but I think a full 360 degree fire range would be better.

Conclusion

It is incredibly difficult to continue working on a game you feel is not up to your standard, but once Sunday arrived, and I had a decent amount of rest, things started moving in the positive direction. I really enjoy ANTagonist in its current form, and I hope you do too. It definitely did not start out that way, and Sunday was the turning point for me. As always, I am considering continuing development, but I want to give myself a bit of time before I decide either way. I guess it depends on my final rating and user comments.

My LD40 Entry, ANTagonist

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/antagonist

ANTagonist Gameplay https://youtu.be/y7V9jVwZcec

ANTagonist Timelapse Video https://youtu.be/ViuRZ_cx4aI

And can no one get the coveted 50K achievement?

Play Now

Play Now

I made video of my LD game "S- The Game" I just wanted to show it to you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lyquhrTPCg

entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/s-the-game

Like, i want to add a button to skip cut scenes. Would that be fine or frowned upon?

Post your games for me to check out here :D

My game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/a-spark-of-light

Have you always wanted to be a conductor? Can you recognize up to 7 different instruments in one song? Find out how good your hearing is, try out Interview at Cacophony.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/ldjam-40-music-puzzle-game-name-pending

Are you skilled enough to beat @azuredraco 's highscore of 169 points?
Play now!

Hi jammers !

We'd like to thank all of you for your great feedbacks, it means a lot for us !

We have uploaded a version balancing a few things based on your feedbacks, but we have to wait for the end of game's rating if we want to make deeper adjustments, like animating our characters, improving the way of you control your character or adding the finale note of polish.

Reacting at your comments, in a few days we will upload a quick post mortem to explain our choices and tell you some of our dilemmas about the ingame text boxes or the character's controls. We would be very interested to know your opinions after that and brainstorming with you about what the future of this game would be.

See you soon jammers !

You can check the new build on our itch.io.

Bug fixes :

• Sound mix : some of you complains about the ghost's scream, we've made some adjustments to preserve your ear ;) also, some balancing with the dynamic of music and sound.
• Escape on retry : you can now quit the game by pressing "Escape" when your are dead, and not only at the end. We are not monsters... :)

Edit :

• Sound duplicated : our SoundManager was duplicating itself when the game is restarted, interesting canon but not intended :)

There's so many games out here and it's hard to find good ones. Previously I woud post collections of the best games out there, but I haven't found enough yet. Also didn't see others do this yet.

So what are the best games you've played? Don't just post your game but show me some others. I'm curious what's out there. I'm into puzzle games, exploration, adventure or really anything with unusual quirky mechanics.

:point_right: Now shoot!

Hey! So I know there are 20 days but I am still promoting my game. I think you should give it a try, some people have found it really addictive playing it for a couple hours. Anyway enjoy the game and I can't wait to play all yours, leave your game in the comments and I will play them!

A Social Life: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/a-social-life

I captured my display every 30 seconds for basically the entire jam (at least, the parts my computer was on for). This only captures one of my monitors, so you're not seeing everything but... most things.

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

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/speed-date-shuffle

You can play my game for this edition of LD here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/crapbag You should be able to finish it in less than 5 minutes, so give it a try.

First time taking part in LD, would appreciate it if you gave our game a go :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/deck-the-hauls

How to add gif to post? I tried link - they don't embed, upload - nothing happens.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/space-defender

It's shame that we are limited with gif sizes to 4MB - what tools do you guys use to create animated GIFs to promote your game?

Check out Voxel Mob Arena here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/voxel-mob-arena

Made some post jam bug fixes to my jam game, Scavenger. I realised the changes I made at 1am before the deadline made it impossible to actually finish the hardcore difficulty mode... lesson learnt - don't make changes to your enemies health an hour before the submission deadline if you can help it!

No new features added so I think this change follows the rules.

I'd love some feedback so it would be great if some folks could check the game out - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/scavenger

The game where you play for Rick Sanchez from RICK AND MORTY!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/quantums-rick

What you know about hard games? You think you are a strong player? :D :D :D Play in web our small game and demonstrate that you are not pussy :)

:yum: :yum: :yum: [Thanks to all that you write us a lot of comments and put an excellent rating! we love you all, friends*] [If you have not played yet - enjoy this little game and comment a little. All our team will be find your game and will appreciate it]