Wow! My first LD has been a blast! I got my 20 ratings in the first day thanks to everybody who came to check out my game. So many people left helpful comments, reported on bugs, or left kind comments, its amazing. I will definitely be participated next time and telling all my friends about this.

My game Tiny Empires was super fun to make and its awesome seeing so many people enjoy it as well. I do plan to release a post LD version the day that the rate period ends. So far about 3 hours in working on it I've squashed all those pesky bugs, if only I did that before the deadline! I'm really excited to implement all these cool features. For those who did play my game and are excited for a post LD version, its coming! AND here is a little screenshot.

For those who have yet to play my game, go give it a try! Also comment your feedback and give me a link to your game, I would love to play some gems that aren't getting the love they deserve.

Thanks!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/tiny-empires

Hey there! I haven't actually posted about this yet but I actually finished another game! This was my 2nd go at Ludum Dare and I am extremely happy about that. If you would like to play my entry that would be amazing! And if you want me to play yours go ahead and leave a link in the comments! Thanks guys for a great weekend :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/berts-adventure

A little headsup: there are still many games that haven't the 20 votes required to be part of the final scores. Play & rate games that are "in danger": https://ldjam.com/games/danger/all

Basic gist

Mizu is a 2D platformer where you use water on your advantage.

You play as a kitchen glass that is able to jump around, but also to take in water and use it to put out fires or to press down heavy swtiches in order to open up new paths. The only problem is that the more water you take in the slower you will move and the shortest you will jump, so you have to be careful and play smart according to the situation. To make matters worse, this game's world is full of nasty pitfalls and mad and violent forks that will try to stop you from reaching your goal.

You can play it right here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mizu

Development

Day 1

Since I live in Europe I didn't learn of the theme until Saturday morning, and to make matters worse I kind of overslept. Around 10:00AM I crept out of bed, checked the theme and got straight into the shower (is a lovely place to think about stuff). Surprisingly I almost immediately came up with the glass full of water concept. I also wanted to do a platformer focused on a simple mechanic and explore it in many scenarios, so I quickly started drawing and planning the scope and needs of the game.

After that I started coding up the basic platforming system and the map parsing classes, in order to be able to easliy create maps with the Tiled editor <3

I use HaxeFlixel and I'm quite used to it by now, but I ran intro some trouble when loading the tilemaps in tmx format, all because Tiled had a new version that doesn't use a simple reference to the image file you are using for your tileset. Anyway, figuring that out chew away some valuable time, but apart from that coding went by smoothly. I finished up around 23:00 and then decided to have dinner, watch a movie and go to bed.

 Day 2

Woke up early and started drawing sprites, tiles and any other kind of graphic resource that I thought was going to be needed. Making sprites for the character was a bit of a pain, considering that I had to replicate any animation in every state the glass was, that is, for every amount of water the player was going to be able to carry I had to make a whole set of animations. Luckily for me I set on a really easy to animate character that only has two feet and a pair of eyes, so everything went faster than expected.

I also implemented a few things that I had left to do, like switches and moving blocks. I also decided that killing enemies wasn't any fun, so I removed that option and kept the game completely based on jumping, avoiding and your puzzle-solving skills, which I think was the right choice.

By 19:00 I started making the levels, which was a lot of fun and actually didn't take long, considering I had everything completely set up and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do on each level. My initial plan of a tutorial level + 5 normal levels changed into 1 tutorial level and 3 normal levels, as I condensed some gameplay ideas into the levels I already had. Luckily no bugs appeared at any point and everything went super smooth, which is something I'm quite proud of (I have a long history of Ludum Dares when I'm fixing a game crashing bug at the last moment...).

By 23:00 the game was uploaded and fully playable online, which left me some time to start checking out the rest of games you people had been making as well.

Conclusion

Overall I'm quite pleased with my entry. I managed to deliver something that is complete, focused and is fully implemented. The mechanics of the game are clear and the game design does its best to showcase them. The game has a full graphic set with animations and also features SFX and music. Also, there weren't many bugs to talk about, and so far the game has received pretty good reviews. It's been a long time since my last attempt at a Ludum Dare (early 2016 I think) and seems like I'm back in my game jam shape :)

The good

• The game explores a single mechanic and tries to use it in as many situations as possible, while keeping the game simple and yet challenging.
• Graphics and music wise the game is complete and is not missing anything.
• I managed to do all this without being stressed or having to cut out on sleep time, overall, I did it all in a day and a half's work.
• Amazingly, people seem to be enjoying my crappy music!

The bad

• The tileset should have been bigger, allowing for more diverse and rich enviroments.
• There should've been indications on how much water do you need to push each button.
• I should have made more levels, but had to condense the ideas I had in fewer levels to keep the game focused.
• Had to deal with some nasty Tiled vs HaxeFlixel crap.
• Windows and Linux versions are missing, but HaxeFlixel seems to be reluctant about the matter since I upgraded to OS X High Sierra.

Anyway, that's all for today.

If you want you can check and rate Mizu right here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mizu

Thanks for reading!

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

Some players noticed that the game would occasionally crash, and were not shy in pointing out the irony of this in a game about glitches and data corruption.

Good news is that this crash has been located and fixed! Some also found a collision bug which has now also been fixed.

Thank you to those who have played and rated Life's a Glitch so far.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/lifes-a-glitch

We got off to a slow start, but then ratings started coming in more rapidly, and this morning we broke the 20 vote mark, with Spacelitch now standing at 23. Now I would still love more ratings/comments, because the feedback is where we learn where people struggle, what we did right, etc. So I'll present a small introduction.

What is Spacelitch?

Spacelitch is a retro shoot-em-up where your bullets may bounce and come back at you. This was our interpretation of the theme; don't button mash, you may regret it.

Who do I play as?

There's a small story driving the game. These are the characters below. You play as only one of them, but I promise you he's the cutest.

I wanted to do voice overs for the dialogue originally, but we simply ran out of time. When it was 2:00am (just an hour before the 3:00am deadline here in Central European Time) I had very little voice left from talking with my team on Discord all day. That said, you mostly play as a space fighter jet. :smile:

Do you rate back?

Yes! Over the coming weeks I will continue to rate games, though I usually hang out among games that need to get their 20, so if your game has 80 ratings I will generally pick one that has 9 next to it first. I try to be objective and thorough in my feedback, which means I take my time playing and writing my comments, so I don't power through a lot of games a night. Now that we have our 20, I will revisit the friendly folks that have rated Spacelitch already and repay the courtesy.

Thanks to everyone for making Ludum Dare such a positive experience! And feel free to post your game in the comments if you'd like me to rate it. :smile:

EDIT: Also, I'm about halfway done sorting through my screenshots for my pixelart/level design timelapse video, so stay tuned!

:droolingface: :droolingface: :drooling_face: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/quantums-rick The game is about collapsed time, that Rick’s is trying to fix it. A simple game, with one click on the screen, the player can restore the normal flow of time or multiply the number of universes in two.

: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]

QUICKLY! com help us fill the world with adorable mythological creatures! Take over the nursery and HATCH THEM EGGS! but be careful! the more you hatch, THE WORS IT GETS!

How long will you survive!? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mobs

https://www.twitch.tv/lerpish just come around

When I had started I couldn't stop so I sketched another 14 potential characters before heading to bed =)

First of all I would like to thank all the people that took the time to play our game. We managed to get our 20 votes and I am really happy the reception for our game has been so positive.

As I did the last 2 days I will be streaming your games over on my Twitch. If anyone would like some live feedback head on over and type !addgame followed by a link to your game and you will automatically be added to the queue. If the queue is full don't worry as I will be opening up slots as I go through the queue this way nobody who has gotten into line has to wait for too long to see their game played.

I look forward to seeing more of the crazy ideas you all have come up with for this jam!

Get ready for real talk (if you can handle it) I am drinking and rating games and I don't care what anyone tells me not to do.... whoa links we need links:

Watch my stream 7:40 - 10pm EST

Thats basically now? YES .... what about If I wanna submit my thing? There we go:

Submit your games

Who's next? OMG i wanna be next....

View the queue

Did this guy make a game? Yeah he did its called PullPals, you can't pick your family but you can pull your pals: Link in the show notes... here:

Play/rate our game PullPals here

The LD40 theme seems to have produced a high number of games that get very stressful, very quickly. The challenges are fun & stress can be a great motivator in a game, but stress overload can wear you out quickly.

Luckily, we had that in mind for our entry, and we've branched out and made a calming tree-drawing game.

Chill Out w/ CalligraTree

Make sure to take a snapshot and show us what your trees look like here or on Twitter! roaringcatgames

so come to my live were we are playing and rating ldjam games

https://www.twitch.tv/lerpish

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/gluttons-heaven

Leave your game in the comments, and I'll rate it if I have time. Thanks in advance.

So I managed to build a macOS version of our game, Desert Express, thanks to a wonderful colleague who lent me her MacBook. Now I just have to figure out how to package it properly.

I have never actually used a Mac for more than a couple of hours, so it took a bit of work to get the game built on this new and alien platform :). Despite what can be laughably called my "engine" using SDL, which abstracted away the platform-specific stuff, some code changes had to be made, since LLVM turned out to be more stringent then other compilers and also due to some runtime issues, which did not occur on other platforms.

Of course, these changes were just to get the game working and no new features were added or anything relating to gameplay or content changed in macOS build. What did happen though, is that in the process of adapting the code for LLVM and macOS a crash, that sometimes happened during the game, was fixed. So, interestingly enough, this version turned out to be more stable then the originals for Linux and Windows.

I'm hesitant to backport the corresponding changes to Windows and Linux though, given that said crash occurred not quite often enough for it to be considered a game-breaking bug, especially given the fact that our game, as it stands in the jam version, for better or worse, features no progression and a very short play cycle (under 1 minute), meaning that even if the game crashes, the player can just restart without losing any significant progress.

Anyway, as for the packaging, I used CMake to generate an .app folder, which is, as far as I understand, one way people distribute macOS applications. I know Unity packages its games' Mac builds like that. What I haven't figured out yet is how to properly bundle dynamic libraries, on which the app depends. I understand that it's not quite as simple as Windows, where you can just put all of the .dll files in the same directory as the executable and you're good to go. So until I work out how to make the .app self-sufficient, it will be necessary for players to install some runtime dependencies via Homebrew before launching the .app on their Mac.

If this is not a big deal for you and you'd like to try Desert Express on your Mac, you can do brew install libvorbis sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_ttf boost, then go to our game's page and check out the newly released macOS build.

In the meantime, if any experienced Mac developers have some advice to give on the subject, it would be much appreciated.

Have fun playing all of the wonderful LD games this month!

If you haven't, feel free to check it out!! I'll play and rate yours too.

13 ratings so far. Only 7 more to go. I am not sure how else to promote my game besides rating and leaving comments myself. So if you have some time and don't mind a little barebones game stop on by and give my game a look-see.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/balloon-baffoon

Good news everyone!

There's now a HTML5 version of TENTAGRABA!

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

The lighting is a bit uglier than the Windows version, and I had to optimize the shadows a bit, but it plays smoothly otherwise. Enjoy!