Hello my fellow alpacas!

If you have the time, please consider giving our game ALPACA AIR ATTACK!!! a look! :upside_down:

And if you're interested in our process, there are also a few posts about that!

• A post mortem, written by our programmer: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/alpaca-air-attack/alpaca-air-attack-post-mortem-tech

• A step-by-step of the aircraft by Daniel: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/alpaca-air-attack/the-construction-of-an-alpaca-aircraft

• And a short gif of my 3D alpaca creation process: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/alpaca-air-attack/the-birth-of-an-alpaca

I was thinking about also doing a step-by-step of my 2D process, but it's just so basic. Would anyone be interested in something like that?

https://youtu.be/6nO1O_MtVWw

Hi people :slight_smile:

Hey, I'm actually making my first blog post on this site! Yes, it turns out I'm actually a person, and yes, I do speak! :sweat_smile:

Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know I'm part of a non-profit game developer group based in Upstate New York that livestreams games every Friday. If you want us to play your LD40 submission, come add it to this form here: https://goo.gl/9KkSqi

Thanks! :grinning:

There were some annoying bugs in our game but they are all gone now!

Check out our Voxel Mob Arena here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/voxel-mob-arena

Full changelog below:

• jumping physics is now improved
• double weapon now synchronize smoothly
• shotgun is shooting faster now
• player speed increased
• player moving faster on diagonal fixed
• world border gap is no more so you won't fall into black limbo! :)
• ammunition pickup sound quality improved
• better weapon convergence - you can now hit mobs with ease!
• weight levels that slows down player are now balanced and picking up heavy weapon is more forgiving
• navmesh rebuilded to fix stupid enemies behaviour and eliminating path blocking in some areas
• you won't have 999 999 999 points at start - sorry!
• weapon shouldn't be able to duplicate when picked up :)
• yellow information text should no longer show up while playing
• weapon damage increased 2x - you can kill mobs with ease now!
• add few weapons and magazines on the map
• active hot bar is now fixed
• weapon slots should not switch to empty slots
• ammunition snould respawn
• enemies should cause less damage
• enemies should push back less
• make more obvoius which weapon is selected on hotbar
• fixed some world tiles gaps so you won't fall into abyss:)

Here are some of the character designs we did in the game. We had a lot of fun create them: very basic template with expressive faces, haircuts and outfits. We also create original outfits such as Freddy Mercury's scene costume, which is very fun seeing in the game (especially when associated with randomly pick skin and haircut).

Play and rate: Bobby's Awful Party: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/bobbys-awful-idea

I'm going to be playing a bunch of games throughout the weekend whenever I take a break from working on my finals for school. Post your games here so I can find them, especially if you don't have enough ratings yet! Here's mine: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/psychoserker

As my family is celebrating the Dutch holiday of Sinterklaas (for all you non-Dutchies: He’s the O.G. Santa Claus) this weekend I decided to create a bonus level for my Ludum Dare game. My aunt will have to play this bonus level to find out where her present has been hidden (though for the sake of keeping the peace within the family, the game also tells you where it is if you die too often).

I’m afraid I haven’t hidden a present in your houses to go with it, but you can still play the level. Instead of collecting all the crates in a single spot, you start with three presents and have to deliver them to three different chimneys. Don’t worry, they’re not as heavy as the regular crates.

And don’t worry about the block of Dutch text at the menu, you don’t need to understand it. If you do, well, I hope you’ll get a chuckle out of it.

A link to the bonus level has been added to the game page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/helicopter-crate-overload

NOTE: This bonus level was made after the Ludum Dare challenge, and should not be taken into consideration for the rating. Also, unlike the full game, the bonus level only has a Windows executable.

Hey there! My name is Robin and I joined Whales and Games during this Ludum Dare to create the Music Composition and the SFX Design for our game, Jazzy Beats.

I mainly do music composition as a hobby on top of being a software engineering university student. For me, my passion are games and their creation.

In this post I’ll be going through the creation process of the music for Jazzy Beats, and in a future post I’ll go through the SFX process instead in more detail.

Materials

The list of materials I used for the music composition this time around was as following: + Laptop with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) installed (Bitwig Studio) + MIDI Controller: M-Audio Keystation Mini 32 + A Pair of Standard Headsets

While preparing for the jam, I had some problems with Cubase, the DAW I wanted to use for the music composition but wasn’t able to. Instead, I used my backup DAW, Bitwig Studio.

Bitwig Studio is a rather new DAW in audio scene, but it has rather some interesting features. One example of these is being able to able to open multiple projects easily at once and switch between them (almost like Chrome tabs). Each plugin (or VST) runs in its own sandbox, meaning that even if the program crashes it doesn’t crash the whole process together with it. Plus, it’s rather intuitive for beginners like me to use.

This was also my first time participating in a game jam with a MIDI controller, and I have no freaking idea why I hadn’t bought one of these before. The MIDI controller I use is a simple one, with only 32 keys, a volume knob and octave buttons. It’s light and quite small, and, as such, it’s perfect to take with me to local game jams, especially when they involve traveling to other places (picture above).

It’s also quite cheap, meaning it’s a perfect choice to get into music composition even if it’s just for something like game jams!

Workflow

Music is not something easy to create, especially during a game jam. The reason behind this is that most music is build around the visuals of something. What happens during most game’s development cycles is that the music is primarily created when the art and the base game mechanics are already in a state where they won’t change much. On the contrary, in game jams, what mostly happens is that you don’t have the time to waste waiting out for the development of the visuals.

What did I do to resolve this issue? After the game idea was settled, I waited for the first sketches of the game, whilst also searching for references. I also asked the game’s programmer and artist for music ideas based on what they’d like their characters to sound like, or asking about the games that inspired it’s visual style. In this case the visuals were highly inspired by two games, Skullgirls and The World Ends With You. I started listening to some of the music in those games. This was the music track I used the most as a reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NKCwjz6e8

After listening to some other tracks, I started setting up the instruments I would like to use, and getting some chord progressions together alongside them. After getting some progressions up I started searching for some non-game soundtracks to see if I could find any interesting ideas in BPM’s, beats, and even in the combination of instruments.

After I got some ideas, I started changing the chord progressions to have more rhythm together with the base/background instruments. The music composition kept constantly changing as new art and gameplay started emerging.

At the end of the first day I had the game’s music created. Even though it was done, during the next days I needed to continue adapting the music to fit the visuals and the sound effects.

To continue making those changes, you really need to find a good workflow that allows you to easily make changes, mix and master the tracks. Always be ready for more changes. The perfect workflow was something that I unfortunately wasn’t able to achieve yet.

You can listen to the game’s soundtrack here on my personal soundcloud account and if you’d like to give the game a try and have a listen to the music compositions on the game itself, give a look at the game over at our game page! Thank you! :whale:

https://youtu.be/MZWc2c9ZhDo

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

But I'm still debating to myself whether or not it should be made. I know it's okay to fix game-breaking bugs after the jam but I'm not sure where zooming out the camera lies. Any thoughts on the ethics of this?

So much suspense! Will Robert be able to find a way out with his loot?

Don't forget to take a look at the project page!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHn1vObTC9o

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/robin-loot!

Day 1

We decided to make a perfectionist nightmare in a shape of UI design simulator and I started things off by making a grid for the UI elememts to snap to. As I soon discovered there were Canvas coords and Worldspace coords that I had to make to work together, but nothing seemed to work and zero information was found on the internet so far. By the time clock finished with last bits of day one I was already panicking. I decided to multiply world coords by random number just to see if they move in the direction I wanted so I went with 40. Hmm... It surely looked closer than I thought it would be. 35?... Too small. 38?... Almost there. So 37... IT WAS PERFECT!

I don’t know how or why, but it worked and I went to the bed.

Day 2

A Ludum Dare friend of mine showed up and asked about our project. He listened carefully about coordinate matters. He worked with such stuff before and agreed that marrying world coordinates and canvas is a huge pain. He also warned me about using OnGUI rendering method because it may drop our frame rate. He told us couple of stories when this method nearly ruined his life.
I told him my method is not going to cost us any FPS nor it will spend eternity to load the game. I told him I multiplied everything by 37 with NGUI. There was a long pause. Grid still did not crash that day.

Day 3

The artist turned to me and asked why all those cute buttons and characters look a bit off when imported to Unity. I told her to try setting Pixels per unit to 370… DRAMMATIC PAUSE… "Perfect match! But.. How do you guess it?"

Timelapse

https://youtu.be/leIY5famrd0

You can check the game here!

I'd like to share some of the tools and tricks I used to put together my LD40 Compo entry, Bearhalla.

https://www.aseprite.org/

I am a lousy pixel artist, but Aesprite provides the utility necessary to make quick animations and push your polish level up just that little bit more. It is perfect for creatures -- pixel symmetry tools let you make interesting shapes quickly, and the frame and layer system in Aesprite lets you create individual parts to move/stretch/skew in order to create motion. For most of us there just isn't time to paint multiple frames of real art, so create a core and use Aesprite's easy peasy interface to put a little bounce and verve into your critters.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21676

If you're making LD projects in Unity, don't write the same input code every time. Rewired and a little bit of your own scripting as a base will make sure that basic input is handled from the get go AND more players out in the world can enjoy your game. If your game is going for unique input styles, this doesn't apply, but if what you're making needs directional motion and button pushing, get up on an input manager and save yourself some time.

At $45 dollars Rewired might not be in your budget, and it might seem extravagant to pick it up for a weekend jam. But if you build games in Unity with any sort of regularity, this is one of the best investments you can make.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/leantween-3595

Super simple method to add some bounce and flavor to your game objects. I use it in the UI to shake and color morph some objects, and I use it in the world to make the powerups fly up off the screen when you grab them. The code is straightforward and often just one line for single effects. Take some time to learn about Easings, I'm so glad I did. http://easings.net/

http://dreamlo.com/

Free leaderboards, easy to implement in Unity. I've built a UI wrapper that I can carry from project to project, because a highscore collection doesn't change at its mechanical core. If your game is score based, Leaderboards drive players to give it one more go and have a little more fun. Track time, progress, or just have an online repository for players to store some information -- what could you do with it?

I wanted to make sure this time around I had weapons that had a lot of punch. In Bearhalla, even the base weapon has the ability to crack and break walls, high rate-of-fire weapons can really tear things up. How does it work? I was loathe to keep track of individual wall hitpoints and the great number of separate objects that would create. I was also unsure about doing track individual damage -- only creating an object if there's an impact, because the bullet spray all over the place would make lots of these impacts.

So I decided that when a player bullet hits a wall, there's a 1 in 5 chance it cracks, or if cracked it becomes broken. The cracking is a texture change, and breaking is converting it to grass. Simple and easy, and something the player really doesn't notice unless they're trying to minecraft through a large wall section. You lose out on the consistency of a wall breaking pattern, but with stuff flying everywhere it's hardly a problem. I added a Shovel powerup that increases the chance of your shots breaking a wall, eventually you can just tear everything apart with single shots.

I was inspired by Oryx's Tiny Dungeon tileset: https://www.oryxdesignlab.com/products/tiny-dungeon-tileset He had this excellent idea for environments where everything was one of two tiles: the solid terrain, or a vertical edge.

Walls check the tile beneath them, and water checks the tile above. If the terrain is the same, then the texture stays the solid color block. If the terrain is different, the tile switches to an edge.

This allows you to create large environments with very little art, and allows you to keep code complexity down. Anyone who's messed with tiles even a little bit knows how deep a rabbit hole it can be if you start considering edge cases, transitions, etc etc. The typical Ludum Dare solution is to just use single tiles, or hand craft the environments. Quick systems like this allow you to create dynamic environments that still have shape and form.

Give it a try!

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

Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts on my tips above, so please comment! And if you feel like it, give the game a spin and let me know what you think.

We finally had a spare minute to smoothen few annoying colliders (so that the player doesn't get stuck anymore) :grin: Now there's nothing left between you and those tiny creatures waiting to be saved! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/where-ma-friends-at

Hooray!

Wow! What an incredible jam. I am absolutely blown away by the work of my teammates, they have a true skill and attention to detail that bring these games to life. I wanted to take some time during this period of rating and sharing to give a little more insight behind the scenes of the artwork & visual storytelling created for this game as well as my workflow with the rest of my team. Please take the time to review their post-mortem blog posts as well here:

Programming: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-will-of-the-wisps/tools-used-for-making-the-will-of-the-wisps

Sound: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-will-of-the-wisps/music-audio-in-the-will-of-the-wisps

And without further adieu, this is my likely far too wordy post-jam art talk.

Color Palette across multiple pieces

I think a big part of what I liked about this game was the final color palette, which turned out looking really great in the final game with Adam’s shadows and lighting effects.

The use of contrasting colors to separate the character from the background elements helps the character to pop out of the artwork, but even in her coloration most elements are very low in intensity. The background elements remained in a very confined spectrum of cool greens and very seldom purples, allowing the character as well as other background creatures to appear more drastic in comparison. I think these colors helped to show that it was a cold night, too, rather than going with vibrant dark greens and deeper browns.

Character Design

I had a lot of fun with character design this time and I thought it turned out well, so I thought I would share some info on what I think the successes were in the design of the main character. One factor is the proportions and hierarchy of elements based on their importance to the character. Everything points to the jar, the focal point of this character’s purpose, from her eyes to the directional lines of her scarf and arms, the jar full of fireflies was her, and our, focus. It’s also the brightest thing in all of the artwork. Her proportions are very heavily exaggerated to focus on her expression and the jar, making the necessary aspects of her character most prominent: she’s scared and/or cold, and she’s focused on filling the jar.

The below is a link to a really useful tool I’ve found for animating/cartooning, and it’s also incredibly informative on lessons that can make you better at designing characters for games, too. There’s a lot of information concerning simplification of form, implying weight, the importance of silhouettes and the use of negative space in a design, and much much more. I still consider myself a novice when it comes to cartooning and I’m slowly trying to grasp animation, but this is one of my favorite free instructional tools: http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-lessons-fundamentals-of.html

I can’t speak on animating her, but I can say that Greg did an awesome job bringing her to life with his animations. Elements were provided to him as separate pieces like a paper doll (arms, legs, feet, head, etc.) then he did all the magic! My recommendation for this type of workflow is to create the artwork like this from the get go, rather than cutting it apart later. It just ends up taking less time.

I won’t spoil our game, but I thought I would talk a little bit about antagonists. I personally feel like 90% of what makes a good game, and story in general, is having an interesting villain. Even for something really small and quick I’ve always been really happy with how our group has handled our concept of a villain(s) when introducing them, from the self conscious bullies in Obsolete to the atypical romance between the main characters in Arm’s Reach. This game is no exception and I’m really happy with the concept we implemented for it’s monster.

Tiles

I’m still very new to creating tiled artwork, and I’m very grateful to have such a capable team to help show me the ropes. My first time making tiles was for our previous game Obsolete, and I’m really happy with my improvements here. The method I used to create tiles in photoshop was taught to me by my team, and it’s very simple. You just create a tile artwork, then to make it a repeatable pattern you use the “offset” filter in photoshop, then clean up the center. I do this a bunch of times until I’m content that it’s smooth (I’m not really happy with the grass tiles in this game, but the tree line and water are pretty nice in my opinion). The simpler you are with the tiles the better they will mesh together seamlessly. This was a challenge with the watercolor texture I wanted to get, since the moment there was a value change it became very apparent when tiled together. In the end it probably would have been better to go with a flat color tile with a few blades of grass here and there, but I hope that’s minor.

Here's a quick & not so great example of the tiling process I used. Create, offset, fill, and tile. This final tile isn't nice though, I'd clean up those edges a lot more. :)

Time management for Illustration

One of the things that I love about LD jams is the challenge in time management, and this was one aspect that I feel went very well for me this time. This is the first jam that I’ve been a part of where I didn’t feel like I was stretched impossibly thin. There wasn’t really a point at which I felt that telltale dread of failure. I was working up until the end but it didn’t feel like a strain, so I thought it might be good to remark on why I think this was the case. I think this is largely due to experience. Understanding your limits and truly knowing what 72 hours of work feels like. Set reachable goals for yourself based on your creative speed and capabilities, and don’t feel defeated if you don’t get everything done. A method that I took advantage of was the reuse of assets where possible (mostly in repeating foliage), and sketching everything out beforehand. By having rough versions of everything before you start lining and coloring, you have a better vision of your finish line and a better understanding of your speed. I think this also helps to keep your style and line widths consistent. This was a particularly useful method on our previous game Vanishing Point, in which I did all of the background artwork. It was an enormous undertaking but by roughly sketching everything beforehand, I could section out my time very evenly for each scene.

Tools

All assets were illustrated using Adobe Photoshop CC 2017. I familiarized myself with the brush panel, color editing tools, and Adjustments. Also gaussian blurs were really useful at least in the title screen to help things look soft and spooky. I keep all of my colors and linework on separate layers and honestly my files are dense and messy as can be.
Kyle T. Webster brushes: soft pencil & watercolor no. 3. I swear by Kyle’s brushes, his sets are hands down the most versatile and realistic set I’ve found. I got them a few years ago, but I have recently found out that he has partnered with Adobe, and his brushes are now provided free to creative cloud users. Find his site here: https://www.kylebrush.com/ This is great news for his career and creative cloud users, but I know this is a bummer to those out there trying to use open source programs.

Previous jam games

Vanishing Point (LD38)(backgrounds, color, & art direction): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/vanishing-point

Arms Reach (LD37) & Obsolete (LD36) http://ludumdare.com/compo/author/adsilcott/

Thank You!!!

Thanks so much for reading, I hope that this post helps other 2D artists out there to keep making games, and I hope some of these tools are useful. Also! If you haven’t yet, please check out and play our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-will-of-the-wisps

Your ratings and feedback are greatly appreciated, thanks!

-Melanie Judd (@inkystache)

Who put those cacti on the road? And what's up with all the chemicals laying around?

Play Guy is late for school now!

Wow, I'm overwhelmed by the positive feedback I've received. I knew time was very limited for me over the weekend, I downscoped accordingly and went for a very minimalistic approach, and - if I'm to believe the reviews - succeeded in fitting the theme and making enough of a game to even be addictive! Thanks all for those kind reactions.

Theme Announcement

The theme is announced at 03:00 in the morning here and I was still fast asleep then. At about 09:00 I heard what the theme was and I ... was stumped for ideas. "The more you have ... ?" Obviously, cramming the level full of more enemies would be 'worse', but it's also too easy. Looting a crypt but getting slower as you got more gold? Probably too common a mechanic too.

I decided to approach it from a different angle: how about a resource you needed, and you wanted more of in order to advance, but that also required a certain upkeep. Like something farm-y, cows giving milk for cash but needing to be milked and fed.

Getting busy

Now that the idea was formed, I was faced with several questions about implementing it: - What programming environment to use? - What genre to create? - What advancement? Just more cows, or stuff that makes your life easier eventually?

The first two questions sort of led to the game I ended up making: By using JavaScript I'd be using something I'm familiar with, and it'd allow me to make a clicker game like Paperclip. Since my time was in short supply over the weekend, this genre allowed me to skip sound and go very easy on the graphics, so killing three birds with one stone here.

What went well

• I was able to create pretty much what I wanted to make.
• I finished a game and entered it!
• making something in JavaScript/HTML made it instantly playable for all.

Even Better If

• I had a second asset planned that I didn't get around to create.
• The original release had some bugs.
• I was hooping to use GameMaker Studio 2, but that didn't really fit with this project.

All things considered, I'm very happy with the results so far. Tell me if you are too!

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

Available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.