Because why not?
All bugs kept. Nothing improved
It may not work though...
Game: HP Bar

I am rating games once again, send me as many as you can! Let's see if I can rate another 100 games over the weekend!

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

So the scrolling background image in the original Jam version of Desert Express occasionally goes all bananas after the player completes the first run.

Any questions? :)

Well, actually, this has nothing to do with whatever substances the train driver may or may not be abusing. It is in fact a bug with the way the tilemap texture in the background is cached by the game. I knew about this bug at the time we published the game, but was foolishly hoping nobody else would find out. The issue reproduced only once or twice on my system and so debugging it, especially hours before the deadline, would've been quite problematic.

Some of the players did in fact experience this bug. (Thank you @Luther for providing the screenshot of the issue.)

The original Windows and Linux versions also have a tiny problem with stability: due to shoddy memory management on my part they sometimes crash when the player clicks somewhere on the screen after loading the next run. In a game entirely controlled by clicking. Whoops?

While I was adapting the game's code for macOS, in order to make the game run properly on that platform, I introduced a workaround, which removed both of these issues, so the macOS port is in fact more stable then the originals.

Since we are not entirely clear on where to draw the line between a game-breaking bug and just-kind-of-a-nuisance bug, to be on the safe side of the rules, we decided not to modify the originally uploaded Win and Linux builds.

Today we uploaded additional bugfix builds for Windows and Linux to itch.io, which include said workaround and are therefore on par with the macOS port in terms of stability. For the sake of consistency, there is also a bugfix build for macOS, but it is currently identical to the original port version (save for the version change in the window title).

All of the builds are identical in terms of mechanics and content. The only difference of bugfix versions is that they're (hopefully) no longer affected by the crash and the graphic glitch mentioned before.

So if you haven't tried Desert Express yet or if it crashed on you last time you did, now might be a good time to give it a go.

Have fun and best of luck with post-LD polish of your games!

5 Minute Reviews Here!

Hi, is there a way to browse only HTML5 games? I'm trying to play and rate/give feedback other games, but the current way of browsing is super painful. Only a few games per page, click on one, and it's only available for Windows or something like that… :( It's taking ages, and it's frustrating.

A few editions ago I used a 3rd party website with a HTML5-only filter, and although it was not very accurate, the experience was better. Is this still working for this edition? What's the URL? Thaaaanks :)

Starting around 7:30pm (EST [-5:00 GMT) going until we run out of games, or run out of steam.

We'll be playing games submitted to our queue first, and picking up games from the itch.io list if we run out. So, submit your game and keep our queue full!

Submit your Game for our Queue Here

We will only be playing games with Web or Mac builds tonight

We will have 2 players, so we'd love to have some 2 player games!

Inspired by the comment thread over at @roaring-cat-games 'CalligraTree' I want Crosstalk reviewers to post screenshots of the art they generate while playing. Perhaps Kazimir Malevich would be proud!

I did not expect the positive reaction I am seeing from most commenters. The praise has really excited me, so I have decided to develop a full game based on this 'prototype'.

Oh, and btw, there is now a native Linux build available.

Thank you all!

I finally edited together all my footage of Enchain's development; my 72 hour weekend is now about 2 min:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTEz4uwC0kA

Also, see the game here: PLAY ENCHAIN (WebGL)

Enjoy!

Hey everybody,

we wanted to present you our entry for this Ludum Dare. It's a side scroller wrapped around a little story about the fox Pajuu and his mother.

Click here to play the game!

Have fun and feel free to leave some feedback. :grin:

we wanted to make a little post about our game... we usually forget!

this was our 6th time participating in ludum dare, and our 5th submitted game.

:-)

:crystal_ball: :sparkles: H3X F0R H1R3

a little magical desktop simulation where you do some freelance hexing to raise funds for the newest gaming console, while trying not to get your computer too cursed in the process.

featuring some of our favorite things: pixel art, fake user interfaces, ENDLESS PUNS, witchcraft, and pastel colors.

this game controls with the mouse! :mousethreebutton:

to view instructions in game, double click the 'WikiHowl' icon on the desktop, and move your mouse near the edge of the screen to scroll through.

click here to check it out, and download for windows & mac!

we are soooooo close to 20 ratings please please PLEASE check out the new updates at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/rush-hour Thanks!

• *This blog post is a repost from my Newgrounds page. Feel free to follow me over there too if you wanna keep an eye on my game shenanigans! https://ninjamuffin99.newgrounds.com/ *

What's up yall, over the weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 40, a good ass game jam. ldjam.com

I made a game called "IN-FAMOUS" and that's a genious title so you should play the game here on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/703072

* _ Intro/Idea conceptions: _ *

This would be my second time doing Ludum Dare, but I ain't no stranger to short weekend game jams. This time around I went solo, I was in talks with Moawling on working with them, but my internet actually went out two weeks ago and I only got it back a few days after Ludum Dare, so I had to go solo heheh. Maybe next time.

Anyways, this Ludum Dare's theme was "The More You Have, The Worse It Is". I actually had to head to the Tim Hortons across the street from me and use the internet there just to check what the theme was since my library closed. Anyways, for the next 6 hours I just brainstormed, and did a small bit of prototyping. But nothing came out of it besides some concepts for a dating sim that definitely would've been called "Too Many GFs".

Here's the concept of what the UI would have been that I made in MS Paint.

It wasn't until I was in bed at midnight when I had the idea to do something related to online fanbases. I then booted up my PC and wrote down some stuff in the text file I had. You can check out all of the ideas I had written down in the txt file here: https://github.com/ninjamuffin99/ld40/blob/master/theme.txt

and also some of the game design stuff I was thinking about for the dating sim idea: https://github.com/ninjamuffin99/ld40/blob/master/DesignIdeas.txt

* _ How the game became the game it is today: _ *

The first day of work, I originally had in mind that, as you get more internet followers, the worse and meaner the comments get. I began by working on a clicker style game, where when you click "create" it increased your followers, and you had a random chance to get a random number of comments. I then built the comment loading system, with scrolling and everything. However I started generating A LOT of comments in a very short amount of time. I started optimizing the code a bit so that the game shows and saves 1800 comments very little performance cost. I actually hacked the core HaxeFlixel code to make a bootleg culling effect, where it didn't call the draw() updates if the object was offscreen, which I am very proud of because it increased performance by over double, with a single line of code:

this.set_visible(this.isOnScreen());

Again, super simple thing, that just doubled the FPS. So I'm proud of this stupid thing, which I'm sure that there's an actual function that might do this built right into HaxeFlixel but ehhh hey guys let me have this moment.

Anyways, I was able to generate a shit ton of comments, which then got me to think about ways to generate all of the comments. I immediately thought of randomly generating the comment.

* _ Randomly generating the comments: _ *

At first I thought of almost completely randomizing the comments, and playing around with sentance structure. But I know shit all about sentance structure and grammar. So I then decided to write some sentances and go from there. I'll break down the comment gen steps.

1. The function first grabs a random name from an Array(basically a list) of names I wrote, and then a last name from another array. Then it puts them together.

2. Then it picks a random number between 0 and 6. These are all of the different kinds of comments, so 7 different types of comments in total. In this breakdown, I'll only go through the process of one type of comment

3. Let's say that random number is 4. That generates a comment, with the base template of * "my (sibling/family) (verbs) this. "* However this sentance is modifiable. For example, instead of that "my" at the beginning, it has a 50% chance to instead add "why does" before it, to modify the sentence to become a question. While generating that bit, it also has a chance to add a "really" before the verb (ex: "why does my brother really hate this?").

4. Since the comment type if 4, it has a random chance to add another sentance relating to it. One example is * "I (guess) that means I (verb) it!!!" * where the guess is a word taken from a list of four that I wrote ("guess", "suppose", "think", "assume"). Let's say it randomly took "suppose", and it took "love" from the verb list. Now the comment reads "why does my brother really hate this? I suppose this means that I love it!!!" Now you already have a picture of some kid, maybe a sister, who does everything the opposite of her brother.

5. It then has a random chance to add either "LMAO", "WTF", or "LOL", and these are still a bit specific to this type of comment.

6. Now it goes through modifiers that'll apply to every type of comment. First is a modifier that'll add a self quote (ex: -firstname lastname currentyear). I really liked this bit to create those kinds of people that make stupid quotes of themselves and its hilarious.

7. then, it has a chance to randomly generate a hashtag. It has a 7% chance of running this bit, so lets go through it. It grabs a hashtag from a list I've written, then adds it to the end of the sentence. It then has a 60% chance to add another random hashtag from the list.

8. The final bit is a random chance to completely erase the sentence, and replace it with a spam message. This has a 1% chance of happening, which is probably way too low to be honest heheheh. Basically the way that works is it writes the comment "FREE GIFTCARD GIVEAWAY" as a reference to youtube spam comments that try to give you free Steam cards or something. then makes a fake url "spam4u.rl" and adds some random numbers and letters after it. Finally, it returns the comment and displays it on a comment block. The final result would look something like this: "Krystin Taylor: why does my brother really hate this? I suppose that means I love it!!! #DEEZNUTS #TRIGGERED #HATERSGONNAHATE"

That's essentially the comment gen process, but this example only used 1/6 comments. Here's a link to the function if you want to see how more comments are generated, sorry about not commenting the code oopsies: https://github.com/ninjamuffin99/ld40/blob/master/source/Comments.hx#L400

I think this kinda semi-hand made style of randomly generating comments works very well. It's almost like how Derek Yu of Spelunky "randomly" made Spelunky levels, by just having hundreds of handmade levels, then randomly modifying them, then stringing them together randomly too.

* _ Final thoughts and misc things: _ *

The final day was essentially polish, title screen, better controls, fades, etc. At this point, I still didn't have any music, so I was browsing through my PC when I found an MP3 of Clair De Lune that I had downloaded when I was learning it on piano. I think it was made in the late 19th century so I'm pretty sure it's public domain by now, if not oops. I think it works really well because when you scroll through the comments, they almost look like piano keys!

The song also adds a seriousness to it, that adds to the comedy a bit, and makes it way more dramatic than it needs to be. I actually wasn't able to upload it by the deadline because of internet difficulties, but I finished the game 3 hours before the deadline. I think the game turned out real good. The last thing I wanna add is that I felt like such a genius when I came up with the title "in-famous" because it refers to both being internet famous, and also infamous, as most of the comments refer to you making shitty, offensive, or weird content and pretty much universally disliked by the internet.

OOF this was a long ass newspost, but here it is yall. I hope you enjoyed reading through some design process and whatnot.

Again, if you haven't played the game it's here on Newgrounds, or if you wanna see the good ass comments again: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/703072

Go rate the game 5 so that I can get a daily award and frontpage this newspost >:) pls pls

Full source code is available on Github: https://github.com/ninjamuffin99/ld40 you can check all of the development history too, and earlier builds and whatnot

And just a small update: Keep an eye on me and PhantomArcade's twitter accounts, pretty soon we'll probably start showing off some stuff for the game we're working on. https://twitter.com/ninja_muffin99 https://twitter.com/PhantomArcade3K

Hello everyone and good morning / good afternoon / good evening! I'm having a blast playing so many games on this ludum dare, some games should even be considered to be worked on in the future.

But however, I'm here now to present our 2D game, we took nearly 3 hours of brainstorming to get to this idea and nearly 50 hours of pure work to get to this result.

All made from scratch we are very proud to present to you guys Tower of Mana:

It is a 2D plataformer with 5 levels and 1 boss, it consist in a lot of die & retry and it requires a lot of your patience! It is a fun little game! You can check our video on youtube if you wish to check the gameplay or use it as a walkthrough (spoiler alert!)

https://youtu.be/azvxTc5z6pA

Check our entry here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/tower-of-mana

Thanks for voting and good luck to everyone :smile: :smile:

Live at Tech Valley Game Space, NY, is let's play and rate Ludum Dare 40 games!

https://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace/

Testing to turn the new post-compo character sketches into vector art and prototyping them with the game backdrop. Each character takes about 15 minutes to sketch and about 1 hour to turn into vector graphics in Illustrator with separate body parts so they can be animated.

If you feel like lending a hand, just 'left click' the snot out of that planet gun.

"Open the Moon Gate" is now available in a WEB version!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/open-the-moon-gate

First of all, come play my game if you haven't!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY!

The Idea

I went to sleep immediately after the theme was announced, lol. I hated the theme! I do like the game I came up with though, so the jokes on me. I was going to quit except I've quit the last few times... I'm tired of quitting! I went through a few related ideas for games, like having a huge inventory you had to sort through as you progressed, but I came to the "collect coins and the stack blocks your path" idea pretty quickly, while hanging Christmas lights outside :)

What went right

• Music -- Listen here! -- I've written so many songs I can spit one out, easy-peasy. The ending is just a low-tempo, low-energy variation on the main theme. Cheater.
• LÖVE & engine -- LÖVE is super easy to use, especially with a few years' experience under my belt. On top of that, I've written a tiny engine that works for me. Prototyping never felt so good.
• SFX -- LabChirp, y'all. It's good. It's so intuitive to me, while still having a ton of control. I spent more than I'll admit on coin_collect.wav, getting it nice and shiny sounding.

What went wrong

Not that much went wrong, surprisingly! - Time Management -- Always a problem with me. I spend a ton of time on stuff that doesn't even make it to the final game. I wanted a whole lot more art and levels and little touches throughout -- I wanted plants and insect! -- and had NO TIME! But I did spend an inordinate amount of time on the programming for the coin stack animation. I wholeheartedly do not! regret it. Look: It's so wobbly and wild! That was worth an hour or two, right? - Startup Time -- Not sure what to call it. But basically, since I don't start projects that often, I'm always rusty on starting a new one, all that require business, and writing the main file. I need to work on a pre-made solution so I can jump right into game making next time!

Conclusion

I love Ludum Dare! I'm proud of the game I made, even if there's a lot of improvements I want to make. And I'm super happy I got out of my losing streak -- the last LD I completed was Ludum Dare 34! Too long! I love the community and I love seeing all the cool games that get made. I'll keep doing Ludum Dare as long as it runs!

Just An Idea

I am a student in university, and have dabbled in web development but video games, primarily developing video games, has always interested me. I first learned of Ludum Dare watching Phil Strahl's postmortem documentary of his LD39 entry “Power, MT”. By the start of LD40 I had played around with a few engines such as Unity and Game Maker Studio and even completed a number of YouTube tutorials. But aside from someone walking me through a few Pong clones, I’ve never actually made a game. Watching Phil go through the process of receiving the theme, brainstorming, hacking and polishing, running out of time and stressing out over the whole ordeal really inspired me. I was excited at the idea of putting myself against a wall, throwing down the gauntlet so to speak, and giving it ago. Fortunately I was just in time for LD40. I made my way over to the site to find that the theme had just been announced the day before. “The more you have, the worse it gets”, for some reason brought coffee to mind. It was probably because I knew I was going to need a lot of it. And with limited time, I didn’t really think it was a good idea to mull around too long. So I just ran with it. I just needed a way in which too much coffee would be a bad thing, near impossible I know. Again, not wanting to waste time, jittery-ness came to mind and I went with it. To be honest, I have no idea how or why I decided upon applying these two concepts with a 2D fighter pilot simulator, but again… NO TIME. So I brewed a pot and got to work.

Art and Illusions

I estimate that about 60% of my first day, I started on Saturday, was spent on visual assets. Not easy to believe looking at the game now but there were two things that slowed me down. One, not really having a visual aesthetic in mind and two, not having any artistic abilities to speak of.

In the end I solved the first by choosing an art style that can only be described as “time saver sheque” . I knew no matter how much effort I put into polish, it wasn’t going to look good and having already spent so much time looking at sample art I figured the simpler the better. And I solved the lack of artistic abilities by finding examples of what I needed and using them as guides. I know looking at the finished product you’re probably thinking there’s an eight year old kid out there who’s art I stole. Again, I stress, ZERO ARTISTIC ABILITIES.

The other 40% of Saturday I spent cramming those assets into Unity and started working on creating the illusion of forward movement. Wrapping my head around the concepts of a 2D endless runner fighter pilot sim, there were two things I knew I would need to figure out how to do. One was rotating the players view as they turned and making it smooth enough not to seem jerky, especially since I would be using flat 2D sprites, and the other would be moving props and enemies forward while scaling their size, giving the appearance of forward motion.

Tilting the Camera

First things first, tilting the camera. I tried what I thought would be a straight forward approach by grabbing the main camera objects transform component and applying incremental value to it’s x rotation. I first tried applying the exact angle I wanted the camera to finally rotate to. I knew it would be a very snappy effect and not exactly what I was looking for but I figured if I could get to the point that I was manipulating the camera’s rotation, creating a sort of “lerping” effect would be no problem. No joy, however. The camera view immediately snapped up side down, rotating along the X axis 180 degrees. Clearly I did not understand Unity’s transform component. Luckily, I found a great example in the Unity API Documentation, a site I have, over the course of this jam, fallen in love with.

float maxAnle = 30.0f;
float smoothing = 2.0f;
float angle = input * -maxAngle ;
Quaternion targetRotation = Quaternion.Euler(0, 0, angle);
transform.rotation = Quaternion.Slerp(transform.rotaion, targetRotation. Time.deltaTime * smoothing);

Forward Motion

With that, I was done for the day. I picked back up on Sunday, refocusing on the movement problem. With a smooth tilt effect in place, I just needed some props to move towards the player. I put together a mountain sprite I deemed “usable” and tried to reason how I might place it in the game space and how I was going to move it in a convincing way. At first, being 2D, I thought I was going to need to scale the sprite as it got closer to the player’s view. But I quickly realized that, just as parallax scrolling is made simple by using Unity’s 3D perspective camera, sprite scaling work’s just as easily. So I simply placed my “usable” mountain sprite in front of the main camera’s view and started reducing it’s position along the Z axis. I was really surprised at how easy the effect was to complete. I really thought I would have to do more than that but no. I did have to be mindful of drawing layers however. When I first placed the mountain prop on the screen I put it’s starting position well past the sky back drop and it was still visible. Having a background, mid-ground and with the moving props serving as the foreground, figuring out a good ordering system for Unity’s rendering engine was key. Fortunately you only need to change one simple value in the editor so experimenting and finding out what works took no time at all.

Wrapping Up Sunday, Running Out Of Time

With a perfectly adequate move effect in place it was time to throw Unity colliders on everything and start working on the game play. So for the rest of Sunday I did just that. I placed the enemy planes in the game world and gave them basically the same code as the mountain props with a slight adjustment that makes them track the player. Easy-peezey. This is when I started regretting having spent so much time messing with art assets. It was late and I was resigned to calling it a day having only implemented the bare bones of the game play. I still had a lot to work out, and a lot of effects I thought would be crucial to explain the theme, none of which I was sure how to do. Worst of all, I had school in the morning and I would be stuck in class all day. I knew I wouldn’t have a chance to touch the game again. At least not by the submission dead line. I had a great time up to that point and aside from following along with YouTube tutorial’s it was the first time I had ever really engaged in what someone might call “game development”. I couldn’t believe how great it felt making those crappy art assets come to life. All I really wanted to do was stay home and work on the game. But priorities...

So Monday morning, submission day, I set out for school. All I could think about was how close I had come to actually making a game and how let down I felt. 8 hours to go. I would spend two in the car, one on the way to school and another on the way back and at least 4 hours of classes. Bummed, I stopped by the gas station near my place. I always stop and buy a sugar free Monster for the trip into school. But when I parked the car I started thinking it all over in my head. Thinking about what I really wanted. So... I bought two Monsters instead and headed back home. Crappy art assets and all, I was going to finish this game.

Priorities

Really I didn’t think there was too much to do before I could call this thing a game in the most basic since. One thing I knew I needed was an effect that simulated the pilot falling a sleep. I figure placing an object in front of the main camera and then controlling it’s alpha over time, starting invisible and having it fade to black, would work. I used a quad and applied a black mesh to it. I just didn’t know exactly how to control the alpha component of a mesh renderer in Unity.

Here’s what I wound up using in the game:

float alphaValue += fadeSpeed * Time.deltaTime;
GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().material.color = new Color(0, 0, 0, alphaValue);

As simple as I thought, only thing was… it didn’t work. When I started the game the screen was completely black. The alpha value clearly was not being changed. After a short visit to the Internet I learned about Unity’s rendering modes. On any given material you can have it’s rendering mode set to either opaque (the default), cutout, fade and finally transparent (the one it turns out I needed).

With that set I had my fade effect officially representing our pilot dosing off. After hooking up a quick mechanic to ward of this sleepy effect, I had the basic concept. Not balanced or polished, but it was there. Now, using a periodic shot of coffee, the player would be able keep the pilot awake a little while longer. It wasn’t exactly right but the tools were there to play with.

Inching Across the Finish Line

After playing around with some other assets, trying to make a few more mountains to dodge, I realized the dead line was coming quick. I simply wasn’t going to have enough time for a lot of the things I wanted to implement and balance out. So I didn’t have a fail state and I didn’t have a win sate. I needed something quick. I gave the player the old standard 3 lives and figured counting his/her kills would suffice as a sort of score. I also thought maybe a timer would be nice? Probably would have been better to use some kind of distance counter, seeing how far you can go on a single run. But as it stands, the user interface tutorial I watched on YouTube, having never implemented a UI before, had a timer in it so that’s what I went with. And with that, I had twenty minutes until the submission hour.
… And I had no sound.

I was kind of panicked about this and I really debated weather or not I should even try. Just like the UI, I had never messed around with Unity’s audio tools before so I knew I was going in blind. I decided to watch a few tutorials to see what I was in for. Thankfully, it was a very straight forward process. And actually the part that took the most time was sifting through on line audio libraries for free licensed clips that would work. I’m sure it seems this way for everyone on the jam, but I think I pressed play on my final test run the moment the jam clock rolled over to zero.

In Conclusion

I learned a lot on this jam. I suppose that’s the point. I also suppose that’s part of the challenge. Not just how much of a game you can make but how much can you learn about making the game. Again, a lot. So much that I was afraid I might loose some of those lessons. I decided to write this post so I might have an excuse to recall and document some of those lessons. The weekend of the jam was one of the best I’ve had. As relieved as I was to have finished, I was just as sad that it was over. I suppose posting this is also a way, selfishly, to drag that feeling out. So until April, this will have to do.

Thanks for playing.

I figured out the issue with my game. It was an ID10T error.

Also, I now have a playable version online so you do not have to download it. WOOT.

Check it out here: https://b34k3rm33p.itch.io/balloon-baffoon

First of all, thanks for all the feedback we received !

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX0Zy2g-JZA

We worked all day fixing little details, such as : - Gravity : More pleasant to play and watch, and allowing food to bounce on the ground, making it easier to feed the opponent's dragon - Scores will remain longer on the screen, so now you have time to make fun of your buddy - REAL KEYBOARD CONTROLS ! Gamepad inputs changed a little too, now there's only one key/button to rotate your wizard

:exclamation: We changed how the game launches to avoid certain problems, so if your game does not launch in fullscreen use Alt + Enter

:poultry_leg: Thanks again for all your support, we should be ready to start working on post-LD build with new features, I can't wait !

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