Just added a web version, was having some problems with it earlier, but now seems fine =) Let me know if you run into any bugs!

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

Hey LD jammers!

I know some of you are keen for a post-LD game jam, so I'm hosting the Movie Game Jam in February, where you make a game based on your favourite movie scene! :clapper: :projector: :sunglasses:

There'll also be ~$200 in game prizes! :video_game:

which everyone will have a random chance to win just by participating! :trophy:

PLUS we've organised YouTubers and streamers to play your entries and give you great feedback!

Join Movie Game Jam ->

You can also join our Discord community, follow MovieGameJam, and form teams on CrowdForge.

Hey guys, I hope your playing and rating is going well. I've seen some really awesome games out there, I really wish I could play them all. I wanted to take some time to write up a post mortem, for posterity. If you want to play the game first here' a shortcut there: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mage-arena

Summary of the game :

This time around I worked on this a game called Mage: Arena. I set out to make an FPS game with Doom-esque sprite based graphics. As for the theme I took a little liberty and interpreted it as "The more you use, the worse it is". So in my game you play as a fire mage who wields intense fire magic that will hurt them if over used. You manage this with a mechanic called "cooling off" in which you cannot sprint or use your magic but your usage level will go down.

What I did differently this time

This time I approached the game with some more knowledge about C# and Unity, as well as experience gained at work over the year. I made more use of the languages features that I wasn't using before; Interfaces, abstract classes, type parameters, delegates and actions, lambda functions, etc. This made designing systems easier as I made a custom input system to assign inputs in the editor and a Finite State Machine controller that used ScriptableObjects and inheretance to define the states(Unity tutorials gave me the idea).I also brought more in Unity engine knowledge. I had been practicing with Blender for a bit and wanted to use that for the sprite animations. It worked out pretty well once I got the hang of it.

Consequences

Working on all of those systems took a lot of time, and while the investment was worth it for the more manageable code, it led to *MANY* features being cut. I wanted way more enemy types and spells, also sounds... sounds would have been nice.

Conclusion

At the end of the day I made a game, and I got some new custom plugins for my future projects. The source code for the game is available on github, I'm currently still working on it to add some enemy types and fix bugs. I think the project has potential so I'm going to continue it for a bit and see where it goes. Anyways, if you read all of this rambling and it helped let me know. Thanks for reading!

If a little behind the scenes of this development interests you, I post updates for these types of things here: https://twitter.com/mactinite

Hi guys!

I'm looking for feedback for my jam game.

The main idea is to repair your drakkar to go conquer the sea. For that you must gather a party on your wild island, but the more men you get the harder it becomes to handle everyone ...

How to play:

-You need to hit 5 time a tree with an axe to cut it down, then you can gather wood by hitting the fallen part.

-Axes are sold by merchants (or you can grab it on a dead man…).

-All vikings can follow you if find how to win them, they will then try to help you in your tasks.

:smile: You can play it here!

This is our Game: Overpopulation

Please try it out and give us Feedback.

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

This time I recorded my jorney on ludum dare 40. I would like to have some feedback on that. Enjoy!

Do not forget to play and rate my game here: Game Page

Making of Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNfTSmiOlr8

If you're on windows want to have some friends over some good old kartracing with HUNDREDS of AI_Cars head over to

itch.io

and have fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT1EdKGpgrg

So I've created a few videos to showcase my game for some added flavour and the traditional Ludum Dare post mortem of course: Short Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ31R0I5cxg

Ludum Dare Post Mortem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHDt1OeoJ-U

11 ratings so far. Hoping to get to 20. Check my game out here: https://sylver.itch.io/razza-the-gold-shark

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/razza-the-gold-shark

Share your thoughts in the comments

Top Down and FPS Shooter

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/shoot-and-die-1

https://youtu.be/WfZdmatxDWs

Play my game & I'll play yours! Just post a link to your game in comments. And please, let me know what you think of "Aaah, Crabs!".

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/aaah-crabs

Play HEADSTUCK now!

part 3 babe!! I already rated all entries from my part 1 and 2 posts and I need more :D Leave your entries in the comments (I prefer Web builds but also download builds are okay), I’ll rate all of them :)

Meanwhile if you’re interested to get drunk while doing parkour please check mine out :) Thanks!

->>> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/dont-get-drunk <<<-

Chitin Conquest is an action shooter where you're tasked with killing off alien insects. Come check it out.

GIF is sped up a bit to show gameplay.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/chitin-conquest

P.S. The aiming button needs to be held, not toggled

Come play and rate my game if you would like!

This is my submission ! It’s about robots, their fruits, and the rodents that steal them. Now with even eviler rats !

I hope you will enjoy it.

PLAY HERE : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/technologis

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/happiness-simulator

Try this, u may get the answer.

Hi there again!

Here is a small play though of my game. It shows all the features added after jam. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/PPnnQeJWS7I

Link for the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/greed-mania

I've been out of town the last few days but I'm ready to get back in the groove! For all of you who submitted your game to me and are waiting, here's my current list (not accepting new submissions, currently).

Here’s a quickly written, crappy, and way too long (sorry..) post mortem for LD40, and some plans for the future.

The jam

Since LD30 I haven’t been feeling very motivated to work on any games. I started working on my codebase maybe a week before the jam, but I didn’t add or rewrite that much. It’s still pretty messy and badly optimized. I was also smart enough to not properly test my new level loading and editor scripts, which was pretty stupid of me.

I live in Sweden, so Ludum Dare always start at 3 am on Saturday. Past jams I’ve gone to bed really early on Friday to get up somewhere around 2:00 and 2:30 am, because I’ve really wanted to be awake when the theme is announced. This time I didn’t go to bed until around 1 am, and decided to sleep the whole night. I woke up at 9 am and checked the theme. I’d gotten the idea of making a golf game when seeing the theme “The more you have, the worse it is” during voting. I felt like traditional mini golf has been done so many times, and thought that I could do disc golf instead to make things a little bit more interesting. I don’t actually know how disc golf works, and I didn’t intend to research it. This is therefore only my take on how it plays. It’s not realistic either, but I think realism is a bit boring though and not very important to me. The player must feel like the game is predictable to some degree, but I think that can be achieved by consistency instead of realism.

The idea is that you walk around a world in a top down perspective, playing disc golf holes scattered across the world. By scoring well enough on certain holes, new areas of the world would unlock. The original idea was a lot bigger than what I soon realized was possible: I had intended there to be enemies and fighting to make the game more dynamic and add some action. I soon realized this was unrealistic to make in the time frame of the jam, so I had to scrap the idea. My first problem came while planning out how the game would play: the level script in my codebase didn’t support diagonal collisions – and I thought making a golf-style game that played on the idea of the ball, or in this case the disc, bouncing off walls would be pretty dull. The first thing I did during the jam was to add 45° diagonal collision support to the level script in my codebase. I have always thought of slopes and diagonals as something super tricky, but after drawing it out on paper I had a good idea of how it would work. It still probably took me an hour or two to code, but it was really worth it.

Coding the disc and the player went well and wasn’t that challenging. Adding the rest of the features didn’t take that much time each, but many small things accumulated to a lot of time spent. My biggest problem during the whole jam was making the disc bounce of edges in the right direction. I spent many hours trying to understand why the disc sometimes didn’t bounce the right way, but eventually I decided drawing this out on paper would be a good idea. I then realized what was wrong and was able to fix it very quickly. It still seems to be a little bit off, but it’s pretty consistent. I think I’m pretty good at planning and drawing out things when I don’t understand, but I can clearly get even better at doing it.

My concentration was really good during this jam if I compare to previous ones. Usually I get tired around lunch on Saturday, and things go pretty slow. This time Saturday just flew by, and I went to bed around 1 am pretty happy with what I had. I still felt behind schedule after spending a lot of time fixing the bouncing problem. Sunday started off nicely, and things were going pretty well. Around lunch I started feeling very exhausted and felt very far behind. The rest of the jam I struggled to keep myself focused. I drew a small world map for the final game in Tiled Editor, but when I was transferring the levels to the game I encountered a few new bugs I hadn’t seen before. Transferring the levels wasn’t fun work either, I just wanted to get my game “done”. The bugs could’ve been fixed pretty easily, but I decided to save what I could and submit early because I felt too tired to continue. I put a “tutorial” hole, my testing level and a start and win room into the game and submitted it.

I can’t say I’m too happy with what I submitted, but it was a fun LD. These 48 hours were as always really worth it.

Plans for the future

This was my 10th Ludum dare, but I can’t say I feel like I know what I’m doing. I’ve developed a bit of a routine for the 48h jam format, but I have such a long way to go. This applies to gamedev in general, not only jams. When I participated in my first Ludum Dare, LD31, I had just recently started learning programming. I used unity, and didn’t even know about public variables yet. Since then I’ve gone a long way. I’m self learning, and my programming knowledge is still very limited. I’m starting too feel like I kind of know what I’m doing and how to go about doing things though. I haven’t really put too much effort into really learning to code properly. I feel fairly secure with lua at this point, but I want to learn properly in the future. I’d also like to learn some other languages, especially lower level languages.

Since LD31 I’ve participated in many jams and worked on a couple of games outside jams. Although I worked on quite a few games outside jams, none of those projects ever made it online for others to play. I always say I might rework my jam games, and on a few occasions I started doing it, but I often lack the motivation. It’s not impossible that I will rework one or two in the future, but I think it’s pretty nice to move onto new projects after LD. Ludum dare always gives me a huge motivation boost, and I’d like to start using that boost more, instead of playing with my submission for a week or two and then throwing it on the death-pile with the rest of my games.

My next step in gamedev is extending my “attention span” for projects. By over scoping my projects I lose interest before I’ve gotten anywhere. Instead of trying to force myself to keep working on too big projects I now want to start to work on shorter and smaller project, and once I’m done with that I can consider working on something a little bit bigger, and a little bit more ambitious.

I’ve told myself countless times to do this kind of thing without too much success, but I intend to succeed this time by setting realistic limits and shorter deadlines deadline, without letting myself crunch too hard. I will have to force myself to sit down and work on projects, because no project is all fun. At the same time it’s really important that I don’t stress about getting stuff done. By working on smaller projects I hope to get more experience with the whole process of making games.

My current goals are: - Keep working on the codebase to have a nice environment to make games - Get a game or two finished and out there - Explore many small ideas and polish them until they feel like finished games - Always work on some game and/or other creative stuff, instead of working super hard every third month and then losing interest - Learn how to set realistic goals - Increase my gamedev "attention span"

We will see how far I can get until LD41. I hope to see you there!

Play it and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/crosstalk

Crosstalk hasn't gotten a ton of attention from people. As of this writing it only has 41 reviews from fellow Ludum Dare participants. However, the reaction to the game is mostly in the range of "totally taken aback" to "very interesting, unique!". So I want to talk a bit about how the game came into being.

I was totally disappointed with the chosen theme for Ludum Dare 40. I was not inspired one bit. I participated in Ludum Dare 40 at a local hosting site, and when the theme was announced, ideas were being tossed around all over the office space, and it was a bit chaotic. So I went for a walk in the cool air of downtown, with headphones on listening to music. I suppose I isolated myself and just let my brain chew on the theme for a while.

Perhaps it was the experience of being in the midst of all the brainstorming from other jam participants, or perhaps it was hearing through my music the rowdy shouting of vague plans from various groups of pre-gamed bar hoppers. Whatever it was, the phrase "cross talk" popped into my head. I liked the concept of "the more noise you have, the worse it is", but I still didn't like the idea of making a game based on that concept.

When I got back from my walk, I resigned myself to developing that nuissance of an idea "cross talk", and began writing things down. I desperately wanted to avoid the obvious interpretation of the theme, which was "the more you progress the more difficult it becomes". Very quickly I focused in on two components of the aesthetic for the game:

1. Subtle, hidden-but-discoverable rules and mechanics. (@lexi described the gameplay with the phrase "hidden dynamics")

2. Visual abstraction.

I don't know why my mind focused on abstraction for this idea, but I can probably take a guess. For the past couple of years, and especially in the past few months I have been studying art history. My research has primarily focused on modern art, in particular DADA, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and most recently pop art. I began studying these artistic periods because I wanted to understand my own artistic approach. Why do I favor Rod Humble's The Marriage or Ian Bogost's A Slow Year or Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia more than say Dark Souls or EVE Online or The Witcher?

I haven't made a lot of games, but I am interested in seeing what expressive capacity gameplay has. So when I see a game expressing an idea through story or through visuals, I am less interested than when I see that idea expressed through a player's interaction with the rules and mechanics of the game.

The approach is called formalism. If games are art, then from where does their artistic expression come? I say it comes from play. I definitely do not want to discount other approaches (indeed, one of my favorite authorities on game design, Anna Anthropy, despises abstract play and formalism).

So while I did not expect to make an abstract game for Ludum Dare 40, that's what happened. I did not want to make a game where the player plays a role which is defined by story or a particular character sprite or a set of items. I did not want to make a game where you use raycasting to disappear sprites that move toward you or where you press a button to use a "weapon" to "hit" "enemies". I did not want to make a game that simulated a real-world activity like shooting or climbing or driving.

I wanted to make a game that caused players to contemplate the the various aspects of the system with which they are interacting. I wanted them to think about color, shape, sound, motion, distance, tranforms, and even the game window itself. How do all those aspects interplay to affect your mind? What kind of impression can that interplay leave? Perhaps this abstract approach, where representation of reality doesn't distract, is a way to measure the expressive capacity of play.

Maybe it's not the best way, but it's what I am thinking at the moment and though I didn't expect to put these ideas into an actual game so soon, Ludum Dare 40 dared me to try.

P.S. Consider Crosstalk a prototype for my next game.

Play it and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/crosstalk