Also here are some more screen shots. I'll be doing a post mortem video some time in the future was just busy with school :D

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/$53270

Thanks everyone for all your super helpful comments so far - very cool that so many people say that it could make a good Nintendo Switch game. Now you've got us thinking....

Please rate and share your feedback, and maybe this will have a longer life! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/vacuum-platformer

Hey, in case you've seen our teen-idol-meets-Metal-Gear mashup but thought to yourself "man, it's 2017 and nobody's got time for downloading files", we've got just the thing for you. Introducing:

Lil' Justin's Fame Escape WebGL edition!

Now you can run away from your bloodthirsty fans from the comfort of your web browser! (oh yeah!) And if those words are not enough to sway your heart, here's a small sample of what our game has to offer:

After some rest and some time, playing other jam games, it was finally time to garther feedback and fix bugs. And there it is, Lava Cave 1.2. Made goal and mechanics A LOT clearer, also added some benefits for amassing artifacts. Made some hints on UI and added music(we opted out of audio rating, because it's post end time). A few bugs was fixed.

PLAY GAME: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/lava-cave

Bonus: funny CHAD animation bug.

Our game "To the hell and back" has received some reviews warnings about major bugs that affected the game and made it impossible to advance to the next level. These have been solved and now is fully functional. Check it out now!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/to-the-hell-and-back

Behold the birth of the ALPACA:

Software used: ZBrush, Blender, Substance Painter & Photoshop

If you want to know how our alpacas spend their time, have a look at our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/alpaca-air-attack :upside_down:

Here is Second Dimension's entry for Ludum Dare 40. It's called Cherry Creek and the aim is to divert the river so all the cherry trees get water.

If you would like to give it a go you can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/cherry-creek

As you can see, the more river tiles there are, that harder the game gets.

I really enjoyed having participated with you in this LD40, I hope that you went through the same experience that I, enrichment. " Your Mission: to survive the untill the time is over, don’t let the toxicity meter grows get to 100%. Collect the cats’ shit to avoid your death. When collecting it, you have a chance to win a cookie, give it to the cats so they stop shitting all over the map.^

Commands (Keyboard and Mouse):

Movement: (A, W, S, D) Collect the shit and give cookies (J or Left Mouse Button) Has joystick support (if you want to) PS.: Remember… The more shit spreaded on the map, the sooner you’ll lose. Have fun!

:poop:

HTML5 (web) http://mateusculpo.esy.es/ld40/index.html"

Hey everyone! We would like to give you a challenge!

Create the biggest ice cream in Ice Dream!

Are you with us? :) The person who will handle to create the biggest one will show up in the Ice Dream Hall of Fame! Join our challange and have a lot of fun! :)

How to join the challange:

• Download and run Ice Dream
• Create the biggest ice cream in the world
• Make a screenshot of it
• Post it here in the comments

Here's our biggest achievement so far: 47 ice rags! Can you do better? :)

That 4mb limit is no joke, but I finally found a way, enjoy these gifs of Captain Capsize, and be sure to check out the game itself!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/captain-capsize

I am really proud that we made ourselves to record few lines and add an extra level of commitment to the game. Hope you'll like it :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/saving-crying-bryan

Finally after some much needed sleep I'm ready to rate and play some games. But before I do that let me tell you about my little entry into the jam. The game doesn't really have a title, but it is listed as "Diving For Ludum". I created the game with my friend Joe who had never made a game before nor entered into anything as awesome as LD. I myself have survived a hand full of ludum jams (first was LD22), I use the momentum from the jam to rejuvenate my motivation for my longer active projects and LD40 has done just that, what a great jam, well done all those that managed to finish.

In Diving for Ludum you must collect booty from the ocean and deposit your stash on the boat to score points. The more booty you have the slower you move, avoid sea beast, ride bubble streams and risk it all for the big rewards.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/diving-for-ludum

Gamepad Recommended. Windows version is better than Web.

Hi all. Wanna try a little runner with Santa Claus? Got the game you want : check it out! :wink:

Be sure to read notes before playing, some people didn't notice the snow circle correspond to the position of the input. Good luck!

:warning: This game isn't child friendly

It’s cool to have many kids. But the more babies you have to take care of, the more problematic it gets. Try your parenting skills and see how many babies can you take care of! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-more-you-baby

Hi everyone! I decided that I would write a post about the development of my entry for LD-40: Squares and Hexes!

It has been quite the journey from when I started the game to when I published it, and I feel that I've improved a lot as a developer as a result. I'm a game development student, and I've only been developing for 3 months, and this Jam has been such an amazing learning exercise, from which I've produced a game I really enjoy.

Before I get into the post, you can play my Ludum Dare entry in your browser, here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/space-hexes. (The name on the link is a little off, I titled it wrong when I submitted it at 1AM, whoops)

Summary:

Squares and Hexes is a reflex-based precision game, in which you must navigate 10 levels without hitting any hazards, as doing so would cause your death, and you must then restart the section of that level. However, there are also 3 hexagons you can collect throughout the levels, which will boost both your final score and your speed, increasing the risk and the reward.

However, the game wasn't always like this, and through a bunch of small tweaks, I managed to produce a game infinitely more fun and polished than what I had initially planned.

Day 1 - Getting a Foundation:

Due to living in the UK, I had a bit of a late start to the jam. The theme was announced at 2AM on the Saturday morning, and I didn't stay up for the announcement. However, I was fortunate enough to be able to have some idea of what I wanted to do as soon as I read the theme. With 'The more you have, the worse it gets' in mind, my first thought was some kind of platformer, in which you had to collect a certain amount of an item to progress to the next level, but the more of these you got, the faster you went, making you more likely to hit hazards and die, subsequently making it harder.

The idea seemed pretty good, it was simple to do in 48 hours, I could do it despite having only been developing for 3 months as a student, and it was flexible enough to change things if I felt it was necessary. With a very simple design idea in mind, I jumped straight into Unity, and got working. I quickly got a prototype up and running with just 2 scripts, and one level. That prototype looked like this:

It had some promise, but there were a few issues. The level required you to collect everything in one swoop, without dying, in order to have a decent chance of completing the level. You would easily collect the first hexagon, and maybe you'd get the second, but getting the third was too much of a jump in difficulty, as you'd die way more often than you should, through no fault of your own. And, honestly, it just didn't feel fun. Something about the way the player navigated the level was just, off, and I needed to fix that before doing anything new.

My solution was to make the player only do one thing: jump. The player would then move automatically, and would only have to worry about when to jump, which I found preferable when testing, as you didn't then get the chance to correct any mistakes mid-air, you had to live with your decision. This was the result:

It was certainly more fun, but the same issue as before reared it's ugly head. Once you had all but on of the hexagons, you just couldn't get the third. It was an issue with the speed at which you went, and the placement of the hazards in the level. But no matter how much I changed values, no matter how much I changed the hazard placements, nothing worked. It'd feel too sluggish, or perhaps the level wouldn't be challenging enough.

It was at this point that I started to worry. My idea wasn't working, I had 34 hours left and still hadn't sorted my basic mechanics or made one proper level, and I was out of ideas. So I do what I usually do: I played some games for an hour,. and see what ideas I'd get from playing other games. One of those games was Super Mario Run, which, a lot like my game, only really has the player controlling when to jump. It was when playing that that I realized that I shouldn't have the open ended level format I currently used, but a linear series of levels which the player has to complete. With that in mind, I then decided that I should scrap the light platforming in favor of more reflex-based precision gameplay (which it had already become in my second prototype).

And so, I took my scripts, and made this really simple level, which shows all of the basic mechanics in one simple level:

It was quick, simple, and right there showed that I had something good. that right there was my baseline, and using just those simple components that made this level, I went and made a total of 5. They were fun, and served as a good introduction that everything the game would involve. And it wasn't just me that thought that, I had people play that demo, and they liked it, their only complaint was the lack of visual appeal, which I was planning to fix right away.

Initially, I had it in my mind that I'd do some kind of dungeon for the backdrop of the core gameplay, using a pixel art style for the visuals. But, by the time I had a playable prototype, I was having second thoughts about that style. I only had a few hours of the first day left, and I knew that I'd not have much time to work on it the next day due to other plans. I decided that a simpler style with more work on certain bits of polish such as particle effects and camera shake would be ideal.

And so, with that, I chose a few shades of red for the level colours, and used oranges and yellows for the player and the hexagons. I made a few simple particle effects for certain occasions, and I scripted in camera shake upon death. It was starting to get more polished, and was far more appealing. Only an hour later, I had this:

That was so much better, and from there, I had a solid baseline for my game, that if all else failed, I could at least have something worthwhile to show for my efforts. And so marked the end of my first day, and I was left certain that I could get it finished the next day.

Day 2 - Trying to get it Done:

With 14 hours left before I wanted my game submitted, I knew exactly what needed doing for the day: UI, menu, and the score screen. If I could get all of that done, I had completed my goal of submitting the game for the Compo. But, the 5 levels I had didn't feel like enough. The theme was 'The more you have, the worse it gets', and yet I had only one of the collectible items in all of my levels. And so began the process of getting an extra 5 levels made. I like to think that I'm somewhat efficient at making levels, however, with the type of game I was developing, levels take so much longer to make. You have to ensure that it's challenging yet possible, and you have do that for every speed at which you're going to account for if players managed to avoid picking up the hexagons. It's slow, and took all of my development time on the second day.

I managed, but with how little time I had that day for actual development, it was all I managed to get finalized. I did start on the menu, but it was nowhere near polished enough to be in a released version. And with this, I ran out of time. I had 10 finished levels, but no menu, no score, no sound, no UI, and it just simply wasn't at a good enough level to submit for the Compo. Feeling just a little bit defeated, I closed down Unity, and decided that I'd submit the game for the Jam when I finish it the following day.

Day 3 - Finishing What I Started:

I was determined to get this thing finished by the deadline for the Jam, there were enough levels, they were fun, I just had to get a few essential features in and polished. Form there I could do whatever else I wanted/needed to afterwards. I got to work as soon as possible, and immediately finished off my main menu, integrated a scoring system, and got UI working. It only 2 hours, and I had a polished result that I was happy with. This meant that I could then focus on whatever else I wanted to add, which for me was a slight change in the look of the game. All I wanted to do was produce a slight outline around the floors and hazards, making them a little more noticeable and appealing. I also wanted to change the shape of the player. Everything was a square in the game apart from the hexagons, and so I decided to make the player a hexagon too. It was certainly an improvement, and slightly separated the game from other games similar to this one. Add in a few more particle effects to the background for bonus style, and I have a much better looking game, which looked a little like this:

The final thing was to add sound. Creating sound effects for jumping, landing, and dying was easy enough, the hard part came from making the music. I'm not a musician, not even close. But I wasn't going to settle for a game with no music, as I personally really dislike it when a game lacks this. I tried various resources for making any kind of music, from online chiptune synths to procedural music generation with a bunch of effects layered on top, I just couldn't get it done.I honestly tried for hours to do this, and nothing was working, and so as a last resort, I found some suitable royalty free music from incompitech.com, and that was that.

With my game finished, and 3 hours to go until the final deadline, I got to work on building the game and getting it live on itch.io, and submitted for the Jam. And 1 hour before the deadline, I was done, my game submitted and playable in-browser, happy with the result.

Conclusion:

Overall, I must say that I've surprised myself with how much I managed to get done in such a short amount of time, and the degree of quality I've managed to produce that content at. I don't really see myself developing the game further, as I'd rather pursue other projects that are new and fresh, but I must say that this has been a great way for me to progress as a developer, and the feedback has been just amazing.

Thanks for playing my game, and thanks for reading this post.

Now, since I've finished that, I'm going to go play the countless amazing games I've seen over the past two days!

[Deleted]

Only one rating remaining !

Please check it out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/all-you-can-loot-cavern

We have received a lot of good reviews about the art and sound of our game, although we didn't made any of it ourselves. So we wanted to have the courtesy of formally thanking the artists behind it.

Art

All art in the game including fonts and UI comes from Kenney, so a special thanks to him. You can find his assets on his website: https://kenney.nl/

Sound

Sound was a lot more varied but we ended up finding all that we needed, we did a little editing of some of the tracks and we leveled all the volumes to bring them all into balance. Here is a list of the sound assets we are using, We want to thank all of the sound authors for the.m:

• Happy Pirate Accordion by alphatone
• Pirate Ship at Bay by CGEffex
• Faster version of Happy Pirate Accordion by Timbre
• Cannonball hitting ship by EFlexTheSoundDesigner
• Coin clatter 4 by FenrirFangs
• Coins - 01 by D W
• UI Series: Hollow pop by alph4tg
• The masterpiece Arr! by bart

Enjoy Greedy Merchants if you haven't done so yet.

--Click this to get to the game page--

https://youtu.be/tjCWP7TOsW8

Hi everybody! I'm working on a post-compo version of the game, with some visual tweaks and bugs corrected. If you are interested, you'll find the new version in the downloads section of the game's Itch.io page (the web version is still the original compo version so there's no confusion).

If you haven't played the game, please, come in!

Yottaman says hi to everyone, and says he'll do his best to avoid burning the whole Americas!

Hello, gamers!

I want to share today with you my excitement over our first Ludum Dare as well as our first game ever! Boy, was it a ride. I am so thankful for being able to participate. If you would like to play our game about squares (because we love squares, squares are awesome) then check it out in the link below!

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/inky-pinky-square

Play as Square and his friends Pinky and Inky in a game that will take you back in time! Cute pixel graphics, 8bit music and devilishly puzzlingly tricky levels, all of this awaits you in our magical square world.

BUT there is a twist! Every time Square meets unfortunate ends, one of his friends comes to help him out on his journey. But oh, help form square friends is not always helpful! The more squares you have the harder it is to get through the level, at the same time Square will be more happy if he can enjoy travelling tricky platforms with his friends.

Have fun and be sure to tell us what you think! We appreciate your feedback. :)

Our Team: @alexandru-buhai, @psychedelia, @donut-daria

Play here!

Welcome to Courier Springs, a small town desolated by a recent sandstorm. This does not mean that people don’t want their stuff delivered. Be the hero this town needs!

Your objective is to get rich, so you have to deliver as many packages as possible per day.

When the day begins, you need to plan it. Choose what are the best packages to deliver and beware of traveling distances, because when the day ends, you need to pay for the gas you used up.

Also note that the heavier the load you are carrying, the heavier the truck becomes.

Choose wisely and become the richest person in Courier Springs!

Play here!

The source for Bullet Hell is now available on GitHub.

It is written in ES6 + JSX and built with webpack + babel. The game is released under the MIT license.

For the rest of the month I'll be adding the features that couldn't make it into the jam entry.

If you haven't played Bullet Hell yet, click here to try it out now:

https://youtu.be/60FWXCs93Aw

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

: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]

https://youtu.be/DYoYvCeQ9XE

Kicking things off for the LD40 showcase! Time to get a little Glitchy!

The Games

Life's A Glitch

Dense Resolve

Too Much Asteroid

Got a game you'd like to submit? Use this handy Google Form! http://bit.ly/LarryDoesLudum

Hey jammers :)

We need a little help with getting to the 20 ratings benchmark ... according to the new LD website

... or bad things happen ... probably ... who knows :)

Anyway, try our game and give us some feedback. Thanks :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/cyber-instinct

You also have the 3D model of our main character :)

Play: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/split

My first Ludum Dare game Problematic Ownage https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/problematic-ownage has gotten some feedback and a few ratings, but more would be welcome! The feedback so far has been mostly positive, and this has given me confidence to try something a bit more fancy for the next LD. Fun times were had!

"IDEA!" Just got 20+ Ratings :heart_eyes:

Have not you seen "IDEA!" yet? Come visit our page, play the game, rate and leave a feedback, here's the link:

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

First of all thank you all who played and left feedbacks for Karma Run! It has been a great experience sharing my first game!

Today I managed to export a binary for Linux. So if you are a Tux fan, make sure to try it out! :)

Also, I plan on doing a post mortem soon and incorporating some of the feedback in a new version (AFAIK I can't do that while rating is taking place, so I'll wait).

Itch.io

LD Submission

Ever wanted to enter a hotdog eating competition? Yeah me neither. Here’s a game where you enter a hot dog eating competition.

Hungry? Play Dog-Off! today!

https://youtu.be/lECSprspMHc

Hey guys,

Feels like trying a management game? Don't hesitate to try our entry, there is a web version for easy access.

The goal is very simple: try to manage your aquarium's population, kill the overpopulate species, allow the underpopulated ones to reproduce and control the ecosystem's stats.

We made it we love, we hope you'll like it :)

The difficulty slowly growth over time, and we maintain a leader-board, so leave your best score in the comments!

I am thrilled to work with such an amazing team, I can't believe how much we pulled off in a weekend that was a crazy rush!

Mornin', Evenin' or g'd afternoon survivors! There's been a couple of days since our game CARnage got released to grace the wild plains of LD space, the whole team has been a bit jet-lagged and dazed. But in good health (unless you count in all the unhealthy foodstuffs our bodies need to process after the weekend).

But now the time has come to give a more public announcement for our creation, CARnage! We're mighty proud of this release, and it's the first one that the core team of the LD Östersund meet-up has done as a whole (previously we've been hacking at the compo, or as 2 man teams). So this was really an experience for us, and a good one at that! We've already started to plan for LD41, and all of us are totally psyched for it!

But back to the pressing matter of LD40. I want to present to the wider community our game, it's a carnage driven Micro-Machines/Carmageddon mash-up, with some sprinkles of RC Pro-AM and Death Rally/Race (add a pinch of Mad Max in the soup and we're good to go). Expect no mercy as the diesel driven machines of death roam through the wastelands on a quest of glory (and meat for sustenance). Here's CARnage:

:metal: JOIN THE CARNAGE :metal:

Now it's back to the trenches for me, I see you all out there in the wastelands! Oh, and a postmortem is planed to be released in the coming week, so keep ye peepers pealed!

As you can see from the tremendously high-quality gif, it's an infinite tower climber.

I've spent a lot of hard work on Monolith as I'm sure so many others out there have with their games and I spent a long time to give the graphics the extra "juiciness" they need. Why not check it out?.

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

Be ready for the ride of a lifetime.

Check out my LD40 entry: Christmas Present!. Its a game where each level you play is layered over the top of the previous one, all played with in your browser.

It's so cool to read your comments ! We had a lot of fun doing it :) If you didn't play it already : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/make-ludum-dare-great-again

Claim your spot on the leaderboard!

Every monday until late January the top 20 contestants on the leaderboard of 'Santas Unwanted Helper: Reindeer Revolution' will be posted on our Ludum Dare page and the leaderboard reset for new constestors to fight for the top!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/santas-unwanted-helper-reindeer-revolution

so yeah play my game im also going to do a post ldjam version so u guys can give me tips of what to do it would be very nice to receive those sugestions

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/house-a-lovecraft-inspired-game

Hello guys, we Wolftek Entertainment, would really love some feedback (This was our first Ludum Dare, and great community, we really enjoyed pushing a game out to our first Jam ever), we're thinking of actually developing this game further and potentially get it on steam one day, we recieved a lot of private feedback from our friends and friends friends, which is very motivating, we're aiming to get a score on Ludum Dare aswell. We would really love a helping hand, thanks in advance.

Link to game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/stranger-danger-a-nightly-visit

• Wolftek Entertainment / @Nilsson.

I was asked in the comments how the "coffee-effect" is done.

It pretty much boils down to a screen space (fragment) shader that is driven by a float I call "phase". This was made in godot but should apply to any shader.

There is essentially a combination of 3 phases which define the amplitude, frequency and speed (time factor) of a sine function.

Based on the phase I interpolate between each phase, so e.g. phase 1 defines:

float amp_1 = 0.0075 float speed_1 = 3.0 float freq_1 = 10

I get the final value by interpolating (lerp/mix) between phase 0 and 1:

amp = mix(0, amp_1, phase1) speed = mix(0, speed_1, phase1) freq = mix(0, freq_1, phase1)

The real magic happens in the final function that takes the original screen space coordinate (uv) with the sine function:

uv.x = uv.x * (1 - 2 * amp) + amp uv.x = mix(uv.x - amp, uv.x + amp, (1 + sin(speed * TIME + uv.y * freq))*0.5)

What's up with al these offsets? Well the input uv coordinates range from 0.0-1.0f.

That means that if the sine is applied directly the wave goes below 0 in x and above 1. This ends up in a clamp or duplicate pixel which looks really bad.

So instead we offset the whole effect by the amplitude and scale the final image. Sine we gradually move the amplitude up it is barely noticeable but fixes the ugly effect on the edges of the screen.

That's it. Here the full effect visualized in an ideal world where the coffee cup is never empty:

Note how the heart beat also gets faster with the phase :)

Don't forget to play at:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/need-more-coffee

Just trying to pimp out and get some ratings for my Compo game: Squirrel Puncher 4000! It's a part boxing game, part bullet hell retro style game. The core attack patterns and functions are complete. Not as in depth as I would like but a lot of fun for 5 minutes. I'd like to turn it into a punch-out style game later on so I would love some feedback and ratings. I would definitely return the favor. My game is not high enough on any list to be find-able on it's own at the moment otherwise, especially with the lack of a search function. :-/ https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/squirrel-puncher-4000

Stretch your monster, cut existing arms, or grow new ones as needed to complete each puzzling level.

Click here to play and rate PullPals!

Hello young applicant!

Do you search for a job? The job of your life? Good news! 72Co is hiring! Here at the Customer Satisfaction Department we only need 1 more QA member to reach our goal of 20 reviews!

Are you up to the task? Then follow this link https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/72cocsd and fulfill your destiny!

So proud of my little creation that hopefully I'll have enough motivation to finish and make it into an App.

Rate for the 20+! Thanks for everything. Had so much fun. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/blood-clot

I've just build android version of the game, so you can take your children to work or school in your pocket! How cool is that?! ;)

Here's ANDROID version of the game:

http://arputikos.com/FILES/GAMES/parentsimulator04_postjam.apk

And if you want to try it in browser:

https://arputikos.itch.io/parent-simulator

Or download:

http://arputikos.com/FILES/GAMES/ParentSimulatorPOSTJAM_v4.zip

Check it out!!

Also, I've fixed minor bugs in version 4, (read more https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/parent-simulator);

return 0;

I had so much fun working on D_Sync this past weekend and I decided I'm going to fully flesh out this game and release it on Android. I'm going to try to add more mechanics that will be based off of time travel, like puzzle elements that require you to travel back in time at critical moments to progress.

Anyways I'm going to keep monitoring feedback and use it to make the best game I can!

Game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/d-sync

I am writing this up about 48 hours later than I intended to, but nevertheless, congratulations to all those who finished their game within the time frame! I've seen some really great games so far (I currently have about 15 tabs open for different games that have caught my eye) and some really innovative takes on the theme. I finished my game, "Vermin", too late for the Compo it was originally intended for but in time to submit for the jam, and I gotta say, while this isn't my first LD, it's the one I am by far the happiest with in terms of my own achievements and the first one that feels like a completed, "real" submission (Okay, first out of two, but still counts right?). So, in line with that feeling of completion, I want to fully round that off with an in-depth analysis of what I did right this time in comparison with what I did wrong in previous jams that I didn't make in time or wasn't happy with.

About the game

Vermin is I guess, loosely speaking, an infinite runner? Infinite scurrier? Scamperer? Yes, anyway, you get the point. You play as a rat king, in charge of leading a growing horde of rat-followers through an infinite farmscape. Your followers will get hungry as their journey takes its toll on them, and they will need to be guided towards food to keep them alive. But the more followers you have, the quicker they will decimate the farms that they encounter...

Thoughts on the Theme

The chosen theme was actually one of the ones I was least hoping for, partly because I felt that it didn't lend itself too much to creativity (boy was I wrong). I was kinda rooting for "you control the scenario" because I had a vaguely, formed idea bouncing around that I was hoping to test-run, but in hindsight I think I wouldn't have been able to implement it correctly. Nevertheless, the theme of "the more you have, the worse it gets", definitely gave me some trouble, because while I had plenty of idea, none felt good enough.

Planning stages

This is where my approach most deviated from my previous approaches to game jams, and I think this is what contributed the most to me delivering a finished entry that I was happy with. I took an entire day to brainstorm concept ideas, analyse them for potential obstacles in development, and approve or discard them accordingly. I hadn't originally planned to take so long (I had allocated about 6 hours of "thinking time" to be able to stick to compo deadlines but I wasn't happy after 6 so decided to spend longer. A lot longer. I started by approaching the theme directly, not focusing on game genre or content in the slightest - just concepts that would fit. My immediate first thought was money, and I actually spent a long time drafting out an idea on it. The concept had the working title of Squandary, and would have been a top-down shooter based around a king trapped in a nightmare in which everything he touched turned to gold, pursued by ghoulish monstrosities drawn to the shiny trail that the king left on the ground. Admittedly I really loved the idea, and was so convinced it would be my final choice that I even drew up some graphics for it:

Recognise him? Yep, he was broken down and recycled for Vermin, although his social standing has decreased somewhat.

I ended up dropping the idea of Squandary precisely because I liked it so much. I ended up creating such an intricate web of different enemies, upgrades, progression, even cutscenes, and I immediately recognised the inherent danger in that. So I sadly parted ways with what I quickly recognised would have ended up being a perfect example of scope creep. That said, I will probably explore the idea further outside of LD, because I am still really taken by the concept.

After canning Squandary, I wrestled with a few more ideas, but none really stuck. I bounced around a lot of ideas involving turning what would normally be essentials for human existence (oxygen, food, etc) into undesireable or harmful elements. And it was while doing some mental research on the basics of human existence that I stumbled onto the concept of reproduction. That quickly led to a thought chain of "what multiplies quickly?", which I immediately answered with "weeds and pests" (yep, I talk to myself when brainstorming. I make no apologies). It wasn't long before I discarded weeds (not before sketching out a puzzle game involving an overgrown garden, which I have actually seen as an entry somewhere for this jam. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but shout-out to weed-garden guy!

After discarding weeds I began to explore the idea of pests more. I wanted to find an idea which would reflect the theme in two ways: Both through mechanics and through the general idea that being infested by lots of vermin sucks. My initial idea was gonna be called "Swarm", involving locusts ravaging a village's crops, but I changed to rats because they have more personality. You can't put a crown on a swarm of insects. It wasn't long before I fleshed out the idea of a sidescrolling infinite runner involving decimating crops with an ever-growing horde of rats.

Graphics

I was intent on creating all the graphics from scratch myself (as I still held some delusions about being able to finish in time for the compo deadline), and overmore I was set on making good graphics. Or at least semi-decent. I have recently rekindled my love of pixel art and this felt like the perfect time to develop that. Plus, I'd been reading a lot of good things about the Dawnbringer color palette and wanted to give it a trial run (the game uses that palette entirely, although I cheated a little with transparency on shadows). I'm fairly sure the palette contributed heavily to the cohesive feel to the finished game, and I have had a lot of positive feedback about the polished feel, so I guess that's a point for Dawnbringer. I used aseprite exclusively for graphics (wonderful tool, highly recommend for pixel artists), and I surprised myself at how quickly I was able to churn out workable sprites for the game, especially since I was working without concepts. I drew up the main crucial elements, opting to leave the more superfluous stuff (the status symbols and the emotes), to do on the fly as needed.

Development ##

I was torn between using Unity and GM:S for development, and ended up settling on GM:S because a) I am more comfortable with the workflow in general, b) I have always preferred GM's handling of 2d, and c) Unity asset store is too much of a temptation to grab premade assets as placeholders that end up being final. Development went smoothly with the exception of 2 wasted hours trying to implement an over-engineered terrain generation system, and 2 hours spent staring at the same block of code trying to figure out why the game was spawning massive stretches of farmless wasteland and boring straight roads. A lot of time went into working on the movement behaviours for the rat swarm, which I am still not 100% happy with. Their current behaviour is close to what I wanted: They will gather in a narrow line behind you if you move faster, and spread out vertically if you slow down. But at times the movement feels less than ideal and especially the slowed-down behaviour is very clunky. Although it adds a bit of personality to the game - sometimes you have to use your king as a sheepdog to dress the ranks.

Audio and Music ##

This is normally my favourite part to address whenever I make a game, and I tend to leave it till last for when I am too mentally exhausted to focus on anything else. The downside to that is that I never get to spend as much time on audio as I would like, which is somewhat frustrating as my principle interest is soundtrack composition. I opted to use sfxr for sfx because it is an amazing tool that produces entirely workable results, quickly (speed was of the essence at this point - sound and music was started about 3 hours before the deadline). The pixelated style of the game meant that the sfxr sounds didn't seem out of place, and weren't entirely jarring.

For the soundtrack (all two tracks of it), I decided to take on a pseudo-chiptune style to complement the sfx and the pixel graphics. It's actually far from being "pure" chiptune but still has a retro feel that I am very happy with. I finally got to use a Casio VL-1 emulator to deliver some disgustingly cheap-sounding synths, and I was grinning like a child with a new toy (or I guess a very old toy) while using it. I cobbled together a main theme and a menu theme in about an hour or so, which was probably an hour too long for my poor neighbours who had to enjoy 60 minutes of squealing calculator noises (Thanks, Casio).

Time and Deadlines

My game was ready about an hour before the deadline, which was pretty much bang on time for when I'd intended. I like to leave a bit of extra time on top of the submission hour for unforeseen issues, which, aside from some issues uploading to itch.io, thankfully never occurred. In terms of completeness of the game, the current content is about 95% of what I originally planned, which I am very happy with. In case you are wondering - the final 5% was going to be cows that wandered around, similar to the villager except stuck inside fields, which your rats could kill and eat provided they had the "berserk" status effect. But I didn't have the time to draw and animate an entire cow, so I decided to leave it out. In general I am happy with how I balanced my workload, and even managed to get some hours of sleep and downtime. Although, that said, it's perhaps very telling that I still have to fight the urge to finish each of my sentences with a semicolon.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned in the intro, this is not my first completed jam, but it is the first where I truly feel satisfied with my submission. My game is playable, and I have received mostly positive feedback, some of which has been truly inspiring. I doubt I will pursue Vermin much further after LD as it feels very much like an arcadey game and I want to get my teeth into something a bit meatier, but completing this jam successfully has given me a huge confidence boost and a bunch of creative drive. I sincerely hope that others have benefited just as much as I have, and I look forward to continuing to play and review your submissions.

If you managed to battle your way through this titan of a post, thanks for reading, and I would love to hear your feedback on my game, if you can spare a few minutes: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/vermin

https://timco.itch.io/space-defender

Better late than never I suppose! Our game Shifting Dreamscape is a very happy and positive platformer about sleep, with a twist. We are 0.5 votes away from the 20 votes mark, so please check our game out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/shifting-dreamscape

It's an HTML5 game! Play here

For now I don't have any constructive thought about my game and I'd like to know what part can be improved
By the way the anonymous comment are normaly open so feel free to say what you think!

Hi everyone!

Some people are having problems with the WebGL version of Platformer for Ants, so I'm making desktop versions. You have now the version for Windows and I'm going to make the Mac and Linux version as well. All of them of the post mortem version, and the original jam entry will stay as a WebGL only.

Also, HonestDanGames have played the game on twitch and he liked it! You can see the moment here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/207246702?t=02h32m32s

And look to his entry, it's pretty good!! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/my-greed-dog-steve

Wobblyfootgamer has played the game too, this time on youtube, you can see the footage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK0DvizdWWk

Thanks again for all the kind words, I never expected that a simple crazy idea could like to so many people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQ4MF5-ts

Are you a brave warrior? Do you have what it takes to find the Golden Sword? Then please try our game, we'd love your feedback!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/greedy-dungeon

https://youtu.be/8d0nnjQITQA

Great work everyone and a big thanks to Ludum Dare for hosting such a great event!

Unfortunately I was not able to finish my game, but I included the link below if you want to check it out (it is playable, just was not able to do everything I wanted to - hoping to finish it and push a new version out after the Play+Rate is complete).

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

I'm going to be live streaming myself playing Ludum Dare submissions!

If you want me to take a look at your game and give feedback feel free to stop by in chat.

Find my stream here:

LINK

I think you're wondering why I put this clickbait title, especially if you're an artist. So let me explain you our journey through this Ludum Dare 40 and how what went during the developpement of One button Hero.

The beginning

I never make post-mortem of game jams because usually the developpement of the game run smoothly. However this time, something was different.

I've participated in a lot of game jams with my sound designer/friend Aurélien, wheither it's a Ludum Dare or not. But everytime, it's just us and while he's doing the sound and music (and working for other teams), I'm doing the game design, level design, code, art, ... well it's a lot.

But for once, he found a guy, an artist even, who was willing to work with us. The guy was good, able to make both 2D and 3D assets, used to make UI elements, well, everything was perfect.

But after some time, something was off...

Why this title

We started like more than 12h late we a first meeting. I already had the idea of the game, and everyone was ok with it. The artist told us what style he could make for the game, and to have a good margin we decided to go with pixel art. At this point, it was good, he said he would start on some concept art.

Then time had passed, I put some gifs of the game to show my progress in term of code, but still no news from him. It went like this until like 8h before the end of the jam, then after putting some pressure, he said that he would do everything soon. This wasn't the best scenario, because he would be a rush to have everything ready, but 8h was doable.

Then it was like 5h before the end. Still no news, until Aurélien the sound designer said "Go ahead, I think we can't count on him". And so we were alone, at the end of the jam, just both of us with no art at all ...

How we managed it

So right now, you're probably saying "But I saw your game, it has some arts, how is it possible!?" and that's a good question. I just remembered opening Pyxel Edit and then I probably went into "Ultra instinct" mode.

The main thing was doing pixel art and making everything really small. For example the tiles are 16x16 pixels and the character and enemies are 32x32. Also I tried to minimize the amount of animation frames.

But mainly the big thing was to stop doing the level design and the polish of the controls. This was a hard decision though because it was either had a good gameplay from A to Z with maybe some lacks in the feedbacks or having something decent to show.

In my opinion, the graphics was the best solution as it was giving some "life" to the game that was otherwise really blocky with lot of placeholders.

Here's a before/after:

What was good

Anyway, despite that moment of panic, the fact of having a graphic artist made me spend more time on the level design and difficulty balance in order to craft a solid gameplay even if far from perfect.

Also, some enemies are missing like the flying one, and some level design elements like the bumper which are already working in game had to be cut from it due to the lack of graphic representation but could be part of an update later after the jam.

What's next

For now, I think we will let the game as it is for a week or two, and if the feedbacks are positive (which seems to be the case at the moment) , we will probably make an update with a complete level design and new features.

In conclusion

So sorry for the rant, it needed to come out. And no, I don't think artists are traitors, this was obviously a bad exeperience that probably doesn't happen too often.

Anyway, despite all that, this game jam was a fun experience as always. Aurelien and I are proud of what we have made and we'll probably be part of the next one.

If you have read this far, you're probably a very curious being, so I want to thank you and hope to see you in the next Ludum Dare.

And don't forget ...

Here is my Ludum Dare Submission

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/house-party

Some in game footage :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO5PbZvLmHg

All the animations in the game are procedural, there are no keyframe animations in the game.

Things we can do in game :

Stand, Walk, Jump , Punch (left and right), Grab (left and right) , Pull, Push, Move hands freely , Slam, Throw, HeadButt

Player can combine all these moves

Tools used :

Unity, Audacity, Blender, Krita

It is a Physics Based fighting game. I got stuck spending all of my time in implementing the fighting mechanics, I had no time to play test the game even once. Im sorry if the game is crap

Theme / Idea :

So the theme was The more you have the worse it is.

The game : The more guests you have, the worse your migraine (Player Controls) get. You have thrown a house party, and there are some uninvited guests. They smoke, break your furniture, fight with each other. This causes you headache, a severe migraine headache. The players movement becomes extremely difficult to control as the headache increases

Game Rules :

Goal is to survive as long as possible. You will have to throw the guests out of the backyard to survive. The more guests there are, the worse your headache gets. You can punch, push, pull, slam or throw them. Do whatever it takes to kick them out. You have to throw them beyond the knee high - white bounding wall

Controls :

*Controls for KeyBoard and Mouse: * WASD to move; Tap Left or Right mouse button to punch; Hold Left or Right mouse button to Grab; Shift to Lift; Q - Headbutt; Space - Jump

Controls for Controller: Tap LB or RB for left or right punch; Hold LB or RB for left or right grab; After grab use right stick to move the hands freely; X - Headbutt; A - Jump

Things that can be done in game :

*Walk *

* Twirl *

* Jumps *

* Punches *

* After Grabbing, the hands can be moved freely *

* Attacks can be combined, like Grab with one hand and Punch with the other *

* Multi-Directional Headbutts *

* Slams and Throws *

* Goal is to throw them outside the bounding wall *

Some more fun stuff :

Can Ride Them :

Take them for a walk :

Some Guests fight back :

You can beat one guy with another :

I didn't even add this, but there is a spinning wheel kick in the game :

Huge throw :

There's still so much more to do to this game, I will be adding more enemy types, and will be working on polishing the game

We did it.

Cat Lady Simulator 2020 cleared 20 votes. Thanks to everyone who checked it out gave feedback and we hope more people still do so.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/cat-lady-simulator-2020

I really loved the theme and I had an idea that I thought was great, playing as a detective that is investigating a serial killer case and while doing it he would find all the clues related to himself and there the plot twist happens. But overall the idea image that I had in my mind was bigger than what I could handle since I didn't have that much time to work on it and I'm kinda new in the field. I learned few things on the way and I had a great experience overall, I really enjoyed playing other people's games too. It was really inspiring and I'm more motivated than ever to improve. See you in the next jam!

In case you want to try out the game here is the link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/apparently-im-a-detective

Yes, every game I design starts in my head with a simple concept, but the moment I know it could be a success only comes after seeing it on paper (after that, I choose to go on, or just to forget it). Here is the first draft of my game.

You can check it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mister-maitre

We have almost 30 ratings in just 3 days! Let's keep the rithm, and do not fall asleep!!

Play and rate us here: Sleepy Chicken Sexer

If you need feedback / rate, please, attached link to your game and we will test it!!!

We tried a lot of new things this time around; new engine, team roles, and adding a third dimension. That coupled together with miscommunication and a somewhat wavering motivation made the process a lot harder than it should have been.

The game idea is that you're a leading mayor for a city riddled with disasters (volcano eruptions and earthquakes had to be cut, unfortunately), and your only influence is where to spend the budget. The concept relies on performing educated guesses using limited information, in a turn based manner. It was supposed to feel a bit like Crusader Kings and the like, in a way that each turn represents a somewhat long time period with some important decisions. We didn't reach that mark by a long shot (the game balancing was cut, as well), but we would really much appreciate it if people tried the game out, with what we tried to achieve in mind, and discuss with us a bit about different mechanics and improvements. Grand strategy players are especially welcome!

Click here to play.

Some kind of short adventure, check it out! :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/black-hole-star

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/furtive-fortune

I made a 2D stealth game - the more coins you have, the louder you are, and "the worse it is".

Created a blog post during the jam while it was a bit hectic so I thought it'd be a good idea to bump this back up.

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I had a blast. I made a lot of "programmer art", but otherwise I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Although perhaps it's a bit difficult...

I am very excited to continue work on this project post-jam. It only features 3 levels currently, but I'm hoping to expand a lot in the future.

Come shoot some ghosts! Not sure how that works but the game's pretty fun! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/marty-the-hatted

Its my second Ludum Dare game and it turned out pretty cool :) I got help from a great composer and a big thanks to him :D I hope you have fun with the game !

You're making video games on the internet. Don't tell me you like talking.

>play here<

Keep up the flow of great browser based games, guys! Post them here and I'll rate them within a day (if you are download only then it may take longer). Remember to play everyone's in the comments and give great feedback (being critical is a must for helping improve quality)!

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

Hey so I never actually posted about our game

Potion Commotion

It's a lil cute platformer with dynamically changing music and BOUNCY SHEEP!!!

Hello again! As I promised earlier, here is my little write up on the development of Sugarplum Summit. If you haven't played our game yet, check it out on the Jam page!

Unity was my tool for the job. I have tons of experience with the engine and the 2D development tools were just what I needed. Pulling temp assets from a previous project, I started like I start any game project, get something moving!

This gif is of a build I finished up on Sunday morning (pushed it at 2:26am to be precise). As you can see none of that cute af art made it in yet and the enemies go off screen sometimes. But despite all that it still looks pretty similar yeah?

Getting the game to end after 120 seconds was easy, and once the SHMUP level was done I moved onto the boss. I won't have any gifs of it for spoilers sake, but holy moly the boss's last attack caused and STILL IS CAUSING me so many bugs! My favorite is when I tried applying some screen shake to it, the sprite decided to just not render in the game view. Worked just fine in the editor view though :)))! exasperated screech

Anyways I'll leave you with this image of part of our repository, can you pinpoint the time where the crunch stress set in? ;)

Also if you haven't checked out Sugarplum Summit, head over to our page and give it whirl! Can you succeed against the enemies of our dear sugarplum fairy?

So, I have 13 downloads of my game (Goonisher) on Itch, but I got the 20 ratings... Do people rate based on the post or something? It's better for the new developer if people don't rate at all if they aren't willing to play. Biased ratings based on what you 'think' the game is won't help anyone improving their gamedev skills.

Anyway, just asking people to vote consciously. Every single like/rate/comment is extremely important for new devs. Have fun playing and rating!

My game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/goonisher

Music search might be painful, however, if you know a man, who writes perfectly sounding music that not only helps me to relax, but also is suitable for my two projects, it is not a big problem for you. This man for me is Kai Engel from Moscow, Russia.

I used his album Caeli in a creation LD40 game Sailor Worf.

Our main theme is "Visum" that is wonderful and right for our game.

Music motivates you to fight till the end!

if you are interested to explore the Kai Engel world, you can go "here": http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel/

You can make up an opinion about Sailor Wolf "here": https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/sailor-wolf

While we're testing our games, I want to tell you a "quick" story, probably not very interesting to most of you, but it is something very special for me, and I want to share it with all of you.

Almost 3 years ago (April 2015) I participated in my first Ludum Dare (LD32), I was full of dreams and innocence and I bought a small bottle of Champagne to celebrate the moment when I uploaded my first finished game.

Long Story Short, that never happened.

The bottle stayed at the bottom of the fridge these years as a personal reminder, "Ok, the next Ludum will be the one". Years have passed and the Ludums were dropped again and again... and finally, in this Ludum Dare, "At first light on the third day" when the countdown was already ringing for many of you and I was on the couch passing a Cold, I said to myself: "Go on, think of something VERY small that you can do in just a few hours".

And from that little idea came "GameJam Survival Simulator". My first game submitted (at last) in a Ludum Dare, which has allowed me almost 3 years later to open that bottle and enjoy a small personal victory together with my partner (who helped me in a hurry with the animations that you can see in the game)

It was a wonderful moment that I wanted to share it with you.

We've managed to find a Unity installation that doesn't flip out when building for web, so now we have a web version of our game!

This is our first game jam and I've been amazed by the friendly, supportive, and honest community here. Looking forward to playing what others have made over the next few weeks and to the next jam.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/dead-weight

Play it here: http://ld.flask-software.com

Rate it there: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/published-feed-them

Thank you :)

If you want me to play your games, just send it in the chat. Please rate and play mine:https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/chores-simulator/ https://www.twitch.tv/dragonfyzex

This is my post-mortem of Ludum Dare 40 and our game "Electrical Overload". It was my fifth Ludum Dare in total and I have to admit that this is my first post-mortem.

I wanted to summarize my thoughts on our game and the whole development process. First off, a short overview summarizing, what we managed to do and what we didn't manage to do:

What we managed to do

• building
• random procedural cave generation
• power supply and energy network system
• automatically mining drones

Parts important to me, we didn't manage to do

• balance the game reasonly
• polishing the game and fixing bugs
• tutorial
• music and/or ambient sound (at least you can do some music with the transmitters :D)

Some nice-to-haves that didn't get into the game:

• drones mining on their own without relying on a beacon (the initial intention of the beacon was only to force the drones to mine specific parts, so that you can make yourself a way through narrow parts)
• the above point would lead to more scattering of the drones, making the game more interesting - currently you have to concentrate on one corner
• rework the lightning effects (especially the power transmissions)
• add some idle effects to some of the machines (like the one of the generator)
• rework the UI, so it doesn't have the Unity look
• add post-processing effects

Known bugs in Jam version

• small black lines between the textures on cave walls
• sometimes energy generators/transmitters don't register newly placed drones
• drones sometimes mine a second time, even though they are already carrying something
• drone particles still playing while in warehouse
• drones can't fly over the energy generator

Theme Announcement

So it was 3am saturday morning and we were waiting for the theme. "The more you have, the worse it is". Well... not my favorite theme, but my teammate came up with an idea pretty fast. The problem with that idea was, that it was way to over-scoped. So we discussed the core features and thought that we can implement a narrowed down version in 72 hours.

The Idea

The idea was to have a procedural generated cave system in which you have to build different machines for harvesting materials. We narrowed the buildable machines down to an energy generator, a droneport, drones, energy transmitters and a diamond press (game goal).

Theme-wise we hoped that we get many drones flying around in the cave, with energy transmitters shooting energy around so you have to watch where you step. The more drones you get and the faster you mine resources, the worse it would get to walk around the cave without being grilled by the lightning bolts.

After we had our idea outlined and cut it down to todos, we started developing.

Developing in a new engine

Before, we developed our games in Java with the framework libGDX. We tried out Unity this time. I had a look at the core features of unity the week before. During the Ludum Dare I had a blast using Unity, many things are way easier and you have a nice workflow. In the future I am going to stick to fleshed out game engines instead of developing all the boilerplate code myself.

Additionally to the new engine, we also developed in a new dimension. Our previous jam games all were 2D, now we wanted to give 3D a shot.

Problems

Ohhh, there were a lot. First off, our game still was way over-scoped... especially for a new engine. I'm never going to take procedurally map generation into a game jam game again, except for the rare case that we can spare time in the end for it. But never again as a starter feature.

In the end the map generation worked quite well, but there are still performance issues (even out of memory errors, as I saw >.<). But we had many tiny problems with it, sending us on bug hunts for a good amount of time. I'd say that it took away round about half a day of our time, excluding the implementation itself. Random map generation is a cool thing to have, but in a game jam game, where most people will play the game one time and never again... it's just not worth the effort or rather not important enough to invest that much time.

Then there was the energy network. We highly under expected this feature. At one point we had to realise, that there needed to be some sort of priority system in place, so the transmitters transport the energy to the right places. Again.. took more time than planned.

Initially we planned that the drones search for ores themselves, but through the already lost time we decided to simplify the drone behaviour. That sadly destroyed the idea of having drones all around, so the game doesn't really fit the theme anymore.

We had several more problems sadly, stealing our time to polish and balance the game correctly.

Conclusion

Our main problem was, that our idea was still too big. We could have dismissed some unimportant features. This probably happened, because we didn't plan enough. After we got the idea, we started developing very soon after. The past game jams I took way more time to work an idea out. Turns out that wasn't lost time, but rather gained time in the end.

Through all the problems we encountered we lost the really important parts out of our sight. Those are polish and fixing bugs, balancing the game so the player has more to do, user experience in general.

I went out of this Ludum Dare with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am astonished of what we implemented in the short time, on the other hand... wow, is this an unfinished game experience. I sadly can't say, that I am proud of our result. In the end the overall user experience matters, not the features of the game itself.

I probably sound very negative and pessimistic about this Ludum Dare, but all around it was a very important and positive experience. Why? Because of all the faults we made. I realised again that the most important part of Ludum Dare is to have a well scoped plan. Nothing bugged me more than having to implement the core gameplay features until the end of the jam. The previous jams, we were done with core gameplay after the first or maybe the second day, leaving us enough time to polish and balance stuff. Additionally, we got to learn very much about Unity.

Even though I am not proud of our game, I am very happy with all the stuff I learned this time. Ludum Dare was fun like always! I am looking forward to the next game jam. Next time with a much smaller game idea and maybe it is better to stick to 2D again.

See you around.

Would you guys mind trying it and letting me know if it works properly? I was having some issues with the windows version before. Thanks!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/block-pilot

PLAY WAVEFORM

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

WAVEFORM is a atmospheric isometric hardcore survival shooter. How long can you survive against waves of enemies in this fast paced experience.

PLAY WAVEFORM

Come and shoot some ghosts! Almost to 20! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/marty-the-hatted

Hey guys.. congratulations to EVERYONE who managed to complete a game and get it entered over the last couple of days.. To anyone not managing to complete their games.. KEEP GOING!!! Never give up.. and next time you will do better :)

I would love if everyone who has time could please test our entry.. We didnt manage to finish everything.. like.. FORGETTING TO TELL PEOPLE YOU CAN PRESS R to RELOAD.. its a biggie :))))

We had so much fun.. 2 massive headaches and a lot of back and forth (nice way of saying we nearly killed each other) hehe..

WHAT AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE!"!!!!!

here is the game..

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/ego-joe-the-idiot-mall-cop

If you could take a look I would be massively appreciative!!! tnx guys..

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

Journey into the mountain, making decisions and getting into hilarious circumstances as you make your way deeper and deeper. Bhalrim is a game about choices and managing your resources. Bandages, tools, treasure, and coins will all be necessary to reach 200m below the surface where the ancient city is said to exist. Carrying too much of any of these resources will make your journey more difficult. Thieves, strange underground obstacles, and the burden of your bag are all your enemies on the path to Bhalrim!

While you are trying the game post YOUR game below so I can give it a try! Thanks!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/hoarder-dwarves

Always wanted to manage a party and try to make the guests happy no matter what their demands are ?

:pointright:There's a party at your house, and you want every guest to be happy. Do their quests but be careful, making your guests happy is gonna bring more and more people to your party. And the more there is, the more fucked up their demands get._

We did this game with a team of 5 in 48hours (we were working that's why we only had time to communicate on it today)

PLAY PARTY AT MY HOUSE HERE

This game is the spiritual sequel to Encounters, the game we did for the LudumDare39. Check it out if you don't want to miss out all the cool references :)

We are verry impatient to hear your feedbacks! Have fun

Alpaca Air Attack Post-mortem

So the LD40 is over,

here is my post-mortem as tech artist / gameplay programmer of Alpaca Air Attack. We've used UE4 so some info in the text is kinda using UE4-slang.

I will go over some of things which come to my mind to show off some wip / how stuff was made.

Wool projectile

After I got the basic flying ready, I spend the rest of the first day on wool and weapon feel and other feel/effects in the game.

This is the very first version of the projectile.

After that I added the impact effect, which is just a 3-step texture blended by time and ~6 particles

Squash and stretch

The wool projectiles are squashed and stretched along their path. As well as on impact here is the final effect.

Just noticed the splash has no color from player.

Sound

First of that was my first real experience with the UE4 sound cues for more complex stuff. I really enjoyed it, but didn't spend enough time with it yet and am really anticipating the new audio engine. But I assume that if you are well-experienced with sound design (which I'm not - I did some audio synthesis for fun sometime and tinkered with LMMS and audio generation) you can really do awesome things :)

The weapon sounds were actually recorded made by me - they are cheap "plop" sounds. Which first got noise-removal applied and then mixed together using a single Sound Cue and some graph-magic.

Motor

The motor sounds are not recorded by me, but the graph for it has a ramp up (at spawn) and then loop forever (until destroyed) with some mixed in "blubbers" for variance.

Total of three sound assets used.

Music

After Vivien recorded the basic music and exported it as single instruments - I could just dynamically rearranged and enable/disable the instruments which allowed for wide variation using little assets.

Airplane Animations

The airplane was simply rigged in blender after it was done. Then we animated it using bone manipulation in UE4 of that parts, which made it super easy to tweak those values as you can preview them on-the-fly.

Scarf Physics

First we experimented with UE4's physics assets for dangling scarf and animated by speed but that didn't worked out so well, will test out why it didn't worked properly. Somehow all child-bones collapsed to one point :( during appliance Here is the test from PhAT itself in UE4. Which worked fine, but somehow was not applicable inside the animation blueprint.

Julia then just animated the scarf by hand and I layered that animation on-top of the idle animation

Multiplayer (Local)

Multiplayer was planned from the beginning. The original idea was to make a lobby-like system but due to weird behaviours we just fixed it to always 4 players. In retrospect we should've just made a simply menu (at start) which allowed for selection of players. But the total app-flow was just made in 30min pre-submission, and some things are still missing (win screen).

Local multiplayer is a huge drawback for JAM games especially for those testing at home, you need other people to play with - so make sure to implement an alternative mode (AI or alternative total mode) for single player. We did not had time for it.

Controls

So far the control feedback was always positive, people like the feel of it. I am glad that it worked out that way, during tests we noticed it was quite sensitive at the beginning and with the addition of wool clinging to your airplane it was getting pretty hard. We aimed from the start for a more arcadey control scheme. At first we also had a slow-speed sink, so you would fall if you are slow. That was discarded along the way as we just made the minimum speed faster which kinda made it feel more awesome.

Bounds

At first we all had different kind of ideas of the level, I thought of a more open-spaced arena where you just have some pillars. Julia did a good job with the small amount of enviroment assets she made to create a visual impressing level. Yet we had the problem limit where you could go. Simple solution a timed bound, which triggers once you've left and removes that effect on re-enter.

Things I still would like do add/change

Air Trails

If the airplane does harsh curves I could add trails of air. To visually enhance the feel.

Better Explosion

The current airplane explosion is crap :D I would love to make a new one. Maybe I will do that the upcoming days just for fun.

Also I would like to rework some of the other explosions lots of things learned during the jam.

Thanks

Could write even more but I'm tired now :o

Thanks for reading :) hope that was a good insight in our development. Also thanks to Julia and Daniel for joining as a team :D

Quicklink to LD Game

See how much gold you can collect in The Adventures of Marty Graw! I'm at about 9 ratings, so far, let's go all the way!

We're around 18 rates!

Please, Play + Rate 60's Alien

https://youtu.be/sUdqaPi8rfI

Yup.Test test test.

We really want to get someone Let's Play or streaming Radioactive Rumble if possible-- it's hard to learn about how people play your game when the only person you've actually seen play it is you and your girlfriend (and her opinions are biased).

Anyone know how to make that happen? I feel like there used to be a section on the old site where you could submit your game for consideration to Youtubers and Let's Players.

If anyone is interested, reach out... or just come play and reach out after.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/radioactive-rumble

Post your games in the stream and I will rate them! Also giving feedback! https://www.twitch.tv/dragonfyzex/

This was my first time making a game for Ludum Dare, or any game jam for that matter. It was a huge learning experience since I only picked up Unity in October. But, I’ve really enjoyed it and wanted to try the jam.

Even though I made the game by myself, I didn’t feel I was ready to tackle Compo. That being said, I loved this experience and had a blast doing it. My only wish is that I got into it earlier!

So, here is my entry for Ludum Dare 40, Bulls & Tomatoes.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/bulls-tomatoes

P.S. Everyone's games here are incredibly impressive and very inspiring

The web page for running the WebGL version of USS Deep Explorer has been updated.

One button for access to game information and another for fullscreen mode.

Have fun on http://eice.be/ld40/

Other versions are still available at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/uss-deep-explorer

Do you want to know what it is like to be the most powerful man of all time !??

Well look no further, click the link below and begin your journey!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mr-great-president

Disclaimer: this game is not suppose to be serious.

the worse it is? We want to introduce our LD40 entry: a game about women hair. For sure is something that many people consider undesirable...

Give it a try!

If you are looking for some ratings post your game below so I can have a look!

And if you have some time check out our game The Lost City of Bhalrim! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/hoarder-dwarves