Hello my fellow alpacas!

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/6nO1O_MtVWw

Hi people :slight_smile:

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

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

Thanks! :grinning:

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

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

Full changelog below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materials

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

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

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

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

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

Workflow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/MZWc2c9ZhDo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1

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

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

Day 2

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

Day 3

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

Timelapse

https://youtu.be/leIY5famrd0

You can check the game here!

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

https://www.aseprite.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://dreamlo.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give it a try!

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

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

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

Hooray!

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

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

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

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

Color Palette across multiple pieces

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

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

Character Design

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

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

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

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

Tiles

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

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

Time management for Illustration

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

Tools

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

Previous jam games

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

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

Thank You!!!

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

Your ratings and feedback are greatly appreciated, thanks!

-Melanie Judd (@inkystache)

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

Play Guy is late for school now!

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

Theme Announcement

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

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

Getting busy

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

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

What went well

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

Even Better If

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

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

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

Available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

LINK

thanks :)

//

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/friendly-fire-on

Thanks to all the great feedback, development is pressing forward on a post-LD version of Friendly Fire, available here: https://sleepystrix.itch.io/friendly-fire

So far I've added a couple cool new features based on your feedback:

• Vastly more flashy and polished visuals!

• Camera focuses in on the action!

• New and improved audio!

• Semi-transparent walls, no more lost troops
• Choose the battle size, anywhere from 2 v 2 to 100 v 100
• Choose the number of rounds to play from 1 to 10
• Your troops celebrate when you win!

Here's a look at the new version in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--X8dX7jv2Y

Not my game, but it hasn't enough votes yet. It's kinda relaxing & about COFFEE!
Play & rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-daily-grind

We' hope you'll enjoy the game!

...and if you like the game, please...

Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen! You're great!

people from ludum dare we have cookies and me to play ur games what more would u want?

Twitch : https://www.twitch.tv/lerpish

By the way, did you know that in USS Deep Explorer each part is different?

A good reason to replay :-D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/uss-deep-explorer

What evil lurks at the summit? Play the beautifully animated Christmas-themed cute-em-up and find out!

First of all, thanks to everyone who played the game, rated  it, or is reading  this and of course thanks to the ludum dare the this event and platform.

Noisy thief

Now that some days have passed since the jam I‘ve decided to take a look to the Jam and analyze it. I should say that this is the first time  I do a postmortem and will probably look like a diary more than a postmortem, I’m doing it from my point of view (not my team’s) and this is the second game jam I participate (first ludum dare).

My team is formed by five members; 3 programmers, 1 artist and 1 technical artist (AKA the guy for everything and the annoying tasks <3). Three of us(2 prog. and the tech artist) study together at the university on a video game development degree, we are friends since the first year (now coursing 4th) and we achieved to be a really cohesive team. The reaming programmer studies at the same university as us a multimedia degree and the artist is a friend of one of the programmers that finished his degree few years ago on design.

We first meet two weeks before the jam and started working on some assets for a game idea we had so that if the jam theme adapted to it we could have advanced work, at the end nothing was “useful” but that wasn’t the important point since we wanted to start working together and from a team rather than be a group of guys.

First day

Two days passed and we meet again at the tech artist’s house all together there. We live near Barcelona so the jam started at  3am, fortunately we slept that evening :). So here we are!! The jam started. We worked two hours on the idea, was fun to see that some ideas we got other teams also thought about them and made them come to true :D. Once we had the final idea, we all went to sleep at 5am less on programmer that started working.

Second day

We woke up at 9am approx and went to our friend home to start working, the second day (Saturday) was pretty normal, we worked on the idea we had and went to sleep at 5am approx. less one of the programmers that stayed all the night working on the AI.

Third day

Sunday raised and the ones we were sleeping woke at 9am approx. That morning we started working but only one programmer (me) was able to work, the artist and the tech artist, finally that afternoon our artist left us but the other programmer joined us again. That day night we realised that we were a bit fu** up. We had not enough time for all the art and program all the mechanics. At the end we all went to sleep at 1am approx.

Fourth day

Monday was an interesting day. We woke up at 10 am approx but had to go to university for two hours. After that we started working until the end of the jam. That day the artist was at his home in another town and one of the programmers was at university too on the morning and at work at the evening so that afternoon two programmers.

Last night we already realized that we had not enough time to do everything we wanted so we cut some stuff we wanted to add but we still had a problem, only one artist that had never done anything on games was not enough. That afternoon was non-stop working, another programmer and me kept programing all the time on new stuff until 2am, the artist kept working on the characters and the other two started mounting some level parts and making some UI. And of course at 2am, just one hour before the deliver hour everything broke!! We made the same error twice with a conflict on the scene while using github, the unity navmesh wasn’t working and other smaller but still important bugs. So that our was dedicated to solve those errors on one part, prepare the menus on the other and create all the builds. A bit of stress.

Finally we reached the hour and the game was delivered. Another success!!! :smile:

To summarize let's check some  good points and some mistakes.

Good

• We formed the team some time before to reach the date as a cohesive group.

• Invested some time on the idea. Seems normal but on other times we didn’t invested it.

• Used time to relax and sleep.

Mistakes

• I personally think we relaxed a bit too much. It’s okey to use time to sleep but I think we were too confident.

• Didn’t organize properly all the code, specially all the relations between the differents parts of the code.

• Had only one artist with no experience on games development.
• Using new assets and tools we had never tested.
• Using different Unity versions.

But at the end the result is great. We ended the game and I like like the result but more the experience! Definitely will be on more Ludum Dares!!!

If you have arrived here, thanks for it and please rate the game. Noisy thief

Let in comments your game if you want so we will rate yours too :smile:

Thought it would be a cool way to remember this Jam, so I printed out one of the cars from my entry :D

Just wanted to share this Let's Play Kanetsu did of my little game. He did do a great job at the narration, I think you'd enjoy it just as much :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhanVc11JSs

after @imphenzia gave me some hints about charachter design, i gave it a try.

what i learned from him:

• using grid for body part ratios (for example: head:2 - body:1.5 - foot:1.5 )
• using resources for character design (i don't know why , but i used to avoid this in past, but from now i'll use it)
• character design don't need so many experience, and every one can do it.

i had no experience about charachter design, and it's the second charahcter that i designed ever.

here it is, "The Colored Mirror" :

Thanks @imphenzia <3

It's pretty hard. (Play on easy if you're having a hard time)

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

I find that download only games often don't get ratings even if they are excellent! While rating browser based games is much easier on me, I wanted to check out some of your downloadables while I have time!

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

Currently working on an improved version of "Boat Afloat" for now just got some polish done and as feedback suggested there are score multipliers to make the gameplay a little bit more interesting (more coming up).

I plan on releasing for android if everything goes well!

You can find the post-jam version (1.1) of the game which includes some improved visuals , score multipliers and bug fixxes(and I am going to keep updating it there often) here

But please rate the jam version here

Flips! is a turn-based matching game by Beavl. We're really happy with our small game and we're already working on the mobile version.

Dev Tools and plans

As with almost every game we make, we've used Unity, so porting is not really an issue but we are making more content, better levels, smoother progression, different modes and different flip tiles and more!

Flips core mechanics

But the core of the game is here. Flip a tile and try to make color matches either horizontally or vertically, between level boundaries, a level boundary and a flipped card or two flipped cards. Clean the board and win the level. The more you advance, the more flips you get. And more flips before checking matches does not make things easier.

Game and Level design

Designing levels for Flips! was a blast. With our core mechanics in mind, we've developed a turn structure consisting of "layer checks" and an after-turn after the flipped tiles are unflipped (more checks there). All of these let us think of levels with not that many tiles but with really interesting possibilities.

For example...

What about a tetromino color configuration?

Look at the orange configuration in this gif.

The central orange piece is key for a 3-color horizontal match and for a 2-color vertical match. So both matches must be isolated so as the checking is made at the same time. Timing in flips is key. Look!

Well this was not a post mortem nor a normal post. But we think that you are going to enjoy our little brain teaser if you give it a try.

Cheers and congrats to all the people making games out there!

You can play the game right in your browser!)

This was my first Ludum dare, and this is the game I created by myself. I had a lot of fun figuring out the physics. Link to the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/sanka-viking-a-viking-warship-simulator

Hello! Have you played Cavern Breakout yet? It's a platformer where you mine materials to build platforms so you can escape from the cave. But be careful, because the more materials you carry, the more difficult it gets!

If not I'd appreciate if you tried it and gave me some feedback. Thanks! 😊

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/cavern-breakout

Here are some more of my favorite games I played & rated so far. Enjoy!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/plague-venue

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/goblins-2-go

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/of-a-feather-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/sheep-without-shepherd

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/intruder-alert

One of the greatest heavy AAA release of this end of year!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-amazing-game-3-0

I've just uploaded the MacOs and Linux version of my game Loot & Looter! Go check it out if you've not already done so!

:skull: PLAY NOW! :skull:

I thought this random part of my city ("world") was unreachable!

(Of course, I had to cheat and change the character's initial position to try over and over again...)

Play Taser Loser!

I've already listed some things I have to improve because time didn't let me implement them. Post-jam updates on the way!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/iam-done

(I hope she doesn't mind me sharing heh)

Her raging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46SNeaHCTzk Her winning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaGzRs0-zf0&feature=youtu.be

:smile: HEY YOU SHOULD ALSO CHECK OUT MY GAME :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/pacific-parkour-league-ppl

I have entered a few Ludum Dare Jams in the past and I each time I received good feedback and some items to change. This LD I have gotten the best comments yet!

• “Something wrong? Yep too short” ~ @lereveur
• “That’s a lovely game, I especially like the art design” ~ @compufreak
• “Ok this is one of the best puzzle games I played in a long time.” ~ @jcmonkey
• “Very polished graphics!” ~ @fis
• “I absolutely loved the sound design” @schu

Six.. Five Others Have Tried (Play the HTML5 Game Here)

I want to take this game to the next level after the Ludum Dare, I could use your help. Please play my game, rate it, and leave me some feedback, I’ll read every one of them. I’ll use your feedback to make this game even better and my plan is to release it on many different platforms. I fell in love with this game while I was making it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.

p.s. I work two jobs so I can only play and rate games on my lunch and breaks, if you have an HTML5 game please link it I would love to return the favor.

This is our Game: Overpopulation

Please try it out and give us Feedback.

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

Time to rate some games! If you have the time, please try and rate mine! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/montil-mali

Play and Rate Here!

There was a huge game breaking bug in my Jam game Dr.Micro vs The Virus but it was such a easy fix took maybe 5 min. I did make note of the change on my game page hope this is all within the rules!

I've already reached my 20 ratings mark, but I still wonder what other people might think of my game! How about a classic trade of ratings?

Show me what games you made!

And I'll do my best to check them out. If you find the time to check out mine as well, I'd be very glad.

My entry: Computer-Man RPG (with WebGL build)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/hey-look-at-this

Our game "Hey look at this" is a parodic game where "the more mates you have, the worse it is" ! You are working on a video game project (like a LD project :wink:). Since you need help to finish your project before the deadline, other "teammates" will join you, and "help" you ! To progress in your project, you must accomplish an action (represented by a typing minigame). Your mate will also help you progress, but when they need help, they won't make any progress (they'll just slack on 9gag or Reddit). Your task is to also help them when they need it.

Don't hesitate to post your fastest time. And please give your feedbacks on our game :)

At least that's what I think. I did build it for linux. I just don't exactly have any linux instances around to test it. If it doesn't work, let me know. It should be both 32 and 64 bit compatible. Have fun!

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

Available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Hello all!

I've gotten a lot of tests and feedback, but i'm on the fence if i should continue development, or move on. So please answer this poll: https://goo.gl/nJEGW7

And please give me feedback!

The game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/you-cant-have-too-many-cats

After some users asked for it, we made a Linux build of our game (at the exact stage it was whe we submitted it at the end of the Jam) :grin: It's tested on Ubuntu 17.04, feel free to comment if there are any compatibility problems! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/where-ma-friends-at

Hey guys.

Gonna stream some of your LD games right now! Will also drop a review when I'm done. Feel free to send me games in the chat or @Poopmaiser6000 on Twitter.

https://www.twitch.tv/poopmaister6000

Yep, just like I said ! There is now a Mac version of The Harsh Life of Terry the Homeless Dude !

Mac users can now wander through town, eating rubbish, jumping everywhere, stealing rasta dude's vegetal dessert and junkie's funny speed-augmenting green liquid ! Add to that some family barbecue's on rooftop, dark matter blubs that drains your life (don't eat dark matter, bad idea) and super-special-awesome score based on speed, quantity of drugs and rubbish eaten... And maybe you'll know what being in the skin of Terry is like !

WITH NOW BRAND NOT NEW EXCITING FEATURES !

Like Lifepoints going to Yellow if under 250/500 ! Or going to Red if under 100 ! ...Or going to 0 if you're a dork like me !

So, what are you waiting for, Mac users ? You can now play some kid Compo-game in which rain gutters, police forces, and yourself are your worst enemies !

PLAY THE HARSH LIFE OF TERRY THE HOMELESS DUDE NOW ON ASTONISHING ENLIGHTED MAC QUALITY SCREENS (that goes same way for Windows, Terry's and myself are pretty tolerant)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-harsh-life-of-terry-the-homeless-dude

PS : I'm pretty open to feedbacks, and of course I want you to send me yur score, I need more of them so I can make a proper leaderboard to see who's the real homeless champion ! Even if I doubt someone will go above 510 000, the dev's personal record ;) .

PS2 : Did I did good at the tv-advertiser-like redaction of this post ? I was shouting in my head while writing all those exclamation points :D

PS3 : I don't even know if "did I did good" is correct English. Isn't that, like, did I done good ? Not-first-language problems.

I will leave the greed for the Merchants

Now it is time to share some of the games that I liked the most:

Unrogue - Play

Earl's Quest - Play

Radical Relocation - Play

Phool - Play

Orbits - Play

Rate my game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-final-judgement

And I will rate back

But beware -- these little bastards will use this opportunity whenever they can.

They are so soft to step on!

And they may attack at any time.

XenoNanny (JAM) - Submission Page

Play on Web

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

Oh No! Zombies! is still deeeeeeeefinitly a game about the zombies and nothing else. You should try it to get what I mean.

I think all the stars aligned for us, making this LD very fun and rewarding. He're a small timeline of what we did and how we approach some of the game design problems we were facing.

We started with making sure we could have a person you controlled, that would feel good to move around and shoot. The inspiration for the shooting-only-in-4-directions-with-arrow-keys came from Binding of Isaac, which meant one could play the game on a laptop (without a mouse). We had some idea as to how to do zombies so we postponed it and implemented a system that would allow us to program different kinds of bullet patterns for each gun instead. While doing so we basically came up with the 8 kinds of guns in the game. Once we had the shooting and movement it was clear we needed to get enemies in so we could really play test. Everything is a rectangle, so collision detection was easy.

@schmavery had the most brilliant idea to get the zombie's "AI" up and going: - generate a random error vector - accumulate the error into the velocity of the zombie - move the zombie some amount towards the player + the error

This was very easy to code and lead to great emergent behaviors. We allowed the error vector to become as big as the directional one (towards the player), which meant sometimes the normal zombies would not runs towards you, they'd wander around and then... suddenly and randomly, THEY'D ATTACK YOU. It worked great.

We decided to have 3 kinds of zombies, the normal dude, the fast dude and the big dude. The fast zombie's purpose was to be a more immediate danger, because you'd barely be able to run away. The big zombie's purpose was to be a bigger challenge, he does more damage and has a lot more health, but in contrast he's not such an immediate danger. If you leave the big zombies around for too long you won't have enough time to get rid of them before the next wave. Going back to our homing behavior, it definitely needed tweaking for the fast and fat zombies. We realize that we could tweak the max magnitude of the error vector to get very different behaviors.

Next post we'll delve into the tooling details in some future post. In the meantime, head over to Oh No! Zombies! we'd love to hear your opinion!

This is the game page https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/daku so we need playtesters if you want to sign up go to this discord server https://discord.gg/f58qnpK and and type signup hope to see you there

My first every LDJam has been amazing. The community is awesome and everyone gives great feedback and can point out specific areas where you could improve. I have learned so much about good game design and time management from the more experienced devs. Also, I have really enjoyed seeing such a variety of takes on the theme, quite a few made me question if my own take made sense.

Before I took part in this, I really had difficulties creating something seamless and sticking with it long enough to polish it. I learned how to use shaders to make up for my lack of talent as an artist and plenty of people have pointed me to great tools for making music!

LD has been a great experience for me, one that I will be happy to share with my artist, musician, and programmer friends, at the next Jam!

Since I have no shame:

Try out my game!

(heh, it rhymed)

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

It is a very simple game I made in about 6 hours, but I am quite proud of it. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/extinction

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

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

Almost there :D

I made a timelapse of my game 'Shelter'

https://youtu.be/e3xAzW-0n9E

We have fixed the last of our progression bugs so now you can actually get to the secretary scene screenshot we have on our page:

There's some other scenes too but we don't want to spoil everything ;)

Moving on from here we are looking to keep working on the game, so if you have any feedback please let us know so we can take it into consideration for our next build!

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

Hi guys

This was my first ever game jam, I was looking at ludum Dare for a while and the day finally came. Bang on 1 o’clock the theme was released so the rest of the Saturday and Sunday I made my game called crave. Over always wanted to make games so if you guys could check out the game I made it might get my name out there.

Game is at https://boschdog03.itch.io/crave

Thanks

Need help getting a html5 version not lag lots. I think i need to give it more memory but i can't remember or find which setting does that... i think its in a .ini but i've had no luck. HALP

The first day was pretty lazy, we still having rest from LudumDare. We designed player’s little ship ( this is the ship you escaped with in demo )

It’s your “base” and safe place. You decide from here where to go next, upgrade weapon and outfit from scraps, restore health and so on.

Saw a lot of people asking for Linux games in general, so I made a linux build! I have no way of testing so if someone could please let me know if it's working I would appreciate it =)

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

Please, when you make a desktop application, have it quit when I press escape.

Thank you.

Thank you for notifying me for the bugs in the compo entry 'Rogue Process'. I've updated the game with minor changes. A devlog has been posted regarding what changes have been implemented. You can download the new version in URL below

Devlog Link https://pixeltrik.itch.io/rogue-process/devlog/17629/minor-changes-for-the-new-version

Download Link https://pixeltrik.itch.io/rogue-process

Last time I did a Postmortem of sorts, it was completely in text. I wanted to try and record a video, but it turned out just as long...oh well.

Wanted to share my experience with everyone, I think taking some time to reflect on your jams is an important step in growing; and I encourage others to make post-mortems and share them with me, please. I'm very interested in your own experiences. Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ99phmVUdA

You can play Kritter Keeper here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kritter-keeper

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/graveyard-shift

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/graveyard-shift

Play it here

Background:

Now that the dust has settled, and I’ve had time to recover, I thought I’d share my experiences from completing my first ever game jam. Let me summarise by saying it was amazing! I’ve only been doing game dev since around June and I decided to enter the Compo to really push myself. This is also the first real game that I’ve put out into the world for people to play (and judge) so it was a really exiting experience for me.

The game:

In Retro Rocket Run! you must make the choice on whether to collect or avoid the abundant coins. Collecting them will help improve your high score but may also kill you… The game gets progressively more difficult the longer you stay alive, so stay sharp!

Concept:

So the theme was “The more you have, the worse it is” and rather than go down the route of making the game progressively worse (more on that in a bit), I thought it would be fun to make a game that became more and more panic inducing as things started to spiral out of control.
I think I nailed the intended experience when I add the power-ups that toggle state, so triggering one required you to collect more coins to undo the effect. In that time, it’s highly likely that you then trigger other togglable effects which escalate the problem. The best reaction I’ve seen was from a player who had their controls inverted, ended up near the spike barriers, couldn’t remember which way to turn and then became invisible!

What went well?

• Time Management

I really didn’t want to lose too much sleep over the jam and made sure I still ate.
On the first day, I broke up the game into smaller tasks and set about completing each one in turn. If I ran out of time, I parked what I was doing and moved on. This gave me a reasonable working prototype at the end of the day, so I could judge whether the game was fun and worth finishing. On the morning of day two I went back through the list and spent time bug fixing and improving assets. The afternoon was then spent panicking over the bugs I was struggling with, and trying to add some polish to the game.

• Scope

Whilst I didn’t get everything into the game that I wanted, I got enough in there to make it playable and fun.
I’d have loved to add more “power-up” effects and give each one a unique visual cue when activated, but time is a cruel mistress. I also wanted to add more level sections, but I thought 12 was enough and I’d already spent more than enough time on them, so other things had to take priority.

What went Wrong?

• Lag

If you’ve played the web build then there’s a good chance you’ve seen some dropped frames! Lag was something I struggled with through the whole of development and is something I only really got a handle on in the last few hours before I submitted (the game plays fine on the machines I tested it with). This all comes down to the number of coins present on screen and how I handled creating and destroying them. Now, there are plenty of fancy tricks that could solve my problem, but none that I thought of right away and none that I could afford to implement in the time I had. Instead, I chose a rather weird approach of deleting several coins each frame until the level block became light enough to destroy safely. It’s not the best way to do it, but it was quick and it seemed to work!

• Coins and Levels

On the subject of the coins causing lag. I also made a stupid mistake when creating my levels. Rather than setting up the coins first and then creating the levels second, I pretty much did the exact opposite.
I was keen to get something working on day one that I didn’t really think about how I’d update the levels later on. So when I changed the coins on day two I then had to go back and redo all of the levels I’d previously finished. This ate up valuable time and was the reason there are only 12 level blocks in the game. Luckily, adding new levels is now really easy, so I’m planning on releasing a post-compo version with way more level variations!

• Modelling

Now, I’m a programmer and not really an artist. However, I roughly know my way around Blender so figured I’d be able to make some half decent models. I’ve never really done any modelling under time pressure before, so this became super stressful when I’d finished my block models and wanted to add some extra details. First (and last) up were the coins… ah, those damn coins again. After making some pretty good-looking coins, I threw them into my game and wham, the whole thing started grinding to a halt! The extra geometry was making the whole thing worse, so I then had to go back and redo some lighter versions in an attempt to get the game running again. This only left a small amount of time for the spike barriers and the ship, so these will definitely be first on the list when it comes time to rebuild the game.

Conclusion:

So there you have it. It wasn’t the easiest development cycle but I’m super proud of what I created and I think I’ve created a fun experience that people can enjoy. One of the hardest parts of the compo was the lack of help. If you have a problem there’s no one to help you out. Haven’t worked on the sound yet? – tough. Need to redo the models, tough! That said, it was a fantastic experience and I learned so much from entering on my own.
It’s also been a great experience post-submission. Seeing people enjoy my game and getting to see what others created has been incredible and I’m really excited to take part in the next Ludum Dare. For the next one I’ll probably enter with some friends, but who knows? Maybe I’ll push myself to do the Compo again and see how much better I am in a few months.

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions (and let me know your high scores!)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/retro-rocket-run-has-arrived

A friend made a bet with you: “If you can tie yourself to all the people in a mall, I’ll give you 1,000,000 dollars.”. So here you are, in a mall, with many strange people. You have to accomplish their missions to make them your “special friends”, but be careful because some people are VERY jealous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz_fldHODhM Lets play!!! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/flirt-themall

I haven't had time to rate games and my game currently has almost double the amount of rates than I have rated. I want to catch up :D Leave you're entries in the comments (I prefer Web builds), I'll rate all of them :)

Meanwhile if you're interested to get drunk and do parkour at the same time, please check mine out :)

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

Chaparrito's adventure is a game of the bullethell genre based on the mythical nuclear throne. With a very interesting mechanics ... Do you want to discover it?

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