Disassembly line is an endless game which will test your reaction time and your aim skills. All you have to do is pick a minion up and aim at the objectives. How far can you go?
HTML5 and zip download link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/disassembly-line
Volcano Rush is a game where you play a villager who must carry a sheep to the mouth of the volcano in order to sacrifice it to the angry volcano god. The path to the mouth is a dangerous one, filled with obstacles that must be avoided.
Just like last December's LD, this one started with the annual Christmas parade on Friday night with the family. I did not sit down to work on my game until more than an hour after the theme had been announced. I spent about 30-45 minutes throwing around ideas until I came up with one I liked. I pictured a little Mayan-inspired villager running up a path on a volcano, jumping over lava and avoiding a variety of other obstacles in his way. My first task was to create a volcano for the villager to run up. I fired up ZBrush and got started. I spent the next 2 hours making a nice looking volcano before heading to bed.
The next morning, I woke up early and got started on the volcano again. An hour later it hit me. My sculpted version of the volcano was somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million polygons. Even with the standard process of baking a normal map to use with a lower poly model, this volcano was going to look bad when zoomed in the required amount for gameplay. I decided to go with a low poly look. So I lowered the poly count down to a bit over 100k polygons and transferred it over to Blender, where I split the volcano into 16 more manageable parts and added it to my game.
The next step was to figure out how to get the player to run around the volcano, following the path. I wanted simple "go forward" and "go backward" controls. No complicated 3D movement. So I opted to create a quad-strip in Blender that is used to create a series of path points on the mountain and the player can then use that to traverse the mountain. It works pretty well, though because his movement is coded as a path index and a percentage of the way to the next index, movement speed can be inconsistent if the path points aren't the same distance apart.
Once I had the path generation working, I had to create a player, so I fired up ZBrush and sculpted out a little Mayan villager. Once he was sculpted, I transferred it over to Blender for UVing, rigging and animation. Once UVed and rigged, I spent over an hour creating an idle and a run animation for him and exported it to my game. Once there, I got the character running back and forth and decided I didn't like something in one of the animations, so I went and changed it. The updated animations were wrong in my game, so I went back to Blender and somehow both my animations got completely screwed up. I have no idea what I did or if it was just Blender screwing up, but unfortunately, I had to go back to the pre-animation version of my character and redo the animations from scratch. I could not dedicate the same amount of time to the new versions, so they don't look as nice as the originals.
Now my villager needed something to carry, so it was back to ZBrush to sculpt a sheep. That was pretty easy. Then I needed to get collisions with the flowing lava. My first implementation was to generate an octree of triangles from the lava mesh and use that for collision tests against the player's OBB. It worked, but by the end of the compo, I switched to using placeholder geometry for the collision triangles (instead of thousands of triangles, there are now dozens). It should work much better that way on slower computers.
I now had a player who could run, jump and if he hit the lava flows, he started over at the beginning. It was pretty close to something I could submit at that point, so I went ahead and created a title screen. Once I had a title screen that transferred you to the game, I called it a day for Saturday.
I was up bright and early Sunday morning and started working on the win condition. I won't spoil what happens when you reach the top of the volcano, but I think it's pretty good and worth the effort to get to. My game had a title screen, it had game play, and win and lose conditions. Now it needed sound effects. I did some quick jump exertion noises and a silly comment he makes when you lose. Then I fired up FL Studio to make the background music. I knew I wanted a drum heavy tribal sound, so I found some interesting drum instruments and played with it until I had something reasonable. Once that was done, I added a smoke particle emitter for the mouth of the volcano.
At this point I had a complete game, but it wasn't very challenging or fun. I needed more obstacles. My first thought was a boulder that bounced down the path after you, so I re-used the smoke particle mesh to be the rock and started coding it. The first step was to get the rock bouncing, so I got it bouncing in place. I tested and by itself that seemed pretty interesting. So instead of taking the time to make the rock bounce down the path, I left it as is. That left me enough time to work on another obstacle. My initial idea was a bird that flew over and dropped something at you, but I didn't have time for that. Instead, I decided to have something moving that you had to jump over. So I re-used the rock mesh again and made a rock that slides back and forth on the ground. I realize that both of these traps make little sense in terms of the real world, but they work for an interesting challenge in the game.
So now I had two obstacles and about three hours left before the deadline. I decided to do a little polish. I improved the lava shader and added in a bloom effect. It looks so much better than it did. I added the ability to mute the music. I also optimized the lava flow collisions and fine tuned the trap placement a bit. That brought me to the deadline. I was exhausted, but I was done.
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this entry. If you decide to try Volcano Rush, please let me know what you think. If you rate and comment on the game, I'll do the same for you. Thanks for reading and for playing!
Check out my game and please play it, rate it and leave feedback. Leave me a comment if you want me to play and rate yours too!
Yes, both Windows and Linux users can play Tank Gauntlet!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/tank-gauntlet-control-vs-power
There have also been some small fixes to the UI, so hopefully, a few more people can try the game out. I'm still a little worried about the difficulty, only one person seems to have gotten past the first level so far.
Hey Mac and Linux users, you too can start a sex cult in Horny Demons, our lewd deckbuilding game.
Our Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/horny-demons
Download: https://team-infernus.itch.io/horny-demons
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/bouncy-arts
Bear - Check.
2 Guns - CheckCheck.
3 colourful levels - CheckCheckCheck.
All songs and sound effects made from scratch during the jam - Check.
All assets made from scratch during the jam - Check.
Infinite Ammo - Check.
Jazz Drums - Check.
Animals harmed during the making of this video game? - ...Obviously not, they're robots. No Check.
Fun as hell to play - Check.
"check" it out here!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/akimbear
In older strategy games, basic workers/peons are cheap to spawn… and early in a match they are the only method of exploration of the opponent’s base. Do you ever wondered how these scout peons feel?
Well in our game jam entry you can try!
When we started mapping out our interactive story we were using a whiteboard, but quickly ran out of room. So we turned to our old friend, Google Docs (we actually tried Google Sheets and found it not very helpful). We looked up some different mind-mapping style software and couldn't find anything that was simple, free, and/or cheap.
We color coded it. Blue meant choice, white was story text, lavender was separating sections, red meant fail/death. This worked out ok for our needs but was definitely not a long term, feasible solution for any future, larger projects. Anyone out there make one of these before and use the end all be all of choose your own adventure planning software?
Then we managed to plug the whole thing into our Google Form to complete our unholy Googley abomination. We thought about using game maker or another development environment, but what would the fun in that be?
If you feel like seeing how this worked out, its over here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/aberth-simple-text-based-choose-your-own-adventure
Are you looking for a breathtaking game which is both challenging and relaxing? Check out Ursa, a gorgeous platformer where you get to play as a celestial cub on a journey to find his mother. In this unusual experience, you have to navigate your way through space full of obstacles. Give up the skills you learn to support your mother as you help her through her golden years.
Stunning graphics, beautiful soundtrack, with a bitter sweet story to keep you engaged. :)
As always, we’ll be making sure to rate the games of anyone who leaves feedback.
Enjoy!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ursa
Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/vikrifice
It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s shameless marketing! The Whales and Games team is proud to present Super Sellout!
Hero duty for super profit! Monetization Man is ready to go save people from disaster, but since being a good guy doesn’t pay the bills, he’ll be needing some sponsors… or as many as he can get.
Sacrifice your integrity to earn big bucks at Super Sellout! Control Monetization Man, the invincible, indestructible and insufferably greedy superhero that will take any and all offers to make it through the month. Accept sponsors, sacrifice your mobility, and try to make as much money as you can! Money, money, money!
In behalf of our team, I hope you enjoy the game and the Ludum Dare rating season. If you have any games you’d like for us to checkout and rate, then make sure to leave them in the comments as we’ll check them first place!
We also have our very own team Discord server and would love for you to share your entries there as well!
See y’all on the flip side! 🐳
Come and play a challenging endless space shooter where you must sacrifice your power cells to temporarly boost your abilities.
Very proud of what we managed to pull off for our first Game jam.
Hope you will enjoy it, don't forget to rate and share your highscore !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/fusion-cell
In Fruit Flinger, you protect your home from the mindless minions with fruit - and a catapult. Use careful aim to target the oncoming masses and take them all out before they reach you.
Fulfill an unfulfilling government job in this mix between 'Papers Please' and 'Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes'. By the way, the government job consists of ritual sacrifices to the gods. Also: hating Steve.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/stablishment
In our game I had to implement a skill system, which would allow the player to easily downgrade their states, and also in return enable them use their super abilities and manager their cool downs. Off course, you could just create endless of variables in the PlayerController MonoScript, however doing that is not really the way this should be tackled.
Also I do have to say, that my solution is probably not the best one out their, however it worked like a charm and was very nice to work / implement it.
I do heavily think that Unity is way more then scripting which is most off the time mistaken taken the amount of people that start learning programming with Unity and do not get introduced to advanced mechanics that languages like C# do have to offer.
So here is what I did:
Creating a new Class, which does not derive from MonoBehaviour. That way we can create a sort off memory object and reference it in our player. I called it SkillState:
SkillState manages all the different Category's off Skills our player has. As we see we do have 5 different skills for this game:
Movement
Health
Vision
Damage
Attackspeed
If we now feel the urge to implement a new skillgroup, just add a new object to the array and we are fine!
No we have created a Array off SkillSets, however, what is a SkillSet? This now basically contains all the variables and methods we need to manage all stats:
(Please ignore the fact that we don't have any getter / setters here, but you know the clock ticked ...)
Now we have grouped every value we could need in our player to manage the abilities that we will later implement in the PlayerController. Also what is pretty neat is that we can also implement methods in our SkillSet class, which we can use to make for example the cooldown management very easy.
For example if we now see in the PlayerController Update function, that our desired key was pressed, we can call skillStates.damage.normalReady() and if true we will launch our fireball.
Also as shown in the first picture, when initializing the SkillSet objects, we hardcodeded our balance values. That way we have everything at one place and can easily adjust them later. (Might should shift that in a separate file for larger projects)
Thanks a lot for reading all this and I hoped it made sense what I have written. If you liked it you can let me know and I will write about how I implemented the multistate character.
Also if you now want to see how all this look ingame, you can have a look at our game "SkillSacrifice" we made for LD43.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/skill-sacrifice
Have a nice day!
Hey ya'll! This is the second blog post about my entry. I added a bugfix for the cursor not locking in the WebGL/Windows versions of the build. I hope this makes the PC controls more bearable!
For those who havent played it yet, I reccomend a controller! Please play the game! I will be spending all night playing jam games, maybe I should stream it.
Added cursor lock on Mouse Click for WebGL & Windows
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/expendibots
Try Fórnir, our turn-based game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/fornir
"Great Game Art! Great Concept! Please do continue this game!" (@tpamir)
"Loved the game atmosphere, great storytelling!" (@naya-rangel)
"Great graphics and superb audio." (@hectigo)
Will you find all the different endings?
I've added a WebGL version of Blót: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/blot-1
But now... time to sleep... I am sending my hero from Blót to bed too.
Ethical Smoothies Co. is a game about running a smoothie factory. It is your job to chop up, mix, and serve fruit smoothies to thirsty customers! You do so with the help of some adorable sentient fruit-shaped workers who keep the factory running. Surely nothing could go wrong here...
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ethical-smoothies-co
I would really appreciate any feedback on my game!!
