my LD 43 game laged some features (Spawn Points) and now that the jam is over, i created this feature. am i allowed to update my game or is that cheating?

How many minions can you get max? :thinking: I feel like they are too weak to really make it to an minion-army.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/bloodmage-1

(Gif of the first test for the revive-ability during developement)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD9z5l8r6cY

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/evil-ship

Something fun I did last time we participated, but here's a wordcloud (so far) from the feedback we got.

Wanna contribute? Feedback is always appreciated, or just play for fun:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/duskhearth

PIZZA ROYALE - A pizza topping survival simulator. Try now please

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/pizza-royale

Post Mortem of a Non-Release :cryingcatface:

Little Snowman Kitty-Savior runs around with a torch and melts frozen Kitties out of ice cubes. Because of the torch he slowly melts away and so sacrifices his own life.

• Time wasted for fantasizing around an too complex, epic story including an ice heart that fills up with kitty love, a funeral and so on.
• Being convinced to switch from Unity to Godot in C#Alpha will confront you with absolutely no bugs :expressionless:
• Knowing nothing about the basic concepts of how to program animated Sprites, Collision or GUIs in Godot
• Lack of Pixel Art Skills combined with the ambition to produce very detailed Sprites

• Learnt a lot of Basic Concepts for 2D-Collision, Path-Following, Sprite Animation and GUI for a new Game Engine in a very short time
• Set up some Core Rules for next LD, like splitting the Game Design in even smaller steps with a obligatory time limit for each of them.
• Learned from reflecting the failures and taking the time to write them down.

Would love to read your feedback guys! CHEERS! See you all in LD 44.

HTML5 available :video_game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/humanity-hero

I saw someone else create a word cloud from their feedback and thought it was a great idea. Here is a word cloud made up of all the feedback we have received so for for Long Live the King!

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/long-live-the-king!

Occult Defence Agency Budgeting Simulator: Defend the realm from vampires, werewolves, pixie swarms. Cut your budget mercilessly. Survive.

I went into Ludum Dare straight after NaNoWriMo, on a really busy weekend. But I liked the theme: "Sacrifices must be made", so I wanted to do it. Between a bunch of social engagements, it took me three days to complete my game, but I did get there.

Each Ludum Dare, I like to joke that I go through the stages of grief about the theme. Denial - Surely people wouldn't vote for that? Bargaining - Maybe if I shoehorn a completely unrelated game into the theme? Anger - People are stupid to have voted for that! Depression - I have no ideas at all. Acceptance - Well, I guess I do have an idea.

This time, this natural order of things was disrupted, and I instead found myself making a matrix of different ways to interpret the theme: On one axis was whether to take the term "sacrifice" literally, mechanically, or metaphorically. The other axis was what your relationship to the sacrifice was: are you the sacrifice, or are you sacrificing? And how do you feel about it? This approach, of finding multiple axes of interpretation for the theme and considering each combination, is definitely something I will reuse.

By the end of the first day, I had multiple interesting ideas that I now urgently needed to choose from:

• You are the employee of a company. At the end of each level, one employee gets fired. You must sabotage the other employees to make sure you get to stay.
• You are a willing human sacrifice. Your tribe has encountered a great calamity, and your ritual death will help them process it. You can choose the details of the ritual. Talk to the members of your tribe to find out what they should be.
• You are in charge of an organisation, and there are multiple rounds of budget reductions you need to deal with, while still allowing your organisation to fulfil its mission.

The first idea sounds quite fun, maybe something like a PvP version of Overcooked where you sabotage each other instead of working together. But I couldn't figure out a way of doing it within the remaining time.

I really like the human sacrifice idea, but I think it needs more time and attention given the subject matter.

That left me with the budgeting game, which had the advantage that I could implement it as a pretty simple-looking JavaScript app.

You're not just running any organisation, of course. You're running a paranormal defence agency inspired by Charles Stross' Laundry and my recent attempts at winning XCOM on hard difficulty level. It's also reminiscent of my previous Ludum Dare game Concierge, in that you have a bureaucratic job where you need to allocate things in a way that prevents disaster.

So you find yourself in charge of the Office of Paranormal Defence, a minor organ of the UK government facing heavy cuts. Your new minister - resemblance to real figures definitely intended - is keen to impose austerity by repeatedly cutting your budget. Each turn plays out as a new budgetary year, as you need to decide which activities of your agency are vital, and which can be reduced or eliminated. Do you need custom werewolf holding cells? A fancy Christmas party to lift your team's spirits? An entire research department devoted to pixies?

Cut the wrong things, and the UK will be devoured by occult horrors. So - no pressure!

There is a good ending, really. There's also four definitely very bad endings and two ambiguous ones where you can make up your own mind as to whether you've succeeded. This is another interesting thing I've come to realize: don't explicitly label your endings as "winning" or "losing". Leave it to the player to decide!

Addendum about the logo: It's of course intentionally drab and horrible. I wanted to give it a real feel of a supposedly modern and dynamic but actually staid corporate-ish redesign given to a UK government agency. I was also inspired by the horrible pixelated logos you see in old bank machine screens. "OPD" stands for "Office of Paranormal Defence", and the O has a dot in it because the original logo incorporated John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica.

I guess it's pretty clear my game is about sheep... :smile:

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/shepards-island

An animated section in your loading screen is called a Throbber. Yes.

Check out our game here to see our Throbber in action!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/duskhearth

If you'd like to know more check our entry here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/celtic-fun

Hey!

We're still recovering from last weekend and haven't had the time to play as many of your games as we'd like (we'll get to it this weekend though!), but why not come check the latest of the Procrastination Team jam games?

It's not very balanced or polished (as always, our initial scope was WAYYYYYYY too big ;)), but it's got Santa, Santa's laugh, Santa's ridiculous hiding poses, balloons, kids, fireplaces, kids attached to balloons inside fireplaces, sacrifices and much, much mo... oh no, thats basically it.

Anyways!

If you're willing to try it, here it is!

Blow up asteroids and alien ships in my game Star Junk. Ammo is also currency so be smart. For once, I'm really proud of the game design ^-^.

Thank you <3

You delete files and the game assets disappear!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them

Hey guys, we've just updated our BOARDGAME's rulebook - now some tricky mechanics should be clearer for everyone! No rules changed, just fixed some descriptions!

If you're wondering "WHY A BOARDGAME ON LUDUM DARE?!?!?"... Well, we're two girls with zero videogames programming skills, but we LOVE games and we wanted to try joining all of you in this amazing creative contest!

Come have a look! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/dark-lords-of-sacrifice

We're having a blast playing your entries!!! Cheers everyone and good job!!!!!!!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/bouncy-arts

Having written this section last, I realize it may look like I don't like my finished product. Not true! Sure, I had some hiccups here and there, but overall I think it was a success!

Considering this was a jam project and I'm thouasands of miles away from my home and work station, I'm pleased with how this turned out. Everyone has to start somewhere and thankfully this wansn't a flop!

With that said, let's get into this post-mortem:

Good - Time Management

I made a schedule and (mostly) stuck to it. Almost all of my estimates for time were accurate and I was pretty comfortable time-wise with the jam. (Aside from sound and build time.) I ended up calling people back home for a combined time of about 2 hours. I would say I could have called less, but they provided the breaks I needed here and there and were something that kept me hyped throughout the whole event.

Good - Theme

It's impossible to play through without sacrificing something. Even if you don't cause any Conflicts or if you resolved them all, you still didn't save all the people on the other track. The theme is pretty deeply routed in this entry.

Good - Writing

I spent my work commute writing most of the Conflicts and DialogEngine entries. I was happy I got to throw in some easter eggs in the game and give the game the mood I wanted through dialogue.

Could be better - Art

I'm by no means an artist, so I'm not super critical about this one. The overall look of the game is inspired by the British Tube system and their graphic design. Without spending a huge amount of time, I tried to create something that mimicked the minimalist design of the the London underground. I don't think I failed completely, but there are some noticable problems. (Bow Wow is a human. But he's a dog. ????)

Could be better - Sound

I apologize to anyone that has already played and had their computer's volume in double-digits. Your ears may still be ringing.
* No volume controls.
I didn't have time to implement a volume controller into the game and I was testing with my system volume at maybe 7. This cause the end result to be a very loud game. If you decide to try it, please turn down the volume for safety's sake!

• It's not my music!
  Since I wasn't doing this with access to my regular soft/hardware, the time I left for making music ended up being too short to do anything meaningful. I did a quick search for music that I thought would match the tense mood of the game and used the extra time to add the News Reel feature.

Nitpicking - Programming

• Public vs. Private
  Namely, for the sake of time, I made a lot of things public that sound have been private. Which, from a runtime perspective makes no difference. Looking over the finished product however, it's all just... very public.

• Changing my naming convention half-way through.
  I did that! *facepalm* I don't know what I was thinking when I first started writing stuff. Halfway through the jam, I spent over an hour refactoring because parts of the code was difficult to read. But I didn't refactor all of it so it's a weird mix of 'mPrivateCounter' and 'mPrivateCount'. Lesson for next time: Refactor _after the jam, not during it. (Duh!)

Could be better - Design

• Rapid-fire rounds!
  After sooooooo many tests for different game components, I decided 15 seconds was long enough for each round. Since there are potentially up to 6 people to review and you need to make a decision based on what you've seen, this is just not enough time.

• How do I play?
  My very first bit of feedback was a comment that basically said "Dude, how do I play your game?" This was super useful to hear and I quickly added a note to the 'Controls' section of the submission. He/She wasn't the only person to mention this and it taught me a valuable lesson in UI-Design. So thank you NAME and others who made similar comments on Twitch for the help!

• Colliders, man. Whatcha gonna do?
  For the life of me, I couldn't size the colliders on the track victims. Ultimately I just told people to hover near the top-left of the sprite because I knew it would be present somewhere near there.
  

Engine Crashes

I had 2 big crashes from the infamous kMaxCallBackStack error that cost me an hour each time they ocurred. I couldn't do anything about it aside from using a different version of Unity, but I figured I'd stick with the devils I know in 2018.2.4f rather than brave the unknown in

Conclusion

Overall, I'm pleased with how it turned out. I learned plenty of stuff for the next time around. I played it safe this time by choosing 2D instead of experimenting with 3D. (Look out LD 44!)

If you find time, give the game a shot. As you saw above, rounds are quite short and there's only 5 per game.

Play the game!

Hi there !

Just wanted to say a big thank you to anyone who took the time to play our game, rate it and/or give us feedback.

We'll keep adding new stuff (The other enemies are coming, we're so excited !), so feel free to stop by once in a while and play the game ! All feedbacks are welcome :)

If you haven't heard of Machine Godz yet, you can play it right here :

https://beardmage.itch.io/machine-godz

The WebGL version might have some issues, so we added a download link on the LDJam page :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/machine-godz

Come join me on https://www.twitch.tv/siraeron streaming your games live!

you can submit your game here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S4u6yaMN61kAcWpmvAuIYklaJnSwB7GSMx6vX6PCTQg