*Just wanted to show you our game, play, rate, leave a comment. *
we like to hear what you have to say about the game.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/not-today-satan
HUNT
EAT
FIND BAPHOMET TO ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STAGE
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/not-today-satan
Streaming more jam games! If you want me to play your game on stream please submit your game via this form: https://goo.gl/forms/fLIahiS3dRmpzgiB2
I record timestamps in the queue of games that are being played: https://goo.gl/N2rkr8 That way you can watch later on the video that is created when the stream finishes if you can't make it for the stream!
The queue is getting pretty low now, so hop on in and share your games! Going live at: https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames
That could be a good theme for next LD (nope), but actually it is what I feel each time trying to add lightings to 2D Phaser games. During developing NOPE I knew that lighting is required for horror atmosphere, but the only thing I had time to do is simple circle lights (which ignore walls and doors) and... what, are these shadows just 2 stretched rectangles? Yes, they are:
I have a lot of free time (nope) so I read lot of tutorials about lightings and shadows. As result, I'd like to present you post-LD version of NOPE with valid shadows, like that:
It is better understandable in motion:
LD:
Post-LD:
Yaw, light of flashlight does not pass doors! But if you open the door - it will:
So, I've spent additional 20 hours of my life to fight with Phaser reality. Maybe it is time to learn Unity. Or Godot. Or... Well, what would you suggest for a game like that?
On a side note: Im getting difficulties porting to MAC with Unity 2018. Has anyone else have this issue?
Check it out here
Hi Everyone!
Going to spend an hour or two playing/rating games to finish off my weekend! Please leave a link to your rating page, and I'll take a look :)
We'd love your feedback as well :) In addition to the jam-version, you should check out our post-jam link! It's in the blog post! We're still making more changes and additions, but we're having a great time and would love to know what you think! The link to my game with @grandtheftmarmot is below!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-tearable-three
THE TEARABLE THREE TRAILER/TIMELAPSE https://youtu.be/CUTThEnC-XE
Help Archibald make decisions on his snobbish journey! What will you sacrifice: a hamburger, a gold bar or the teddy bear from his childhood?
Download: https://gamejolt.com/games/archibaldssnobbishjourney/382781
Ludum Dare game page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/archibalds-snobbish-journey
For my very first Ludum Dare, feedback and ratings are appreciated! I'll try to rate your game if you rate mine.
Happy 43rd Ludum Dare everyone!
Well, there are always things that didn't make it to the game. Here is our list (shortened to things we miss the most).
viking should axe their enemies, obviously. But because they lost their axe, they have to jump their enemies to unconsciousness.
the cat was meant to be a partner of the viking, going where they go, jumping where they jump and watching viking fighting enemies for the both of them (looking as bored as only a cat could look). We think that it would make the player/viking and cat's bond stronger. Unfortunately such a huge task would be very hard to do on a game jam, so viking just puts the cat in their basket.
the enemies you fight with in the game are the Sightless Goðar (Priests) from the tribe of the Sharp Welcome. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the clan, who are much better in fight because of the abilitiy to sense (and see) the viking, are busy fighting vikings on the other side of the Sacred Island. The same goes for their allies, the Blue Mouth tribe, who are able to shoot the little poisoned arrows from their fifes to put vikings to sleep forever. I guess the viking the player is controlling was the smart one trying to sneak up on the back of the enemy to make a sacrifice the God is demanding. (Actually the code is there, but for various reasons a.k.a some mistakes a.k.a too-much-game-jam-code you won't meet them in the game version that was shipped)
There are no shooting enemies, although there is one blue enemy that doesn't really make sense since it has no pike. The behaviour doesn't change when they "see" a player.
(Also now the animation is kinda different because they keep their pikes low instead of toward the sky, but it's the only difference; I didn't want to change it now in my Unity)
Standard Enemies with the Follow functionality (regular Sharp Welcomes):
Shooting Enemies (Blue Mouths; they have s cool blue shield with holes, they shoot through them, ok?):
Fan art from themselves) Try to play our quest. We welcome feedback.
*Game page: * https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/apatanat-the-benefit-of-all
I got a ideal for a game and don't no how to go about getting it out there but hear it is, its a open world zombie game base on the looks of the world today and you can go to secrets military base and steal there weapons if you can make it pass there army and you can go to different continent if you can find gas to put in boats or airplane to fly or sail to the continent you going to each continent got different stuff you can do but the storyline is trying to take back the world from the zombies
Play it here: https://bippinbits.itch.io/trahere
Jam Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/trahere
Hey !! Come check out & rate our submission : COLLATERO !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/collatero
It’s a thinking game with a retro cartoon style, will live jazz music. I hope you’ll enjoy ~
Lab Animals is our entry into Ludum Dare 43
Please play and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lab-animals
And let us know what you think in the comments!
Never under estimate the power of screen shake!
I think it turned out pretty well! It has a beginning, middle and end - and I think it's even fun to play. It features 3 unique enemy types, each with their own behaviour and attack patterns and 3 different power up modes to help you fight the horde!
For me the highest priority was to make a game that was fun to play in 3 days. If we could also make it fit the theme too that would be an added bonus.
When brain storming ideas we had a thought "What if the player had to sacrifice something, not the game character..."
You, as the player, had to give up your visibility of the game or your ability to control the game, etc, to get something in return.
I started to think that a top down shooter could be the way to go... I could build a basic one in the time frame and then you could collect or use powerups but they'd cost you something in return.
Good game feel was going to be critically important so I spend a lot of my time focusing on that.
At this point we still didn't have an art theme for the game. All I knew is that I wanted it to be top down with hefty meaty shooting.
Due to the day job Erwan, who provides all the original art for the game, had to go back to work on Monday. We spent all Saturday morning unable to decide what game to make so we really only had a day and half to get the majority of the art work done. Then on the end of Saturday we decided to switch to pixel art too! We never make it easy for ourselves! :sweat_smile:
So all things considered I think the art came out looking pretty good!
Erwan created our dog main character...
...but what does he fight and where? A Dungeon maybe? An Aztec temple in the jungle?
Then we settled on a sci fi lab settings, fighting demons and mutants. Those scientists have been up to their old tricks and accidentally opened portals to hell again.
We had an idea and settings and a playable game with the chunky combat working well enough. I'm particularly proud of managing to fit in 3 different enemy types, each with a unique attack pattern. By now it was was 10pm (GMT) on Monday - now I needed to start working on including the theme by creating some power ups!
Health regen - your vision becomes blurry as you heal. In the end I used multiple shaders to create a 'drunk vision' style effect.
(I had to compress this gif a lot, it looks better in game!)
Berserk mode - you gain speed, your enemies are slowed down and your hit much harder but you can only see whats just in front of you. Running into danger is very easy!
Infinite ammo - your shots don't use any energy but you can't choose when to fire or where to aim! You're also slowed down a lot.
There were loads of features and even art work that only just didn't make it in time. With just a couple of more hours I think I could have successfully added at least some of the following, all the art work was ready to go: - GORE! - A melee attack - pixel art main character - pixel art explosions - a 4th enemy type - a teleporter power up - use it to escape a tight spot by teleporting away.. you'll telefrag one random enemy a minimum distance from you but your controls would have been reversed for a while
You can play the game yourself here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lab-animals
Thanks for reading!
-- Sam
And hey, the stages won't look terrible this time! (New/Old)
Play the original here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/hyperfight
In hiJack, you can steal any ship and asteroid you want.
The ships include, but are not limited to
Beefed up Unity logo
The uterus (my significant other coined that particular nickname)
Steroids
Try it, rate it, mention your score and share your thoughts and suggest any possible improvements.
If you like sheep, explosions, and fast-paced games, try Flocked :sheep:
It is currently available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (unfortunately no web build yet).
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/flocked
I would appreciate it if you could rate it as well; it only needs six more reviews :smile:
We only need seven more ratings to get an official score on Do It for Their Sake! I am quite happy with the outcome and response. There were tons of things people have pointed out to me, and I am very glad you all rated and commented on it.
You can rate the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/do-it-for-their-sake
Thank you all for participating in the play and rating. :smile:
or, "What do you mean I have to market?"
Ludum Dare is not like most game jams in that it's not over when it's over. Finishing and submitting your game is actually just the beginning; after that, you need to market. You may have (and probably did!) make something really cool in just a weekend, and that's great. But if you don't find a way to get it out in front of people, nobody's gonna know about it but you.
Looking back at the Ludum Dare 42 statistics, fully one-third of the entrants failed to crack 20 ratings, and therefore did not get their game scored. Some of them probably weren't interested in a rating at all, and were just doing the jam for fun. That's fine! But part of the appeal of Ludum Dare is the scoring. If you want to be part of that and are just at a loss for what you're doing wrong, the answer is probably either a beginner mistake about your game's presence on the website, or a failure to properly market it.
First, here are some of the most frequent errors new users make, and the simple improvements you can make to get your game noticed.
This is the single mistake most likely to make people overlook your game. Here's a snapshot of the None filter on a random day. A big chunk of the titles with no ratings at all simply do not tell me anything about the game. How's that supposed to pique my interest? Why would I play gray box #3 over literally anything else?
Luckily this is an easy one to fix. Take a picture of your game. Scale and crop it to 640x512. Upload it. You're done! Still struggling? That's okay. One quick-and-dirty trick you can do to make a nice cover image is to turn off your in-game UI, take a screenshot of something interesting in your game, then overlay your game title in an image editor. Alternately, if you've already put some effort into a pretty title screen, you can use that in a pinch (again, just hide the buttons and stuff).
Okay, I've clicked on your game. Then I see... one sentence about how you made it in a weekend. Or alternately, 1000 words of lore and instructions. Back button. Next game.
What went wrong? This page is your big chance to sell me on your game. Snazz it up! Add some screenshots. You're not limited in resolution like the cover image, just upload size. GIFs are allowed here, but unfortunately not mp4 video, so with the 4mb upload limit the quality isn't going to be superb if you go that route.
Also, pretty up the description while you're at it. Use headings, bold and italic text, links, etc. (sparingly, of course). He're how to format your text using the proper syntax.
As for what you should include in your description, here are some ideas to consider:
Alright, so you hooked me with a picture and a kick-ass description. Now I scroll down to actually play your game and find... a link to a sketchy-looking file on Dropbox and an instruction to go download some 3rd party framework to actually make everything work. Ehhh... probably not.
There's really no need to host your file yourself. There are tons of free hosting sites that provide an attractive, consistent interface for players looking to play Ludum Dare games. And they give your project an air of legitimacy and not-being-a-virus. The hosting guide covers this in detail.
And whatever you do, don't put the onus on players to do all the work. Try to make it as simple as possible to play your game. For example, if you're using Unity, there's no reason* for you not to have a WebGL build. This lowers the barrier to entry to practically zero - click play in your browser and you're good to go!
*unless you're developing a game that requires a native client - like an incredible networked dungeon crawler or a game about literally moving windows around
Even better than building for WebGL, build in WebGL. Switch your target platform the moment you start your game jam project, and build early and often. Like, every time you take a break to eat. This will help make sure you don't run into any last-minute snags or platform-specific issues that might cause the next mistake, broken build. You can always go back and build native clients later if you decide it's necessary.
Oh, and if you host on itch.io remember to change your pricing to "No payments." Prompting users to pay for your jam game is tacky and off-putting.
I clicked on your game. Dug the description. Scrolled down to the downloads, and managed to grab the files without catching any viruses from totally-legit-file-share.ru. I click run and... nothing happens. Missing DLL. Content not found. Sorry bud, time to move on.
So yeah, try to verify that your game actually runs. Build it as you go. Even once you've got it hosted somewhere, download your own game and test to make sure it all works. See it through the eyes of a new user. Try it on another person's machine if you can, or at least a different browser. Resize the window. Change the aspect ratio. Break your game before your players do, and iron out the kinks early.
A common issue for games made with Unity is forgetting to upload the supporting files and only sharing the exe. You need to upload the entire output directory:
All o' this.
A common mistake. You can change your game description at any time, but there are two "gotchas" that are easy to overlook:
I know, major usability bug. It isn't clear this is a requirement, but it is.
So feel free to change the page after the submission deadline. Even fix bugs in the game itself. Maybe you just want to be done with your game once the jam's over, which is understandable. But in Ludum Dare it's acceptable to release updates that fix bugs as long as you're not actually extending the game/adding new features and the changes are clearly spelled out. Not everyone is above-board about this, which I feel kind of spoils the sport of making a game in a weekend, but fixing bugs at least is expected and encouraged (and you're putting your game at a disadvantage if you don't).
Those are just the basics, the stuff that you need to convert someone from seeing your title on the website to actually playing it. Now it's time to make sure they can find it in the first place. It's time to learn about visibility.
In the beginning, having zero ratings can actually be an asset. The "Zero" filter gives great visibility to games that haven't been rated yet. But once you have at least one rating, you're out of that category and it's time to find other ways to surface your game. The other categories to target are Smart (the default filter), Classic, Danger, Feedback, and Grade. Grade just shows which games have the most ratings already, so it's not really relevant to this discussion. The rest are pretty much different ways of divvying up games based on how well their creators play and rate each other's games.
The ratings for your game come from other people spending their precious free time playing it and giving feedback, so it's only fair that how visible your game is corresponds to how well you return the favor. Click on other games, preferably other games that need the ratings most like the None and Danger categories. Play them. Rate them. Pretty straightforward! Just do this a bunch and your game will show up higher in the Classic filter. But unfortunately, this is kind of trivial to cheat. You're not really forced to play every game to rate it, after all. That's why the Smart and Feedback filters exist, to try to give a leg up to raters that take the time to leave insightful feedback in the comments.
I'm not positive how the quality of feedback is measured, but it seems to be based on how many likes your comments get. This still isn't perfect - lots of people seem to spam short comment like "great game!" on everything they can to rack up karma. Meanwhile I'll sometimes spend half an hour digging into someone's game and write a paragraph of feedback only for the dev to stiff me on karma entirely. That doesn't seem fair. But it's still more fair than counting ratings alone and mostly balances out in the long run.
So yeah, rate a lot of games to climb in Smart and Classic, leave a lot of comments to climb in Smart and Feedback.
Write a blog post. It'll show up on the front page, which can generate more views (and potential players) than many hours of ratings and reviewing could. It's so effective in fact that some people don't even bother with ratings and just spam blog posts all day to get players. I still have to recommend against blogspamming though. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons situation - if everybody tried to get scored without giving ratings, well, nobody would get any ratings. But the occasional blog post is still an invaluable tool in your arsenal.
So what should you write about? Anything, really. You could advertise your game with a pretty gif, or offer some insight into your development process with a postmortem or retrospective. You might even write a big how-to about something completely unrelated to your game, then nonchalantly slip a link to your game somewhere in the middle!
>> how did this get here <<
If there's anyone streaming Ludum Dare games on Twitch, that's another great way to get your game in front of people, and get really honest feedback. Not only will viewers see it and possibly get interested, but it can also show up in the Twitch feature box on the right column of the LD page for even more visibility.
This definitely takes more effort though. You can't just drop your game into a queue and disappear. Almost all streamers are looking to interact with the game maker on their stream and require you be present to have a shot at your game being played. But they're usually entertaining and worth a watch anyway. Plus you'll get to see a bunch of cool games you might not have seen yet!
Seems pretty obvious, but easy to overlook. Post about your game on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter (don't forget the hashtags: #ldjam #ludumdare43 etc), whatever!
Another big reason to go with a hosting site over self-hosting. In addition to finding players on Ludum Dare and sending them to your game, players can actually discover your game organically on a hosting platform and find your Ludum Dare page from there!
I'm going to focus on itch.io, because it seems to be the most popular choice right now, it's the one I know, and has good "game jam integration."
edit game -> metadata -> external links -> add new link to Ludum Dare and paste your game url
If you do all this, you might just get enough ratings & platitudes in the comments to earn the right to a ranking. Then you can see how they really feel in cold, hard numbers!
If you have any suggestions or corrections, please drop them in the comments below. I always appreciate honest feedback on my entry, Space Battle Zero. I'm also happy to give my thoughts on your project. Thanks for reading!
You delete files and the assets disappear. Fun right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I
Check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them
Fire Swept is a Fire Fighting Real-Time Strategy game! Fire it up and give it a shot! Please rate and review if you like the game. If you have any suggestions on the game, please feel free to let me know. I take all suggestions, feedback and critique seriously. Reviews will get your game played and rated in return.
Post-Submission Improvements - Improved Gameplay - Redesigned UI - Pathfinding - Unit training - Budget system - Four season time line with dryness effector - and much more!
https://youtu.be/Jjw7kg_Ae1Q
