https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/plateformer-txt Platformer.txt is a game where you manipulate files to influence the state of the game and your avatar in order to complete the different levels you can subscribe to this newsletter to follow the developement of the game https://tinyletter.com/Platformertxt

A small world living into your computer files.

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

Hey !

We changed a few things on our game Abortion Boy based on the feedbacks we took good note of. We're not changing the download link on the Ludum Dare website since it would be cheating, so make sure to play the first version if you want to rate us, however you can find an updated version HERE and see the few updates that have been made ! :)

If you're looking for a simple game to play quickly, try Flocked :sheep:

Flocked is a neoclassical shoot-the-targets game in which the targets are sheep, the goal is to sacrifice as many sheep to the gods as you can within the time limit :smile:

The game currently supports Windows, Mac, and Linux; for some reason the web build is currently broken.

I would appreciate if you could rate the game as well; it only needs two more ratings to reach the target amount.

You can find the game here

Cheers! - IceMaker

You delete files and the game assets disappear. Fun right?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I

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

Sadly I've been super busy and haven't had a lot of time to play and rate other games. I'm doing my best, but it would mean a lot to me if you would play my game, Ultimate Sacrifice. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy!

Squares are coming.

Get ready for the fighting.

You will kill those Squares.

I don't know why. Nobody Cares.

By sacrificing your guns.

While I'm making these puns.

But I'm out of time, which is only thing I fear.

So you should go and play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/squares ;)

For this Ludum Dare @JamesOliverMusic and I put together a game called King and Country! I also continued my tradition of getting my own game's name incorrect on the submission page... :rolling_eyes: I normally make pixel art action games so I wanted to try something different. This time, we decided on a strategy game where you have to help the king escape a castle under siege. The enemies are too numerous to fight them all, so you have to strategically use the knights you have to run interference. Sure, sometimes they die, but SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE to insure the safety of the king.

We work well together since I do all the code and art while he takes care of the music and sound effects. This was our second Ludum Dare working together plus some jams in between and since we can both work independently the process was extremely smooth.

@JamesOliverMusic and I are ~5 hours apart so by the time we were able to brainstorm and come up with a plan we were already 18 hours into the competition (about 3:00 Saturday EST). Losing all the time was painful especially when making a strategy game.

Originally the game was going to have some real time combat element, but that was scrapped very early on when I realized how complicated the systems were becoming. So in the final version the battles are fought automatically.

Timeline

Day 1

Friday night. I got the theme at 9:00 and brainstormed for 3 hours. I came up with a bunch of ideas, none of which I liked. Crap.

Day 2

I had a meeting in the morning and spent the morning brainstorming with @JamesOliverMusic trying to come up with an idea. He proposed a castle under siege and after some discussion we ended up with King and Country! I got started working at 3:00 PM on Saturday, almost 18 hours after the theme was announced. By the evening I had most of the systems finished but all the art was just placeholders.

Day 3

I lost another couple hours in the morning to other obligations. Then again in the evening when we had company come over. I basically worked on the art finished up the systems for 6 hours and ended up going to bed at 1 AM.

Day 4

Monday. I worked. I put another 3 hours in the evening and crammed in as much polish as I could and submitted about 20 minutes before the submission hour started.

Here’s the post-mortem in the Good, Bad and Ugly format.

The Good

The art style - I knew that I wasn't going to have a lot of time for art. I wanted something clean and simple with a hopefully nice aesthetic. I made everything in Inkscape which let me quickly and easily scale and modify it, which was good because I didn't decide on a resolution until late in development.

The music - I think it fits with the game perfectly. It builds from suspenseful during the planning to frantic and epic during the Battle phase before returning back for the planning.

The Bad

Code - I normally write some fairly clean code during jams that is easily extensible. This time I knew I wouldn’t have as much time so I hard coded a bunch of stuff that came back to bite me. Normally I expect the pain of bad code to come after the jam is over when it doesn't matter as much, but not this time.

One nasty bug - I got caught on a bug that was driving me crazy. My game would randomly crash with null pointer exceptions, but I could never recreate it. I don't mind bugs during a jam, especially on some of the more complex systems I had in the game, but this one made the game unplayable so it had to be fixed. It ended up being my own fault. When a unit dies in battle I would kill it, which removed it from all the arrays and locations in the game. But the unit was still present on the board, just invisible. So when you draw the selection box you would catch the dead unit and move it along with the live ones, which would place it in a new room. Then a battle on the room would have a different number of alive units vs total units which caused the crash. I could have went through and done actual garbage collection or coded around it, but I had already wasted so much time that I just move their invisible dead bodies up to -1000,-1000 in the game. If you scroll all the way up there and click on them, then scroll back down to the board and move them you deserve the crash.

The Ugly

The systems - This game has a crazy amount of systems all running independently, none of which my engine supplied and I had to code from scratch. The castle was a collection of nodes, so I needed heatmap pathfinding. The selection of multiple units is all coded from scratch. The movement and arranging of units is all scratch. The battle screen and relationship to the board units is all scratch. I think this is my most complicated, system heavy Ludum Dare entry yet, and if it is all working well nobody even notices.

Overall this was a great Ludum Dare and I had a ton of fun participating.

The game is here if you want to play: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/for-the-king

Hey, we decided that we open up a competition - so far none of our players seemed to reach the lowest possible number of rabbit sacrifices. So we decided to offer a prize - a beer with developers (if you're in reasonable distance from or directly from Czech Republic, else we have to negotiate something instead) - to anyone who can finish the whole game in one run sacrificing the least amount of rabbits of all the players (including the dev team)! Leave an endgame screenshot with your best numbers in the comment!

We're not sure what numbers are possible, we encourage you to glitch and destroy the game completely, just tell us how you did it to your numbers afterwards! And if you won't make the lowest? Then we encourage you to leave a comment so we could play and rate your game back ;)

We're looking forward to your numbers! Play here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ronin-sacrifice-the-story-of-a-rabbit

The link was broken on the other one so here’s a fixed link:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ewPoFkNz3fg

My game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/more-sacrifices

Greenguy's life was a peaceful one before the apocalypse. He and the other Greendudes lived in Greenvillage, a little self-sustained rural settlement where they planted their greens.

Living his whole life off organic food Greenguy has become quite nutritious. Of course, no civilised being would eat a sentient creature ever. That's a disgusting thought. Wild beasts however...

Come and play Berrytales!:)

Reverse Quest began with a simple idea that my friends and I, and I'm sure many other people, have thrown around for a long time. What if it was a Zelda game, but you have to put your items back. It is such a simple idea, but I find it incredibly evocative, and "Sacrifices must be made" seemed like the perfect theme to finally use the idea. I finished the game after 49 hours, and feel very good about it, and the amount of stuff I was able to make without sacrificing sleep or food or anything like that. The final game looks like this:

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/reverse-quest

Every time I do a game jam, I try to come in fresh with a few goals. Sometimes, it is as simple as learning a new tool, like how my last game was a learning opportunity for Unity's new ProBuilder tool. Sometimes it is do try a new design pattern to see what works. Other times it is to optimize my schedule or figure out what good scope looks like for a Jam. For this Ludum Dare, I had been playing a lot of NES games on Switch Online, so was really looking into that sort of scope of Zelda 1 and Metroid as a goal. In addition, I had just recently learned about Scriptable Objects in Unity which really open the door for good design practices.

With these two jam goals in place, I decided on a schedule.

Day 0: Brain storm an idea for each of the possible themes.

Day 1: Choose an Idea, Create mechanics. Only make levels for testing.

Day 2: Content and Polish.

Especially as a solo dev, I have found that programming all the way up until the end is just asking for trouble. If I am making new mechanics 6 hours from the end, then I have done something wrong. By creating the tools on the first day, I have found that I can keep my scope in check and deliver something that I feel good about. For this jam, I would spend the first day creating the jar, and the second day filling it with something (hopefully) delicious.

As soon as I grasped onto the Idea of doing a reverse Zelda game, I started making some art. I knew I would be using Unity's tilemap, so I had to figure out what would make for good assets using that system. As I am not primarily an artist, I decided that all of my assets would be using an 8x8 grid. Having just played through Zelda 1, it felt a little strange to be using half the resolution of such an old game, but doubling that would mean 4 times the pixels that I would have to place, and that would also mean there is more importance on that sprite looking good. I felt that as long as could get the characters and tiles feeling evocative of what they are supposed to be, then I am good; Therefore, I create the main character, a skeleton enemy, a bush, water, and a cliff. If these didn't look good, I would have to start thinking larger. I then made them interactable, putting collision and different layers on the cliffs and water, a simple movement script to go on the player, and easily breakable bushes. After 4 hours, I had this. It was fine! I can tell what is going on, I showed this image to some friends, and they could as well. I could walk around and swing my sword and hit things. Before even going to bed for the first night, I had something playable which I feel is always a good goal.

Sleeping is important. I now know how my character moves, and what the basic world interactions are going to be, so I wanted to brainstorm the full list of interactions so I could start thinking about how I would implement those ideas. Basically, I wanted to know my scope before turning in for the night. I decided on 10 hearts, meaning I would need 7 places to return hearts to to reach the classic 3-heart starting point of a Zelda game. I decided on two weapons, so I needed two dungeons to return those weapons to. I wanted non-linear connective tissue to hold the game together, so an over world like the original Zelda seemed like the way to go. I would need obstacles, so I decided on two enemies, eye switches for arrows to hit, and breakable objects for swords to hit. Perfect, 2 weapons seem very doable since I already had one. 2 enemies seemed good, as I already had one. An overworld is easy enough, I could just expand my test area out in all directions. 2 dungeons and 7 mini-dungeons I was not as sure about, as those would require differentiation and a unique feeling to each to not just feel like padding. Overall I was satisfied with the scope, and was ready to start in the morning.

As I began piecing the game together, I began to explore the ramifications of the concept. What interesting gameplay can emerge from losing items over the course of the game? Hot off the heels of playing zelda 1, I admired how the world slowly expanded as you gained more items and more power, but also how just gaining more health and confidence in the mechanics did the same thing. You could truely explore in that game, and get to dangerous places before you were really ready. Losing power over time felt rather counter-intuitive initially as the game would be sealed off and more restrictive as you go by necessity, but then I thought about how to use that to my advantage. The answer I came to is that it allows for an ever escalating difficulty curve as well as an avenue for organic optional difficulty. Players of any Zelda game have the choice to not pick up any new hearts to do a sort of challenge mode, so i decided that you should be able to go down to 3 hearts before any of the main dungeons, In fact I decided that this will be the way to activate "Hard Mode" and thus how you 100% (Or in this case 0%) the game. So I have my structure, the game should increase in difficulty whenever you return an item, but you should be able to choose to play the game however you wish.

My main task then became to make it playable from beginning to end. I created all the code required to strip items from the character and placed them onto a map. Once you got rid of the items, the gate to the end of the game should open up and you get the end screen. Once that is in place, then I have a minimum viable product and won't feel to bad about releasing. All of this meant that I made two levels on the first day. The intro: Which is a simple temple to present the premise of the game and prove that the player knows the controls was the first to be created. The second, which felt counter-intuitive, was to create the connective tissue of the game, the overworld. Entering any of the dungeons or sub-dungeons would give up the corresponding item and spit you back out into the world, and 24 hours after starting the jam you could play through the entire structure of the game. My final task before sleeping was to come up with my plan for the final day. 9 new scenes would need to be made, which felt like a lot and I may have been starting to panic. I narrowed the list, and hooked up all logic needed for those new scenes before going to sleep. Triggers were set up to prevent reentry after completion of a level on the overworld, so what I was left with was that fully functional jar I mentioned before. I had a concept for each level, and perhaps a few scenarios to go with them as well. The final day was going to be hard. Here is that final brainstorm:

Keeping with the idea of completing the minimum viable product, I began with the two main dungeons. The concept would be that you would return the sword in the Temple of the Serpent, and the Bow in the Temple of the Eye. But my game is non-linear, so I decided that each dungeon would require the item that you turn in at the end, but be a lot easier if you also had the other weapon. This introduced a problem which I will talk about later, which Is that I was already running out of ideas for scenarios. You could smash pots with a sword and shoot eyes with a bow, but that was it. There was no other thing you could do with one that you couldn't with the other. I will talk more about this later, but I believed I may have underscoped in terms of mechanics. So quickly I added in a new enemy type, a bandit who would throw daggers at you. I figured that you could take them out at range with a bow, or you could sneak up on them to get easy kills with a sword, so I felt that I could solve two problems with this one new feature. After completion of the two main dungeons, the tension just left my body. I'm practically done. Anything that I add after this point is extra, and was not needed to fulfill the promise of the game. Now I could have fun!

The final stretch of this jam was the most fun to me. At this point, I had no more "requirements", and could just go nuts. I had about 6 hours left, so I just started creating. I started with a level which was basically an homage to Zelda 1, I gave myself leeway to add new mechanics like locks and keys, or killing certain enemies unlocking certain doors, or I event modified a goo enemy with different stats to be a boss. I just had a blast with the whole level.

I then made a few levels designed to be mazes, one was literally just a maze. These came with the intent of being the "baseline" for what a level would look like in the game. An area with a unique feel, perhaps a new or modified piece of music, and some new or recolored art assets.

The final kind of level I made were the challenges, these were either puzzles or gauntlets that would test the player, and would probably require a weapon. For instance, I wanted to mix up the mechanic of shooting eyes on the wall by making them move, or obscuring them.

In the end, I am quite happy with where the game ended up. It was not without its struggles, and were I to do it again I think there is plenty I would have done differently. Overall I was left with a few main takeaways to bring into the next jam:

The negatives: - Figuring out the exact right scope is hard. I think in this case, it was unbalanced and I had to reevaluate mid way through. There are only so many interesting combinations of game elements, and I would have run out of ideas had I not broken my initial scope. In the future I will try to think more about these sorts of reusable elements more. - My most interesting stuff became the optional content. I guess if I had had another 12-24 hours (and didn't have to work in the morning) I would have gone back in to polish the intro and two main dungeons as those are what every person will see. It just feels a little bad that the earliest, and weakest parts, are what the most people will see. Maybe this is just one of the problems with creating games this non-linear in a game jam setting though. - After creating most of the game, I determined that the movement might be a little floaty, and stuff like aiming might be a little un-intuitive. This is hard, because changing the foundation of the game so late may break everything that is stacked upon it. I would have to re-balance everything. I would have to playtest to make sure everything still works. I think I missed one of the first steps that I always try to do which is to make movement feel good as the first step to the game. I think I succeeded on getting the rest of the game around the player to feel good, but I could have done better on the actual controls and feedback of those controls.

The positive: - Plan ahead for the next day. It is really easy to just start improvising, and sometimes that can be good, but I think most of the time it leads to scope creep and problems keeping your game cohesive. - When working solo, maybe art does come first? I could easily have started with capsules attacking cubes, but I don't think it would have sold the concept of the game as well as it did in this case. I even got a music track written out very early just to get my brain churning. - Build tools first, then use them. Once I figured out how to create a level for my game and made that easy, I could crank these things out like they were nothing. In the beginning of production, everything is experimental and you don't know what works well for your game. By the end, you have had 30-40 hours with the game and know exactly what works and doesn't work.

And that is all! Hopeful anyone who got this far gained some sort of insight. Please leave me a comment on my game, I love feedback (Make it harsh!) Also I love writing pieces like this, so I would love to talk more about my process or what the rest of you have found to work. Time to get back to playing all of these wonderful games!

Well so do I! Check mine out, play, rate (maybe even leave some feedback) and I'll play your game! It's mutually beneficial, a win win!

*Available for play on web: *https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/reactor-overdrive

I uploaded a polished version of the game on itch.io, the game it's still far from finished, but hopefully I'll be able to keep updating it. However if you want to rate the ludum dare game please do it based on the link of the game page :)

LUDUM DARE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-lord-of-possessions-1

ITCH.IO: https://cigsandflowers.itch.io/the-lord-of-possesions

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/rift-plugger

In our game you play as a hero who defend village from demons. Demons come from dimensional rifts and to save your friends you need to plug them. But how to plug the rifts? Maybe you will use one of this villagers? It is up to you what you will sacrifice to do it.

P.S. This is first LD for most of our team. And we really enjoyed to develop the game for this event. That was really fun!

...

Hello all LDJamers!

One more ludum for us! After an usual "damn this theme is tough", we finally came up with an idea:

You play as a parent of a broke family and struggle to have enough money to feed your children.

With this idea came the wish of showing how tough lfe can be for some parents by making a game in wich you have to act as the worst kind of parent.

Each day comes a new little kido. You can stop this flow only by buying condoms. Nothing's free...

Slap 'em!

Make them do it! You will be quickly overwhelmed with all the things you need to do for them.

Feed only the bests of them.

Your children have stats (RPG style) which drive you to decide which one deserves to be fed and cared.

They have satisfaction gauges that you need to fill for them not to die, and being efficient at doing their jobs.

To earn money you can make art (your favorite hobby isn't it?) but it won't be enough. You need to send your children to work. Work? Yeah. Prostitution, streets, drugs.. but also Astronaut, if your manage to grow a children educated enough.

But never forget: their life and survival is up on you!

Play the game HERE

Post your links here.

Our game is now ported to webGL! Try it out! Brothers and Sisters rejoice! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/an-unpharo-seeable-future

You are Herakles, son of Zeus, and you have been chosen to become a god. In order to achieve that, you have to survive to seven dangerous rooms. Every time you cross a gate, you will have to sacrifice the power of one of the gods supporting you.

Let's see if you can reach Apotheosis! (playable on Windows, Linux and MacOS)