In just delete them you delete files to make the assets disappear. Fun right?! I am currently working on some puzzles, bug fixes and other things but in the meantime you can play it, or watch the trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I
Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them
THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS GAME !!
...and you are welcome at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lastcrifices
Come Play and Coment, Enjoy ! 😄
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/break-a-leg
So everything important told in the title, Luckily here's a wide variety of small games. If you have a game that you want me to rate and give feedback for, feel free to link it :)
Also if you want to play our entry (it's web-playable so no need for downloading) you can find it here; https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/tims-christmas-nightmare
That's right! We've got a Post-Jam version, fresh out of the oven! Get it while it's hot! Here's some changes for anyone wanting to keep track:
Go grab yourself a copy of the game and rate it now! We're only 3(.625) votes away from the minimum, and now is the perfect time to check it out and compare it to the new and improved edition!
almost 85 participants on the upcoming Christmas Game jam! A 48 hour Christmas spirit jam for those who don't want to wait for the Next Ludum Dare. I also want to remind to play our game Suicide Sanctum!
https://itch.io/jam/christmas-jam-2018
https://discord.gg/WG3G57j
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/suicide-sanctum https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/suicide-sanctum https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/suicide-sanctum
Hey you. Yes you. I see you browsing the Ludum Dare front page looking for treasure. We’ve got goods in the form of fun facts of our sponsored-fueled avarice marathon of a game, Super Sellout.
Stick around, for this ought to be interesting, and insight about how a team of five can somehow crunch a game in 72-hours while barely clinging to anything that loosely resembles a spec of sanity. Here we go!
After our long back-and-forth brainstorming session we settled on a superhero theme. As such, we wanted a protagonist that looked heroic but somewhat goofy in line of our previous characters. Our inspirations, for an early concept, included Crimson Chin from Fairly Odd Parents and Captain Qwark from Ratchet & Clank.
We didn’t truly like the cyan colored suit for the protagonist, so we kinda took Crimson Chin as an inspiration, making him red and black. However, we also gave it a logo of a white triangle on the chest. Since someone jokingly said he looked like a YouTube inspired hero, we ended up calling him Monetization Man, the hero who “demonetizes crime”.
Early in development, @Moski made grass assets for walking around, fire hydrants and an old lady stuck on a tree. However, since the programmers thought a runner-type game would benefit from jumping, the park got replaced for rooftops, inspired by another piece of trivia in this post. That’s how we got stuck with grandmas stuck on trees stuck on rooftops.
At that point, we threw common sense out of the window (like we normally do as a team) and added dogs, a bunny-suited bunny-girl and a lot of ice cream, beyond the added-in cosmetics that Monetization Man gets when different sponsors are equipped.
While we were discussing the superhero thematics and were starting to turn the game into a runner, one piece of oddware that was brought up as an inspiration was The Incredibles (yes, the animated picture) video game adaptation for the Gameboy Advance.
While the theming and actions you can perform in that game are vastly different from the ones you can perform in Super Sellout, the game did provide some inspiration as to how to tackle the gameplay perspective and ultimately, how we should design and implement the different rooftops.
And of course, two looks at the game’s style, remove half of the halftone we put on top of everything and you can also see some direct inspirations for the comic-book art style not only from comic books themselves but also from the likes of Paper Mario, with the characters outline with the white outlines and soft shading.
If we were able to give teams human traits, then our team at Whales And Games would be guilty of not having any self-awareness at all. In similar fashion to our previous projects, we cramped our game full of internal jokes and references. Of course, we don’t think anyone will really be able to name them all, but we keep putting those jokes in for self-amusement. Guess we’re the true super sellouts in the end, eh? 🐳
As an example, Dapperfish is a recurrent character in our games and conversations. You can see a muggler with a Dapperfish mask, and he even appears in his own panel in the main menu. You can even click on him there for a goofy surprise. 😉
Of course, the self-referential fun doesn’t end there either as there's plenty of other situations where we took the opportunity and cramped even more self-love into it! - On the main menu, beyond Dapperfish in his own tile, there’s also Whalechan, one of our main mascots, in the credits panel. - All of the billboards you can find when you activate the Whales And Games modifier, are as expected, mostly Whales And Games references, including three of them to previous Ludum Dare projects, Colossorama (namely how the 1.3 update has been in development for a while), Petty Puny Planet and Jazzy Beats. - Other billboards also have other miscellaneous references, with Maid Dragon parodies and Egg. - While you might think that Rob Boss is simply a direct reference to Bob Ross, they have actually appeared in Colossorama, as a playable character. We decided to throw in a reference to the character in Super Sellout as we thought it’d make for an interesting sponsor. - And last but not least, there’s also a sticker in reference of Wool Pit which despite not being a Whales And Games project, was @moski’s saving grace from whatever happened during Ludum Dare 42.
When the “Sacrifice” theme was announced, each member of the team brainstormed ideas for what to make the game about. And we brainstormed * a lot*. One of the most popular ideas among us was to make the game about a dating game show, where contestants would get sacrificed if they were not selected for a date.
While that idea never came to be, one of the things that remained as a left over was having a sick goat with a sick goatee as the host, which we later wanted to repurpose to serve as a sort of tutorial for the players in Super Sellout](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/super-sellout/) and even interrupt the player based on some sponsors.
Unfortunately, wiring out text-systems into the game were quickly ruled as being too out of scope for the time we had in the jam, and instead we kept the goat as one of the rescuers as a callback to our original idea. Mayhaps the day will still come where he will actually get to be the host.
And that’s your fun time fun facts trivia of today for Super Sellout! We always have a stupid amount of fun working on our games despite the occasional hiccup that happens here and there. In fact, we actually left our development text and voice channels for the game completely open for public-reading over at our at our team’s Discord server!. We’d love to see you (and your games) there!
If you haven’t tried Super Sellout yet, we’d love for you to give it a try and tell us what you think!. We’re still going around and playing as many as we can, and would love to check yours out! Make sure to share it with us, and we’ll get to them first opportunity! Cheers! 🐳
Two minutes of entertainment, in the comfort of your own web browser no less.... I wont bore you with details, as there aren't many, but you can pop in, have a look see, and then be off... I think its worth 2 minutes, you be the judge!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/shepherd-sacrifice
And as always, thanks for playing!
Skills required : You are able to fix and maintain an offering machine. The conveyor belts which compose it are a bit disordered. Your job is to put them back in place and send the future sacrificed straight to the death pit to satiate the blood thirst of the gods.
Be careful ! One misstep and your offering will take to his heels!
Remuneration : To be discussed. But if the crops are bad, it’s on you...
At some point @matank had a cool idea to just posted a list of random games they liked, mine was on it and it made me really proud of my game, so I wanted to to do the same for others and call out some games I thought were cool. So here we go!
Creepy-Crawlies
@kaunispoika
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/creepy-crawlies
Like creepy crawly bugs? Yeah me neither, but here's and rts about bugs anyway.
Battlecraft: Orcs and Famine
@sokette
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/battlecraft-orcs-and-famine
A fun, little game about managing your orc resources until something goes wrong and everyone dies horribly!
Dark Villagers
@praleks @mavne @skigfx @dimauknow @awix
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/dark-villagers
Manage a town of cultists and defend it as angry people come to kill you, the art in this game is really good.
Altitude Sickness
@antti-tiihonen
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altitude-sickness
This one is hard to describe, you have to climb to the flag, but by using the frozen bodies of others to do so...
Astronaut's Journey
@radical-dog
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/astronauts-journey
Try and reach the moon on your rocket, I have a bit of a bias towards this one because it has an upgrade sytem like mine.♥
Feel free to suggest more in the comments!
It's time to say thank you for all the feedback on our simple platformer! We are working on a couch game collection as secondary project besides Maze Crusher and we will definitely put Platform43 with some slight modifications into the compilation!
Btw: I just explained a bit of how we realized the respawning when dieing in a comment if someone wants to have some insights :)
This is not the most original idea on the theme, but I think I made a enjoyable game. I hope you have fun!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-best-sacrifice
Fight off zombies and protect your baby while keeping your stamina high. It also has a high-scores board. Can you make it all the way to the top?
-Fight zombies at night, rest by day. -Don’t let baby noise get too loud, it attracts more zombies -Sleep to regain stamina. -Exchange points you earn for useful upgrades. -Have fun!
Play and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-love
Hey everyone! Since the voting round is still going on, why don't take your chance to try Samurai's legacy? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/samurais-legacy
It was even featured on a youtube video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-epgKaAyrI )... I'm feeling so important right now! ;)
Game Idea
I am myself a member of GameDev Underground, a community of aspiring game developers. As a result, I experience my game jams in a community focused manner, hanging out in discord and watching community streams.
So it was Friday and I was watching one of those. When the theme dropped I was kind of glad, because it wasn't god-awful to work with. There are a lot of ways it can be interpreted. My first decent idea was a superhero theme. After all, a good superhero has to sacrifice himself at some point for the greater good. Then someone in the chat mentioned the trolley problem and I knew what I was gonna do :) The established consensus on the trolley problem is that you should sacrifice less people for more people. I personally despise that attitude of killing someone on their lucky day and I can't see sacrificing someone else as a commendable course of action. And there it is, my theme :)
And so I began work on a game about a superhero who heroically sacrifices other people.
Mechanics
The easiest way to adapt this was a platformer. I view platformers as the thing you make when you have no idea for a game, but its very versatile in what you can do with it.
I quickly made associations in my head between superhero -> monsters, superhero + sacrificing other people + monsters -> feeding peolpe to monsters -> throwing peolpe at monsters -> children fly faster etc. But I also needed an incentive to throw them. Which means the monsters had to follow you around. Which means I had to make a full platforming pathfinding algorithm. I was a bit of a pain.
For the algorithm I chose Godot's AStar, which worked pretty well. After getting my platforming mechanics down, I built a bunch of platforms to test the capabilities. Then I wrote an algorithm which constructed navigation grid based on the platform tilemap layout. The algorithm was pretty simple, as I was using tilemaps exclusively for the platforms.
There. That's all the map information your AI needs to jump and drop from platforms. It's really satisfying to see it go :) The path following algorithm has its own quirks, but its pretty straightforward conceptually. I will upload my source files for completeness.
Throwing is very easy. Its just a normal projectile with gravity, right? You have 3 ammo types: children, adults and fatmen, and the all fly differently and take different amount of time to digest each: 1, 2, 4 seconds respectively. Throw in a proper flight path prediction and you're set.
Ammo restock is more interesting. Finite ammo would be depleted way too fast, so I had to make it infinite. Localized spawn points would work very well, but I was lazy so the people just rain from the sky. The willingly follow you around and if you don't have anyone in your hand they will come to you on their own. No need to pick them up, it happens automatically if they are close enough. There are level design problems with this but more on that later.
Monsters are about 70% slower than you. All AI characters have randomized speed for visual variety. The big problem with my platforming AI is that during a jump the AI has to be as fast as you are, because they need to be able to get wherever you can. This makes vertical sections surprisingly more tricky. I could probably just make them jump in slowmo, but that would look silly. Monsters will enter eating state on contact with any of your dudes. They will remain for an amount of time determined by innocent type and they will go back to normal. When they are hit with an innocent when they are eating, they will die. It's a very simple and effective concept.
Level Design
I didn't have a lot of time to like refine my levels or anything. I made a bunch of arenas to see how they would turn out with the platforming AI. It turns out that the 'go-anywhere-from-anywhere' style of arena is tricky in that the AI has no problem to surround you because its just so good at pathfinding. Using some sort of move restrictions gives player more tactical evasion options.
Having learnt my lesson, I implemented a simple checkpoint system. Its so much better with it.
All roofs have holes in them for the innocents, so that they may fall from the sky to you and drop down the rest of the way. Simple and effective, but it has one problem. I separate the arenas with doors. Doors respawn when you restart from checkpoint. Now thats problematic. If an innocent drops on the wrong side of the door, it will be stuck there forever, limiting your ammo. The solution to that could be localized arena spawn points, or replacing doors with one way passages (just a 4 tile drop). I've made one of those before the first arena and then I just forgot about them for the rest of the game. Oh well.
Art
So I decided to just learn Inkscape now. I used it a little bit for some simple palceholder art like triangles with gradients, so I was a little familiar. I learned an awful lot more this LD though. The graphics are nice and crisp as a result :)
Because of the sacrifice theme I immediately though of Cthulhu, so I decided on a Cthulhu theme. The background is slightly animated. Not much else to see here.
Sound
I bought the RPG Game Dev Bundle lately and I decided I'd try it out this LD. All sounds and music come from the bundle, particularly from the pro sound collection. Its so great and versatile, its awesome! I'm super glad I bought it. Worth every penny.
There is one outstanding issue with the sound and that's the child sounds. When I found the child scream file in the bundle, I sank my face into my hands for good 10 minutes, contemplating whether I was going to use it, because I felt i was crossing a line. I decided to use it anyway because of limited reach of the game. Hopefully it won't bite me in the ass later.
Summary
I learned a lot of useful stuff this LD and hopefully I will see that reflected in my score :D I placed in the lower 25%, 20% and 15%, so If I don't change the tendency i will go negative during LD46
The game and source code are available at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/most-important-person Enjoy! I can play and rate some other games too.
Merry Christmas everyone!
To celebrate our 20 ratings, I've written about the inspirations and design decisions that went into our game QUELTRIS.
How we came up with the idea, how the initial idea wasn’t fun at all, and how we turned that around to find something that was worth playing. Read the rest here.
Hi people!
I’m Pedro Fuentes game designer, and with Sergio Martinez (programmer) and Daniel Gomez (artist) we made the game “NoooooMan”.
The idea is inspired by the popular action scenes in movies in which one person sacrifices himself, saying NOOOOOOOOOoooooo and stops a projectile (perfect for the theme “Sacrifices must be made”).
With these scenes, we have a clear overview about the game, the camera position, the character (in front of the camera), the guns, and the civils (innocents), pretty similar to penalty kicks in games.
Concepts and mockups about the game
It is important to focus on the core game and the main mechanics at the beginning, and later, iterate step by step, here you can see the evolution of the game:
First Prototype (focus on the core game: character movement and the time behaviour -bullet time-)
Prototype v3 (focus on bullets and guns behaviour)
Early version of the game (focus on the innocents behaviour and win/game over condition).
Actual version of the game
The next days we will explain in another posts the visuals, the tools and another details that we use in the game.
If you’re interested, check it out here (the game is available for web browser, Windows and MacOSX. Enjoy! I can play and rate some other games too.) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/noooooman
Thanks for playing! And Merry Christmas everyone!
In just delete them you don’t only interact with the game, but also game files. By deleting games assets you delete stuff in the game! Fun right?
I now had a time to create this gif:
Check this game out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them
Turtleboi's main strength is acceptace. He can accept mostly anything. He accepted when he lost his job. He accepted Turtlegurl leaving him because of that. He even accepts that some people put up toilet paper the wrong way round. The concept of an end of the world however is the first thing he doesn't want to blindly accept. That's one step to far. The floating eyeballs themselves are okay. Even your dragon seems more accepting towards them as long as Turtleboi is around. But that the world as source of anything acceptable itself will stop... Unacceptable!
Save Turtleboi and other dudes in Berrytales - Fracture Flight!