Eldritchual was my first game jam entry, and writing a brief post-mortem will be a great opportunity to smooth out the process for future jams. (That's my hope at least.) Hop over here to rate, play, and check out the source code, and after you have a chance to play and review Eldritchual, hop back here and see a few of the lessons learned.

What Went Right?

• The mechanics and interactions remained simple. One of the driving design notes on the whiteboard next to me was "Simple." It was a reminder to keep the scope small enough to complete and clear enough to be both accessible and approachable.
• It's complete. I kept saying that "I just won't post if it's not done." I pushed myself to have a complete game, and then I still needed a nudge to post it. Being able to stay on task and check off every one of the features that I decided that I needed to be in the game was a fantastic positive for me. There was a list of "like to have" items on my feature list, but
• I posted the game. This was surprisingly challenging to post to the Compo. I almost backed out at the last moment, but just posting the game was another positive for me. I needed a push.
• Tried things I've never done. Unity scriptable objects for the lesson topics in the tutorial, mouse click and drag interactions in Unity, Music in Bosca Ceoil, and of course all of the things that come with the process; hosting a game, participating in a 48-hour game event, and pulled everything together before the deadline.
• Clearing my mind before the event. I started thinking about the themes as they went through voting and I listened to the positive and negative feedback about them. Ultimately, I needed as much time as possible to clear my thoughts and position myself to tackle the challenge.
• Subtle 2D lighting. I really enjoy the subtle light flickering effects from all of the objects. There are a few things I would have like to have tried with it. In the end, I think the small amount of light and motion helps keep the game screen alive.

What Went Wrong?

• Slow start. The majority of the game balance and timing seemed to work, but getting the player interacting with meaningful choices had a 36-second delay, even if you know what you are doing. Difficulty settings and an event system would have addressed this.
• Tutorial was too long. At first, it was going to be a tutorial. With scriptable objects, I was able to create more content relatively quickly, and I had initially intended to display some "under the hood" information there as well. The tutorial quickly turned into a game manual, which would be fine, but was not represented that way, and the game lacked an introduction as a result. The "Tutorial" should have been rebranded on the menu screens as a "Manual" before the conclusion.
• No version control. Not only was there no version control, but somehow the main game object had all of its balance values cleared and I didn't have a complete list of them. I was also not prepared to host my source code once I decided to post the game. As a result, there was a needless delay in posting the source code.
• Coding became bulky and sloppy. Too many features were stacking onto the game objects, and later on, some methods would have cleaned up the code and been easier to maintain. For instance: each method that toggles the display of a menu or UI canvas manually sets the canvas to true or false. As I added more menus and screens, this temporary code kept drawing my attention back with strange canvas interactions. More methods and classes would ultimately have been worth more and would have been able to be used for more features than my inline-procedural hacks.
• Music quality was low. Had I been prepared, I would have just played and recorded a music track. I thought it would be cleaner to use a tool like Bosca Coeil, but I think I could have had higher quality if I was just ready to perform and record.
• Eating and sleeping. I didn't eat or sleep like humans usually do. That was somewhat to be expected, but with a little bit of preplanning, this could have been avoided.

What Will I Do Next Time?

• GitHub. I've uploaded the source code to a GitHub Eldritchual Repo after the event concluded. This is significantly easier to work with and trivial to share the source code. In addition, I've been able to create a development branch to make some small changes to the code that can be reincorporated into the master after I finish the features and balance that I really wanted to include in the game. Until then, the original LD version can still be seen in the master. I was worried that the time crunch of the jam, and Unity, and my limited exposure to Git would be a hindrance. In reality, it would have likely saved me time, and in retrospect, I had enough time to get it started. In addition, I could have used the GitHub project features instead of my trusty whiteboard for my feature based development. Just incorporating the tools available on GitHub, I hope to have a much cleaner and more organized project.
• Have my instruments and recording equipment ready the night before. I could have and should have had better options for music available.
• Vacation day on Monday. A 48-hour event takes a lot out of a person. I should have taken the day off on Monday. This may not seem like a lot, but having a chance to relax, spend time reviewing some games, and spend time with family after ignoring them for two days would be a better way for me to handle it.
• Get to the good stuff. Get the player playing as soon as they launch the game. You have less than 30 seconds to get to the hook without the player feeling the hindrance of that delay. I'm going to aim for a player-driven ramp up that allows a player to ramp up at their own pace.
• Gimp brush dynamics. I noticed that there were a few brush dynamics that I would have like to have tweaked a little bit. More options for cleaner lines, more options for smoother brushes. I want to have the brush dynamics ready for a variety of styles since I don't know what I will need to create.

So, those were some of the lessons that I've walked away with. I hope there is some insight that can help you, even if it is from a first-timer. What do you think? I'd love to hear what you think I've missed or how you tackled these issues in the comments. Thanks for reading!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificium-2

Can you break into the Vault and steal the Golden Mullet? Come and find out!

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

Game-play example...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQJ-HWYpZE

Geta Game Jam 6 will be occuring between January 5 and January 8!

• Challenge yourself to make a game in three days
• Work either individually or in a team
• Share your progress with our wonderful Discord community
• Participate in theme voting and influence the final chosen theme

Interested? Come and join!

Leave a link to your game and I'll play it and give you feedback! I can't play Windows games unfortunately, only browser and mac games.

I would also really appreciate feedback on my game, Ethical Smoothies Co., a game about running a smoothie factory: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ethical-smoothies-co

🔧 Fixes :

• Press "F" to toggle fullscreen on / off
• Tutorial will only play once per launch now
• New game icon

📝 Quick recap on what will change in a future version :

• More levels with different grid sizes
• More tiles with new mechanics
• The timer will change to a move counter
• Losing will not restart the whole room
• Mouse controls will be totally reworked
• Cloud feedbacks for the blocks when they move (and more feedbacks in general)

🍻 Our friendly team

• 🎧 Alexandre Meunier : Development, music, sound design, voices
• 🎨 Emilie Defernez (Frigolite) : Character designer, animator, main beer supplier
• 🖌️ Quentin Cloos : Graphic designer, commnunity manager and GIF master

Thanks everyone for your interest and feedbacks !

📲 Download and rate here :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-inc

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!

I just got to 600 views in the last month in itch.io. Half of them are from Alain's sacrifice, my LD entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/alains-sacrifice

-Try to evade all defences and take your ship to the Core.

-Play our game on: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lastcrifices

See you space cowboys...

It's a peon scout simulator. You know from those in RTS games, early game. Just now you are not the commander, but the expandable one...

Aaaand now you can play it on Mac and also without downloading in WebGL!

Oh, how I love Unity when releasing on multiple platforms!

>> Play PeonCraft! <<

I still working at some missing animations and sprites. You can find me working via twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/skigfx Welcome.

Play and rate my game!

What was right

• Management. I’ve spent two days just working on my game. I’ve had enough sleep, food, fresh air and even managed to rest and finish the last few mission in Red Dead Redemption 2!
• DevStream. I streamed the whole process on twitch. It was a little bit scary and I haven’t stream with audio and camera for five or six years. But now I’ll try to do it more often.
• “Okay, that’s good enough” - I told this to myself several times during the development. And it REALLY helped to keep things simple and just move forward wthi stuff. You can spend 10-20-40 hours working on “perfect” soundtrack, or you can stop after 1.5 hours and say “That’s ok, I can live with it”. And just move to the next feature. Amazing.
• I made everything. Sounds, music, VFX, UI, Start and end game screen, tutorial, testing, achievements, analytics… That’s my most complete indie game at the moment and I’m happy :-)
• The game is completely realtime and 3D. That is a huge step from my usual “2D turn-based prototypes with text as a placeholder for everything”.
• Replayability. I can’t say that making the game round length so short (60 seconds) was a completely good decision, but because of this, many players can try to play this game two, three or even five times in a row. I was thinking about two tries per player, but I saw 5+ on streams, with full ten minutes of gameplay. That’s really cool!

What was wrong

• Balancing and difficulty. Noone managed to save all the 10 cubes (I think it’s still possible and the main menu tells you it’s not, but still…). It’s way too hard and chaotic. The short game session makes every mistake fatal.
• Playtesting. There was none. And when I saw the first streams with people trying to play my game, I was laughing and facepalming at the same time. It was terrible. They were completely overwhelmed with UI and stuff to do and dying cubes and then the time is already up and everyone is dead. And I thought it is so simple! Some cubes with health and needs, four rooms and just 60 seconds to save them all. But your first playthrough is taking you 30-40 seconds to just get around, click some stuff and it’s already too late to win.
• UI. OMG. Again, I first saw this on the stream. And it hit me. I tried to make everything SIMPLE. I made icons in photoshop and progress bars for each parameter - so you can watch it with ease! How wrong I was… The game starts. You have 4 sectors with 2-3 cubes in each. 10 cubes in total. Each cube has three params with three possible state + health bar. That’s 30 params to estimate at first seconds of the game. Each sector also has three parameters - oxygen, heat and power. They can be turned on and off by three interactive objects. And you can open the doors between sectors and move cubes. And there is also fuel progress bar and time to evacuation timer.

• So… it’s 30 icons, 23 progress bars and 26 interactive objects (which you can HIGHLIGHT with TAB, yay!). It’s easy, right? No. I think I could make a few simpler levels with smaller capsules and less cubes to watch for. And the current game level should be the Last ExtraHardcore YouCantSurvive Boss stage.

• Exhaustion. That was really unexpected, but after 25 work hours at the weekend I was really exhausted. And that completely ruined my work week. You just can’t think clear. Now I understand how important the rest is.And I’ll try to take a day\week off after the next LD :-)

It was very inspiring and entertaining LD. I hope you can find some time to play and rate my game ;-)

I had a lot of problems with my game breaking after the first level, but only on other people’s computers. Either way I’m finally confident that it’s fixed, so you can check out my newly working game, ‘More Sacrifices!’ here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/more-sacrifices

In a world of limited resources, there can be no infinite growth. Will you promote innovation to the detriment of some or promote equality at the expense of progress? Use the elements to develop your different territories and forge your society in a limited time. Sacrifices must be made and decisions come back to you...

You can play here and rate there

Please play my game and rate it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/maze

So, I finally updated this game and now you won't have to wait for the level to generate everytime you pick a good sacrifice ! The game is also now playable directly in your browser !

You can check it at this url :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/im-bored-so-lets-make-some-sacrifices

Hey everyone! For this Ludum Dare we made a game in 72 hours, called "Ursa". The game is about a little cosmic cub, learning about the secrets of the universe with the help of his mom. Growing wiser and older, he'll eventually have to take care of his mother. We received a lot of great reactions, but the game still is far from perfect. We have carefully listened to all of your helpful feedback and decided that we will continue working on the game to fix every little bug and polish every detail! We will improve the story, levels, mechanics and art to try and give you the best experience possible! We will try to post a devlog on itch.io every now and then to keep you guys informed about our progress. We hope you are as excited as we are!

Here is the link to the devlog on itch.io: https://maksymdev.itch.io/ursa/devlog/59457/we-will-make-a-post-jam-version-of-ursa

And here is the link to the jam version of the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ursa

For LD's we try to do as much of the sound effects on the day as possible. This jam as well as doing the music @shaunjmr also did some of the effect recordings, turning it into more of a professional affair than previous jams where we would use a hand recorder.

Sacrilicious required effects for the volcano, boars, chickens, screams etc so for the object effects we recorded tin trays being hit, boxes thumped, gas cookers lighting, etc. For voices and creature noises we used human voices (even the chicken).

Below are some of the outtakes that didn't make the cut and some that did. Some were not used due to not sounding quite right (at one point I sounded like scoobi doo) and other reasons like the pizza turning up while recording.

https://soundcloud.com/carl-hughes-409527001/sacrilicious-ld43-game-audio-outakes

If you would like to hear the results in the final game you can play and rate at :

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

It's almost been a week since the jam finished and I only just set up the theming for the Itch page for my entry: The I in Team (the title made more sense with earlier ideas for the game...)

It's a simple puzzle game where you can swap between two characters that need to work together to navigate a dungeon and escape... but only one of them will escape!

Give it a try and don't forget to rate it. Let me know if you make it out :)

I fixed the intro bug on the linux version of my game. You can play it Here

Our first update to the game has been uploaded, it fixes various bugs and adds a few new features which make the flow of the game a lot better. The jam version is still on HTML, the post jam version is downloadable.

Oh, and there's also a new enemy:

Try it here.

Still streaming via twitch — https://www.twitch.tv/skigfx

"Icy Golems" is a puzzle game where you control some golems!

How many will you sacrifice to get to the end?

You can find out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/icy-golems (WebGL)

here is your chance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLXj3BiPfNs

Vegefrice is a nice puzzle/plataform with an unique take to it, go play it here! => https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/vegefrice

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I

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

A small game about the family that desperately trying to save their birthday cake
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/cake-hunters

Hi everyone i want your opinion of my LudumDare game, please check out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/power-with-sacrifice

The only sad thinks it's that i didn't have time to put sounds :(

Thanks to all who have played our game so far and gave us some feedback!

Ratings and feedback would be much apprechiated!

Play here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o0z9nt4ipci4ioy/Save%20the%20Sheep.zip?dl=0

Due to Monday patch for Gamemaker 2.0 I was finally able to build the HTML version and added it to the downloadable Win one from the jam.

Itch Project Page

Hopefully, more people will be able to play it!

Have fun!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/gods-thirst-my-first-published-game

Click here to finish the adventure: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/keyboardgod

Check out our entry Bunnycula on Windows! It has controller vibrations! And bunnies :rabbit2: and squirrels :chipmunk: and a monster :japanese_ogre:! And an EASTEREGG!

If you manage to 'add' the EASTEREGG, let us know :D This lame kind of EASTEREGG works only on the Win64 version - for a reason it isn't in WebGL (if you want Win32 or Linux, I can try building it). Who'll be the first to give us arguments about how you append to the game to command it in order to activate the EASTEREGG? :) I'm only sad that I didn't put more into it. :egg:

Our game doesn't collect anything (it's offline) and as such fully complies with GDPR! :rofl:

Drop us a comment and we'll play yours, too, you know the drill!

Before creating slash rush we made some small concept on paper Thanks to the game jam the apha of the game is available it's so cool !!

To Test SLASH RUSH : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/slash-rush

With @antoine-vion

plz i need more ratings https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-relatives

Our game Abbey Massacre is missing just two more votes to get at the 20 mark in all the categories! Ratings and feedback would be much appreciated!

PS: Couldn't get it building to HTML5 without some odd looking artifacts, so only Windows version is available.

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

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

My last game, Fist of Wrath, was fully made on Manjaro Linux (thanks to Unity, it's not really an achievement).

Used software:

• Unity
• GIMP
• SFXR

Come play - it has a WebGL version!

Thanks everyone for the amazing feedback.

Long Live the King! Has received such positive feedback we have decided to develop the idea further. We will be adding a bunch of new levels and adding extra grunts so you can do more.

If you haven't checked out the jam version you can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/long-live-the-king

Any reviews will of course get a review in return.

Try my narrative puzzle platformer! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/metamorphosis

Good morning! Please leave you game's link in the comments and I'll play it today! If you're interested in playing my team's game it's:

AfterHours: A Reverse MetroidVania

AfterHours: A Reverse MetroidVania

Hey everyone!

I've spent the last few days fixing various bugs in Blight Tower. This update is focused purely on eliminating bugs to refine and smooth out overall gameplay. No new features have been added. There are probably some things I missed, but a lot of the low hanging fruit has been addressed.

BUG FIXES - Capsules now appropriately change color to reflect team affiliation (Tower owned == red, Player owned == blue). - Rocket explosions do the same thing now. This doesn't affect gameplay, but it looks cool. - Capsule AI has been improved (they won't accidentally fire on and kill their other capsule brethren). - The player will no longer run into their own rockets while running forward. - The Tower Wave now flips capsules and outposts correctly. - Outpost capture bar is easier to see. - Outpost capture area is larger. - Capsules won't spawn while the player is inside an outpost. This prevents capsules from spawning inside the player. - Player move code has been refactored, and is no longer tied to Update(), thus resulting in consistent move speed across different machines. - Added audio feedback when the player is hurt.

BALANCE CHANGES - Reduced outpost capture time from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. - Rockets have a constant speed and no longer accelerate from an initial, stationary position. - Reduced rocket damage from 20 to 10. - The tower now passively recovers health. - Rocket lifespan has been reduced from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. - Tower wave attack frequency has been increased from 60 seconds to 70 seconds. - Rockets now have a smaller collider. - The player now has a smaller collider. - Increased Tower health from 2000 to 4000. - Health pickups now have a larger collider, making it easier to pick them up.

KNOWN ISSUES - Sometimes the first capsule spawned will attack the player. This happens rarely. Still tracking this one down. - Capsules attacking the tower during the Tower's Wave attack will still attack the tower. Also tracking this down. Enjoy the extra help, for now ;)
- Destroying the Blight Tower doesn't actually destroy the Blight Tower. Doesn't affect gameplay or the win/lose conditions, so this is in my backlog.

Hey there! Let me introduce myself: I'm Archibald, at your service. Do you wanna fly with me on this hot-air balloon?

Oh, nice! I'm glad to know you're gonna be travelling by my side. I brought some of my personal belongings here. If it's too heavy, then the hot-air balloon will fly down, then sacrifices will be needed.

Are you ready for our journey?

Help me!

Demon Queen's Possessions

Its 25 lvs, but most people gets to 12~15! can you step up to the challenge?!

Its a game about blowing through waves of dangerous (and not so dangerous bystanders) foes. You can use your units to attack your foes, or sacrifice your units to possess your foes.

From peasant to Hero, passing by Goblin, nothing will be spared. Use your cleverness to Create spirit value from "nothing". (You'll see, it seems like you can't "grow" your army, but you can! It's tricky though)

Just got quite an optimal(Least kill possible) playthrough so I thought I'd challenge any competitive people to beat it.

My Best!

(got to wave 23/25 before being forced to kill... So CLOSE!!!)

The Art of sacrifice & possession is a puzzle in itself, but here are some hints! - You can possess multiple units at the same time!! - Goat has the ability to increase its spirit value. - Sacrifice & Possession > Fighting. By a lot actually, you can almost not fight at all. - The campaign is 25 levels and they are always the same: Yes you can "Learn from playthroughs" to optimize approach. - You can split 1 high level units for many lower level units, The stars must match, but dont be afraid to downgrade.

I'll be playing some more games today, but in the meantime, I hope a bunch of you get to try this one, It's a nice challenge! Feedback would be appreciated!

Demon Queen's Possessions LD page

Have fun and a good day!

Hey everyone this is our first ludum dare game. we finished this game under 36 hours in our local jam which was parallel to ludum dare. Now we are planning to develop this game further, so any critics or expansion ideas are very valuable for us.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-treachery

Fixed the bugs int the linux version Play HERE

Check this game out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/alains-sacrifice

Sheeps vision =)

Try in browser from here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sheeps-empire

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

Want to know if Nature is really harsh? Well, try my puzzle-platformer entry Nature is Harsh. :monkey_face:

* Here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/nature-is-harsh *

Mama Monkey seems to have no problem sacrificing her own babies!

* Even squishing them and using them as a ladder. * WUT. 😨

Please, don't call the PETA. 🙈

havana24

Play my game here

Time to play and vote 🎉

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

Feel free to comment your games under mine or in the section below :)

When you delete game files the assets disappear. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I

🔧 Fixes :

• Press "F" to toggle fullscreen on / off
• Tutorial will only play once per launch now
• New game icon

📝 Quick recap on what will change in a future version :

• More levels with different grid sizes
• More tiles with new mechanics
• The timer will change to a move counter
• Losing will not restart the whole room
• Mouse controls will be totally reworked
• Cloud feedbacks for the blocks when they move (and more feedbacks in general)

🍻 Our friendly team

• 🎧 Alexandre Meunier : Development, music, sound design, voices
• 🎨 Emilie Defernez (Frigolite) : Character designer, animator, main beer supplier
• 🖌️ Quentin Cloos : Graphic designer, commnunity manager and GIF master

Thanks everyone for your interest and feedbacks !

📲 Download and rate here :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-inc

If you haven't so far: Please check out my first game "Tiima's Sacrifice" that I was working on completely alone. It was fun to build and I hope you will have fun playing it! Please leave a rating and a comment because I value constructive feedback 😊 The game is playable in your browser, on your Android smartphone or tablet and on your Windows, Linux or macOS PC!

Play Tiima's Sacrifice

TAMUTU is a cute boss rush game! (... or is it...?)

TRY IT OUT? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/tamutu

OWO

I write in the end of this post why but essentially I decided I would keep working on this Ludum Dare project!!!

I would like to get people to play this game and give me feedback... BUT!! I don't just want a "yeah music is cool I guess" or "shooting needs work" I want IDEAS. You should not limit yourself, reccommend me your ideas nomatter how big or small they might be. In fact I urgue you to pay a lot of attention to detail like "that animation need to be like this" or "there should be particle effects there" and also thing big like "MAKE THIS MMORPG" I will decide which ideas I actually make or not so even if it's crazy post it and i'll give it some thought!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/we-fight-together

Boring stuff...

I had a big dilemma for a few days now. It was whether or not I would keep working on this project or continue development on a space survival project that me and a team of 3 have been working on. Long story short, the survival project requires a lot of work and some big planning and since my team is currently busy with finals I decided I would work on something on my own.... and so the dilemma continued "Do I work on my main project that is a few months old....oooor this funny LD game?" Anyways after some time I figured this game simply feels better to work on since progress can be made quicker and I don't need to overwork myself over perfect performance or extremely accurate controls etc... This is just a funny little game that requires lots of polish and new ideas.

Thanks!!! <3

Blender is so freaking powerful 🤩

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

I'll be playing for like 30mins, prefer web gl games :D but i can download some..

Our game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/fighting-souls

Hello there!

I just need a few more ratings to reach the 20 ratings mark!

If you leave me a comment with feedback, i'll play and rate your game, too :smiley:

Just have fun!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-path-of-sacrifices

*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

THE GAME

• 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

PLAYA AND RATE!

Our shelter

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!

What happens when you have so little time and such a huge and ambitious plan?

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)

What is in the game (Sigthless Priests)

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)

What was (also) meant to be

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

devour tasty peasants!

rage in their villages!

gather sacrifices before the doom comes!

craft beautiful flesh golems to pull your cart!

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.

Wreak havoc or calmly float through space in hiJack

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.

Part 1: Common mistakes

First, here are some of the most frequent errors new users make, and the simple improvements you can make to get your game noticed.

No cover image

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).

Boring game page

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:

• Write a bit about your game (of course)
• Give brief instructions on how to play (especially if you didn't finish a tutorial or how-to-play screen - totally normal in a game jam environment)
• Team members and their roles, if not a solo project
• Guidance on the type of feedback you're looking for
• Tools and assets you used in the game's development

High barrier to entry

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.

Broken build

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.

"I'd like to fix all that," you say, "but the website won't let me update my game after it's published!"

A common mistake. You can change your game description at any time, but there are two "gotchas" that are easy to overlook:

1) You need to redo the submission checklist every time you update

I know, major usability bug. It isn't clear this is a requirement, but it is.

2) You need to click "save" and then "done"

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).

Part 2: Getting noticed

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.

Play and rate other games

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.

Blog

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 <<

Twitch

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!

Social media

Seems pretty obvious, but easy to overlook. Post about your game on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter (don't forget the hashtags: #ldjam #ludumdare43 etc), whatever!

Promotion on your hosting site of choice

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."

• Set the cover image! Resolution of 630x500 on itch.io. Try giving your LD cover image a bit of extra room on the sides and just trim it down for this if you're in a rush
• Add screenshots. Simple, just reuse the ones from your LD description
• Set the Genre and choose relevant Tags (helps with discoverability)
• itch.io might prompt you "is this a Ludum Dare game?" Click yes! It's important for people who discover your game on itch.io to be able to easily click through to your LD page to rate & comment.
• If you don't get the prompt, you can add this link manually

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

Play and Rate Fire Swept

Play & Rate Please :)

Hi everyone !

I'm currently at work but on my lunch break (in about two hours) I'll play and rate somes browser games. So send me your games and I'll try to play as much as possible.

And while you're here, you can play my game too, Ethic in the machine : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ethic-in-the-machine It's a browser game and it's quite short (about 5 minutes).

Isn't playing a fetus a great way to start the week ? ABORTION BOY !

So this is the second time I joined Ludum Dare but this time I brought my family with me. My wife helped me out a lot with the graphics but also this game was basically her idea. My son contributed the sound effect (yes singular, next game I let him do more effects maybe).

My wife and I spent about 6 hours each so the game is pretty basic and surely lacks some depth but we still had much fun and will surely try to join in on the next Jam.

Your goal in this game is to get as many of your goods over the bridge as possible. Unfortunately the gods are somewhat unhappy and so the volcano is about to erupt. You have to please the gods by sacrificing some of your goods (the goods demanded are displayed at the bottom).

Note: I definitely did NOT misspell volcano and was too lazy to rename everything.. "Vulcano" obviously is a reference to the isle vulcano :)

I appreciate your feedback!

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

How many people will you sacrifice to defeat the Emperor and conquer the throne? Dark Lords of Sacrifice awaits you! Play now and have fun!

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

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

Charming received a letter. From Bert, who apparently needs help. He don't ponder any longer. He grab his most shiny armor, only one spell, and begin to run. But when you have nothing to lose but your life... There isn't much left to sacrifice.

We made this game in duo (even if in the end, a kind person let us use her lovely song!), so we couldn't end what we had in mind. But we will finish it when we'll be able to! For now, we hope you will like this prototype. Any advice is welcomed!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/charmings-sacrifices

Hi.

Been playing quiet a few games now but my game is requiring more ratings if you want to check it out go here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/doom-trails

Thanks everyone!

Hi there!

Today we are Play-Rating Ludum Dare 43 Games live on twitch! You want your game rated? Submit it to this form:

https://goo.gl/forms/DmttN0GhV8f8ARsq2

We will do Play&Rate-Streams on Monday and Wednesday for two weeks now: Plan is subject to be changed.

We would appreciate, if you'd also play and rate our submission:

I have some free time to play and rate some of the games, write yours here if you want me to try it out! I'll play and review.

Also if you'd like to try out my game, here it is: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-love

This is my first LDJAM game. Avoid flying enemies or defeat them by eating items. Try and see how long you can last! The game is not complete yet, so there are a lot of gaps, but please support us.

(https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/testxtest)

Hey our game Wicked Kinders needs one more voting and we're in! You're the assistant of Santa Claus and need to punish some misbehaving kids. If you like dark humor, you will love this game!

Well it has been already several days since our little game came out and we have to say that the experience so far it's amazing. It was our first time in a Ludum Dare game jam and we are having such a great time rating games and sharing other developers work.

We are so pleased that our project was well received since the first day, at the beginning we thought it could be a little hard to solve and a little difficult to look at since we decided to give it a different approach in the artstyle. It's a point and click based in an old game called 'El Album del Tio Alberto', which was a series of games from the early 2000's here in Spain.

We had so much fun creating our own puzzles and hints to solve the game, when we was thinking about clues to make it through we never thought about the troubles some people could have so we should have used more testers before publishing the game, but we felt relieved when people told us that they were finally solving the game entirely.

There were people that told us tips that were very usefull and we never realised before, we are excited already for the next LD and We will continue on making games above everything else.

Thank you very much!

Hi guys, I recorded a timelapse of the development of "The best Sacrifice". I hope you like!

And if you haven't played yet, take a chance here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-best-sacrifice

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

In a world of limited resources, there can be no infinite growth. Will you promote innovation to the detriment of some or promote equality at the expense of progress? Use the elements to develop your different territories and forge your society in a limited time. Sacrifices must be made and decisions come back to you...

You can play here and rate there

Not all of us do have a green thumb. When it comes to growing plants, you probably have the guilty suspicion that this one cactus, sitting on your window bench, could reallly use a second watering this year ;) With this in mind, we decided to make this part of the game easy for you. Water your fields once, and soon you can see your beautiful plants flourishing happily!

But, as in real life, every plant still has its enemies. In this case, those aren't called aphids or bugs*, but cops! You heard right. The cops want to kill your green friends, and you are quite upset about that. Defend your leafy treasure!

*To be fair: You might find some.

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

A few tips:

-Crops before cops. Take this tip from the current world record holder. Which is me.

-Don't shoot the deputy!

-Put your high score in the comments!

-Water your cactus, and do it now! No, wait, play our game first pls!

-This is a game about maples. Maples like in canada. They have a lot of maples there, and they are totally legal. Why would you even ask? And why do i tell you this, when you didn't ask?

-I can neither deny nor confirm that you should or shouldn't burn or water the forest to discover some super secret gamemodes nobody knows about! :D

Have fun :D

When you delete files, the assets disappear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I

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

I never had enough ratings, so please rate my game! Yes I know this isn't the best so far, but I'm afraid it is the worst just because no one is interested in my game in the real world either

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/planet-saver

I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who's played and reviewed our LDJam43 game:

AfterHours: A Reverse MetroidVania

Your kind and fair comments have been much appreciated ^_^ and I'm also interested in playing your games too!!

Please post a link to your game in the comments if you'd like me to play it!

AfterHours: A Reverse MetroidVania

Yo! Occasionally I will do a post-jam writeup on technical stuff that went into the making of my LD game.

For my last few jams I've been focussing a bit more heavily on graphical fidelity than I did this time, as you can see below, but that doesn't mean there aren't things to be said about the kind of approach I went for this time either! c:

You can play my LD43 entry F.O.U.R. here!

Single texture

One thing that helps a lot when going for graphics as simple as this is just making one texture used by all assets in the game, just moving the UV's around. It can do wonders for speeding up both the game and the content creation, which was vital for me this time, as I wanted to cram in as much narrative and puzzly content as possible for the detective story of this entry, which forced me to downplay the graphics this time.

Here's the texture used by everything in the game world (but not UI):

As you can see I ended up not even using the last three rows on the grid!

Tiling the world

So what's a good way to speed up your content creation by using just one texture? Building the world using the grid-based texture like a tileset!

This is the entire map of the game:

Everything that rises off the ground (houses, vegetation et cetera) is a separate model, but the ground itself was just modelled as a plane subdivided into a grid and when I was done designing the layout of the time I just removed the superfluous tiles!

Here's a WIP screenshot from Blender:

All I did was unwrap each square separately and move it around on the UV map, holding the control key to easily snap it to the desired tile. Rotating UV's as necessary allowed me to keep the needed number of road tiles low. The road tiles are twice the size of the other tiles which meant sometimes scaling the UV's by exactly 0.5 or 2, but Blender makes that sort of stuff very easy. c:

Materials

Using just one texture meant that every object in the game was able to share the same material, and everything static was set up for batched rendering on top of that, making the whole thing incredibly cheap. The one exception were the house rooves, which needed to be able to fade out and so use a transparent version of the material instead:

Next

That's it for this post! Next post will be about setting up the code and assets for easily churning out unique characters since I needed quite a few of those in the game. Thanks for your time! c: