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

If you decide to play it, please leave some feedback. It doesn't matter if you like it or hate it-- if what you have to say is really that horrible, then feel free to leave an anonymous comment. :P

If you leave good (and non-anonymous) feedback, I'll return the favor to the best of my ability; if you leave something generic or lazy, I probably won't.

One more episode of "Dare to Play" before the Holiday break! Come submit your games and watch me fail at playing others over at https://twitch.tv/cyberlightgames! Starting NOW!

Fun idea right?

Check this game out.

Hey everyone I just need a few more votes to hit the quota. You rate my game and I'll rate yours! Thanks :)

Play it here.

It was a really nice surprise when we found out that Farewell, Dear Cargo was at the top of itch.io's most popular games from LD43!

Thanks a lot to everyone that played and voted our little game and spread the word!

If you haven't played it yet and want to check it out:

:airplane_small: Play Farewell, Dear Cargo!

Experience "Beyond", another nightmare game from MouthlessGames

Balancing a game that is based on random mutations is a pain in the butt. That's why I tried to automate the problem, I don't think I really succeeded but it does make for a nice gif :D Try my evolution-based game at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/cheela I will definitely try out yours ( Starting tomorrow I have a week off so I will be playing as many games possible this week)

They are coming.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/they-are-coming

Only 7 days more to rate entries! Tried "Accept this Offering" already? Time's on the run!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/accept-this-offering

Have a nice holidays!

I know I said my next blog post would be about the post-jam code refactor, but I wanted to make a news post first:

Golden Lord now works on mobile!

Play the mobile version here!

EDIT: It has come to my attention that it has issues in some versions of Mobile Safari and Firefox. I'll work on resolving those.

No longer live, but will see if it can happen again :yum:

Hey I'm a little late to the party with holidays and all, but the Ludum Dare 43 stream is finally here at https://www.twitch.tv/pwnchoguy :smile:

I will be giving proper feedback on all the games I play after the stream so please send me yours! :thumbsup:

You can also checkout our entry here!

We finally managed to create and upload the first revision of our turn-based exploration RPG BloodTrail to itch.io, so if you didn't play the game yet, you can try and rate it now (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/blood-trail) and if you liked it dive right into the improved version on itch.io (https://fluffyvoxels.itch.io/bloodtrail).

Hey everyone! Make sure to try and review our game :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/my-little-daily-sacrifice

Balancing a game that is based on random mutations is a pain in the butt. That’s why I tried to automate the problem, I don’t think I really succeeded but it does make for a nice gif :D Try my evolution-based game at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/cheela I will definitely try out yours ( Starting tomorrow I have a week off so I will be playing as many games possible this week)

By deleting files you make the assets disappear in the game. Fun right!?

Check this game out!

Hey y'all!

Santa is running low in gifts and time is running out, he needs you to help him replenish his stock before tomorrow!

Come help him! (and check out our game at the same time :p)

Well, I finally have some time off during these last days of the year and I wan't to play a few of your cool entries.

If you have some time to spare in the next few days I would really appreciate your feedback on my game so I can get a score.

I will play your game if you leave a comment on this post or if you leave some feedback on my game. :smiley:

Have a huge merry Christmas and happy winter holidays from Delthor Games (me)! The results of LD are coming, if you haven't played my game feel free to check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/alains-sacrifice. If you wnat some feedback leave a link to your game in the comments and I'll try to play it and rate it.

It's that time again! Time to dissect my LD43 entry, The Gods Are Angry, and look at the positives and negatives of its development. I'm more proud of it than I am of my LD42 entry - and it fared much better on Newgrounds - but there's still plenty I can improve on for LD44. So, without further ado...

What Went Well

• I wanted to make a more story-based game this time round, and the theme, "Sacrifices must be made", was absolutely perfect for that. The game's story and atmosphere have generally been praised, and I do think I did a pretty good job with them.
• Compared to my previous LD games and their plain black backgrounds, The Gods Are Angry has actual environments, and with a pretty good level of visual detail. I'm still really proud of the lightning effect, if you couldn't tell from the fact that I show it off at every opportunity!
• I didn't feel like there was much I could do with my previous Ludum Dare games, but this time round, I have a complete (if basic) platforming engine. I've had a couple of ideas for more complex, full-length platformers lying around for years, and now I feel like I have a decent starting point for them.

What Went Badly

• One of these days I'm gonna learn my gosh-darn lesson about testing things. I programmed the game's ending and restart procedure, then immediately shipped it without testing to see if they worked. Predictably, they didn't. It took me a total of fifteen minutes to write the patches that fixed those issues. Nice going, me.
• The game generally lacks polish. The gameplay is too simple, and lacks any interesting mechanics; the level design isn't challenging or varied enough; there are no visual effects when you die, your sprite just disappears. Part of this is due to PICO-8 limitations, and part of it is due to me spending way too much time programming the basic engine and running out of time on Day 2.
• My sound design is still terrible. I still don't know how to use PICO-8's music tracker, and the sound effects are still annoying to a lot of people. It's at the point where I'm seriously considering entering the Jam next time round instead of the Compo, just so I can get someone else to do the music and SFX for me.

What Comes Next

Earlier today I published the final post-jam update for The Gods Are Angry on Newgrounds. It fixed the game's horizontal collision detection, and tidied up the code to make it neater and more reusable. Love Is A Battlefield DX, the post-jam version of my LD41 game, will finally be posted on Newgrounds on either January 23rd (the site's annual Pixel Day), or Valentine's Day.

For 2019, I plan to start developing more indie games outside of Ludum Dare. As I stated earlier, I've got a couple of ideas for full-scale PICO-8 platformers, for which I can re-use parts of the game's engine. My ultimate ambition is to publish a full game to Steam and/or the Discord Store, either next year or in 2020. I will continue to take part in Ludum Dare in the meantime.

A big thank you to everyone who's played The Gods Are Angry and left feedback so far! I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

We were a little disappointed in the result of the game. We aimed really high and didnt quite hit our target. We learned a lot during the process of making the game though and thats what its all about.

the combat and animations dont have that polished feel like we wanted. If anyone has any tips to improve these I'd love to hear. This project was a big stretch for us but we had fun making it

It's not Too long until Results day (scary) Make sure to rate our Game !!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/2305-new-generation

(Actually is a collaborative/competitive asynchronous multiplayer platformer with hats) I had it in my head to try to make an Async Multiplayer game regardless of the theme for this jam. Something where players are affecting the state of the world and then interacting with it. Once the theme was chosen I had several ideas that seemed fun to try to execute, but I landed on a collaborative platformer, where players are trying to expand ever upward by building their own routes, with each death getting them higher.

Well, after the first iteration on Friday evening I noticed that this was EXTREMELY BORING, building ever higher with no goal, I just got in a loop of building ladders. So I came back to the theme: Sacrifice. Maybe players were trying to feed their gods to grow stronger. Maybe it's competitive so you aren't just dealing with optimized paths, but also trying to screw up other players.

It was my first time trying to tackle any kind of online multiplayer in a game, so I had some new concepts to learn. I knew in my heart that what I had in my mind was relatively simple (syncing and updating a single file), but I only had a slight idea how to execute it. I had glimpsed Gamemaker's http request functions and asynchronous events in the past, and bookmarked tutorials without actually looking at them.

Eventually I gleaned that I needed a place to host a single json file, and then I needed to be able to access that file remotely and update it. I was able to find a few free solutions for hosting the files and I settled on https://jsonbin.io/ . The documentation for the API was really straightforward, and by comparing it to the examples I had from tutorials, I was able to figure out the necessary syntax. example of the json file { "god1": 45993, "god2": 44950, "objects": { "24,-667": { "name": "Jojo", "dir": 0, "y": -506, "obj": "obj_Token", "x": 24 }, "372,-42": { "name": "Ravamba", "dir": 0, "y": -42, "obj": "obj_Platform", "x": 372 }, All of the world data is stored in a singe Gamemaker ds_map. The map contains the scores of the gods, and another map within storing the information on each object. Each object is stored as a (mostly) unique name by it's x and y value, and then referenced that way.

Whenever the game refreshes, it goes through the map of objects and recreates the instances based on the info. I ran into some issues with async events being called before previous ones had ended, which caused some crashes or loops to occur, but eventually I sorted out most of it.

Since I had some fun integrating this, I'm thinking of making a short tutorial, or a Gamemaker asset so others could get this simple async MP in their projects quickly.

I somehow achieved what I set out to. As a game, I'm not really sure it's all that compelling, as there isn't exactly a victory state, though I do find a sort of dreamlike quality to interacting with other players without being at all aware of them... As it stands it's more like a social experiment to determine if people like the color red or blue better.

Right now it seems like people really like red.

Check it oooout : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/bla-v-raa-eternal-god-battle-brothers

P.S. If I had more time there are several things I'd have liked to add: - Leaderboard (tracks your sacrifices and deaths) - Lock names to chosen gods - Better Construction UI - More stuff to build (spikes, traps, monster spawns?) - God Combat ( victory/tallying matches/rounds, some animation ) - MORE HATS

One week left! Keep playing, keep rating! Kudos to everyone else who is continuing to rate more games through the busy holiday season.

Our game, "Colors of Your World", draws quite some similarities to Celeste. Please give it a try if 2D platformers are your cup of tea!

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/colors-of-your-world

I said Golden Lord works on mobile before... well, this time I really mean it.

Play the mobile version here!

So what went into making this work on mobile?

The most obvious thing I had to do was to deal with the varying screen sizes and the fact that touch gestures make the window scroll. My solution to this problem was twofold: first, use media queries to handle portrait-mode vs. landscape-mode screens differently, and second, use fullscreen mode whenever possible in order to get rid of the browser UI. Fullscreen requires a bit of care, though. It can only be launched in response to a user request. So I have it request fullscreen when you start the game, and then jump back out of fullscreen when the game is paused or on game over. And then Safari for some reason STILL isn't using the standardized event names, so I had to add special handling for that.

It also turns out that some browsers refuse to preload audio files even if you ask them to. So in order to make the loading process actually run to completion reliably, I had to make the sound effects claim to be done before they were actually fully playable. It shouldn't cause any issues on any real-world situations for sound effects, but it might cause stuttering for background music.

I found a few honest bugs while I was at it, too. (There's one I've not fixed because I'd actually worked around it during the jam and I don't want to dive into fixing it all just yet.)

So if you haven't played Golden Lord yet, give it a try now!

By deleting files you make the assets in the game disappear. Fun right?!

Check this game out!

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

Don't miss out on participating in the 6th Geta Game Jam!

Geta Game Jam is an online event occuring between January 5th and January 8th. * Create a game in three days * Work either individually or as a team * Share your progress with our wonderful discord community * Vote for which theme you would like to be selected

Interested? Come and join!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/trojka! TrojkaGameplaytiny.gif

We have added web version of our game to itch.io Feel free to try it out.

https://amiendor.itch.io/moneyrun

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/money-run

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6M-wG5JGBk

:heart:

My game, King Erik, has just been released on Steam! My first ever Steam game and on Christmas day!

King Erik on Steam

https://youtu.be/SsT2Tmozwxs

Hi, Ludum о/ here our game entry

Game page - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/crushburnsacrifice

• #### That was our 14 LudumDare(wowow). The theme was "Sacrifices must be made", in Crush/Burn/Sacrifice you need sacrifice whole city ¯_(ツ)_/¯

https://twitter.com/_FQteam

https://twitter.com/Rt8vr8ttr

Hey guys, check out my game Space Control here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/space-control

I appreciate you playing my game.

I'm glad to say that I've completed the postjam version of my Ludum Dare game.

The comments I received during the voting were really precious in making this final version. I tried to make the game as enjoyable to play as possible. I don't know if I was able to pull it off, but I really like how it turned out, and I hope you will enjoy it too.

It is rather short, albeit quite a lot longer than the original game. I think it came out quite more challenging too. If you like platformers or just atmospheric pixel art, I think you should give it a try.

You can play it now online, if you want to: Fallen Girl

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I haven't had much time to play games, but I managed to get 20 scores in almost all categories, so thank you!

Dot, the Wanderer

I'll have some more time over the weekend if you leave me a review or a comment here. But I'll be only able to play web (or osx) games that don't rely on mouse.

Happy Holidays, everyone! Season’s greetings from all of us at Whales And Games! While they’re almost over already, we hope they were as snow-white as Whalechan’s hair and we wish you had or are having a fantastic time with yourself, your friends, family and/or loved ones! 🎄🐳

While the banner is the same as the one we posted last year to celebrate the occasion, we have updated it with a fresh coat-of-paint and made a handful of tweaks. Similar to last year, the banner features characters from previous Ludum Dare entries such as Colossorama, Petty Puny Planet and Jazzy Beats, together with other games we have in development or that were part of our story as a team. Of course, Whalechan and Polite Whale are also present together with other minor characters that make part of our vast array of mascots.

However, if you look closely, we are also added and featured some-brand new characters, most notably, Monetization Man from Super Sellout which was our game for this Ludum Dare! If you feel like giving the gift of saving civilians from an array of different situations, we’d suggest you give it a try! Of course, you might also need to get some sponsors in order to pay-off the bills of the presents you bought yourself...

And that’s really it! We’re hope that you continue to enjoy the upcoming days as we get ready to close off the year! There’s only a few more days until judging ends and we will be replying to everyone that has left us a comment in the game and continue to push through judging and cover as many games as possible. If you’d like to celebrate the holiday mood with some strangers and share your game, you can also do so at our Discord server! Everyone is welcome to join and we’d love to see you there! :heart::green_heart::whale2:

Waddle on!

Doesn't that sound fun?!

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

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

Sup, I have an entry called "Pecto" so it like cards, dungeons... or games? you can try it here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/pecto (some people really liked)

After far too long, we've gotten around to rating a proper 20 games so now we need your help to get Dwarf Climbers to 20 votes! It's a simple game about climbing up a mountain as 2 Dwarves and mining as much ore as possible before reaching the top. You can play by yourself or with a friend on Windows or Mac! Note that there is now a Version 1.2 with some minor bug fixes, which is a POST LD Build. I'll leave it up to you whether to play the original build or the new one with minor updates (there's a change-list on the download page).

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/dwarf-climbers.

Itch: Buddy Jam

Buddy Jam 2 is Jan 1 - 31

Buddy Jam 3 is Feb 1 - 28

Community: Discord​ link

I invite you all to participate in Buddy Jam - grab a buddy, make a game.

Buddy Jam is a sharing of knowledge and experience, leading new people into game development - in the form of a collaborative game jam!

The jam is an opportunity to share the love, joy, magic, excitement, frustration, creativity, and labor of game development. Because so many people want to make games including you, and you could be the difference that helps someone make their first game.*

Inspired by:

• Hanging out with my uncle and watching him code away on his projects when I was a kid.
• Making games with my older brother Gabe when I was new to game development.
• Indie Game the Movie; Specifically the game development relationship between Phil Fish and his Father. (Phil would make drawings in Kid Pix on the Apple II, and his Dad would make video games out of them)

*Buddy jam is not limited to duos, teams are allowed, it's not limited to first timers either. "Experience" is on a spectrum too. Your buddy/buddies might be artists or musicians without coding knowledge; that's fine.

The intention of Buddy jam is to make something possible for people, that would not be possible by themselves.

I have been working hard over the last month to improve my game and I have finally finished! The game is officially completed. Please check it out if you have time!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/finally-finished

I wish you Happy holidays. This year was a good dev year - i participate on all ludum dares and released a big game for Android.

Also i am very proud of my LD43 game and want to invite you to play my jam version here.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/hyper-skater.

I Plan to Make a full game out of it next year so stay tuned.

the link is https://discord.gg/yhGruD. please do not spam and use for a good use

We make games to be played,
that's just what we do.
I've made this to be played,
and enjoyed by you.

I hope that you like it,
its short but its sweet.
And if you could review it,
well that would be neat!

So Lend me your ears, eyes, and hands for a while.
Play this small game, and don't forget to smile.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/shepherd-sacrifice

Its been quite a while since I posted here...So now I am looking for a final feedback of my game if anyone is interested. It will help me to develop this game further. Also, a big thanks to everyone who already gave their precious feedback...

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/friends-or-food

Play the updated version now (Web)

There Will Come Soft Rains is a game about the harsh realities of dealing with climate change as the leader of an important nation.

I found some time over the holidays to put together a post-jam release. I expect another release tomorrow with a few more scenarios just to round things out.

Besides a few visual modifications and an extended background track, there are two big changes to this version:

1. The addition of hints. Now you have some insight into what a decision might possibly effect. Hints are currently disabled by default.

2. Stats have been reworked. Population has been dropped in favor of Industry. Instead of managing your population level, you just have to make sure your nation's industries stay afloat. All scenarios have been rebalanced around this change.

Please take a minute to play a round or two and let me know if you think hints should be on by default instead.

I just need one more rating on my game to get to 20.

Leave some feedback on my game or drop a comment here and I'll play your game when I have some time to spare. I'll prioritize games in the danger zone. :smiley:

Doesn't that sound fun!?

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

Need 10 scores...

https://youtu.be/RPGL4K5W5Lg

Rate if you like, need 5 more ratings still!

Play as a warrior fighting to protect an ancient altar attacked by hordes of goblin warriors, assassins & brutes! Sacrifice your own life and stamina to the gods in order to hold the enemies back a little longer.

How many waves can you last?

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/superesse-sum-sacrificium

Hello

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates the 12 days of Christmas. Hope you are all having a blast this time of year.

We will be doing a post mortem on our LD43 game and then we will be streaming your games! Join us at https://www.twitch.tv/cyberlightgames

Last time I shared some analytics data for the first 30 players of our game, and we tried to learn how people played our game. This time I've brought the data collection back, and ran everything through a spread sheet... here are the first 61 players:

Totals

• Total Players: 61 players
• Shortest Play Time: 19 seconds
• Longest Play Time: 48 minutes
• Average Play Time: 13 minutes
• Total Play Time: 13 hours
• Players That Won: 19 players (31.15%)

Play Time

How long did it take players to get through the game.

Time Until Giving Up

The average playtime does not really give us the complete picture of when players stop playing, here is a histogram that highlights us dropout "windows." It seems players don't give up around 13 minutes, they drop out in less than 5 minutes, and the longer they play, the less likely they are to leave.

Time Until Winning

Same as above, but looking at how long before a player wins.

Day Of Week

A fun chart trying to see if there is any day of the week that correlates with longer play times, it seems constant (no effect) within the margins of error.

Time Of Day

Like the Day Of Week chart, but for times of day, to look for any insights we would need to control for when our team rated games too (times are Eastern Standard Time :: UTC-05:00).

Player Dropout

Where in the game did players dropout.

Join The Dataset

If you want to become an entry on our spreadsheet, you can play the game here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tVb5VbO2QA

It took a while to make the game as I envisioned at first, but I'm proud of how it came out in the end.

You can play the game here: Fallen Girl

Merry Christmas everyone! If you still haven't tried our game, feel free to give it a try! :smiley:

We're live now streaming YOUR games at https://twitch.tv/cyberlightgames Come join us in chat and share your game with the world!

Come Play & Enjoy !! ;)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/break-a-leg

The all-mighty Quetzalcoatl will be very displeased if he does not receive 10 more sacrifices in the next five days. Grab a friend, or play solo, and please the reasonable and merciful Quetzalcoatl!

Spartan style! It's an RTS-like game so you can control and kill off a lot of weaklings which is necessary to have enough generations to ‘evolve’. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/cheela

Play My Game Here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ld-43-jam-project

In the comments of this post, post the link for your game.

My game is a browser game, so it should not take long to start and finish playing. It is a 2D platformer.

Come Check Out Our Game! We Only Need 11 More Votes to Qualify! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/graveyard-gladiator

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/graveyard-gladiator

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

Hey all! Just a couple more ratings needed to get a ranking on the game! Thinking about picking this project back up again depending on what feedback I get so any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated :) Its a game all about choices and consequence (and canmibalism) Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/transit-terror

In my last blog post, I described the basics of working in html52d, how Golden Lord was implemented using the features that were available, and some of the corners I cut during the jam in order to get it done faster.

Since then, I've been refactoring the code and https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/golden-lord. (Try it out it if you haven't yet!)

I realized fairly early into the refactoring process that I needed a better way to organize the code and the assets. Throwing everything into .js files and loading it all from the HTML file worked, sure, but it was sloppy and I had to be careful about dependencies and global variables. And I discovered the limitations of the prefab structure I had built, but I didn't want to take the time to overhaul that during the jam itself.

The prefab system was intended to support class inheritance from the beginning. The asset manager would let you put anything you wanted in a prefab, so you could return a descriptor object like I showed in the last blog post, or you could return a constructor function or a class. And using a class meant that the problems I described before with adding additional functions went away. But this yielded an API inconsistency: you had to know whether a prefab was a descriptor (new Sprite(assets.prefab.hero)) or a class (new assets.prefab.Hero()) when you wanted to use it.

This was straightforward to fix. When loading prefabs on startup, the asset manager now wraps descriptors in a class that inherits from Sprite. Everything can be constructed the same way now.

Once I had this worked out I was able to refactor my character prefabs. I moved the common utility functions into a CharacterCore class that extends Sprite and made the prefabs into classes that extend CharacterCore. The awkward checks to see what kind of character it is turned into clean object-oriented function overrides. I'm MUCH happier with it now.

However, this inheritance scheme means that the characters have a load-time dependency now. This meant more global variables and more manual configuration of the load process. Normally I would have just used ES6 modules for the task, but browser support for these isn't quite universal enough for me to be comfortable with it yet. If you want to use them in your own code, it's perfectly well supported by html52d itself, so feel free to do so. Instead, I built a require() mechanism sort of like CommonJS or AMD modules, except it's a little cleaner than either of those.

While I was working on import machinery I also added a way for prefabs to define asset dependencies instead of requiring the developer to specify all of the assets that will ever be used up front. This can include runtime script dependencies too, though you can't use this syntax to pull in a class that you inherit from since the Javascript language requires that the superclass already be defined.

In the end, I'm a lot happier with how things are structured now. I still have some work to do because I'm not completely satisfied with the way the modularization works because there's no good way to minify them. I don't want to require a build system for development but I also don't want to prevent using a build system for deployment, so I've got some thinking to do. In the end I might go ahead and switch over to ES6 modules after all and let the build process be responsible for supporting older browsers.

I’d like to share my approach for creating reflections for AkimBear in Unity since I think it turned out rather well and could give you some ideas for future projects. I am a technical one so there will be code, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Inspiration

If our reflections look at all familiar that’s because I based them on this post from Kingdom’s TIGsource. I wasn’t as strict on my pixel precision and didn’t do any of the perspective correction that Kingdom details (this being a game jam after all).

Overview

You can get an idea of the final result (if you haven’t played AkimBear yet) from the trailer:

https://youtu.be/avRx-U6SNHk

I felt that a flowchart of the rendering to attain the reflection would give the best sense for how this effect is achieved at a system level:

In terms of components, the system is just a camera for capturing the area to be reflected and the reflection itself.

Easy, right? Stick around for the alignment issues.

More perspectives on the world

Apparently, a camera in Unity cannot both display on the screen and render to a texture. Initially I found this disappointing as that’s what reflection is right? I think this may have actually been a blessing in disguise; AkimBear has a rather lively camera (both position and orthographic size are constantly changing) and I might have ended up with even more mess if I’d been trying to use that camera to generate reflections.

A second camera it was! This camera is offset up from the main camera and it has a render texture set as its target texture. Other than that, it’s identical to the main camera… or so I thought initially (see camera property matching script later). This was my first eureka moment, since I could see the screen in the inspector for the render texture:

The TIGsource thread from Kingdom had stated that this was not possible without the Pro version of Unity so I was very, very happy when this just worked without being pay-walled.

It’s basically done now right?

Sitting under a tree on a sunny day

The task of the shader is quite simple: take a sample from both the screen texture and the highlight texture and then combine them. The sample into the screen texture should ripple to give the sense of water and the highlight should show some flow. I’ve commented this snippet (shader source here) to give you an idea of what everything does:

fixed4 frag(v2f IN) : SV_Target { // Generate an offset value in both x and y directions float offx = noise(15.0 * IN.texcoord - 1.5 * _Time.yx); float offy = noise(0.05 * IN.texcoord); // Sample the screen texture offset in the x direction float2 uv = IN.texcoord + float2(0.02 * offx, 0.0); fixed4 c = tex2D(_ScreenTex, uv) * IN.color; // Sample the highlight texture uv.y += offy; fixed4 h = tex2D(_Highlights, 3.0 * uv + _Time.yx / 2.0) * IN.color; // This is not good shader code; should be no dynamic branching! // maybe o = lerp(c, h, h.a) would have worked as well? fixed4 o; if (h.a > 0.5) { o = lerp(c, h, 0.5); } else { o = c; } o.rgb *= o.a; return o; }

Why did I use a noise function seeded with a 2D vector? This is a legitimate question and I’m not sure (I’m sure it made more sense at the time). The same result could have been attained with a few trig functions and would likely have been more efficient.

Why all the magic numbers? If you take their product it spells game jam in ascii. Just take my word for that.

All done right?

Well, its kind of reflecting.

The last 10% is 90% of the work (but not of this post)

A few unacceptable issues are apparent. They all stem from using Cinemachine to control our camera for following Grizzle and creating screen shake. This means that it isn't as simple as just attaching our second camera and reflection surface to the main camera. This was solved with a few scripts to exactly follow the Cinemachine (main) camera on any axis and match the parameters for the two cameras. The parameter matching is incredibly hacky: it uses linear interpolation across empirical values to keep the reflection camera at the right offset while the orthographic size is varying.

After much hacking, both the reflection camera and surface were following the wild zooms and shakes. This took much longer than the actual reflection to get right.

Remaining bug

The last remaining (apparent) issue with the reflection system is quite awful. I really wished I’d had time to fix it (maybe a variable passed to the shader on a per-frame basis to compensate for it?). But I’ve yet to hear anyone notice it on their own, so if you see it keep it to yourself.

Find the bug yourself by playing AkimBear!

This was a pretty quick overview, so if you want to know more, feel free to reach out! If you want further detail than the comments allow, my email is ecmjohnson at gmail.com

An so 4 days and 17 hours until the rating ends I realized I need some ratings. Please have a look and give my tower defense game a try.

Castle Defense will keep you on the tip of your seat.

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/castle-defense

From this after only a few hours into the JAM...

TO this after the JAM...

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

Our entry, PeonCraft, is a peon scout simulator. You know from those in RTS games, early game. Just now you are not the commander, but the expandable one.

You can play it without downloading in WebGL!

>> Play PeonCraft! <<

You have angered the god of war, Ares , and now you are forced to fight in a 1v1 ​gladiator arena to kill and sacrifice your opponent just for the fun of the gods. You have to choose, it’s your life or theirs

If you want me to play and rate your game please post a link to it in the comments. \

Welcome to the Cursed Town, a seaside village over which looms a famished Eldritch God. As the authority of the community, you are tasked with saving your villagers from its ultimate demise: the destruction of your village.

To do so, you will have to build a town strong enough to exorcise the God out of this plane; but the more time goes on, the hungrier they will get: you will have no choice but appease the God with the occasional passerby, snatching them from the bridge.

CONTROLS: -Click structures to activate them / upgrade them -Hover over the top-left "?" icon to get an overview of your situation and resources. -Manipulate live crucifix (or any other holy bauble you might own) to hopefully save your digital environment from the calamities of the Outer God's fury.

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

Happy holidays! If you've got a moment, please check out, rate (and optionally leave feedback for) my LD43 compo entry, 'Goat Life'. I need a handful more ratings to reach 20 total, so I'd really appreciate your help!

We only need 2 more ratings on our game Suicicde Sanctum! 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

Do you have a missing brain? Have you ever felt like you have one excess kidney? Whatever your problem is, Dr. Dr. Ludwig and his team will gladly take care of you and your organs. Just lay down on that conveyor belt over there and wake up a different person*!

* Terms and conditions apply

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/organic-harvest

Do you have any fiends and are you ready to play a local multiplayer game? Then you can play and rate my game, and if 9,920 do the same, the game can reach 10,000 ratings.

You find my game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/exploding-sport

Imagine if you woke up in the middle of a cold and dark space, hands tingling, head dizzy and feet betraying your nerves… How would you feel?

TERRIBLE, of course! In fact, that’s the exact situation you’re in, inside the game called _Lintahlo. _

Constantly, your heart is beating in an irregular manner, like a grim reaper’s anticipation as he takes his time preparing for the sails. What makes you think that he won't take you with him? No less, did it ever cross your mind that he wasn’t real? *Big mistake. *

As you’ll find out, when you play this game, doubting its existence would be making a terrible decision.

Oh but DO NOT panic, for all hope is not lost. Within the shackles of the icy dungeon of despair, you share company with a stranger. Are they friend, or are they foe? Who decides that? How do you know if you’re a friend… or a foe?

When you begin to regain your senses, you realise that you have superhuman abilities such as jumping midway through air. Not only this, but you’ve also been equipped with a grapplehook; it’s almost as if someone has hooked you into one big plan…

At any point, you can fall to your death.
At any point, you could get stuck *forever. *
At any point, you could even *disappear. *

If you dare to play this game, be prepared for consequences that exceed the time you’re currently living in. Be prepared, child of man.

As the black winds howl, *sacrifices… must… be made. *

Play now on https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lintalho

Not a lot of time left for LDJam 43 to be over...I am looking to get as many reviews/feedback/suggestions/comments/criticisms as I can...

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/friends-or-food

Try my game :) It is a small puzzle game about re-assigning stats to optimize your score ! :sparkles:

-> Play now <-

Hi people! I’m Pedro Fuentes, Game designer, and with Sergio Martinez (programmer) and Daniel Gomez (artist) we made the game “NoooooMan”. In the last post I explained the Idea and the Evolution of the game (you can see the previous post here --> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/noooooman/making-of-noooooman-part-i). In this post I will explain the visuals of the game.

The Visuals

For the concept of NoooooMan, as the main character we made a loser hero, but he tries to do good things and sacrifices his life. We made Noooooman fat, short and with “innocent” colors like white and yellow.

NoooooMan concept by Daniel Gomez

With the civilians, we used as a reference Superman proportions: big hands, huge body, strong constitution, etc. With this, we created a good, strange and hilarious contrast between NoooooMan and the civilians.

Civil concept by Daniel Gomez

We used for the environment references like the Wayne’s Mansion (Batman). With this environment, it is coherent adding the cutlery props like tray and spoons. Also, we did the modular drawers to reuse a lot of pieces and have a lot of variants.

Environment props by Daniel Gomez

At last, we animated the characters using Spine.

Character animations by Daniel Gomez

In the next days we will explain in another posts the tools and another details that we used 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!

When we used screens with a shape of a square everything was OK. The UI and the game just had to scale with the screen, but then the rectangle screen revolution came.

Gamedevs were in a struggle. They had to make scripts for the UI to scale properly. Then the window era came. Games now had to scale with the window that had so many options.

So now we have three options for scaling: - Square screen - Rectangle screen - Re sizable window.

The first option isn't available anymore and the third one is like committing suicide.

My game depends on the third option, because you have the game opened on one side and your file explorer on the other. When I was designing the game my intention was to play the game in a messy way like this:

After releasing my game was played on a stream and the streamer put windows next to each other like this:

A game that have different ways to play is good for players, but not for devs. I hope that this little post told you the struggle of window scaling.

Find Cessabit here

Music :notes:

The soundtrack for AkimBear started off as a joke and quickly morphed into something that actually fit the game quite nicely! Its purely frantic jazz drum solo soundtrack was originally a play on one of the games influences; Banjo Kazooie. A game about a bear and a bird going on adventures, meeting whacky characters and having a good time.

It was pretty apparent that from a character design standpoint that having a bird be a character simply wouldn’t work in the game given the main characters rogue like attitude as well as it would more of a rip off of Banjo Kazooie as opposed to a head nod.

So instead of seeing the bird as a character visually, I decided to having him be a part of the soundtrack.

Birdman is a film released in 2015 that made waves among audiences and critics alike. It was all portrayed as being 1 continuous shot and is soundtrack had little to no melody, rather was all scored by a single jazz drummer. This always stood out to me as an interesting design choice in the film as it both shared an interesting sound musically, but also played well to the lead character’s, played by Michael Keaton’s struggle. It was chaotic and yet felt intimate in a way a full symphony just could not be able to capture. So I adopted the idea of a full soundtrack of only drums. Here's an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-fQ-xd1whA

And thus; in spirit the Bird and Bear were back together!!

The more I sat with the idea, the more I found reasons why it would fit best into the game. As the game is a 2D side scroller I recalled a similar style portrayed by another director; Wes Anderson. Often he would have long takes of a simple dolly shot as the camera tracks a character. Some of the these shots would be scored by a drum solo. Not only does this make the scene feel just plain cool, it also helps portray how chaotic everything is surrounding the character.

https://youtu.be/llWWGgiBY4U

The main theme for AkimBear was made on Native Instrument’s Maschine, a pad based drum machine with its jazz kit. While I do play real drums, my kit is cheap and horrible sounding. Also Everything for this game was made in one apartment room with 3 other people... so I figured this method would be the most appreciated. :heart:

The menu music was made on a Lowrey vintage organ.

SFX :microphone2:

The sound effects were kept to a minimum due to the soundtrack being so wild, so I kept it simple. In other words, I made a loud, meaty, thicc machine gun. (And some shells drops for good measure!)

So here’s a recipe I made so you can save a trip to a firing range! 


DIY MACHINE GUN SOUND (1-3 MINUTES)
You will need: 1 Zoom recorder 1 strip of pizza box cardboard 1 tin (I used a planters peanut container) 1 fan and basic editing software.

Step 1: set up the zoom mic close to the fan.

Step 2: turn on fan.

Step 3: insert tip of the cardboard pizza box strip gently into fan

Step 4: after removing the strip of pizza box cardboard, turn off fan and get your tin ready.

Step 5: tap with your fingernail on the metal top or bottom of the tin until you’re satisfied with the sound you made. (this is going to be the high pop you that you’re going to mix in with the bass-y cardboard sounds, so you want a nice pop. A flick will also to the trick.)

Step 6: In your editing software chop up some of the sounds you recorded and lay the cardboard fan sounds over the tin sounds.

Step 7: Apply so many filters… I used a low oscillating Flanger with some reverb and a bass boost, then raised the highs for nice crisp punch. Obviously this is the part with the most freedom, so have fun with it!

Bonus Step: For bullet shells; drop something light and metal on a floor tile. (We used a ring but you could use a bottle cap or something of similar size. You want something that can bounce a little, and has a nice “ting” when dropped.)

And that’s it! Had a ton of fun making the sounds, and hopefully this was of some use! I always make all the sound effects for my games because I feel it adds an extra touch of myself to the game. Plus… it’s just a lot of fun to do! Give it a shot, and get creative!!!

Oh, and check out the game here:

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

And if you want to here the soundtrack, check that out here:

https://closecallstudios.bandcamp.com/album/akimbear-ost

We're pretty happy with our entry for LD43 this year, even though we didn't get to build the ending we wanted and had to scrape a bunch of content, this might be our least buggy entry. @linear and I have been doing Ludum Dare for a while, and LD43 was our... 7th Ludum Dare, I believe.

Check it out! Will you save the world? We'd love to hear your honest feedback about how our puzzles played out and how the game plays out!

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

A Different Art Style This Year

That said, I wanted to share what we did for an art style. In our past LDs, we took out all of the techniques we could think of... Parallax Occlusion Mapping? Check. Tesselation? Check. Complex shadows with custom shadow casters? Check. Detail Mapping? Check.

That said, it's hard to get that to look good during a Ludum, so we decided to go for an art style that is different for our team. We decided to analyze The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess to see how they do things. Thus, before LD even started, we produced an art guide for ourselves so that we could make sure we were on the same page as we build different assets and prefabs.

Scapegoat Art Guide - How to Mimic TP

Our attempt

With only two people actually working in Unity proper, and myself doing most of the code and @linear doing most of the art, we couldn't get the EXACT results we wanted, but we think we did a decent job. We chose to sacrifice normal maps for the first time, which is pain when you've been generating normals for years, and relied wholly on Ambient Occlusion.

Considering how we didn't use any Unity Terrain but all custom geometry, the ground blending turned out okay, but cliff blending took much longer to get a decent result:

We tried to make sure that things such as levers and the goat were visible against the intentionally stretched background, but it turns out we didn't get the effect we wanted as too many people didn't see levers or keys scattered through the levels.

In order to get the desired blending, we ended up creating a number of blending masks that we used even for detailing things:

Different masks served different purposes, but a lot of the ground blending was done using basic photoshop filters applied to black and white clouds.

In order to give our space a nice vibe, we used a tree shadow spot light with fake tree branches and leaves, to imitate the effect of actual shadows from above (which didn't exist).

Finally, our cavern sequences turned out to be really hard to see the goat in because of the purple-ish light we had emitted from the crystals and the goat's white fur. In the picture below, the goat is hardly visible, when in fact he ought to be higher detail density than the rest of the background. Alas, these are things we only noticed when watching others play our game after LD!

And some things we made too detailed. For example, these mushrooms were just little decorators, but people kept thinking they were important. This is why consistency is important in detail level.

Thoughts

All in all, there were definitely things we could have done a lot better with our graphics, but I think we found a nice art style that doesn't let us fall into the uncanny valley and is still doable in a short amount of time. The lesson we learned is that sacrificing graphical fidelity doesn't ruin the graphical aesthetic. Even if you have some seams and places where objects intersect a bit, it's not the end of the world for the atmosphere and play of the game. We're pretty happy with how things turned out aesthetically, but we are looking forward to improving for next time now that we've got this technique figured out.

Thanks for reading!

Check out our game! and please let us know what you think!

My entry for LD43 encapsulates the experience of making an LD entry. Implement features! Allocate time smartly! Make sacrifices to get it all done in time! You'll get a rating at the end in classic LD style, along with a live webcam showcasing your progress.

PLAY THE GAME

and now some sleep...

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

The all-mighty Quetzalcoatl only needs 5 more sacrifices to be artistically quenched!

As always, I take a lot of time out of my busy schedule to play and feedback some LD43 games. Here are the first parts. be sure to subscribe to the channel if you want notifications about it the next time, as I won't be accepting any new submissions for LD43.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeUPXVSPps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZuUnksM0WM

I AM VERY GOOD AT programming PART I KNOW A LOT OF UNITY AS I HAD BEEN ON UNITY FRO AROUND 7 YEARS AND I AM VERY SERIOUS ABOUT IT, I WANT SOMEONE WHO IS GOOD IN ART TO COLAB WITH ME AND GET READY FOR NEXT LD44 IN ADVANCED WE NEED TO MAKE STRONG BOND BEFORE WE DIVE INTO JAM AND THIS TIME I WANT TO MAKE A VERY SERIOUS GAME WITH DAY AND NIGHT WORK T.Y

If you feel like a shoot-n-switch-em-up, then here ya go

hiJack

Experience "Beyond", a nightmare game from MouthlessGames

Trying to avoid being "that guy" who continually posts the same image asking for more ratings, but there are only 3 days left so against my better judgment I'm making one final push for ratings!

Thank you to everyone who already played and rated Colors of Your World. We really appreciate the feedback and kind words! Here's what some people have been saying:

I absolutely love what you’ve done with the theme in this game. I love the look and feel of the world, and became intensely curious to how it would transition and look throughout. You did not disappoint with how the world changed, and each phase looked stellar! - @foodzilla

A joy to play, as always. I loved how the tone of the game shifted as you continue. The difficulty curve was especially impressive - it’s hard to both ease the player into a game and challenge them with with the short time you have to make a Ludum Dare game. - @arcling

Really well polished game (cant stress that part enough), from the art to the transitions, the world objects (such as that cool bouncy animation with the mushrooms), the music, dash animation etc. The level design made for a fun experience, and I really enjoyed getting myself through each area. - @exilegl

People have been loving our gameplay, art, and music, while having mixed reactions to how we approached the theme. Some people loved it, other people didn't like it. I get it though, that's sort of just a personal preference thing. Try to just see it for what it is, but if it's not for you, then just enjoy the rest of the game!

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/colors-of-your-world

I was hoping to add a set of "challenge mode" (a.k.a. "B-Side") levels to the post-jam version, but it looks like that may have to wait until after results are announced, as I've been busy with other things. We'll see though! I'm really happy with the engine and level framework that we have so it would be fun to design some crazy difficult screens. I also do plan on writing up a postmortem with some (very) brief descriptions of how the platformer physics are architected.

Over here

Check this game out.

Hya,

Ludum Dare is almost over! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/meta-magic

For this LD we threw together a small magic casting game, with a little twist on the usual mana system found in most magic casting games. You can cast magic WITHOUT mana... but it isn't all that great. When you cast magic without mana you give up parts of yourself, whether that is vision, speed, or even your HEALTH!

However, we are in the DANGER ZONE in regards to ratings! It would be of great help if you could rate our game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/meta-magic If you can't, well thanks for reading this post!

Thanks, Inkie Inc

Hello everyone! Check out the video tutorial of our board game Dark Lords of Sacrifice

https://youtu.be/igX7MPK-HFc

Hey guys!

Hope you're all doing well, I've played some absolutely brilliant entries this LD! Unfortunately I've hated that I've not had much time to play more than about two dozen, or even stream! University work has kept me busy. As a result, our game still has yet to quite hit the 20 ratings mark, we're in the danger zone.

Could you help get us out of the danger zone, please? I'll try my best to rate yours too, if you like, between my work.

Our game is a voxel-style wave-based hack and slash with a big boss at the end!

Check it out here.

Super appreciate it, thank you! Always nothing but love for this community.

Taha

Alien Escape is a challenging puzzle-platformer that needs your ratings!

You can check it out here.