Just in case you miss my entry, please take a look to my MUSIC SHOTS, a mix between FPS and Guitar Hero!

Please visit the game page for more details: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/music-shots

Bearly Fishing

Have you ever wonder what's like to slap a fish? Have you ever had an army of Bears towers defend your ocean? If not, then I can bearly contain my excitement to tell you that you now can!

Just hit click the link for the WebGL version of Bearly Fishing!

Bearly fishing

If you need cuddles, try our five minutes games! If you don't need them, try it anyway. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/heaven-and-earth we are lazy and we are italian... and we are noob too! Please play html version in full screen or you will lose some score

Thank you for your feedback and ratings of my game PuzzleGolf! To summarize it a little...

PLAY HERE

It's a very difficult game. No one has finished it yet. Will you finish it?

Hi everyone!

We want to show you our screenshots from the concept stage to the final game that we have developed in this Ludum dare. Here we are!

We started with the idea of a runner + puzzle game with a panda as a character. Our first big problem was to think about the main view of the game. We have decided to make a 2D game so we need a clean screen with all the info required for a runner and a puzzle game. That was not easy because it requires to have space to show the wave of obstacles and a space for the puzzle where the player can play puzzle and runner at the same time.

After a lot of ideas, we choose this view of the game:

Our artists make a cleaner mockup of the view to start with the implementation of the game:

This is more acurrate of the final game, uh?

At the end we have this view of the game (this is a built-scene, not a screenshot of the game):

This was our developing process of the main view of the game, do you like this kind of posts?

Have played our game? No? Oh my god, here it is the link to play it! We love to hear your feedback!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fat-panda

Hope you like it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/numbness

We are closing in to get 20 votes. Pls help if you want. THANKS! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/unidungeon

You can play both WebGL and Windows versions here!

Originally we thought that browser version of our game would be sufficient to reach the widest audience. However, since some people expressed preference for a standalone Windows version instead of the WebGL player (lesson learned), we now added it as well.

Therefore our turn-based first-person shooter is now available for both the web and as a standalone windows application here. Right now we did not add any other platforms, as we couldn't immideately test them, but we are open to suggestions, as to which platforms should be targeted and why.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dont-leave-me

These are my surroundings for the next 6 hours. It's going to be a boring day and I would love to rate your games to entertain myself. However, only gaming device I have is a tablet and you can't sort the entries by controlling method... _so... _

If your entry works on mobile browsers and can be played with touch screen, please drop a link in the comments.

I'll try to go through them all, but my Internet connection can be a bit spotty so no guarantees!

We never would have gotten an idea like that without the theme but we think it actually works very well together. Take a look if you want! :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/roguepets

Hey guys! Check out Threerena, our LD41 game! It's a local multiplayer game where you and your friend have to fight each other; but, each round, you will have to face modifiers that changes the gameplay [For example, 'you can't see your characters' or 'you have superspeed']

We would be very grateful if you do! ^^

Ps: Gifs are speeded up ;D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ludumdare-41-threerena

Well, not really...

It runs soooo sloooow on my smartphone, but still is playable with a Bluetooth keyboard.

Or you can just try it yourself in your browser using this link.

Have fun!

Play NOW!

Hello dear Ludum Darers! 😊

What a weekend! It's been a year since we took part in our first Ludum Dare together, and we've made so much progress in finding the style of games we wanna make! Let's talk a bit about our entry, Definition of a Ghuest 💜

Our first LD game was The Cashbags Man, it'a hotel simulation where you check in guests in the Brownie Cove Hotel, you had text choices to make, leading to different things happening [and in the Post-Jam version that we are releasing very soon, several endings!]. The choices you made had an impact, our story file contained a lot of variables. We still like this game, and we're still proud of what we did back then, we went down a quite different road after that...

We then made Between Stations, where you watch TV in your hotel room... at the Brownie Cove Hotel. You turn on your TV, and you go through the channels, hidden in the static. They were like a dozen of channels, with different unrelated stories. You still had different choices to make, but they had a very small impact of the stories, sometimes changing the following text, but most of the time they were just there to add variations to how you perceived it all. Some people liked it, some people didn't:

And this time we've been doing Definition of a Ghuest. It’s a game about a film about an art piece about a hotel (guess which one ;) ). We won't spoil you too much on this one but I just leave a part of our game page here: "We interpreted the theme as a transfer of one medium into another… i.e. an installation piece remade as a documentary, or a film being viewed within a video game. What is gained and what is lost when two incompatible mediums collide?"

It was our first real 3D project (hence why we don't participate in Graphics category, we're not 3D artists and we used hotel assets and cars from the Asset Store), and it was maybe the most gameplay-esque thing we did, I mean we've got several cameras, a controller you can move around, we use the mouse, the keyboard... However, this may be our most "passive" game, striving further away from games like Telltale games where you're the hero of the game, here you just happen to watch it and merely try to have an impact on it... I'll stop there but if you're interested in thoughts about player agency and games as a medium, I'd suggest this great blog post by Sam. We tried to warn people beforehand so they know what they get into, so we hope it will be easier to appreciate than Between Stations.

We're very glad we've been able to pull it off in a weekend, we worked very hard on it and we can't wait to have some feedback on it.

Play it here: Definition of a Ghuest

We're also looking forward to play your games and we will probably make a small curated list of some of our favourites... 😉

So making this was pretty epic! I thought I'd write this to share with you some of how this came about.

Background

This is my 3rd LD. In LD38, I built "Conquer Earth" and came 154th. I wrote that whole thing with JQuery, and spent a long time drawing and scanning art. Art was never my strong point. People liked the music I made for it though and I do have a lot of design ideas. In LD40 I made "Contamination" with a team of randoms from around the world. Most of them didn't contribute much and it was hard keeping everyone on the same page. I basically did most of the programming - overall the game placed 881st. So I figured I'd go back to working on my own this time and seeing what I can do with all this LD experience behind me. Conquer Earth had a spinning WebGL globe I hacked together from a simple WebGL tutorial I read during that jam, but other than that I'd never worked with it before or since.

How it happened

When the theme was released I had the problem of too many ideas. I didn't know what I should do with everything for about 2 hours. Eventually I decided I wanted to make a builder, with the general goal being to build a magic school using cards. I thought an isometric-type display would be cool for that. I figured, given that the game would need to display a lot of tiles (I'd learnt about lagging in LD40, as that had a ton of objects at any given time the game did pathfinding for), I'd have to either use WebGL or an engine that did it for me. Because I'm old-school I went down the route of programming it from scratch.

This turned out to be a bad idea. After some hours I managed to get tiles to display. Some time later I managed to get the tiles to space my textures out across several tiles by passing in data to the shader. That alone took about 3 hours. I made some super quick ground textures and a mask texture to handle terrain transitions. I also added a water shader I came up with, and before I knew it I was already 9 hours into the competition.

I figured the next logical step would be to add basic environment art, so I drew a bunch of trees in Photoshop. To my surprise they didn't suck. I went to bed, and the next day I drew more trees. But then I noticed a problem - with all this rendering my game was running slow as hell and I hadn't even started coding gameplay yet. I'd never worked with framebuffers in my life before, so I pretty much spent most of the next day figuring that out. Even the code that's in there now is a huge hack using vaguely made-up values that seem to work because I was under so much pressure to get it to render properly, at an acceptable framerate. In an effort to prove to myself I'd made progress, I put together some UI art and recorded a few sound effects. Again, didn't suck as much as my art usually does. Still, at the end of this I was about half-way into the jam and still had zero gameplay. I spent the rest of the day making sprites for a witch, figuring out a particle effect for user interaction (and making THAT render quickly) and also adding terraforming tools.

Heading towards the last day I was totally convinced I couldn't make it. I mean, come on. I had maybe an acceptable isometric engine but certainly not a game. At some point I made a post here asking for opinions. The majority said I should try to give making my game a go anyway. OK, I'm impressionable. Now I had to write a building system, which meant converting between map coordinates and mouse coordinates ... and that's how I spent my whole night, figuring that out. Working furiously I drew three buildings, and a bunny rabbit. There was now no time for cards or anything fancy like that ... this was now an action-building game. I don't know if I've ever programmed gameplay faster. In particular, the AI for the movement of the witch character drew a lot on my experience writing AI for LD38. I spent a good hour adding a shadow to the witch's broomstick-flying sprite because the visual effect was weird without it.

When I was about 6 hours out from the deadline, I had the sudden realization that my game lacked music. I composed four original pieces for the jam, and modified another track I'd written earlier, sticking to simple riffs inspired by decades of experience playing RTS games and vaguely witch-like instrumentation. I'm good with music but under pressure you're never sure if what you're writing is total garbage - some of the pieces I didn't even listen to start-to-finish before the submission deadline as I was in such a rush. Miraculously they all turned out mostly OK. With 30 minutes to go, I rushed in the code to make the bunnies appear/disappear and wrote instructions on how to play. I finished writing pretty much exactly when submission hour began.

With the jam over I collapsed into a sleep, hoping for few serious bugs. As it turned out, my final submission was completely unplayable on Firefox (fixed now) and the rabbit spawning code could probably have been refined a lot. The game could also be faster and have more content. But I MADE IT. I wrote a fricken' isometric engine in raw WebGL, made a game, composed music and sound, drew all the art etc. It's about twice as much code as what I made for LD38 (if you include the shader code etc), 3 times the art and a longer soundtrack. In my view that's pretty awesome for me to see how much I've improved over a year - and it hasn't been an easy year for me either.

Screenshot

So you know what I'm talking about...

What went well

• I think I'm getting better with my art. I mean, I still suck, but I'm getting better.
• I'm getting darn good at speed-composing music.
• For the most part the engine I wrote works well.
• I'm very comfortable with my development setup, all the problems / challenges I faced were just my own learning.
• In the end I made the design elements and genre conventions of action and city building work together well.

Things I learnt

• I learnt how to work with WebGL from close to zero.
• I learnt how to make an isometric game engine.
• I learnt a ton of shader techniques and how to use framebuffers efficiently (I think XD).
• I learnt how to draw character sprites in Photoshop.
• I learnt how to make isometric building graphics and draw trees better.

What I need to improve on

• Although I've improved on this a lot, I still need to get better with scoping and time management. Time is so critical and I mean, I literally spent more than half of the jam just on rendering the background! Come on!
• After LD38 I figured I'd add more narrative elements into my games to make them easier to learn and more fun to play. Although I called the game a "tale" there wasn't really much of a tale to it. I did do this a bit with LD40 as I scripted an interactive tutorial, but I want to do more with it.
• As reviewers have pointed out, there's bugs. I didn't think working in a team worked for me as well (I literally did like 5 times better on my own lol) but playtesting is the hardest thing to do on your own when you're trying to approach the game as a novice player, but also you have so many other things still to do! So maybe that's something for me to think about.
• I need to become more confident with my art! My art was ok, I need to worry less.
• I want to refine the engine so it's usable for future web-based 2D games I write. It's definitely something that could still go faster especially if I ever did another isometric game, even with all the hacks I'm already using.

Next steps

I'm working on a post-jam version. I don't have tons of time but people have given me really useful feedback and I'm motivated to make the most of it. I'll make another post about it when it comes out. Let me know if you want me to tag you so you can play it!

Actually I think there should be a second competition, after the Ludum Dare, for people who have fixed up their games in response to feedback from the LD! That would rock lol.

You are trapped! oh no! Use the boxes to climb and get out of here. We mixed up First Person Shooter, Puzzle and Platform in our game. It is a game submitted for Ludum Dare 41 Game Jam.

Objective

Your objective is simple, get out of the place that you are, use the boxes, out of the force field there is a Red Button, just press "E" to finish the level and go to the next one.

//There is an EasterEgg hiding through the game!

Controls

• W - Foward
• A - Left
• S - Behind
• D - Right
• Left Mouse - Fire
• Space - Jump
• Esc - Pause

Team

• @ziovoxxer (Daniel Candido)
• @johnnydalvi (João Dalvi)
• Jorge Cesar Ribeiro Andrade Junior

We hope you enjoy our game :).

Here's a glimpse at out notes from before development!

As you can see, we have a very professional design process.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/neon-space