https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/think-before-escape

Play it here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/real-text-adventure

Any thoughts and ratings are welcome!

Much Love for you.

Getting ratings today was comparably hard compared to last year. I'm still 13 ratings away from the 20 required. Please Help

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/black-horizon

Before I go into my epic two paragraph story about how I got into "game dev" as a hobby recently, I will do a shameless plug for my Ludum Dare 41 game. "Ammo Bear and the Wrath of Dr. Goo.." You play as Ammo Bear, he is a bear, he has a gun, you kill mutated creatures. It's a platform, it's a shoot em up, and it's educational because sprinkled throughout the game are fun "Facts" about bears.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ammo-bear-and-the-wrath-of-dr-goo

The past three weeks have been a blur for me. It all started with a 48 hour jam hosted by Tim Ruswick of Game Development Underground(creator of an amazing gamed for LD41 called Gnome Man's Land) on itch.io(JimJam), where I made a terrible platform game using Construct 2. I was hooked after that, I knew that I really wanted to keep doing this and get better at it. The following weekend I got into another jam(pun intended), this one was Retro 8-16 bit, and the theme was "speed running", pretty simple, once again, another platform using Construct, and not much better than the last.

Then Ludum Dare 41, at this point I was somewhat exhausted from the last two jams, but I was nonetheless determined to do this. To make matter worse, I made a crazy decision to use GameMaker Studio, a program I was barely familiar with, to make my game for Ludum Dare. I ran into a lot of problems, and didn't make the game near as big as I wanted it, among many other things I didn't have time for, but in the end, it still felt and played way better than the last two games.

I'm seeing improvement. At 33 years old, I'm finally doing something I attempted to do with QuickBasic nearly two decades ago, but I just wasn't confident or determined enough to do it back then. Between then and now, I tried getting back into it, but I would just fizzle out every time. I'm hooked now, and making games is only half the fun as I also get to play all these amazing games that other people like me(but mostly more experienced and competent), come out with in 48-72 hours. Glad to be here!!

First off: if you haven't played Split-Minded, yet, could you please do so and leave a rating (and maybe even a comment too)? Thanks!

Second of all, you can view the development timelapse I made for my game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJnVOql9JEw

...Wow. Looking back, I worked on the game for almost 45 hours out of 72. (Of course, 10-ish of the remaining 27 hours were taken up by school on Monday, so...)

Now, to sum up what I thought of my own game:

The Good

I'm really proud of the work I did with writing the characters, I think. I really wanted to give each and every one of them their own unique flavor and personality, and I think I managed to make that really shine through in the visual novel parts.

I'm also proud of the writing for the first few segments of the game (up until the second day of the game). These are the first few parts of the game that I wrote, when I thought I still had lots of time left, so naturally I took my time and made sure they were good. And then I started running out of time and rushing the last few segments of the game.

I'm also pretty in love with the character designs for Hitomi and Nanami, though that one's not really me; thank the character generator I used.

The Bad

In general, he top-down shooter half of the game definitely needed more work to be done. Unfortunately, it seemed like I had to work around Ren'Py nearly as much as I worked with it, severely hampering my development pace with the top-down shooter mode.

Here's a few of the biggest problems I faced:

Saving and Loading the Game State with Ren'Py

So Ren'Py has its own built-in saving and loading system. It automatically saves and loads all of the game state that a normal visual novel would need to save: simple boolean flags, counters, etc.

Unfortunately, this game is most decidedly not a normal visual novel, and the objects we need to save and load are almost all complex (and possibly nested) objects-- which makes saving and loading their complete state nearly impossible to do, particularly because Ren'Py exposes only an on-load hook, and not an on-save hook.

Of course, since the player probably won't save during a fight, this is much less of a problem than it seems. But we need to save some state in order to fully support rollback (because certain lines in the script go with movements of the top-down shooter sprites-- for example, most of the lines in the intro).

Collision Detection

Pygame comes with its own methods for collision detection with Sprite objects. Unfortunately, the version of pygame that comes with RenPy isn't actually pygame, but rather pygame_sdl2, which is a stripped down version of regular pygame.

And, unfortunately, one of the many features that was cut from regular pygame was Mask-based collision detection-- and since I didn't have the time to write a completely new collision detection system from scratch, I had to fallback on using Rect-based collision, which is strictly axis-aligned.

This would have been great if all of my sprites were axis-aligned, but they're not, and so using Rects for collision introduced a whole bunch of weird bugs and glitches involving broken / odd collision handling. I tried to mitigate the effects of this as much as possible-- but I could only do so much.

Fortunately, for the 2.0, Post-LD version of the game, I've already written a completely new and fully-compatible (and tested!) collision handler that already seems to work much better than pure Rects.

The ~~Ugly~~ Time-Crunched

There was a lot of stuff I didn't get to fully develop in time for the Jam deadline. Most of this stuff is already on the to-do list for the post-LD version of the game, so if you stick around and follow the game on itch.io you'll be in for a lot of treats:

Festival Events for Hitomi and Nanami

You have no idea how disappointed I was in myself for not giving our two main girls normal, happy endings. But Ludum Dare is Ludum Dare, and the rules are the rules, so all they were left with was a quick little immersion-breaking apology note from yours truly. I kind of owe it to Hitomi and Nanami to give them a true, happy, fluffy, and romantic ending, I think.

Epilogues / Extended Routes

Honestly, I now think that, in the final version of the game, the routes would be much longer and involve more choices. So I'd like to go and simply add even more, brand-new story to the game.

Reworked "Calm One" Events

I basically wrote all of the post-victory events for "The Calm One" in 15-20 minutes using a lot of Ctrl-C'ing and Ctrl-V'ing, and they're definitely not as long or fleshed-out as they deserve to be.

Reworked Endings

The same thing happened to the endings for each voice: I ended up writing them all in the last 30 minutes of the Jam using a lot of copy-and-paste, and one of my goals for Post-LD is to fully flesh them out and rework them with new sprites and backgrounds-- and maybe even custom CGs. The whole nine yards, yeah?

Additional Diversion Events for Survivor / Artist / Pyromaniac

Did you know that each Voice was actually supposed to have seven total victory events in their "routes"? Of course, as the time crunch started to get worse I quickly scrapped that in favor of four events per Voice. But now that I have more time, I want to get to fully developing them.

Custom Weapons for Artist / Survivor / Pyromaniac (+ a Side-Weapon for the Player)

My original vision for the game involved each Voice getting their own, personalized weapons for the top-down shooter part of the game: for example, the Pyromaniac would get a flamethrower, the Survivor a bolt-action rifle, etc. But I just didn't have the time to make them or test them out.

In General

In general, I'm amazed I managed to finish as much of the game as I did. I realize now that my game had a massive scope-- quite possibly too large for me to handle in the <72 hours I had. But it kind of seems like a massive scope simply comes with the territory of making a VN. It just wouldn't do to have only half of a story, you know?

Looking at all the other games out there-- they seem much more focused. They do a lot less things-- but they do them well.

In the end, though?

This has been one of the most engaging and exciting experiences I've had in a while! I definitely had fun doing this, and I learned so much while I was jamming as well.

I'm almost positive I'm coming back in August-- though I guess that depends on how well my first month of college goes.

I just added some slightly more detailed instructions on how to play my game and some brief ludo-narrative text.

• also a few small tweaks to audio balancing and audio cues
• the AI is a little better at baseball
• added some new, subtle and vague UI effects to note when you're 'safe'
• I also made the Victory Screen that no one will ever see a little friendlier.

Give it a shot! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/baseball-in-hell

Where do I begin... I suppose I could start by saying that the theme was pretty awesome, but quite a few people don't seem to agree with that. I think it's a really neat theme to do, since it really makes you think and break down a genre to its essence, and cranks those creativity juices as you try to make two wildly opposing (or at least, not quite related) beasts come together.

But enough about what happened last night, I'd like to do a small post-mortem for the hell of it.

Overview

Dungeon Slider, if you haven't played yet, is a combination of a dungeon crawler, and a 15-puzzle. Y'know the ones, where there's this jumbled up picture, the grid has 1 tile missing, and you gotta slide everything into place. Here's a handy .gif, courtesy of @jfraser314 .

What Went Right

One of the reasons I was rather happy this theme was chosen was because... this game idea had been sitting in my head for the past week or two! What a coincidence! I'd already hashed out most of the design and played paper prototypes to the point that I'd like to think I'm a 15-puzzle master. It was only a matter of implementing the ideas I had on paper!

I actually didn't think I would be able to make it for this LD, as there were other work-related plans that were in line on the weekend. Still, I did as much as I could for the hell of it.... and lo, the whole thing was cancelled! I still had to go to work on Monday, but at least I had more time to polish whatever I had.

What Went Wrong

Gonna be honest, coding isn't my main skillset. A game this complex (at least, complex for ME) was quite a struggle to implement. If I tossed this idea over to an actual programmer, I'm sure they would've implemented this in half the time, looking at how oddly-structured my code was.

No time for sound and music. Normally I'd set aside some time to generate a few chiptunes and an SFX or two, but I had my focus set on... well, making other things look pretty.

Instructions. Oooh, the instructions. I worry over that day and night. Please, if you do play, read the instructions on the page itself. I don't know if the one included in-game does it justice... The game makes sense once you get used to how it works, but I've playtested with others, and they do all sorts of weird things, even after I've explained the rules to them.

Conclusion

So far, I'm really, really proud of this entry. Sure, it ain't one of my more polished ones, but I'd like to believe the concept is solid. I'm definitely planning to improve on it, add some new monsters, maybe a boss... Oh, some proper progression as well. Sound, particles... The works. All in due time, of course. I'm itching to do another post breaking down the design of the game too, buuut not quite yet.

If you're interested in trying out the game, just click here! Go ahead and leave a comment if you do play, so I know which game I should be playing next! Web games take precedence, simply because I'm at work... When I get home, I'll play the ones that require downloads, or a mouse.

Also, if you think any other game deserves some attention, lemme know down below!

No.

But you might as well play our game anyway. It's an HTML5 game so you don't have to worry about hiding the evidence after playing ;)

(NSFW 18+ ONLY)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tsun-tsun-button-mash

In our game - Fear of Silence, we want to mix horror and rhythm games! We thought that this would be an interesting mix of genres, because it's quite absurd!! And we decided to make a cool atmosphere by choosing the theme of the level of the entrance of the house from the post-Soviet space! As we think the atmosphere at us turned out, but in two days we did not manage to realize much that wanted! These are some elements of the horror, like screamers, monsters, etc. The rhythm elements of the game we sketched pretty fast, it turned out to be acceptable, but we would not have had time to do something more cool, since we did not have experience in such types of games unfortunately! Rhythm set is very complex, so it is difficult to move, but we've added the ability to disable the rhythm of the game, so that players can simply evaluate the level of the atmosphere! We hope you will appreciate our game on advantage!

Link - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fear-of-silence

I have a long history of making multiplayer games for Ludum Dare, so one thing I'm familiar with is the challenge of getting people to play them. So I figured I'd start a list of as many as I can find. If you're a player and you know you're going to have some friends over some time next week or something, you can use this list to find games to play with them.

This list is going to start with just our game, but I'll check the comments and list games from there when I can, and add any I find in the wild. If someone else already has a list going, point me to it and I'll merge them.

Oh, and if you want me to change anything about the descriptions, let me know. I might just be skimming :)

Update: The list has been moved here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fellow-campers/list-of-multiplayer-games-ive-found-so-far

This is my favorite theme so far, both to develop and play. I love the variety of creative games it has produced, and it seems to embody everything I love in a Ludum Dare. Thanks again!!

So, here it is, my first game with the Godot engine. I have to say i am quite content with how it turned out. After some user feedback i had to fix a serious error last night (see the project page for a detailed description), but now it is ready to be enjoyed.

PLAY HERE

Go help the unicorn escape the lava in this TETRIS and JUMP&RUN mashup:

When I made Street Chess I imagined it being played by 2 or more people on a multitouch device lay flat on the table. As most computers aren't capable of that sort of thing I have released the game on the iOS AppStore, so those with iOS devices can play it as intended. If anybody manages to play 2v1, 2v2, etc. do let me know how it was.

Get it for iOS here - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/street-chess/id1376028593?ls=1&mt=8

Compo page here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/street-chess

Have fun :8ball:

I got soooo many good and kind feedbacks on my entry , I don't believe it! A lot of people think the concept strong!

I'm fired up for the post-jam version :).

We have more than the 20 reviews and a lot of very kind comments. A real and good thanks to you all !

Hey, everyone, we have created turn-based strategy game where you can control time. Projectiles will stop and stay in there place unless you want to move them.

Check it out here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/battle-bots

And it's time to hug for free

Test our game here

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/heaven-and-earth

Any feedback is welcome. thank you so much

remember to put HTML version in full screen ...and ...sorry for the volume of the FX

I played a lot of really interesting games from this LDJAM41!

HELLFEST SIMULATOR

WORDELICIOUS

CRAZY CUBES

CHECK, PLEASE

UNBLOCK THE EXIT

But I can't help feeling like missing something more!!

Have you found a really exciting game?

Please, tell me! :D

Are not you going to help her??

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/him-i

We finally finished debugging our game, It will be more pleasent to play. And you can choose your level.

Ready to fall in love of a puck ?!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/flayer-puck