The sprites I created for the jam are free to use, you can download them here:

https://opengameart.org/content/dropzone-mars-shmup-sprites

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dropzone-mars

Thanks!

Soo, this is list of changes:

-Added some sound

-Refreshed main menu

-Fix some bugs

and ... start playing football! :soccer:

play, rate and comment!) online version or windows/mac build: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fire-duck-football

Will you manage to communicate with your crew ?

Since we noticed A-Card Shooter can be one of those games to play while waiting for a train or a bigger game download, we decided to add mobile support! We have added an Android version, sadly we cannot provide an iOS or Windows Phone version.

If you have 2 minutes to spare - you can play our game in your browser :)

Lots of love to all of you for your ratings, reviews and especially your games <3

We thought of our game as of a web based experience right from the start. But unfortunately we didn't make any midway builds during the development. We just worked and worked and launched our game only in Unity editor. And what was our surprise when twenty minutes until deadline our web build just didn't work! We tried a couple of times, none of them worked. So we made the standalone builds and uploaded them during the last minute ticking.

The problem was that we used quite recent Unity 2017 tilemaps feature for managing our foreground islands. And as it seems even the latest stable Unity 2017 version has a bug with dynamically setting tiles of the tilemap on web builds.

But thats not the end of story. If you look into a browser console, you can clearly see, that dynamically setting tiles causes errors. But that only happens if you use standard nonscripted tiles! In our case we used a scripted tile that automatically picked the fitting sprite depending on its neighbors. And in our case we were getting an unexplained exception in Unity internal stuff which was barely googleable.

So after finally figuring out the problem and porting the project to beta version of Unity 2018.2 the web version of our game is here!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/peculiar-adventures-of-dorothy-hops

Have you already checked it out? I hope so! If not here is a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/citydefense

I'm toying with a post-compo version. I've recreated the golf swings, adding a new proper swing, chipping, and putting. And now a golf cart. Think 4-person multiplayer is also in order =)

So once again I would like to offer you to play your games on our live stream. All you need to do to add your game to our list is play and rate ours and leave a comment with a few wourds if you liked it or not and containing a link to your game. We will then play you game live on our mainly german twitch channel and give it a rating.

Our rating stream will be within next 7 Days, no exakt date yet.

Our Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ld41-1 Our Channel: http://www.twitch.tv/firesplashtv

Hey there, I see you scrolling down here looking for interesting stuff, well look no further because you are at the right place. Like platformer games, well I got the perfect game for you. Prison Farm, kills all boredom. If you have uncontrolled rage problems please contact your doctor first since the game might cause some unwanted effects. Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/prison-farming

Hey everyone! So a lot of people expressed interest in me doing a breakdown of the art for our game Jeff From Accounting and I figured I'd do just that. If you haven't played our game yet, please play it before reading this. I promise it's worth it!

A quick thanks to our coder Aaron (@almax) and our sound engineer Dale (@dale-smith), without them this would have just been a very stationary and silent pile of geometry.

Aaron (@almax) has written a design/code retrospective. You should check it out here

I was asked a few times by friends and people on twitchchat, "Did you make all the assets in the game? Also, when was the last time you slept? you look awful." I did make all the assets, and a lot of people expressed interest in an art breakdown. So here it is! Buckle up, it's quite long.

Early in the jam I decided this was going to be a 3D game and I roughly knew what sort of theme we were going with, it was a typing game. So an office theme made sense to me, the 60's-70's retro vibe was added because I thought it would be fun (spoiler, it was fun). I've never made an FPS before, so I was a little nervous and decided that I needed both a large amount and reasonably decent looking assets. Which is obviously difficult, but we found interesting ways to work around it.

The main software I used to create all of this was 3DS Max and Substance Painter. I did use a little bit of Photoshop here and there as well.

Tileable Textures

One of the first steps I took was creating a bunch of tiling textures that would be a nice solid foundation for the rest of the work I was planning to do, I used substance painter to create all these. Substance Designer is the better option for doing this sort of work, but I'm substantially faster with Painter workflow and I was already panicking a little at this stage with the amount of work I wanted to get done. I learnt long ago, don't be afraid to use a tool that you are more comfortable with, even if it's not the ideal tool. Teaching yourself a tool or getting stuck in the middle of a jam is a disaster (more on that later.....).

I looked at some quick reference, of decor in the time period I talked about, but I really didn't spend long on these assets, these were the utter bare bones. It's important to look at reference or have an idea of what sort of palette you want to use when doing this sort of work, it's your broad brush strokes and framework. I had a really rough idea and then tweaked colour values later on as needed.

Props and decorations

This is where I spent most of my time in the jam. Our programmer Aaron had the idea of reusing the props as enemies, this (genius) decision essentially halved the amount of work I had to do! I could focus entirely on the prop work, I even decided I wanted to dress the final room in a Cathedral-style, using office props in weird and twisted ways to build a surreal world. These decisions are probably the sole reason our game looks nice. Reuse of work and planning go a long way!

The pipeline for the props was simple, I do a lot of hard surface 3D modelling and I'm pretty quick at it, so I knew I could just throw my body into mass production mode. I googled a big list of office props, took suggestions from the other guys and then put my headphones on and disappeared for a few hours.

I modelled a bunch of props as low as I could, optimisation was not a priority, but I didn't want to break the game as I knew I'd be duplicating a lot of these props later to create the final room. I used the high poly model to give me a nice smooth edge with a chamfer as well as additional detail, but the most useful thing was using Substance Painter's material ID colour. I was able to create a mask by using a coloured high poly model. I could then use this mask to quickly isolate different areas of the model for different materials, for example 'red' could be 'metal' and 'blue' could be 'wood. I highly recommend looking into this workflow if you are a 3D artist.

The UV maps were mainly automatic and terrible, but it was fast. I made sure to batch groups of objects onto one texture. Ensuring you don't have a unique texture for every object in the game is a good way to make programmers like you. I roughly floated around 1k-2k in size for most of the textures, we could have probably gotten away with smaller looking back.

Level creation

I ran out of a lot of time making the final room, but the starting room and coridoor ended up looking quite nice. The whole thing is essentially one big mesh that I sliced up in Max and then imported into unity. I used a similar method that I talked about previously and applied colours to different areas of the mesh, then swapped out these colours for different materials within Unity. This allowed me to really quickly knock together and iterate levels in Max. I'm much faster and have more flexibility in Max compared to building the level within Unity. It meant I took on the role of level designer, but my team seemed confident enough in my ability to knock something up. Either that or they were too busy to care.

Learning to make these calls is vital early on, know your strengths and the strengths of your team and tools.

Lighting

Lighting is the thing that can make or break your game visuals. A strong base of good textures and level design is required, but lighting really is the icing on top of it all. I had not used Unity's light baking system before, I had planned to last weekend before the jam (I was heavily pushing to do an FPS before the jam and wanted to try out Unity's lighting), but ended up in hospital getting my appendix removed. So I gave myself a crash course on Monday evening and made a lot of mistakes. I highly recommend any 3D artist reading this to learn about baked lighting and post processing in whatever engine you are using. I also highly recommend not getting appendicitis and trying to learn the lighting system on the last day.

The player/weapon

My favourite thing in the game is the gun, 'The Punctuator' (shoutout to Gram for the name). A lot of the assets I built were set in reality, but this gave me a chance to play around with something a little more fun. However, as much as I love it, I get a little sad looking at it. I had so many plans for how the gun was going to look, but ended up with only about 30-40 minutes to texture it in the end. It turned out alright, but I wanted so much more. I very well might go back and create a full model of the gun for fun after the jam.

We made a lot of bad calls during the jam, as you do under pressure. One that I'm glad we didn't make was animating player hands. At the very start we seriously discussed visible player hands for sexy reloads, but it would have been insane to try and do on top of all the other work. I honestly think the game would have been much worse for it and it wouldn't have made that much of an impact. In fact, not a single person mentioned that it was just a floating gun.

I tried to make the animations fast and exaggerated. The flow of the combat in the game meant that a lot of time was spent looking at the enemy, raising the gun, typing the word, lowering the gun and finally shooting. I didn't want to add to this already slow process with a slow animation. It needed to be snappy, responsive and satisfying.

Hacks, mistakes and silly things

My assets generally degraded in quality as the deadline approached, in fact running through the level, you can tell I spent a lot more time designing the first half than I did the second. If you looked through my Max assets you would also see a shameful display of 3D modelling as time got short and I stopped caring about my modelling practices and switched to 'throw anything in the game' mode.

My favourite hack of this jam was an issue I had with the windows. I wanted windows, it helps makes the level feel more real and adds some really nice lighting that isn't just a ceiling light. However, I didn't have the time to create an outside scene or some parallax effect to fake an outside scene. I decided blinds would be the easiest option and I could still get some cool shadows. I put in a light and built up a fake exterior to block the light. Everything is looking great with the dynamic light pre-bake. Turns out that static geometry always blocks baked light by default in unity, so all my blinds don't allow any light to pass through, leaving my entire scene dark post-bake. To work around this, I slice out the windows, import them as a separate mesh, set them to dynamic and rebake. It means the windows ended up not being included in the light bake and were pretty awful looking, but I think I got away with it.

There were a few assets I ended up wasting a bit of time on as well. I made a pencil holder, an awful looking one. That easily cost me half an hour if not more. I also made a full water cooler that I then threw out. I wasn't happy with the transparent top, and I don't know enough about Unity to create a nice material without a fair bit of work (I would have given it a go in UE4), so I didn't use it.

I also spent a fair bit of time texturing the clock that can be seen in Jeff's office and then later in the main room. This was originally our end game boss, but time took it's toll and it was dropped. You can still see it clearly placed at the end of the room, ready to be a boss. The music used in the final room was originally the boss music, you can hear the bong and tick tock of the final boss that never was.

Conclusion

This was one of the most fun jams I've done in a while, I was worried I wouldn't be able to take part in the jam last week while in hospital. The fact that I was able to not only able to take part, but make something that I genuinely enjoyed playing, really put a smile on my stupid face. The kind words everyone has said about our game so far has been massively appreciated by the whole team.

I hope that this breakdown is at the very least interesting, if not useful. Any devs that would like any help, advice or maybe just like reading my terrible attempt at writing, feel free to follow me on twitter @HeyImGreg or contact me through it.

It's been such a blast, it really has. The other games I've seen on here have been fantastic as well. I've probably missed out so many things that I meant to write about, but I'm tired and the weekend is blur.

Cheers, Greg

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

Our Jam Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/toaster-boy

please rate our game! (⊙ ▽ ⊙) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/weio

Your feedbacks had been really helpfull and filled our heart with joy. Thanks for the Twitch streamers who tried hard to beat the 644 000 Highscore, and for all these positives feedbacks.

We'll spend the whole weekend rating all your game, and giving as much real feedbacks as we can, as we know we all here to improve ourselves, to learn, and to meet people all over the world : )

We have some ideas to make the games cooler, and add some controls over the game for the players.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blocksnblaster-1

Hey everyone, @caterein and I spent a handful of hours yesterday playing, rating, and leaving feedback on a whole mess of games and we're ready for more! We played something like 26 games yesterday and we're aiming to take on even more today, so go ahead and drop us a link in the comments! We promise we'll play them all.

And of course if you happen to trip over our game, Puttsy, on your way to the comments section we'd be happy to hear what you think.

(For all you historians out there, here's the original post)

EDIT: Oh, jeez... 6 hours and 25 games later it's nearly 1 AM here. I'm going to need to call it for tonight, unfortunately. Don't think I'm not coming back for all these un-played games, though! I'll be back on this weekend to finish off all the ones I didn't get around to, and who knows, maybe we'll do a part 3 if there's any spare time.

Since I received some comments from you after playing my game "Love and Hate in Hell Café", I realized that the blue spirits waiters really seem to be seals. What do you think about it?

Maybe I considered them as blue spirits, since the first-day graphics for them were really simple:

Nevertheless, 3 hours before the deadline, I was able to improve some of the graphics of the game and the blue spirit waiters became in this:

Which one do you prefer?

Those blue sp... seal waiters can be found working in the café where Angels and Demons are being seated next to do love (or hate) arise. Would you like to give a try to the game?

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤💔 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/love-and-hate-in-hell-cafe 💔🖤💜💙💚💛🧡❤️

Thanks for playing and also for your comments and reviews! 😄

Hello all! If you have the time please check out my game WaveRush https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/waverush

I want to get this bad mofo to 20 ratings!

Leave your game in my comments and ill be sure to check it out ;)

Hey! Have you taken a look at the game Toasterman Types? Go check it out! I had a lot of fun making it even though it is unfinished and kind of sloppy, and I am looking forward to more game jams! Be sure to like it and review it!

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/toasterman-types