This was my first game jam and I had a blast! I learned a lot that'll help me plan better the next time around. I appreciate everyone that took the time to drop me a rating! I'll do the same for you as well. Let me know how many zombies you can kill!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/deck-of-the-dead
I'm sitting in my chair, breathing heavily. I press F5 for the millionth time, just in case the theme was announced a bit early, or the clock was a bit off. Three minutes to go.
I'm so excited, I have to go to the bathroom. But I rush it, and when I get back, there's two minutes remaining.
One minute.
Seconds.
It's time.
I slam F5 and the refresh button as hard as I possibly can and wait. And wait. And receive a timeout. 'Server crashed again!' I thought. Quickly I rush to Twitter. No news on Mike's page. No news on Ludum Dare's page. Refresh again. Then, finally, there's the theme.
And I hate it. For a moment. And a brilliant ideas blossoms in my head.
First impressions of the theme were not that great. I tried a lot of different methods to get inspiration, my most complicated of which was to find a random number generator, and generate two random dates. The genres of the first game I could find released on each date would be combined into my game.
Which probably would have been kind of cool. I ended up with Golden Eye and some JRPG released in 2002. But I couldn't come up with an idea fast enough, so I scrapped it.
I though back to my favorite genre: Metroidvania. I'd never made one before, which should have been the first red flag. But I decided to mix that with the most unlike genre I could think of: Diner Dash.
The idea was going to be that you were the caretaker of the West Chesterfield Archives, a massive natural cave system full of old books. Your job was to keep the visitors of the archive happy by bringing them the books they requested. There would have been an indexing system, upgrades, and all manner of comical cartoon bookworms.
The key word up there is 'would.'
10 minutes before I decided to knock off for the night, I realized: I can't make this. It's too big! I played around with other ideas, merging other themes into Metroidvania, like stealth, horror, and art house. But the idea I finally settled on was completely different.
I doodled around on a piece of paper for inspiration (I like to base games around characters that I draw). I came up with this chubby boatman:
He quickly became Elias Muttonhedge, the last of the Conservationists, and before I knew it, I had a plan.
To Be Continued...
You can play the final product here: The Fat Man and The Sea
I just realized:
InvadTris isn't just combination of shooter and block puzzle genres.
It's also a combination of action and turn-based genres.
That's kinda neat.
Wanna shoot these damns blocks ? We got something for you ... We'll be rating dozens of games all the week end, and try to give the most feedback we can !
So far your feedbacks had been amazing, we really put a lot of effort into this game, we happy you like it !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blocksnblaster-1
challenge yourself!
Try to destroy all enemies and score 8200 points
You can play it in your browser Or download it to your computer (windows) have fun
play the game here =) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/crazy-cube
You can do it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/think-before-escape
Thanks so much for playing & rating my game! Every time I participate in Ludum Dare it's always been a ton of fun! (this is my 3rd LD and 4th Gamejam)
I started off hating the theme, I had a hard time coming up with anything that would be easy enough for me to develop in 3 days, it took me around 3 hours to even think of anything, Until I found a site someone made that generates 2 random genres and mashes them together to give you some ideas. I got Escape The Room + Programming, once I saw those 2 genres I got so many ideas flowing through my head, I've always wanted to make an ETR game, and a game about cracking codes and stuff, So I instantly got to work, first thing I always do is draw basic sprites to use as placeholder and I polish them later on if I have time. Then I lay out the level, the UI, basically everything I have in mind. Then I get to programming non-stop. I usually get the core of the game finished within the first 4-6 hours of development, so that leaves the rest of the time for making the audio and finding music I think fits the game well (I can't make music). After all the audio and mechanics are in place. I polish the crap out of the game.
I love the way the game turned out, It ended up being just what I imagined. Except it being so difficult.. I had planned to fix the difficulty but I didn't have time! But, I think the difficulty is what makes it fun, so i'm okay with it. I enjoy playing the game sometimes just to challenge myself and see if I can beat it quicker than the last time I played it.
If you haven't played it yet, Check it out if you'd like! :: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/escape-1
Sorry for the long post :P Just wanted to say I had a lot of fun!
Hey there, I'm doing Let's play videos on Ludum Dare 41 games this time, with 8 so far, and several to go!
Here are the first few videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKZ-GMNkk6I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnlqU52nHaQ
You can find those on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/vincentlequang2
Want me to make a Let's Play of your game? Just hit me your reply in this thread!
Make sure the game can run on Mac (so it has either Mac or Web build)
Also, check out my game :smile:
Hey guys, come on and try this game out and let us know what you think
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/daxua
Woo! For our first Ludum Dare game jam, we're very happy with the positive feedback we've received so far!
If you haven't tried our short pixel horror yet, you can play it here! Comments definitely welcome! https://davidsheadgames.itch.io/helsing
Our Ludum Dare entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/helsing
Hey all,
We are still looking for some feedback and reviews on our game. If you love the idea of playing with your food and wrecking a once pristine kitchen, please give our game a go!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/chef-yes-chef
Now the game has a censor setting, so you can stream gameplay without getting banned from Twitch! You can even play it at work (don't play it at work).
Tsun Tsun Button Mash also has music now, but it wasn't done in time for LD so we're keeping sound ratings off.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tsun-tsun-button-mash
Finished implementing the scoring system and some bug fixes / improvements.
Try your best to get a perfect grade in accuracy completeness and survival!
Play in the Browser or Win. Standalone
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-magic-shotgun-coloring-book
With this joke I made, Roundabout was born. But let me rewind a bit.
Every Ludum Dare, we try to gather the gamedevs from our city in local sites to keep ourselves hyped up, cheer one another and provide quality feedback for our friends. This is awesome and I love these guys. However, the theme hit us like a brick in the face and we were all bummed out when we first heard of it. No one had any good ideas and we couldn't stop joking around and complaining.
In the middle of that, something fun happened: When I made that joke, I got to know that Felipe was dying to try to code a card game. I threw in my passion for roguelikes and it looked like we had a good idea for a fun game.
We were counting on a local musician friend to help us out with that, but we were crushed to receive the news he wouldn't be able to - he's busy with another awesome game's work (and we are SO happy for him). We thought to give our best anyway and try to finish early, so we could leave sunday+monday only to learn and work with sounds.
Comes Saturday morning and we had a working alpha. I grinded Photoshop to make all the sprites as soon as I could and have time to test and work on balancing. I was drawing with one eye on my screen and another on Felipe's, pointing out changes needed as I was delivering musicians, enemies, card arts and background previews. Sometimes I had to stop and write the HP and Damage number progression, how the targeting system would work and more. we only had a couple discussions about how something should be played and how to give visual feedback to the players. It was a lot of work, but the work was going on fast and quite smoothly.
On Sunday we were able to contact Murilo, and he pleaded allegiance -caham- to help us, even if he only had a couple hours to work on that night and a couple more in the next morning. He delivered all the sound effects for the cards and lent his awesome voice for our Vocalist. We improvised he rest of the solos with what we could find and edit.
By Monday morning we were only empty shells of ourselves, smelling like redbull and coffee. Felipe had college and work. Murilo had to work as well. I did my best to publish the game and spread the word to streams and more people, until I came back to work on tuesday and didn't have much time to play or rate others games until now (but I'm anxiously looking forward to the weekend for that).
And today I'm impressed to see we surpassed 40 ratings and have a lot of nice feedback on our game's page.
This is actually the first time I can deliver a finished product for a Game Jam that was my initial idea and something I was really proud to work on.
It gets even more rewarding from the fact that I have been tied to a dozen projects that never got to see the light of day. I wrote countless pages of GDDs, animated pixel characters (and I suck at animations), made concepts, talked to teams... and somewhere in the middle of the project, someone pulled the plug.
I genuinely cried when I hit "Publish" this time.
Because it's another step towards my dream of living off my games.
It's me getting a little closer to being sure that I can be a gamedev.
And it's also a great reminder that I can't quit.
I really hope the HUGE amount of work we did this last weekend can give you all a couple minutes of excitement and entertainment. I hope it can make you laugh with its bad jokes and puns. I hope that it makes you feel challenged and rewarded for overcoming those challenges. Above all, I hope that it makes your day a little bit better and fun.
Because this is why I want to keep making games.
Thanks for being an awesome community. Love y'all. <3
It started as pride. Ha ha ha, players are finding my game challenging.
This turned to a bit of frustration, since so many people seemed to be unable to complete it.
The most recent emotion was horror, after watching @rebecca-kremer play it on stream, when I discovered that through a perfectly normal interaction players could accidentally render the game unbeatable. :frowning2:
It was a simple bug: Cores were deactivating when their shields reached 0 without checking if they had been activated or not. This meant players could accidentally repeatedly deactivate the same core, which borked the music layers, severely handicapped their tower inventory, and ensured the chain in front of the victory doorway never opened.
So yeah, that's fixed now.
In other news, I'm working on a post-jam version with some cool changes, some of which are environmental:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/happy-quiz
We chose to create a quiz game but not a traditional one… To discover the second genre, you are invited to play Happy Quiz available on itch.io !
Hey everyone !
My game, Dungeon of High School Romance reached almost 40 ratings, thanks all who leave a comment.
I'm currently at work, but as usual I'm gonna play and rate some browser games during my lunch break, in about 3 hours. Send me your games available on browser (no download sorry, I use my office comupter) and I'll try to play and rate as much as possible.
Oh and also you can still play my game, comments and critics are always welcome : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dungeon-of-high-school-romance
Thanks for the theme, this was a blast to code!
WRECKLESS RALLY, where you drive your tow truck around a race track, playing some kind of Bejewelled along the way. Drop off wrecked cars for points, but mind the frog! 🐸🏎️🏎️🏎️
https://youtu.be/V3wt-auXdIg
Put together a trailer just for fun. :smile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgTUz4eYZ9k
Hello!
Please check out my compo entry - Lands of Hello!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hello-go
It is a mix between FPS and RTS where you contol small army gaining control over the map.
