https://clips.twitch.tv/ElatedSparklyPigeonPeanutButterJellyTime (0:12)

damn

With a couple days having passed, it's a good time to write our post-mortem, along with everything we never got to blog about.

Saturday

The first day went by rather quickly, as all three coders of our team were preoccupied with figuring out the Godot engine, and its scripting language GDScript. Both were actually very intuitively designed, and it's a testament to the engine that with no prior experience we managed to create something playable within 48 hours - but still, most of the first half of those were spent on learning our tool. It's a good thing that (apart from me,) everyone was already familiar with Git.

Pictured above are the burgers we got for lunch, and our working area. The basement is actually much more spacious than most. And it has good Internet, and plenty of power outlets, and desks and a spare monitor and a keyboard and four (!) couches along the walls. It's very cozy and helped us retain our sanity while working for two days away from the sunlight (for some, those might actually be ideal conditions).

We started out brainstorming, and quickly settled and expanded on a concept georgesdoe had come up with at a previous jam - a platformer/puzzle, wherein the player selects the colours to shoot, depending on the colours of the enemy, and even allowing him to combine two basic colours to obtain a complex one. The reverse is also possible, by shooting complex colours towards obstacles that act as filters, and remove one of the basic colours from the projectile. A nice, but also simple idea, which surely wouldn't pose any difficulties in implementing.

The slow progress on the coding part didn't stop TSTigris from creating loads of assets though, first and foremost Prisma - our main character.

* EDIT: Please note that this character, while made from scratch, has a huge resemblance to the main character from Nykra (http://nykra.com/). This is entirely unintentional on our part, and we'll try to redo our art to make it more distinct. We're in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Nykra, and would like to thank endesga for pointing the similarity out to us in the first place. *

* EDIT 2: We've confirmed that Nykra's character has indeed been used as a direct reference to create our character. We're very sorry about this, and have thus removed all media containing our main character. We have posted a public apology on our blog. *

Sunday

Having put most of the engine-related studying (at least the basic stuff that we needed) behind us, the second day was more productive. We even had two colleagues visiting, bringing supplies and fresh hope. We divided the coding work among us, and regularly pushed and pulled our repository, which went much better than I had imagined. It was the first time I shared a repository with a team; an interesting and informative experience for me. We decided to go for souvlaki this time, and soon after lunch georgesdoe had a working colour and colour-filter system. After a little while, I also had figured out how to do the inputs and the animation, and we all gathered round to marvel at Prisma in action. TSTigris was enamoured; it was the first time he saw any of his creations animated and in a game. Mistermij shouldered the ungrateful task of creating the whole dynamic, auto-resizing, floating health-bar for the enemies, and of course the enemies themselves, which required him to dig deeper into Godot. By afternoon we all felt a little sleepy and weary (the souvlaki didn't help), so we decided to go for a walk.

We emerged from the dark depths of georgesdoe's basement and marveled at the beautiful day. The cloudless, but not too bright sky was a welcome change after sitting inside for so long; we could see from the mountain in the north to the southern sea, and strolled aimlessly around the broad, quiet streets. The break was desperately needed - soon after we returned, mistermij had figured out how to do the health-bars properly, and went on to help me out with a bug about an invisible projectile (it turned out that it wasn't invisible, just off my laptop's screen limits). The game was coming together nicely, and the few glitches that remained for the basic functionality only made us laugh.

By the end of the second day, we had a running prototype, with moving and shooting enemies, colour combinations, and a first small level.

Assessment

What worked

• The place. Having a dedicated space to make a game is something of a luxury, especially for younger participants. Having a spacious, well-connected, fully-equipped space is a double luxury.
• The team. We'd never all met before Ludum Dare, but this never proved to be a problem. We had a good chemistry, all of us felt involved in the game-making process, technical collaboration as well as personal communication was so good that we probably wouldn't mind getting locked in a basement a second time.
• The tools. The Godot engine worked without a hitch between a Mac and two Linux distributions, is easy to understand and quite intuitive. Same goes for its language, GDScript. Git was indispensable.
• The game idea. In hindsight, I'm relieved that we didn't go with the real-time, medieval, city-sieging, strategy/stealth mix I'd envisioned during brainstorming^^. Our game was simple enough to actually be doable, while also interesting enough to keep us engaged.

What didn't work

• The lack of preparation. None of us had had a look at Godot up to a couple days before the Jam's start, which caused us to spend most of the first day reading up on the documentation. Although, proper preparation might've needed twice the time investment, which is rather difficult for people working full-time.
• The burgers were a tad expensive.

What's next

We were all immensely proud of how far we'd come. For mistermij and me, both LD-veterans, this was more than we'd ever accomplished in the past. Alas, we had to essentially wrap it up by the second day already, since georgesdoe, mistermij and TSTigris all had to go to work on Monday. We added a little functionality during the last day's evening, and are playing with the idea of perhaps continuing to work on it in our spare time. Little does the game's state matter, though. We had a lot of fun, honed several skills and learned a lot. What more can one ask of a single weekend?

Hey everyone! If you really enjoyed Super Slime Slasher Ultra, we now offer Super Slime Slasher Stickers! Show your slime-slashing pride by sticking these lil' buddies anywhere stickers can be stuck! Stickers can be found on my tictail: https://birdpun.tictail.com ! We offer all 3 designs for $1 CAD, or any 1 for $0.50 CAD. WOWIE!!!

And definitely check out Super Slime Slasher Ultra if you haven't already done so!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/super-slime-slasher-ultra

Our team thanks you all so much for your support and love so far!💕

Hey all! I'm with Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS), a diversity-focused game community in the New York Capital Region. Every Ludum Dare, along with having a real-world jam meeting, we stream Ludum Dare games during the rating period! Our first stream is almost about to start (8:00 PM EST)! If you'd like us to stream your games, submit it at the form below:

goo.gl/forms/zQAhArQG3Lfp2imS2

We'll be live-streaming at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace. Games will be played on a first come, first serve basis; but if you're in the chat, we'll play your game first! If you'd like to know our review style, a previous recording of our livestream is available below:

https://youtu.be/ti2zBlE7Ov8

This was my SCORE, CAN YOU BEAT IT? Leave your score in the comments and come check out the little game we did for this JAM!

I promise you that all the fun is happening here, COME GIVE IT A TRY!

THE "Puzzllerrs" are coming and ...

We need to prepare, grab all the glue that you can !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/puzzle-invasion

Old draft from Compo 38 ..

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Try if you can find her in our game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/Haiti-Kitty

Playable in your browser and will only take 2 minutes of your life!

We love you all <3 🐟

BIG update for Poker-Man ! An Android version with new graphics is now available here !

I'm also live on Twitch for a few hours as I'm adding new gameplay mechanics to the game !

For updates on the game : Twitter

Will you ever reach the top? (Or at least the clouds)

For returning players

Thank you all for the precious feedback you gave us. You will find some neat fixes and value tweaks that make the gameplay more dynamic! (you can already see it in the GIF! :wink:).

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/shuffle-climber

To be quite honest,im still not actually sure why there is such a thing as dating simulators, so obviously I made one... With war. That's right, a dating simulator war/idle game, so if ur dying, u can have a life. Wanna play, just go here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/date-attack, so thank u 4 ur wasted time! :D

"...what if we made a Trading BARD Game?"

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 50 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

Why didn't we do this to begin with?? Now ANYBODY can GAWK IT UP👁️👁️, WALK IT UP👣, or ANYWHERE IN BETWEEN👁️👣👁️! Without the nasty download to bog you down!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/toby-gawks-pro-walker

(Internet Explorer users will not hear sounds. Working on this now.)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/project-avn <---------------

I made a video showing some things that you can do with CHARLIE. If you had trouble playing before, please check it out and let me know if it helps.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=H0rnM0liGZk

rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/charlie

play: https://notb.itch.io/charlie

Let me introduce your instructor -and best friend- in the game:

Let him know your support by rating our game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/parashoot

Come hang out with the whole crew. We will evaluate and play your sweet games. Can't wait to see what you have got!!!

CLICK HERE TO SEE STREAM

Here's the time lapse development video for my Ludum Dare 41 entry, Blocks of Nibiru. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zes_vXk8MoY

Entry page - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blocks-of-nibiru

We were very excited to do some more work on our game in order to push it in the direction we wanted it to go and share it with you all. Since this release contains significant changes to the original-jam-release we designed our website to make it abundantly which version you are playing. We hope everyone finds this to be a fair and reasonable way to share this version we are so excited about without compromising the jam.

Play both versions now at purplesloth.studio!

Changelog

• UI rework
• added tooltip
• empty cards no longer execute "wait"
• fixed a bug that caused the grid functionality to not work properly in the HTML5 build
• fixed a bug with the turncounter
• added 2 completely new zones with cutscenes
• polished existing zones
• added some QoL in many locations
• tutorial can now be skipped by pressing S
• tutorial dialog can now be skipped by pressing Space
• new Linux and Windows standalone build

Based on your Feedback

Many of the changes and additions we implemented are based on the great feedback we have gotten over the last couple of days. The additional maps are considerably shorter, allowing for fun gameplay with less time investment and patience required. The grid feature (that should have been in the original release, but for some reason did not work as intended in the original webGL build) makes it much easier to recognize distances and plan your turn. The tooltip gives further inside into how certain cards/moves function. And finally as requested by many: the game will only proceed as many turns as you place down cards. Since Many people really enjoyed the fully voiced cutscenes we're glad that we can ship two additional scenes we've had all along but lacked finished levels to go along with.

So far I have been overwhelmed by the amount of people who've enjoyed the game and given really great feedback - thanks everyone!

However, in all of the games I've played and watched being played... the fabled TROUT has yet to be completed! What's a trout you say? Matching 4 lines simultaneously in one single drop (...like a "Tetris").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJuy7-m2F6g

If you can record yourself getting the first ever trout, you will earn a place in the in-game credits and on the LD/Itch game page. More importantly - you'll feel like a boss. DM me any links to videos if you succeed :D

Goodluck.

Balancing, bugfixes and more sound effects added in this inbetween update to my 48h solo game for LD41 compo, Danmakoid! I am currently working on a V2 with music, UI and more visual polish! I have also used this opportunity to update my page with sexy gifs. Come check it out: Danmakoid - Bullet hell metroidvania If you are going to rate it, the original v1.0 is and will still be available for windows/osx/linux and web.