Have you ever wanted to be stuck in a room for a few days, with no food or water? No? Even than you can play my compo entry.

Escape the room, escape your death

Acid needs your ratings! Enjoy the action RPG combined with idle game!

Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6PnmjQYCmg

FB: https://www.facebook.com/PlayAcidGame/

LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/acid

Hey everyone!

first of all big thanks to those who have already come by to rate and leave feedback, it's because of some of the feedback and encouragement I received that I've decided to continue developing Card Coded in hopes to release it somewhere (steam if I'm lucky). This game jam has taught me a lot, especially about myself. but I think this will be a fun next step.

If you haven't played Card Coded yet, or maybe have some things you think would improve the game going forward please leave a comment on my game's Ludem Dare page. any feedback or critique would be majorly appreciated.

https://youtu.be/-ZPGaMEvxdM

The first ever documented Trout was achieved by @david-boeger - Congratulations!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYLONPxtp0

Who else will join him in the prestigious Club Trout??

PS: Plans are in place for a new challenge... to earn a Trout without losing a single life (meaning no free 5 seconds of no ball causing havoc!).

Android

My Entry

We also have fixed a few unpleasant bugs(like the first gif below) in their behavior(a remenant line of code, put by sleepy me).

This is the bug in crystall "sleepiness" after spawn, he even didn't realize he killed me. It's fixed now.

And there is some gameplay gifs.

You can play it here.

Hey we didn’t post anything about our game yet so there we go !

Introducing Dark Soil, when Dark Souls meets a garden game, made last week end for LD41

Play and rate DARK SOIL

Back to part 4: Flavouring

Cutting Corners on Essentials

We could assume players will discover all mechanics by the intuitive nature of the game, but not all mechanics are that easy to discover, like drifting and chaining-multipliers.

So instead of coding a separate tutorial and welcome screen, we’ll just have the main game loop how the player how to play the game. But how do we do that?

Recycling what you have can save you a lot of time. In our case we were using an ECS system which makes everything really modular, which is great for recycling.

We already have triggers in the map for the finish line, so instead of player buttons controlling the car, let triggers in the map act as inputs as the tow car drives over them.

Cheap but effective!

No Player is the Same!

While you as a developer might breeze through your game other players haven’t been playing it constantly. If mechanics are hard for /you/, many of your players will struggle.

In our case, high number of colors on screen, or multi-color pit stops are not easy to deal with, so lets copy the difficult map, and make the cars a bit more conveniently placed and preferently mono-colored.

Highscore

We want to give players something to strive for. Since the core loop is score based lets focus on that and keep track of both easy and hard scores, so they can beat themselves.

Next up: (Getting) Community Feedback!

Other parts here!

If you haven’t yet, please play wreckless-rally here and tell us what you think!

https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

Come join me as I play your LD games!

Just finished some bugfixing in my first game jam entry ever (also first ever published game), including major bug that prevented the game from increasing difficulty, so now

THE GAME IS ON

When you actually can die, is only up to you how long you can withstand your rivals' attacks in this highly unconventional race!

So if your heart belongs to Smith and Wesson and bicycles, wait no more and come to try Tour de Arizona! Leaving feedback would be much appreciated!

I want to play on mobile :d

If you have a Android Smartphone with a compatible VR Headset, you may consider checking out our game "Wrong Priotites". https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nohastag.vrgame If you also made a VR Android game write a comment so I can check it out. :) Have fun

After combating bitrates and re-rendering things a bunch of times yesterday, I finally managed to complete my pixelart timelapse video for WRECKLESS RALLY. I've been getting a lot of positive feedback on my art, so I'd like to thank everyone for their very kind words.

I also had a bit of fun with our game's soundtrack by @meatmachine, turning it into an 11 minute 80's musical score for the video. I hope you'll enjoy it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LheYFO_i6XU

PLAY WRECKLESS RALLY HERE

PS - In case you missed it and are interested, @daanvanyperen wrote an extensive 5-part series of postmortem blog posts about our process (with more to follow). Check them out if you want!

• PART 1: Brainstorming and Merging Two Genres
• PART 2: Prototyping Smototyping!
• PART 3: Meat of the Code
• PART 4: Flavouring!
• PART 5: Game Balance and Intuitiveness
• PART 6, I am told, will address (getting) community feedback

Hi there! Have you guys given Nanashi a try? If not please do, would love to reach those 20 ratings. Also if you comment with a link to your game I'll help you too. Thanks!

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

I forgot when I first published this post here on Ludum Dare to subscribe to my youtube channel, I post game-related stuff there. Here is my first experience with Ludum Dare :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/beat-warriors

https://youtu.be/QF7dL1Jpz-c

Hey guys, have you tried our game Daxua yet? It's a combination of plot-twist story telling + hack n slash platformer. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Link:

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

Hey we didn't post anything about our game yet so there we go !

Introducing Dark Soil, when Dark Souls meets a garden game, made last week end for LD41

Play and rate Dark Soil.

Ships with no captain has arrived in ya dock!

We need ya help, cabin boy. Go to you harbor and fetch some cannon fodda (fishes). Throw it all against those freshwatah’ sailers!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fish-ships

https://youtu.be/Xe0zV2Mrpqw

"Feed Me" is a dark-tamagotchi-ish game. Come take a look at our ludum dare page!

Or download "Feed Me" here: https://pyrodaes.itch.io/feed-me

Yup, I made a game, it was my first ever LD attempt and I'm very happy to say it hit the 30 reviews mark yesterday. The feedback has all been very positive and on the back of this I very much intend to take part in another LD some time in the future.

I wrote a choose-your-own-adventure-style story and slapped a candy-crush-style game on the side which the player uses to choose which option to go to next.

I'm happy with what I made, it was fun to make, I don't mind the story is nothing special (or downright bad depending on your taste) and I don't mind that it looks and sounds like the absolute bare minimum to be called a game.

If you're into reading lots of text, or just to see how this kind of idea plays out, here's my game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/candy-crush-your-own-adventure (with apologies that it's only in English at the moment)

I haven't seen many other games that are so text heavy so I figured if I shared how it went for me people might get some inspiration next time and/or see it as a valid game option. I also would love to play more like it so link your text-heavy game in the comments and I'll gleefully take a look.

So, if you are willing to read my LD development story here you go:

Planning

I set my alarm for 30 minutes before the theme was announced. At 2am in the morning local time I can't say my brain was firing on all gears but it turns out I judged my limits pretty well. I've not made a full game before, let alone one in 48 hours, so my goal going in was to keep this as simple as I could.

Going over my notes, apparently I was toying with the idea of a rhythm game for a while. I have absolutely no recollection of this but I was brainstorming into a text editor which I will absolutely do again. Having ideas somewhere outside my head where I can assess them and come back to to riff off later is definitely beneficial.

I had a lot of stupid ideas, which is fine. I was just trying out anything I could to see how it felt.

It was only after I'd spent some time suggesting mad ideas to myself that I actually prodded them with the rational parts of my brain that were still awake.

I made a list of what I thought would be fun, what I thought I could do and what pitfalls I could identify and what makes each of the mechanics I was looking at "fun". All of this based on the advice I could get myself before the jam and I think it worked for me.

I've heard from various project management bods that the point after which planning produces diminishing returns is very roughly the 50% mark. That is, so long as you have half a plan, you're probably ready to start working on it and winging the rest won't be too bad.

I had already decided to use phaser.io (http://phaser.io) to make the end game as accessible as possible, I was always going to force my idea into that framework.

I identified I'd probably have to write two different game mechanics in the same 48 hours. I wanted to make my first LD as simple for myself as possible so, coupled with the fact I still don't know phaser.io very well, I opted for match 3 as one of the mechanics. I suck at artwork and graphics so lots of text in an engaging way seemed like a good way to cheat my way around that. So I opted for a text based adventure controlled by a match 3 interface.

Notably I hadn't picked the actual story yet, not identified fail states or win cons, hadn't designed the UI, hadn't worked out my graphical style etc. etc.

As it happens, I almost disastrously over-estimated my ability to churn out the words needed for a complete story, but this was fine and I'll get back to why later.

Time elapsed since compo start: 1 hour

First the bit I knew I could do

I was pretty sure that match 3 would be fun on some level right from the outset, it's generally just satisfying to see stuff disappear, fall and make a little noise having done so. Still, that was the very first thing I checked and it took a few hours to implement the basic match 3 UI in my chosen framework (http://phaser.io).

If this wasn't interesting I guess I could have bailed and tried a different idea but as it happens, it was fine. Also, if you don't know what the text on the left hand side is referring to I recommend googling it, you will not be disappointed. If I was going to be sensible I could have used some sample lorem text (https://www.lipsum.com/ is a very handy tool there) but I digress...

Anyway, at this point I was feeling pretty pleased with how things were going. As I made breakfast I was even wondering whether I'd low-balled myself and that I was going to be done by the end of the day.

Pause for delirious laughter

Time elapsed since compo start : 4 hours

Content is king

So, with the mechanics all done and dusted (it wasn't) I felt it was time to start writing some actual text to go on the left hand side. I hadn't actually decided where I was going to take this yet, just that I wanted to do a detective story with some Lovecraftian undertones if I could.

Use what you know

I have a little experience writing a lot in a short period of time. Not a ton, just a little. For the last few years I've subjected myself to NaNoWriMo (https://nanowrimo.org/) where you try to write a whole novel of at least 50,000 words in a month. I've only succeeded a couple of times and never published anything. I am definitely a novice at this.

Still, I have forced myself to write many thousands of words in a weekend in pursuit of this goal and I've learnt a few things in the process:

1. Let it flow. Your internal editor will slow you down, editing comes later.
2. Crap is better than nothing. You can build on crap.
3. You will surprise yourself, you're not as bad as you think.
4. I can sustain a pace of 2,000 words a day but it's hard.
5. I get stuck picking the course of my narratives.
6. I have a bad habit of not doing nasty stuff to my characters.

Notably, some of this is personal to me. If you're thinking about writing games with a ton of content I'd recommend forcing yourself to write regardless of the quality. Do NaNo if you have the time around November, it's mad and fun.

I ended up writing 8548 words of story / options on top of the actual code which I'm pretty sure is a personal record. But I digress...

Plot out the narrative

I started by just writing scenes without any idea of the direction I was going in. I think this was fine and got me a feel for the character of my protagonist but I'm sure the pacing of the first few scenes feel very slow as a result.

As it happens, that might be just what the player needs to get into the game mechanics. This was a fluke. I think there were a lot of flukes in this game's development, which is fine.

Anyway, I realized that I needed to work out a story tree after all this meandering. I am very, very glad I did but I did make some notable mistakes :

• I felt like one of the ways to make the match 3 interface have narrative significance would be to make the "candy" items mean something. Red was meant to be violence/agression, blue was thoughtful, green was "go with the flow" and yellow was meant to me money related. This turned out to be a bit restrictive.
• Initially I wrote the interface between the two games to need there to always be four options. This meant I forced myself to write paths that ended up being, basically, dumb. Well, more dumb (see item 2.).
• In trying to avoid the pitfall of 6., the main reason I tried to write something Lovecrafty in the first place, I added too many fail states.
• I overestimated how much I could fit in a panel and thus underestimated how many scenes each story point would take to write. So I made a lot of scenes...

By the way, I don't have a good tool for this. I know there are writers who use various plotting tools. I just use pen and lots of paper, which seems to work for me.

Don't plot too much

This is actually something I realised while making the tree but it felt like an important point in its own right. Going back to the 50% rule I mentioned earlier, I left myself space to improvise on my plan and this helped keep me engaged while I was forcing myself to write so much text.

In case you need telling: Give yourself the space you feel you need to have fun while being creative.

Time elapsed since compo start: roughly 7 hours

Write until your fingers bleed

Once I made a tree I started writing one branch at a time. The crucial thing was: with the narrative tree sort of there (it got changed a bit) it started becoming clear how much there was to flesh out and I knew from experience that it was going to be a heck of a push.

As the first day progressed I couldn't help but notice that I had so much left to do. I put that aside and wrote more and I had fun doing it.

Story flowed, characters changed and grew and whenever I was bored with one reality I'd made I'd go to another branch and work on that for a bit. Still, I got stuck plenty.

Breaks are good. Take them.

Whenever I got stuck I took breaks to do the graphics, add some sounds to the game, tweak the mechanics of the match 3 half, play through the game and catch times I got the layout wrong or just take a walk.

When you can't write more, then you can reflect

Before going to bed, I took time to assess my progress from the first day and it was clear that I had too much left to write. I wasn't sure what I was going to do about it but something had to be. But that was a good problem to sleep on.

Time elapsed since compo start: roughly 19 hours.

The results of a good night's sleep: Change the plan

I woke up at a sensible hour on day 2, ready to push on to 2am on Monday, and I started with coffee and avoided my keyboard for a bit.

I had a few good ideas. I changed the code to allow me to use less than four options and I spent some time fixing bugs in the match 3 code that I had previously tolerated.

Then I got writing again.

Time elapsed since compo start: 29 hours.

Last minute panic: I'm not going to make it - bodge it

With maybe 12 hours left to go it became painfully clear that the only way to tie these branches up would be to loop back to other branches done but that it wouldn't make sense to provide options back to the branch the player had just visited.

So I made some last minute engine changes. I was very, very lucky I could change the engine of my game so significantly to fix things this close to the end. I think the simplicity of the mechanics I was working with and the fact there was relatively little code to it paid off here. There are plenty of other reasons to keep it simple. Do that.

Last last-minute panic: 20 minutes before submission hour

Let's just say the quality of a couple particular endings are even worse than the rest. It turns out I can write even faster than I was doing for most of the weekend. I don't recommend it but needs must as whatever crazed gremlins that sit in my brain drives (See item 2. again).

Summary / TLDR

I got lucky with my first attempt in that I finished within the 48 hours by the skin of my teeth. Just text seems a simple option for a game mechanic but writing that much content was no mean feat.

It was definitely fun to make this game and especially it was fun to write the story. I learnt a lot about my ability to write, my capacity to ad-lib in the process and it's given me some ideas I might be able to use next time I try to write a novel in a month (again http://nanowrimo.org is worth your time if you have it).

If you want to try this but haven't done much writing before I recommend getting practice with that, like every other tool you end up using in LD it's important to know your limits and even then you'll get your estimates wrong.

All that being said, I'm very happy to discuss this more in the comments if anyone actually gets this far!

And finally a reminder that my game can be found at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/candy-crush-your-own-adventure.