It was fun to create Marco Polo. I've always wanted to do a classic text adventure game like Oregon Trail or Marco Polo. At the same time, slowly I'm getting better at creating a game experience. There was a lot of good feedback and this has been my most ambitious game.

What went right: 1. I had maybe a day and a half to work on the game. So using the skills I already had, I didn't try to go crazy learning something new. So for genre #2, I used a side scrolling game mechanic that I have been working on.

1. One hour game jam. This little compo on Saturdays has really helped focus on what key items need to be part of the game experience such as starting, stopping, winning, and losing a game. I am getting good at quickly putting those key items into my final application.

2. Graphics and typography. I have found a few typefaces that I really like and have a particular aesthetic. Likewise, I had decided a while ago to embrace 8x8 sprites because they require a lot less time to create. They hearken back to the old Commodore VIC-20, which I am very fond of.

3. Playtesting. I got the feedback I needed by simply playing other games and rating them. I had a lot of fun and it was good to see what others were able to accomplish in 48 hours. You learn quickly what works and what doesn't. It is fun to play and rate the games that your reviewers have created!

What went wrong:

1. I had never created a text adventure in a modern event loop based architecture. I spent many hours trying to work on state transitions in order to keep the game from crashing.

2. I was not able to smoothly transition from one genre to the next. I would have liked to smoothly fade in the screen. This requires some more work and understanding on my part.

3. I didn't do as good of a job at marketing my game. On the LDJAM website, I had screenshots of my game and very little description. Next time, right off the bat, I'll create a compelling graphic to represent my game and a good description highlighting its features.

4. Random events. So this time around, I used a random number generator to create events, but what I needed to do is created randomized lists so that events do not happen repeatedly over again.

I hope this was mildly interesting. If you would like to play my game, feel free to visit https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/marco-polo

A Die a Retry mixed with a 3D visual Novel game !

Play as Mamy, and discover what’s remains of your world. Interact with many things in your home, but don’t forget what’s important !

Come rate our game and we will do the same for you 😁

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dont-forget

Finally we are fully done with our participation in LD 41!

Our postLD build is out and you can download it out on our page:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blob-dungeon

We made a mix of genres Metroidvania + Bubble Shooter focusing a wide amount of content as for gamejam scope. Whether we achieved this or not it is up to you to decide. :3

But for our postLd build content remains the same.

Here is our postLD changelog:

1. Added enemy hitting animation
2. Finally finished parallax effect :3
3. Minor fixes of level design in two rooms
4. Added a rewarding effect for those who collected all the stars :3 (To re-play the effect you may press the "J" button.)
5. Fixed minor visual bugs (a few objects was on the wrong layers)
6. Added tutorial boards
7. Optimized build size

Now I can finally say this with a big relief

Congratulations to everybody who completed their entries during the Ludum Dare 41!

I have already evaluated about 100 games and as I have free time today, I want to play some more games. If you want to indicate me some, please reply with the link below. And of course, feel free to play mine. Super Bass Racing (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/super-bass-racing). Kisses, ;d

Hi!

This LD I have created game so bad that it is actually good, because it contains birds, hippos, flowers, bread and a lot of vodka! So it must be good. Q.E.D.

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-game-that-bad-that-it-is-actually-good

Please, leave a rating under my game, thx. 😍😍😍

New #RogueAndClick update.

The idea was Roguelike+Point&CLick and still is but due no enough time no submitted the entry due not has any playable. So i'm still playing around to see what can be done.

Some Top-down zelda now with 8x8 sprites instead ascii. Also added some CRT filters and colors.

Hey fellas!

Dirty Pink is a game that combines two genres: Runner & Blockchain

You can download it HERE!

Controls:

• WASD to move the car 🚙
• Right click to change the flavour / color 🍋🍉🍇
• Left click to make ice cream balls (max 3 stacked) 🍧🍧🍧
• Change music with Q and E 📻
• Pause with P 😆

CrazyHomeboys

Thank you for playing, sharing or voting us!

If you like rhythm and action game and not against challenge. Feel free to dance here.

Hey there! So, It may be a good time to have some fun! How about checking my game Elemental Monk? Here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/elemental-monk

I hope you enjoy it! :D

If you ever wanted to see what a combination of mini golf, FPS and the 80s would look like, we would be happy to show you what we came up with in our jam entry "Retroviral" :)

*Our page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/retroviral *

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/255425715

play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/magic-and-machines

The "Puzzllerrs" are coming and ...

All the fun is happening here:

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

I made a game.

You can play it here

Part 1
By the way I used GameMaker Studio 2 :wink:

Design

Day 2 was the best day of the jam. I woke up refreshed, ate breakfast and got right to work by 6 AM.

I fleshed out the gameplay flow of my game: - Player must catch fish / defend self - Catching certain color fish would allow the cannon to shoot down certain color missiles - Arcade style = no ending, try to get the high score!

From then on the game design was made up as I went along! I quickly sketched some fish and missiles and prepared to color them in Photoshop, but because they were going to be so small on screen, I colored them in Paint.Net instead for efficiency.
Then I colored the boatman in Photoshop, using a brush I found that gives me some nice, patchy edges:
The reason he has no eyes is because the eyes are a separate sprite with a randomly timed blink animation, independent of the lever-pulling animation of the body.

I quickly threw together a scene, using camera code from my previous project, which re-scales the view to all screen sizes, and started writing the player code. Originally, WASD would control the boat and the arrow keys would control the cannon. This was a little to hard to play, though, so I thought about making it a two-player game (which would have been a lot of fun!). In single player mode, the cannon would auto-aim. I even started creating the code for it:

After creating the game controller object, which generates random fish as long as there are no more than 15 on screen, I drew the buoys to contain the player and remove the invisible wall effect. Then I added the waves and the up and down motion to all the objects.

I sketched a bunch more art and then went into creating the powerups: - Invincibility: 4 seconds of .5 alpha invincibility - Rainbow Cannon: 4 seconds of 'I think my cannon just got a Starman...' - Speed-boat: 4 seconds of double-speed on both horizontal boat movement and vertical hook movement. - Instant-catch: Reels the hook in instantly (in case you can't pull it in on time).

These are one of the few sets of powerups I was happy with in the first iteration (though there were some tweaks, of course).

I spent the better part of the afternoon polishing the programmatic animations and the boats on the left and right. I added Rudolfo on the right but left the left boat blank because I didn't have a character for it. By the end of the day, I had a nearly completed game with only a few bugs, but no points system or high scores list. That came on the worst day of the jam: Day 3.

You can play the game here.

• Post Mortem: Day III
• Code Breakdown
• Post Jam Post Mortem
• Conclusion

Ah it feels good to be able to write a postmortem again. Last one was for LD34 which was... basically forever ago.

I had three reasons to enter and finish LD41. The first was the magnificent Keynote by @philstrahl, where he said that the secret to LD was making a game that only you could make. I couldn't agree more, and wanted to do my bit.

The second was because I came up with two jokes that I thought were funny and wanted to put these jokes on screen.

The third was as a technical experiment, to see how far I could push my point and click adventure engine and scripting language by trying to stuff a platform game into it. I'd always struggled to squeeze story into platform games in previous Ludum Dares, it never really worked properly and I wanted to see if the benefit of experience and fancy new tools would make a difference.

The writing for the game took the entire first day. The dating sim bit was by far the single most complicated bit of scripting I've ever done and required an awful lot of paperwork in the background for me to figure out all the various combinations. What made it even more complicated is that each character can pair up with two other characters so that people can be... creative... in how they set these characters up. I never want to do this sort of thing again, but I'm glad that people have responded to the inner lives of these brave (and not so brave) soldiers.

The second day was coding and getting the game actually running and doing The Full Vlambeer for the run and gun bit. I don't think I've ever made a game with any action in it before so this was especially exciting and new for me. I knew the more juice I could add to those bits the better they'd work even if it was really only for a few seconds at a time. Hacking in the platform game character controller and keyboard/gamepad controls for the dialog puzzles and menus was extremely painful and took WAY too much time.

Third day was art and music and just generally making the whole game feel a bit more coherent and complete. Was a stressful, awful day and I'm a bit disappointed by how little background art I have but I think each world in this game looks pretty much like it should, if... only just.

When I launched it... I was pretty miserable and worried, but the response so far has been really positive as far as I can tell... and so I've, eventually, decided that I actually quite like this game now. From a technical point of view I'm thrilled with what I was able to achieve, it's kinda crazy how much I've come on since the last little adventure I made for this competition.

Final note: I think I much prefer doing the Jam to the Compo. I had to do the jam because i'm not in a position to be able to publish the base code I started with because that's part of a commercial project, but I found that extra day made all the difference. It's... definitely the best thing I've ever made for this competition. I'm not sure if the score it gets will reflect that but I don't actually care, this is definitely 100% a huge success.

Not going to link to it here because I've got enough ratings to get a score. Just want to say thanks to everyone who's played and rated it!

It's the weekends, and I thought I will talk a little bit about how our idea came about and, at the same time, get some more views from the community. Play/Rate our game!! Please!

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

To be honest, I felt a little irritated when I first saw the theme. How do you put 2 incompatible genres together? If that's possible, are the 2 genres still considered incompatible? But complaining about the theme won't change anything. After a quick breakfast(from where we are, LD starts at 9am 😁), we started brainstorming.

Eventually, we settled on a fighting + time management game. @yunix recently got her hands on a Switch and is quite into Overcooked. We wondered if we could combine games such as Overcooked, Diner Dash, Air Control with another genre that requires immediate and quick actions. A genre that conflicts with the time delayed nature of time management games. And the first thing that came to our minds was.. a fighting game!

So this was how our 'Sumbot Fighting!' came about. A 2 player fighting game where punches and blocks have to be built and fed to the fighters. In a typical fighting game, the more complicated a move is, the harder it is to push the keys in the correct sequence. For 'Sumbot Fighting!', the better moves require more parts/parts that takes longer time to build. As we build the game, we noticed that besides the big fight going on in the middle of the game, we could steal parts from each other, get in the way of one another, and the 2 "incompatible" genres actually goes quite well together.

I will end this post with a video capture of one of our play sessions. If you can, grab a 2nd player and give our game a go. Let us know what you think. Thanks!

https://youtu.be/HDepEjS-mhM

ps. Drop your game links in the comments if you need more ratings, especially 2 player games!

Added a new cover image for the game and tweaked the difficulty, so it's not so crazy anymore. THE STUN LOCK IS NO MORE!!

Updates:

• Tweaked difficulty of each stage
• Increased recovery time from after getting hit to avoid stun locks
• Collision bug fixes

Play in browser and rate if you like:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/five-iron-frenzy

Deep Space is a space action game where you have to collect as much dilithium as you can. Game Controll: ADSW - Motion, Mouse Left - Shoot

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/deep-space

Maze in dark is my first LudumDare.

Not the best game (well ... maybe ...) but I think I had good time management.

And above all: I finished it :-)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/maze-in-dark

Day 1 - LD41 start at 3 in France... - wake up at 5 (hard week before) - find idea (hard, not inspired by subject): it will be a sort of maze. A "hero" (his internal name is Valentin, like Valentin Haüy) move in it like a Sokoban game (without crates). But the difficulty is elsewhere: Valentin is blind - the player only see a black screen... - write a sort of GDD - Game Design Document, of course without details - speed benchmark : A Blind Legend (I recommand it), and some other - go to the market, buy some food, walk, and think... - draw some screens - work on assets: design, fonts (braille) - Google, Affinity Designer - quick lunch and a nap - Launch Unity... - Visual Studio... - Small(s) break(s) on the balcony (reading "picsou magazine" of my son), very big sun ... - Unity, Visual Studio, Unity Studio, Visual, Studio, Unity visual... - Dinner time... and SLEEEEEEEP

Day 2 - Take the same: Unity, Visual Studio, Quick lunch, Nap, Picsou... - Dinner time... and SLEEEEEEEP

Day 3 - Some quick little finishes - PUBLISH - and go to work... a little tired... but happy : I did it !

If you haven't tried yet, here it is: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/think-before-escape

You can also check out this clip from @JoltJab: https://clips.twitch.tv/PunchyFaithfulTapirBabyRage