Thanks for all the feedback we are trying to improve it this weekend, your bugs may no be more https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/chick-n-die

Studies show that some number of people that like grapes also like my game, while a different or possibly exactly the same number of people that don't like grapes do like my game. So, if you may or may not like grapes, then try my game out and leave a review! Thanks! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/racing-tower-defense Disclaimer: I may or may not prefer people that like grapes over people that don't. I also may or may not prefer people that don't like grapes over people that do. But I may or my not try not to judge you. I also may or may not try to judge you. Thank you for maybe or maybe not reading what may be or may not be a blog post.

On Ludum Dare 40, I wrote about how I spent 2 days drawing characters for our game. It was a follow up to the post I made on LD 38 about Krita, the free open-source program. Today, I'll be retreading the whole thing, but applied to the art of our latest game, Wizsnooks!

The games developed by Whales and Games usually consists of a programmer, a sound effects person and, in the lack of any other art-people, me. So, during the brainstorm of ideas for our game, someone suggested mixing snookers with roguelike elements in a medieval setting. Seeing the appeal, I quickly sketched a concept of sorts for it:

When we finally decided to use that theme as our game, we had to start thinking about the whole "looks" of the thing. I even tried at one point going with non-lined art to parody Dark Souls or something, but in the end, we chose to stick to my classic style. I even sketched many possible faces for our protagonist white ball

And Just Monika.

I could go into detail about the story behind every enemy of the game, the tiles and the weapons, but the core of what I want to comment is this. Because of how our team is managed, the programmer(s) can focus on making a great game and the sound person usually does a few tracks and then offers main support to the programmers. I, the lead artist, have no real knowledge of programming and can barely use the tools to upload my own assets. However, having one sole task, I get to draw a lot, and then some, and then some more. Here's a few screenshots of the development of art assets of our game:

I really want to thank my team, since, otherwise, I wouldn't be able to participate in game development in this fashion. Dedicating pretty much the whole game jam time to art lets us make more with our time. If you're interested in seeing how this all went from still assets to something live, do give Wizsnooks a try.

And for those that would like to do their own assets for future game jams, go download Krita. It's 100% free and constantly updated. It can also be used for sprite work. Like all good tools, it takes a while to understand it, but even with a very cheap digital painting tablet, you could really make your future projects sparkle.

That's all for now. Whales and Games thank you for reading and for participating in this jam. If you feel like chatting, our discord channel is live. Cheers! :whale:

Challenge you self with my first Ludum Dare Entry.

Gender Circles. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/gender-circle

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EkkoEKko.GenderCircles

Theme

I spent all of Friday night trying to come up with a concept I liked. I looked through lists of game genres, lists of good games, lists of best games in a genre. A lot of lists.

Some discarded ideas:

• Tower Defense + Virtual Pet
• Side-scrolling shooter + Trivia game
• Psychedelic western

The main problem was that none of these were fun. They would certainly satisfy the theme, but I don't think I could stay motivated working on something I didn't want to play. So I stopped focusing so much on the "incompatible" part of the theme and that made things a little easier. But by that time, I had wasted all of Friday evening.

On Saturday morning, I settled on Tetris + Robotron 2084. It's not something I had seen before. It doesn't immediately sound compatible, but as you think about it (the blocks are rotating and that can shoot in multiple directions) it makes more sense. Plus, it combines two games that I enjoy, but have never tried to replicate.

Collisions

When creating the movement system, I wanted to make sure the block always stayed in line with the grid, so the game object can only move in increments of one space at a time. This is easy enough; I just set the position directly.

As a consequence of this though, I could no longer use any of the physics stuff built into Unity, since the game object is not moving to a new space, it is being teleported there. So I had to manually handle collisions with the border of the screen and any blocks already placed on the grid.

This took longer than I would have thought. I had a system that I thought made sense, but I kept running into strange behavior and occasional index out of range errors. I wondered if I had a loop that was off by one somewhere or something. But it turned out to be more insidious.

Floating point math sucks

It turns out that 1 != 1.00001. I knew that this was a thing in Unity, but I guess I never needed anything to be terribly precise before. Once I realized that was the problem, I sprinkled a lot of Mathf.RoundToInt() around and wrote a simple helper function to convert float-based Vector3 to the new int-based Vector3.

Vector3Int FloatVectorToIntVector(Vector3 v)
{
    int x = Mathf.RoundToInt(v.x);
    int y = Mathf.RoundToInt(v.y);
    int z = Mathf.RoundToInt(v.z);
    return new Vector3Int(x, y, z);
}

Two Tetris Grids

Once I got the basics of Tetris functioning, I didn't like how much empty space there was. I thought about expanding the grid to cover more space, but it looks like Tetris has historically had a pretty consistent grid size. Every (official) Tetris game seems to stick with a 10 column x 20 row grid, so I didn't want to break that tradition. My compromise was the use two grids that you could move between.

From there, it made sense to have each of them offer different rewards when you complete a line. This is probably the most clever bit of game design in the project and it was completely unintentional. You can't stay in the health grid and rack up extra lives, because you'd run out of ammo and you can't rack up ammo because you'll run out of lives, so you constantly need to balance those resources.

Look and Sound

I used Paint.net to create all of the art (aside from the borders which are just the Unity line renderer). I'm not really artistically-inclined, so the shapes had to be pretty basic, but that worked well with the game.

I was heavily inspired by the sound design of Robotron. The lack of music is hidden by the constant barrage of sound effects. I don't think I quite made it to that level, but I like most of the sounds I ended up with. I used by sfxr and bfxr to make them.

Enemies

I think I'm gonna write a separate post about the enemies and waves, since I like the way it turned out. It was a bit more flexible than it really needed to be for a game jam, but that flexibility allowed me to easily re-balance the difficulty at the 11th hour.

Known Issues

• The starting blocks will sometimes contain a complete line. These are just built randomly, so that's gonna happen sometimes. Enjoy the extra life/ammo.
• I'm pretty certain line clears sometimes happen when the line is complete. Haven't tracked down this bug yet. Seems very intermittent.
• Getting to the top of the grid might crash the game.

Next steps

If I had more time (or I didn't waste all of Friday), I would have worked on these features next:

• Score/Stats system
• Showing the next piece
• Diagonal shooting

Check the game I made, full of A E S T H E T I C S, puzzles and medieval ambiance. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mediwavehttps://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mediwave

Hey guys,

I've got some free time tonight, and I'd like to review some of your awesome games! If you could comment this post with a link to your project and also test ours, it would be awesome.

Here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/shady-cards

Cheers

Hello! i’m here to invite you all to try https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/wild-cards

In the download page you will find TWO versions. The first is the Event version, and the second one have some bugs corrections and some changes that we were unalble to include in the Event Version for a mater of time.

A friend incited me to participate in the Jam.

I wasn't sure as that weekend I had to go out to some work meetings but I'm SO GLAD that videogame adiction was stronger and sacrificed my sleep to make it possible. I've been making some games in the past years. Dedicating all my spare in some unfinished proyects. With this challenge the game was afoot, a perfect time to prove ourselves.

These days have been flooded with atonishment and surprises testing other people's games. Comparing how different our concepts of fun can be and how much more is to explore in the videogame industry. The feedback I'm recieving makes me grow everyday and gives me this warm sensation that we're not alone in this utopian niche. That gives me the pride and confidence to shout to the four winds: "COME AND TRY TACTICAL HYDRA!"

Something that started with so personal feelings about the gaming industry turned in something I'm always looking for when I'm browsing the internet and the playstore. Something that deep down we know more or less how it should be.

This post is a depiction of my gratitude to all of you... Thank you so much =O)

Check out Ludums Kitchen!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ludums-kitchen

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ludums-kitchen

Have you already recovered your trophy?

No? Just do it !

Hi, thanks for all the feedbacks!

We fixed minor bugs some players reported us, mostly due to collision detection, some audio issues that were making some sounds to play way louder than they should and some minor level design adjustments where many players were having trouble typing a sequence of commands.

Also, many players requested more types of actions, so we added TURN, JUMP RIGHT and JUMP LEFT to the list of commands.

Now you can download Type 'n Jump too :)

Safari users couldn't play our game due to its WebGL version, so we decided to upload standalone versions, both for Windows, Mac and Linux.

👉You can download and play Type 'N Jump here.👈

I've got 20+ in all the other categories, I just need one more in Audio!
Do you like ukulele music? Play The Fat Man and the Sea here

A TowerDefense / Plateformer in the sky !

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

Not for casuals ^^

Make sure to play & rate Nine Lives, a game with a cat and some mice.

Catch them before they escape!

This morning, something special happened. The very first documented trout was witnessed!

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

A new challenge was needed... and so I introduce to you - The Platinum Trout Club.

Rules: Earn a trout (4 lines simultaneously) without losing a life (this means you aren't able to abuse the ball respawn timer). Post a video of it on my page if you succeed. Successful applicants will earn a spot in my post-jam version credits, and earn my respect! Goodluck, trouters!

[link to game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/honest-dans-trout]

Just made a sequel to my quite successful game Just pick a Number back from LD37. Play You have 20 coins now!

https://boltkey.cz/yh20c/

Since I loving looking at the design process and documents of other developers myself, I though I'd share my incredibly detailed plan for Super Soup Slicer.

Head over to itch.io if you want to have a look what came out of it at the end ;)

I like to browse the Ludum Dare page on my iPad and I just found out that my game is perfectly playable on my iPad on Safari. So if you are also on your tablet or smartphone and want to play a game. Check out “Just One More Flap”

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/just-one-more-flap

It's annoying clicking through the boatload of Windows-only games when you're not on that platform, and this new and apparently modern website doesn't even have a basic filtering function.

I quickly threw together some fancy web cloud 2.0 scale node mongodb on rails.js stuff and ended up with a huuuge list of all the games, able to filter all the platforms with no javascript, just pure CSS!

Behold:
https://tsjo.st/r/ld41/

(Beware it might be a little bit slow if your computer isn't from this turn of the decade)

Now I can finally go back to playing and rating games 😄
If you'd like you can also play my game here!