We weren't able to finish this time, just like for LD40. We did make it farther than before, though, and I can tell we're definitely getting better. Can't wait till LD42.

My Team: @kaisor-meridian @thanksforcallingatthowmaywehelp

I was going to participate for the first time in LD40, but unfortunately I didn't have any time. This time I scheduled my tasks so I could use at least about 20h for this jam. I wish I had more time, but life is life ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I have done some projects before, but my vision has always been way too blurry from the beginning so that I could finish them. One great thing Ludum Dare gives you is the theme. That makes planning the game so much easier when you know what you want to do. I had one moment when I just wanted to give up, but I was able to overcome it.

During this jam I used Godot and GDScript to make my game. I discovered many new features in the engine and ways to code. Before this project I knew what arrays were, but I really didn't know what to use them for, but now I know! Looking back I wish that I would have done some things differently, especially the powerup system. I added it during the last hours of making the game and well... that's what happens.

I don't know why I wrote this, but anyway, see you guys in LD41!

Feel free to check out my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/slot-machine-of-death-casino-adventure

Hello fellow jammers!
LD41 was my 1 year aniversary of consecutive LD-Jamming, and so far it was my best one!

I'll do a blog post detailing some technical aspects of my game, particularlly the map parsing side.
That was something I have done before (once) but with different tools and it was a long time ago.
The way I didn't on "Platform Hero" is quick, dirty and works like a charm.

In the meantime you can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/platform-hero-1
And if you leave your games or just comment I'll play yours!

Have a good one!

|Platformer|Rhythm| |-|-| || |

Tour de France Legstrong is a mix between a sports simulator and an apocalyptic survival game. Will you help France Legstrong fight his way through hordes of zombies to reach the finish line?

This was our first LD event, and although exhausting, it was a great experience. I am looking forward to see what you all have created. I will play, rate and comment on anyone who rates and comments on our game. Thanks for playing!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tour-de-france-legstrong

In our game, some 3D was kicked out because it doesn't fitted the proportions in Unity project. For example walls and floor.

Our artist developed a full set but it arrived too late! :(

Remember to ask your programmer (or Unity project manager) about sizes, proportions and navigation of AI. Also how are the props programmed and animated. So you don't work in a prop that he cannot use later!

¡Always learning in game jams!

Our game look great anyway!! :D:D

Play Survaby

I spent a lot of time on them.Hope you can enjoy our game:)( https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/typer-world-cup ) (The slide animation will appear in the game soon...probably.)

An happy little adventure with rolling Bob Ross and its brushes! 🎨
Paint blocks to change their behavior and help Bob getting back all its brushes! 🎨

Try it out here! HTML5 version available.

Hi! After a looong night of good sleep, I'm back for playing/rating/sharing experience !

And I know that I need to dive into it if I want my own game to be rated but it feels like not many people are playing on androïd.

What do you think I should have done ? - make it also playable on PC, at the risk of breaking things. - make an iPhone port. - forgeting smartphones altogether. - chillout man, just wait.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/brains-of-racing

All those crows are going to steal your goods in my submission. Be nice to them though, all living things need to feed.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/farm-punch

Have You Ever Wanted to Drive a Succulent? Well Now You Can! Grow a Small Desert Plant and Beautify the Desert in Succulent Drive USA!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/succulent-drive-usa

let's play ball..oldschool difficulty!!

play it, rate it, love it, hate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/court-invaders

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/chickens-vs-dinosaurs

The game

The game is gameplay-wise a combination of a rhythm game and supposedly an RPG. The idea was to create a classic Japanese turn-based system but enhanced with the music aspect. In the current state, it’s more of a prototype than anything else, but I think the combination would work very well in a full-fledged and polished game.

The struggle

We planned to go quite easy on us for this jam, as my ideas often end up being too ambitious. As it turned out, it wasnt as simple as imagined and the battle system still lacks many features we planned to implement. In the best case scenario, we expected there to be more enemies or a color changing mechanic connected to the attack types. But who knows, maybe one day?

Anyway, saturday was quite hard on us, as our computers betrayed us a bit. Graphic software crashing and learning to animate in a new one was one of the many obstacles we had to overcome and sunday on the other hand was in the sign of adjusting the game to the beat. Technologic failure was, as in every game jam, a huge factor.

The experience

Every game jam is mostly not about the finished product, but about the experience you learn on your way. Me and my GF made flat graphics for a videogame for the first time and it was a great opportunity to get to know this style further. Vašek got to finish his first game jam ever and he didnt panic or get stuck at all. For me, it was alsao a lot about experimenting with design choices further, as I never did a music game before and just had to try!

The summary

Game jaming is fun, hard, sometimes stresful and not always rewarding. But it gives you so much motivation and energy to make your ideas to reality. Sure, your game almost never looks as you imagined it would be, but game jams are not about a polished game of the year. Its about ideas, experiences and people.

I know how demotivating it is to see these geniuses who somehow manage to make a new Skyrim within two days. But it should not stop you from doing the best you can do. Because if you give it your best, thats all that matters. Just make games, have fun and enjoy one of the best hobbies you could possibly have!

In this game you have to sneak past guards and paint a replica of famous paintings in the Louvre. There have been some... Interesting results. Unfortunately we didn't finish it quite in time, but it is somewhat playable, so give it a play and test your painting skills!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-tale-of-an-arts-major

Game Description

Genres mixed: Bullet Hell + Puzzle

Get to the end of the level and try NOT to die a lot

What Went Well?

1. First time using Unity for Ludum Dare - This is our very first Ludum Dare game made with Unity. Previously, all of our Ludum Dare games are made with Game Maker Studio. I would say this is rather successful as I am still a rookie with Unity.
2. Music and Sound FX - I composed the music about 5 years ago, and it went super well. The sound effects are pretty decent too!
3. Engaging gameplay - I was playing the game this morning, and my mom just woke up and got engaged with my gameplay... 10/10.
4. Smooth control - Apart from getting stuck, the control is pretty smooth and feels like an arcade game. The control layout is pretty straight-forward and simplistic as well. All you need is a joystick (for movement) and two buttons (which are not essential to the gameplay), and you can play this game.

What Didn't Went Well?

1. Bugs at last minute - We only have 3-4 hours before submission before we started getting loads of bugs. This is mostly due to our level design having weird floating point values for the transform and scripts aren't attached to the correct place. We should've been careful with the transform values and make sure they are rounded down.
2. Graphics - Graphics were not original, we have limited number of art assets and it just looks like a typical indie game (unoriginal).
3. Actual puzzle elements - We focused way too much on the bullet hell element that we have ignored the puzzle elements until the very last day. This meant that our actual puzzle parts are too basic and simple. The pushable block are too sensitive to touch and hard to push it to the exact place that we wanted. We should've went with a dynamic block with constrained rotation
4. Getting stuck - It's easy to get stuck behind wall while trying to escape. We tried to fix this by making opening bigger.

Play Our Game!

• Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/gallica

I'm live over at https://www.twitch.tv/grizeldi playing LD games. Come submit your own so I can rate them.

I released the soundtrack for Golf N' Grenades as a separate MP3 download if anyone wants to grab it:

Imphenzia - Golf N' Grenades MP3

(Right click and "Save As" to avoid playing in browser)

This was my first game jam would really like it if yo guys coud test my game and give me some feedback.

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

Play: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/platscii

PLAY NOW!

I just released a quick update that adresses some of the complaints people had with my game. You can now encounter enemies at random and the difficulty has been adjusted as well.

If you want to check out the new version: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/commodore-combat (When rating, keep in mind that 1.2 was released post compo. I just wanted to adress some of the feedback.)

Hey, I hope you don't mind me shamelessly trying to get someone to play my game... Still haven't got any feedback...Anyways Its a Race-Tower-Defense.You're supposed to stop racers from getting to the finish line.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rock-the-road

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/sloppy-dungeon

Had a lot of fun making this game with my brother and Oscar did a great job pulling the music together at the last minute. Really looking forward to what people think of it

Good morning, Jammers!
Like fishing? Conservationism? Dodging missiles? Then you should play The Fat Man and the Sea!

I threw in difficulty mode 'ridiculous' before release - I doubt all 9 holes are beatable at that level though :)

Play Golf N' Grenades and give it a try =)

The reds are taking over! Fire bullets and dodge stuff in Grid Gunner!

This morning I submited to the LD my jam project, called "Ace Golf: Blade Brawlers"!

It's an action MOBA golf game where teams of 5 players each compite to rule a floating golf camp by smashing each others heads with their clubs!

And playing golf. Sometimes.

I managed to implement a very decent AI system to simulate what could be to play this game online. Please give it a try and share your impressions with me! :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ace-golf-blade-brawlers

We just uploaded a Web Build of our game: Check it out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/card-castle

PLAY THE GAME

Want to cut cook some living ingredient? Come check out our game!

What a crazy 40 hours it's been since I released Skirmixer out into the wild. Skirmixer is probably the weirdest most technically complex Jam game I've made solo.
For those that haven't seen it yet. You don't download Skirmixer and play. Instead, you tune into a livestream and play live on the stream with some controls that mixer.com supports. On the down time while people are afk or asleep it plays bot games so there is something to watch.

After about 8 hours the stream got featured on the front page which was really awesome then the viewer grew to really scary numbers (I think about 200 people was the peak) which was really rad! But my buggy 48 hour game totally wasn't ready for that many players. So quite a few issues came to light! Since then around 1000 people have stopped by to have a go or watch a couple of rounds! Really Really cool. You can come play over at https://mixer.com/Drapsicle

After 24 hours of solid panic at so many people seeing my Jam game. I feel really proud of what I've achieved! <3

What do you get when you cross rpg elements with arcade mining games? Well.... :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dig-knight

* Nobody managed to win, actually. *

Can you challenge the darkness and beat Scarry?

* We'll create and gift a customized version of our game... *
*..WITH YOUR FACE ON THE MONSTER to the winner of the contest! *

How to participate

Just play Scarry, make a screenshot of the win screen and post it on the game page!

THE FIRST ONE WILL WIN.

* ADVICE: Our game is very HARD to beat. *

Don't forget to leave a rating :>

GOOD LUCK FELLAS!

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

Ultra funny platform game, with cute slime in main role!

This game contains:

-Classic 3 levels platformer mode

-Flappy bird mode

-Infinity runner mode

-Full pad service

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/lorik-the-slime

I challenge you guys to try and save the princess. If you did, then give me the feedback if you got happy after saving her.

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

If you got some Spare Time: Try beating the current Highscore in my game

CURRENT HIGHSCORE: 57.560 (@mao)

It's a combination of Flappy Bird & Tetris:

Hey there, got a moment? Go and check out our game! :D A prisoner in jail... selling pot??? Who wouldn't wanna play that! Hope you will have a blast! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/prison-farming

Still looking for more feedback!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rogue-crush

Incompatible Rally is a 3D Platformer Racing game that gives you a new Racing Experience in a Platformed world. LD Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/incompatible-rally

Watch the Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2coMUolMWmo

Here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/quick-down

Can you tell I left the name choice til the final few hours of the Jam!? Think Tetris-Breakout... Tetr-out..... Trout.

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

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

Would love to have some feedback, I'll be playing some games and streaming feedback on my twitch channel during the week.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully check out my game.

Hey, I hope you don’t mind me shamelessly trying to get someone to play my game… Still haven’t got any feedback…Anyways Its a Race-Tower-Defense.You’re supposed to stop racers from getting to the finish line.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rock-the-road P.S. It has a web(HTML5) version.

We realized CTRL wasn't a good key to use for the web version and we changed it to shift! and its playable on web now so please do give our game a shot :D I promise you it can get quite competitive >D Grab and friend and spend 5 minutes with us! If you've tried it please leave us a rating and some feedback :)

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

There is a contest running right there, and a challenger is now trying!

I DARE YOU

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/scarry/contest-can-you-escape-the-monster-and-win-prize

Think you can get past the bullets, enemies and challenges and get all 5 crystal to beat the game without giving up? I dare you!

(Translator's note: Nanashi means unnamed)

Please try my game, Nanashi, and tell me more about it https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/nanashi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92A3yMfdK4A this is the development's timelapse for my entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/i-bet-that-your-cats-look-good-in-the-dance-floor/

Game made in 72h ! Learn the human body by smashing your friends!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bully-logy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uTCdEY7HtU

Hello do you have a moment to try my compo game (Horror & Dance)? Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dance-for-your-life Feel free to comment/vote! Any feedback will be appreciated!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/pieter-post-apocalypse

This morning I saw this screenshot of our game from a friend of one of our teammates.

I personally suck at this game, but apparently some people really know how to drive.

I'd love to see how high people can score on this game! 😁

Hey! Let's try to beat @deltagardner's highscore (2'231) in my zuma + tower defence game!

? :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/seaman-sleuth

Combining the detective game genre with the Metroidvania genre proved to be an extremely difficult task, which most certainly wasn't helped by our lack of experience with either. Through some miracle, however, an actual, playable build of the game was submitted before the deadline. Here are some insights into our development process:

Dialogue

Dialogue was written in a Google Sheets document, alongside notes from the writer to the programmer. The document was then exported to a TSV file, which would be read into a string array once the game was loaded. This made both writing and programming dialogue events a ton easier than the method we used for Ludum Dare 40, which was just copying and pasting paragraphs from a script into string literals in the game's code.

Code

In total, around 1462 lines of code were written for Seaman Sleuth, with over 500 lines dedicated to player movement alone. In the spirit of 72 hour game jams, code quality varied from readable to catastrophic. 26 global variables ended up being used to "save time", which made debugging a nightmare. Additionally, due to some sort of weird stuttering bug with Godot 3.0's physics timestep, most player movement code was written in the render loop instead of the physics loop; this caused a whole bunch of problems with collision checking on the first day that took well over six hours to fix.

Programming the detective parts of the game was stupidly easy in comparison; cursor position was checked against collision shapes drawn over points of interest in an image. When an area was selected, it would just skip to a certain point in dialogue. The same system was also applied to the "interrogation" segment, because it was 5am and creating a normal three option menu was apparently too much effort.

Levels

Levels were designed in Godot's lovely tile editor, which made it easy for non-programmers to design levels; despite this, only two levels were made for the Metroidvania segments. Initially, the game was going to consist of one giant level on a single tilemap, but this resulted in the game running at an unplayable framerate on the HTML5 build. Due to my inexperience with programming, tilemap data ended up just being "swapped out" when loading new areas, without making any changes to the player instance - this is why the player is falling when changing to some scenes.

Time and project management

There were very few breaks whilst programming for some reason, which culminated in horrible burnout for the first two days of the jam. The few breaks that I did take had tremendous impacts on productivity, with a particular six hour bug only being fixed after 15 minutes of doing literally anything that wasn't programming. Looking back at things now, not taking regular breaks probably had the single most negative effect on the game's quality, as many hours that could have been spent on levels, enemies, and polishing were lost to bugs and other inefficiencies from just being tired.

Tasks were also not evenly allocated amongst team members, with the level editor only being introduced to non-programmers around twelve hours before submission. Some features worked on were also cut due to the bottleneck of having only one programmer (and a very inexperienced one at that). An example of this is puzzles - a team member spent an entire day on puzzle designs, only to have them not implemented due to the code for actually running the puzzles in the game being considered low priority and never actually written.

Git was used for version control but non-programmers were not shown how to push their own commits to the repository. This meant that art assets had to be sent over Discord, which didn't impact productivity too much but could have been excruciating for something of a larger scale.

Conclusion

Overall, it is a miracle that this game got anywhere close to being playable before the deadline, considering everything in its way. A lot was learnt about tilemaps, player movement, and other stuff, and a lot was applied from what we learnt from our previous Ludum Dare game, "Smash! Smash! Destroy the West! Jangnanmon!" ( https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/smash-smash-destroy-the-west-jangnanmon ), such as making use of the twenty seconds of precious programming time that it takes to add a god damn skip button to the intro dialogue.
Here our our key takeaways from this Ludum Dare:
* Make sure the programmer actually takes breaks * Don't abuse global variables * Figure out ways to make level switching more seamless * Allocate tasks more efficiently to different team members * Allow for time to polish * Watch out for scope creep

If you like pain, you can play and vote on our game here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/seaman-sleuth

PLAY NOW!

I've found an issue with the Power System where it'd keep resetting itself as you typed. this was causing difficulties getting the power back on, it should be fixed now.

I've also found an issue with the Audio System where it was defaulting at 0% volume for new players.

Fixed some difficulty problems (The typing minigame for the Power System now gives you 50 seconds instead of 30)

And added something explaining which ones are the "compile errors" in the Compile error minigame.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/escape-1 << Check the game out! Escape The Room + Programming

Link to project

First time in, and the best thing about this jam is that I have actually released a game and learned some stuff. That stuff, in no particular order:

• Distributing Python programs is as weird as it was three years ago. There is a ton of build tools, some of which are better and some are worse, some have very complex interfaces that overlap with other complex interfaces for distantly related things (I'm looking at you, cx_freeze, and at your setup.py. That's pip's favourite toy, leave it alone!), some randomly produce builds that are detected by antiviruses (hello, pyinstaller), some sort of support Python3, but probably not versions after 3.3 (that was py2exe; at least I hope that was indeed python version issue and not something even more obscure), and all tend to pack everything into your distro. No, I really don't think my game needs ssl support, cryptography-grade random number generation, XML parser and half the unrelated libs I have installed. Especially considering that they sometimes forget the actually necessary DLL/.so files. Really weird for the language so mature and so opposed to black magic in its design. Next LD I'll either make some VN in RenPy (which does your packaging for you) or drop Python altogether. Still, you can make a distro in an hour using google and a bit of patience, so whatever.

• It's very possible to finish a project, if you have a deadline. Deadline is actually your friend.

• Speaking of finishing, do not use your own mostly working engine/lib unless you're John Сarmack. Figuring out why Alt-F4 stops working after you play the game more than one time is fun, but not at 2 am in the middle of the Compo.

• LD is also fun, and people make very cool games. Go play Infernoculus if you haven't already.

• Maybe kinda-sorta realistic gravity doesn't really mix with (obviously very discrete) ASCII pseudoterminal, maybe it doesn't mix with tetris, but just today I had a PhD spend some time figuring out what "divided by the distance squared" means in relation to changing trajectories of the things. Maybe that's because he was a PhD in genomics, not in rocket science, I don't know.

• Themes actually don't suck. I was thinking "mix two incompatible genres" was the most boring jam idea possible (come on, wasn't that the idea of half the indies in the world?), but that was interesting enough to work with.

• People really love making rhythm games.

• Zombies as a game subject aren't dead. Nor is flappy bird mechanic. Hopefully I haven't just insulted all the flappy bird zombie survival devs out there? That definitely sounds like a thing.

• And also tetrises? I'm not the one to judge, I made a tetris myself, but there are quite a few of them.

So yeah, this was a cool jam. Ten turn-based split-screen card-based fairytale JRPG infinite runners out of ten, will participate again. Check out my tetris with gravity and ASCII stuff, it's not that bad.

This is what my game turned into. Not quite what I had in mind. But sure worth the effort.

Check it out:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-imaginary-room

PlatSCII is out!

It's an ASCII Platformer!

Play it here!

Check out the game timespike!

What an exciting process, our cooking / racing / acrobatic game is out and ready for your judgement.

The theme "2 Incompatible genres" could not have been more perfect, with this being Frosty40 (the artist) and I's first project together and being two very different personalities. I'm the excitable, more outgoing one, he's a bit more reserved and together, I think we made a terrific game.

Please go check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/recipe-for-disaster

Recipe for Disaster was both of our first experiences for a real gamejam and we've learned a lot about working with each other. It's not a perfect game (yes, the controls should have been less sluggish, we had some hiccups there), but overall I could not be more proud and I hope you will be too!

Couple of issues popped up which I've tried some small band-aid fixes for.

• Fixed the score not displaying on the post-game leaderboard screen.
• Attempted a very basic anti-cheat just so I don't have to moderate the leaderboard as much.

  It's still possible to cheat but this should save me some time having to police scores.

If you haven't set a high score on the leaderboard, I encourage you to come try aVOID. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/avoid

Finally a gameplay!! Check it out:

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

And of course, you can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tennis-z-a-zombie-apocalypse-tennis-game

:D

Can you survive the night just by judging from the direction of the sounds near you?

Try our #LDJAM entry here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/memebumps … and find out. #FunFact : This game uses 3D audio 😉 so better use earphones.

Comment down the link for your game and we'll check it out!!

Game link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/memebumps

I've already got a bit of a list going of games that look interesting, but looking for more. If you need ratings post your game here and I'll get too it... sometime, depending how long the list gets :)

In the mean time, you can try my game if you want.

Elite Beat Zombygons

A Rhythm Based, Top down ~~zombie~~ Zombygon survival shooter.

We have finished a game which combines RPG and pinball. In this game, the ball becomes a warrior who wants to save the princess. He will go to the Ludum Dare Kingdom, help the villagers, climb the mountain and defeat the witch. Use the left arrow and right arrow to control the pedals, space to continue the conversation.

The download link is here! Hope you enjoy it. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/pinboy-an-rpg-pinball-game

tips: During the mission, you may notice the bottom-right item list, It will show what you have got or the condition.

The icon "?" and "!" will reveal the processing of the mission and tell you where to go.

In the boss battle, the power of iceberg can protect you from the damage of fireball; the forest can help you get rid of the blizzard; while lured, the left arrow will control the right pedal, the right arrow will control the left pedal.

Good luck and have fun :)

btw, we will update the boss battle in few days.

PLAY THE GAME

My own fifteen minutes of fame

This Ludum Dare was my first Ludum Dare. At first, I was a bit hesitant to take part. The main reason being I found out about this event barely a day before the deadline was set. However, I needed to up my game in game programming (bad pun, yes), so I decided to challenge myself and take part!

Man, that was one of the best decisions I ever made.

I poured hours and hours of work into my game. Yes, it's incredibly basic, barely has any graphics and outputs scores and the main gameplay information to the console, but ultimately, I'm proud of what I made. My first game was a success. It was a deceptively simple combination of two genres, or rather, concepts. The mind bogglingly casual gameplay, with a premise only hardcore geeks and nerds would understand, guessing of RGB values.

The experience of using my favourite programming language, C, alongside a great 2D graphics framework, SDL, boosted my morale during the development of the game.

None of the above has made this the best coding jam of my life. That honour goes to the amazing community on this website! From the first moments my game was uploaded, everyone was giving me helpful feedback. Naturally, I acted upon this. More and more people kept giving useful, constructive criticism about how I could become a better developer. I started doing the same. And I think this communal voting on games is what really makes the Ludum Dare tick. By suggesting and criticising the games of others, we are building our own skills and learning more by the second.

If the point of the Ludum Dare was to make programmers want to apply their skills to game development, they have succeeded! Kudos to the team and everyone who has helped me during this journey!

The Best Part

The programming of course! Although my code did get a bit messy sometimes. Just take a look at this: ```c if(state == GAME) { while(1) { index = rand() % 4; key = keys[index]; correct_colour = randu32();

        printf("\nGUESS THE COLOUR!\n");
        for(size_t i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
            if(state_struct[i].code != key) {
                printf("Press %s for %x\n", state_struct[i].keyname, randu32());
            } else {
                printf("Press %s for %x\n", state_struct[key_matchsym(state_struct, key)].keyname, correct_colour);
            }
        }

        SDL_FillRect(screen, NULL, correct_colour);
        SDL_UpdateWindowSurface(window);
        SDL_Delay(3500);

        while(SDL_PollEvent(&event)) {
            switch(event.type) {
                case SDL_QUIT:
                    goto end;
                break;

                case SDL_KEYDOWN:
                    pressed = 1;
                    if(event.key.keysym.sym == key) {
                        points++;
                        printf("Correct answer, %lu points \n", points);
                    } else {
                        miss++;
                    }
                break;

                default:
                    if(miss > 3) {
                        state = DEAD;
                        goto die;
                    }
            }
        }
    }

``` Yes, it's messy. I hate it. But I was tired at the time. If I had more time, I would have cleaned this up. In fact, I am actively working to clean up the codebase now. Despite this, the programming was very fun!

The Not-So-Best Part

I need to work on my art skills. Maybe I should work in a team next time.

Fruits of (fun) labour

A picture of my game on the front page (Hexguess):

P.S: I'm a systems programmer. Hit me up if you have a low level programming (for example, OSDev or emulator dev) question. I'll answer

Hexguess: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hexguess

GitHub: https://github.com/safsom

Twitter: https://twitter.com/safsom2267

Reddit: https://reddit.com/u/safsom2

Discord: safsom2#7370

So. Here it is, I participated in my first jam and managed to publish something by the end of it. And now that I fully recovered from all the accumulated lack of sleep (I will get back to this later), it is time to rethink about it, trying to figure out what I did wrong, and what worked out.

What didn't work out?

I definitely didn't sleep enough. And I even think that this is the origin point of most of the issues I encountered during the process of developing Roguespector). Usually, I don't need much sleep, so I thought, "well, let's sleep even less, and make a few power naps, and it should work just fine." And it worked fine, for something like the first 30 hours, and then my brain started to melt, and I wasn't able to focus on anything. So I had to take a much longer nap, only to be able to finish the game on a hurry so I could get back in my bed as soon as possible. And that's a bit of a regret because, even if my game is playable and, I hope, enjoyable, it could have been better, and I would have had more time to polish the game, if only I slept more.

Not using the planning I made for the game in the early hours. I'm not a planning guy, and every time I work with written notes, I end up tossing them away and let my feelings drive the process of creation. Most of the time, it works great like that and I'm used to it. But in a Jam, time is a major constraint, and not having a plan is really hard to manage. I think I could have made a better, more balanced and constant game if I had followed my initial game design document. I'm going to try to work on that, but I'm not sure I can change that.

What did work out?

The brainstorming. It took me less than an hour to know where I was going. Yet I hated the theme we got! I used a method a teacher gave me when I was in high school, doing improvisational theater : "never say no to an idea, as an idea is always better than nothing at all, even if it looks somewhat clunky, go for it like it's the best idea you ever had.” The setup was nearly the same: we got a random theme, and 30 to 60 seconds to imagine a plot and perform something on stage. So I thought, why not doing the same here? And it turns out it works pretty well. Of course, I kept iterating over the core idea during the whole development, but I stopped thinking about "what" and started thinking about "how" very early in the jam.

Forcing myself to write "poor" code. Yeah, I know, it sounds weird. But I am one of these people finding beauty in code, and capable of spending hours refining his code, so it is as beautiful, and as efficient as possible. That was one of my major fears: getting stuck in a refactoring loop, and losing so much time on it I couldn't publish anything by the end of the jam. That extends in some ways to graphic design, where I could spend an hour getting a pixel perfectly aligned with another. And discovering that I am actually capable of doing so for the sake of productivity is a pretty good step for me and my other projects.

Actually finishing something. My god it feels great! I work on another video game, solo, for more than a year now, and I can't see the end of it. Being able to release a finished project is something I haven't experienced in a long time, and I really needed it. And it gave me a great motivation boost for my other projects, which is always nice.

Conclusion

In the end, I'm really happy with this first jam, and I'm already looking forward to participating in the next ones. Thank you all for making this kind of events, and thank you for your kindness! If you didn't already, feel free to check my game : Roguespector, an unbalanced (due to lack of sleep) turn-based shoot 'em up.

If so grab some friend and hook up some controllers, and fish up your weapons.

Get Ready For.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKKWVzipah4

Come check out our game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fishx-brawl

We are proud to present you our game. It was the first time i used the tilemap from Unity. Always rewarding to learn new methods !

Here are some concepts and screenshots I did :

Here are some sprites for the environment

Thanks to all and don't hesitate to play our game and give a feedback ! :D

Links :

Our page : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/unbelievabubble

Our Game can be played in the browser and every level beyond the tutorial has no highscore uploaded yet.

This is YOUR chance! ;)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-mad-tea-party-a-card-and-run-game

Ok ok... I admit the game may be a bit difficult? But there must be people that like this, right?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bouncy-bullets

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

Try to beat the actual highscore ! (Not for casuals ^^)

This is my third shot at Ludum Dare and it has been, hands-down, my best experience yet. It was a struggle over the course of a month to get my last games enough ratings to be scored. This time, we qualified day one. We're now sitting at over 40, more than double the past few, ratings and the feedback has been awesome. I've also been playing the hell out of these games and I have to say that my skepticism about the theme was unfounded. Everybody seems to be doing really awesome work and I wish there were enough time in the day to play all 3K+ entries. Thank everyone for everything, this has been great. Also, if you have a minute, check out our game Cyclevania, a mash-up of Excitebike and Castlevania.

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

Im certainly not the only one, but this is my fisrt jam, and i really need to know what you guys think. I made a Dungeon crawler/Space Shooter. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/lost-in-spacetime I really want a rating of at least 20 on this! i would love to see you guys play it!

Play our game and leave a comment, I'll be playing everyone's game who left a comment on mine. Or if you don't feel like leaving a comment, just reply to this post.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/music-make-me-shoot-my-gun

So this was my 5th Ludum Dare, and my first compo. All in all I think it went well. Modeling with the Oculus Rift gave me a massive headache on day 2, but apart from that it was pretty smooth. I hope you'll like the game!

Soccer Racing combines all the fun of soccer with the thrill of a racing game. Grab the ball, go through all the checkpoints while avoiding the opposing team, and go for the goal!

Give the game a try! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/soccer-racing/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZh4ls0PTQc

Controls :

• left/right : turn
• space : tackle (without the ball) / shoot (with the ball)

Credits :

All code, visuals, sound FX and music by me. Created in 47 hours using Unity, Photoshop, After Effects, Medium, Figure, Blender, Cinema4D, AssetForge, XSplit and Github. And Spotify in the background.

Screenshots :

https://youtu.be/RXq7-LZROWQ

Hi everyone! This is or Ludum Dare 41 entry!

World is in danger, in danger of deadly boredom! And, our mission as sa​viors from the other world is bring the DANCE to the humanity, to save their souls!

Play here

Thanks for playing!

This game was developed in 72h by: @overmolo + @azahara + @alcarendor + @hiwarp

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 ! 😘

If you want to play with 3D sound effects, download the game on your computer !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/happy-quiz

Just pushed a patch for the game on itch.io which fixes some issues with the html version of the game, like the text in the titlescreen having no spacing, etc... so I hope those who had technical issues before, can enjoy it now.

If you haven't played the game yet, you should give it a try here! =)

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

It's a 6-minute game, you will not regret it, I myself forgot my self playing it while development....

Have some quality fun:

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

Play & Rate !.

Hi, please play and rate our game. Hope you enjoy it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fightin-words-real-typing-strategy

Our game is done and up on itch.io! CHECK IT OUT HERE: https://sparrowhousegames.itch.io/on-the-fly

It's designed for 2 Players but you can play alone too :) Make sure your birbs don't go hungry by switching between them and catching bugs. Answer questions about love and watch their affection grow.

This game was made by myself (Art) and @qkjosh (Programming)

We got amazing response from players - having 34 ratings during the first day was something we did not expect. But the positive response got us off guard too, thank you people for trying out our game and giving constructive and positive feedback! :heart:

Even sporty bot loves the response, as you can see from the photo we took during his date last night!

But we still have a problem. There are still lonely bots trying to find a matching date. We know how robots are, they are bad at relationships.

HUMAN, GO HELP THEM!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$80129

HAve you ever wanted to play the best game ever? Well then youve obviously come to the right place, because a random person on the internet would never lie to you, for his own gain. Anyways, the best game ever is obviously the one i made for the last ludum dare, and I personally think you should try it out. Not because its actually the best game ever, but because I would really like to find out how it could have become better, even if it is already perfect, I mean who wants to play the new GoW game when you could instead defend a trophy and your family honor AND the whole universe, by shooting a bunch of drones? Well then click this link and download!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/trophy-defense

Id be more than happy to hear any critisisms about the game, to make my next entries even better than the perfect game in the universe!!! (but mostly just in my moms basement, where I obviously live)

Hi there! We are planning to build a real game upon the CornWars LD concept. What do you think about it? What would you like to see in such a game?

This is out LD41-Submission https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ld41-1

Now! Take you weapons and plant some crops!

Caroyale is an online multiplayer Battle Royale + Racing game where you race to come in top to survive the subsequent rounds. The “circle” is the race track itself which shrinks as rounds are completed. If you run out of fuel you get eliminated, if you’re not in the top list before a round ends you get eliminated.

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/caroyale-br-racing

Check out my turn-based sports game with optional local multiplayer playable in web browser: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blipblapball

Is a mix of rolling ball game with time management aspects. Serve as much icecream as you can before the time runs out!

Play here: https://probhe.itch.io/super-ice-cream-roller-ultra

Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/z5-pCVgUN8M

Here is a GIF of a very early look at Flaptris. The Flappy effect were still very buggy and unpredictable. LONG LIVE RIGIDBODIES and PHYSICS!

• Early build on saturday morning

• Current build, looks much more polished!

I'm thinking about making it a small time-waster for your Android or iPhone

https://youtu.be/Gl9M7bUpRL8

I used chronolapse and it take screenshot each 15seconds

PLAY THE GAME

A game about love and blood ♥️

It's our second Ludum Dare as a duo and we are proud to present you "Last Girl On Earth" !

We are still working on it but it's fully playable, just some tweaking and bug fixing and it should be done !

For the theme, we mixed a "Tamagotchi like" with a shoot'em up !

We should be working on the HTML5 version soon !

Available for Windows and Android.

:joystick: Download on our page !

If you haven't already, give Super Slime Slasher Ultra a try! Be sure to link your games so we can play and rate them as well!

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

Actually I am a designer so I wanted to make great art for my game. But because of my poor programming skills, there was just NO TIME for that! ;) Most content I planned for the game is missing but I think I managed to get a playable result. It is more like a playable prototype for the game that I wanted to make. But still I am proud that I managed to finish it to this state. I had to do quite some bugfixing after submitting and there are still some issues (play with care;).

The past days where quite exciting and a turmoil of feelings. There were hours when I thought I could never do it! But then I also I was quite optimistic at times. And now i am just happy! ;)

I Hope you enjoy my game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rogue-race

Quite excited to see some other games now...

As always, a race to the finish...

Super proud of @james-war-lloyd for sticking the landing on art, and really being the design lead on the surgery portion. The duel genre really was lucky for us as @mutatedsoftware and I were able to divide the work between the two different games and pass values back and forth.

The game probably has too much discovery as you need to experiment with both games to get them working, and I doubt that anyone will find the victory state (but it's there.)

It gets heavy on the cartoon gore as ailments stack up, but I think it's not too over the top. (Feel free to let us know :smile:)

This is our first browser-based LD entry, and out tools did not let us down (outside of a minor, cosmetic error box in Safari.) We'll take a breather, get back to the real world and post desktop and mobile builds of the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

My coworkers are my first outside testers and watching them play is so funny. They kept swearing a lot and getting frustrated, but they played all the way to the end! I got to see their frustratiom turn into determination and watch them improve.

The game is hard on purpose, because it's highlighting the dangers of distracted driving, so I anticipated them to just hate it. But, to my surprise, they liked the difficulty. I kept asking if I should tweak things to make ot easier, and they said that was the fun part.

I'd like to hear what you guys think too! Please try my game "MiniGame Racing" and leave some feedback. I'd love to flesh this idea out a little more and feedback is crucial.

You can find it here, and if you like it, maybe give it a vote too! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/minigame-racing

This was an amazing first Ludum Dare for me, I'm so happy I joined in. Can't wait for August!

Hey, I hope you don’t mind me shamelessly trying to get someone to play my game… Want to get some more feedback, to be seen. Anyways Its a Race-Tower-Defense.You’re supposed to stop racers from getting to the finish line.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rock-the-road P.S. It has a web(HTML5) version.

Combining a an arcade racer with elements from a dating sim, you have to text while driving to get more time. Like any dating sim, knowing the right answers is the key to victory!

We learned a lot this jam. Such as how important play testing for difficulty is, to build your game and test it earlier than an hour before deadline, and how art assets can change the feel of a game.

Enjoy!