Hi, this LD I did not had much time, so I thought I would try something diferent, if you are curious, go check https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ludum-dare-review-meta-game
Spoiler: one of the generes is reviewing games on the ludum dare <3
Comments will be appreciated to see what do you think : )
Hello everyone!
I'm the Audio composer and Sound Designer of the game Wizsnooks made by Whales And Games!
For this game I've worked on two music pieces. One majestic game theme and a introductory Main Menu theme!
The Main Menu theme is normally the second music track I make in Game Jams. The reason behind is that I many times focus firstly on the game experience making the game theme and the SFX for it. If I have enough time after that's done, I'll start working on the Main Menu Theme.
The Main Menu theme actually inspired the current main menu background and the lore of the game. As I was regularly posting small updates I did to it. When we were discussing what the name of the game would be, @moski , made a small scrible of the main menu after he was listening to one of my updates.
While we had known that it was medieval we stil hadn't figured out a plausable explanation of the setting of the game. After the scrible we came to a conclusion that our game was a wizard's snooker game(Hint: Did u see the sribbles on the table?)! And done, we just found an explanation and shortly after we decided on the game's name! See what a piece of music can do to the artists? Always post updates to your workmates! :)
You can listen to the main menu soundtrack here:
While creating the game theme my objective was to create something that was adventurous/fantasy, but still casual, with some epic mixed in there.
The game was inspired in some fantasy game tracks, like Rayman Legends and Magicka. I tried to get the more up-beat melodies from Final Fantasy, in the beginning, but that didn't felt really well placed with what I was creating.
You can listen to the Game Soundtrack here:
I hope u guys enjoy our music. Be sure to leave your games in the description if you want specially feedback on the audio!
Don't forget to rate Wizsnooks!
Hey everyone! Come hang out with me and my cats (video feed) while we discover cool games the LD community created this weekend!
I will be streaming for a couple hours starting at 7pm CST (~30 minutes from now).
Tune in to the stream here: https://twitch.tv/thirio
You can submit your game into the play queue here: https://goo.gl/forms/G0Ya5FINlSINhnGv1
I hope you will play my game as well: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bang-bang-revolution
See you soon!
For some reason 3 people found our game so lacking in humour they didn't even rate that category.. Could someone check out our game and find out why?
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/iocus-navis
I have no idea how GIFs work so the line thingy in the gif is not really in the game
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/black-horizon
People seem to like to share their performance on our game Type 'n Jump but that's just unbelievable:
To put that in perspective, the average number of commands used to beat the game is 200, in 10:00.
My personal best as the designer of the game is 96 commands!
"Hey you. Yes you. Do you hear me?"
Okay so the responses to the game are trully awesome so far. If you didn't play "ShootEm?", and you want to play a Singleplayer + Multiplayer game, consider trying it, I am sure you wont regret it!
Important note: You DON'T need a friend to play this game. I know you guys don't have any friends. But that's okay:)
I decided to continue working on my Ludum Dare 41 game, 1on1 World Cup 2018, and will eventually release an extended version. Here is how the game is looking as of now: https://youtu.be/NH67XRtTgcQ
Fixed a dumb bug that was keeping scores from uploading. Come fill up our high score list.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/untitled-pinball-hybrid
Hiii everyone 😁 As promissed, our little tiny team presents you with our very first update ever on our first entry on Ludum Dare 41. This game was done from scratch in 2-3 days, so please advise, content may be buggy XD!
Neverthless, with this update, we introduce you:
Please go check it out and don't forget to COMMENT and RATE!! We want your opinion :D
I'm also rating and reviewing every game I play!
Hey everyone! I'm streaming games again over here: https://www.twitch.tv/flightyfelon
Want to see your game played? Fill out this form here: https://goo.gl/forms/nwe6zUGdOoUvKGSJ2 This will put you in a queue to get your game played!
Want to skip the queue? More info on my stream's page. ;)
One of my favorite parts of building games is putting the player in a scenario where they can triumph and feel good about their victory. Enemy design is a key factor in making that come true. AotK has a few interesting enemies to help generate these scenarios.
For starters, I knew I needed a generic enemy type. An enemy that is ridiculously easy to overcome, and feels satisfying to just mow through. This is where Enemy 1 comes in. They are very plain, they are slow, they have low health, and they deal little damage. They often show up in large numbers in the later half of the game to make up for their lacking strength. Attacking these guys is supposed to feel satisfying as you can kill them in two hits, quickly clearing a crowd if in the optimal position.
Next up, I needed a more vicious enemy. I took the base I had with Enemy 1 and made it a real threat. These turned into the red Clawer enemies. They move faster, have more health, and do more damage than Enemy 1. These guys don't show up in groups larger than 5 for the most part, because they are a force to be reckoned with. They force the player to move around due to their high speed. This makes it tougher for the player to position themselves to mow down groups of Enemy 1!
At this point, I discovered the winning strategy for this game. To win all you had to do was strafe around the arena, swooping in to kill an enemy in the opportune spot, then bounce back to the outside and keep strafing. This made the game sorta boring in my eyes. The enemies were too dumb to prevent this from being a winning strategy, so I came up with a different type of enemy. This is when the Sucka enemy was born. The Sucka is a unique enemy in that it never attacks the player. The Sucka code literally doesn't even have an attack function built into its loop logic.
What this forced the player to do, is move to the inside more often. The strafing strategy wasn't totally ruined, but it was definitely made less effective. If the player just strafed around constantly, the Suckas would eat the perfectly placed tiles before the player could escape.
This led to some interesting levels where the player was forced to lure the Sucka into blue tiles so they could be killed to fill the tile. The Sucka doesn't even move if there are no colors to eat! This did however, lead me to the fourth and final enemy I was able to implement in the 48 hour window.
The Slug is the counter to the Sucka. If a Slug appears on the map, it will randomly move about, ignoring the player unless they get too close. The trail it leaves behind GREATLY decreases the player's score if it doesn't get cleaned up, but it also lures Suckas away from potentially more valuable tile fills.
The Slug also comes in any of the three colors at random. This means they could be used to fill victory tiles be luring them over tiles to be filled, or that they could wander over tiles the player has painstakingly filled in. In later game levels, things can be chaotic and not noticing a slug can be a huge hamper to an otherwise winning strategy.
I hope you enjoy these write-ups on my game entry! If you haven't given my game a try, why not try it now? I'd love to hear more feedback! If you have played it but not recently, give it another try. The difficulty was slightly toned down to allow players to advance further on less plays and see more of the content!
First of all we want to thank all those who already played and rated our game. You are awesome and we are really happy to see people play and enjoy our first game :)
But there has to be more folks here willing to try it out. We really really wanna hit the 20 rating mark, so feel free to play it and toss in a rating. Feedback is very appreciated as well :D
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bubblin-caldron
Lookback through the ongoing week, I've already done the maintaining,
I'm sure this time is the best to step back and set the mood in.
Even now, I'm looking forward, really excited about all of it,
check in on stream http://www.twitch.tv/zm5j
Gina’s world is a game made for people who are willing to dress Gina in the best possible way so she can visit well dressed the world where only she has control of what she does.
But be careful! Your imagination can not be touched when it loses its balance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im3AUSPzMIQ
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ginas-world
Definitely give it a try! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/real-text-adventure
Hey there ya'll! Come on down to Barney's Bird-View Burger!
The only place that flys your food in not once a day, not once a hour but once you make your order!
Food so fresh and legit you can taste the difference! We even got a review in the local newspaper-
Now don't be afraid! Come drive on by in your car just visit us at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bird-view-burger-barn
There you are, in the final moments of PUBG, you and a few other players left. You're being as careful as possible to not get discovered as you move in on another player. You get into position, you aim, and bam! You're dead. You didn't notice the guy to your left.
Does this sound familiar? Are you tired of losing at battle royale games?
Well try Slime Battle Royale. It's single player, it's turn based, it's battle royale. Fight every enemy, mash the buttons and choose the same attack over and over. Stand in the center to cheese the round so you can win. Camp the poison circle and wait for everyone else to kill themselves. So many options, what you do is up to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyeg6q8pIZ4
The elusive bug haunting our ghosts was finally tracked down and terminated. If you'd like, please try and rate our game! I'm taking the time to play as many games as I can as well :)
Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/maroon
Leave your comments below and I'll play + rate your game!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dog-petter Is mine!
It's turning out into a pretty good LD all around!
Play my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/highway-to-hell-first-person-rally
Hello! i’m here to invite you all to try and rate our Game 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.
I wanted to show off our entry, Cyclevania, and maybe get some ratings! If you link your game, I will rate it too!
Thanks for all the support <3
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-dark-of-winter pls I worked hard enjoy
I cooked up a very special SFX soup for everyone today. Ingredients? Every single sound in the game.
If you haven't had a chance to play Super Slime Slasher Ultra, check it out, and leave a link to your own games!
Enjoy your soup!
YEAHHHH, that's right! 😱 "Zombie" puzzle pieces are trying to set something up by completing that old cardboard puzzle you left in the attic for .. hummmm ... 25 years! That is so from the 90's! Go back to your paper contry!
Let's put them back in the respective boxes, otherwise they'll steal our precious time!
Glue them as fast as you can before they reach their destination and step right on the respective colored floor tile to make them DIEEEEEEEE 🔪 .... sorry ... but no ... caa humm .. this is for educational purposes only, so lets just say they disappear ok?! 💨
This was our first entry in LDJAM! 😍 Loved to do it, it was simply an amazing experience.
We published our little game in https://estacaomarte.itch.io/puzzle-invasion/, please GO CHECK IT OUT!!
Dont forget to RATE and COMMENT https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/puzzle-invasion, but first HAVE FUN!
*Please remember that this game was made from SCRATCHHH during the EVENT. Buggy content included inside. Everything you see started from ZERO XD
Try out my game and help me get over 20 reviews:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rhythm-and-cruise
Web version available to for quick playing
My highscore is 200 - can you do any better?
Hey all! I'm with Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS), a diversity-focused game community in the New York Capital Region. Every Ludum Dare, along with having a real-world jam meeting, we stream Ludum Dare games during the rating period! Our first stream is tomorrow at 8:00 PM EST! If you'd like us to stream your games, submit it at the form below:
goo.gl/forms/zQAhArQG3Lfp2imS2
We'll be live-streaming at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace. Games will be played on a first come, first serve basis; but if you're in the chat, we'll play your game first! If you'd like to know our review style, a previous recording of our livestream is available below:
https://youtu.be/ti2zBlE7Ov8
Thanks for all the feedback! Mac Vers adds some elements that I was forced to drop. It is also over a GIG dl. Too Big For This World! Gameplay vids and Win Post Jam coming soooooon!
Hey guys i have the new Version of my game some of the bugs are fixed!! I need you comments and suggestion to enhance my simple but fun game. Thank you!!!
LD 41 entry page : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/gender-circle
I wrote a little blog post about our experience making Flower Hero. You can read it here.
If you want to play our game, you'll find it here. I'm still playing it. That's a good sign, right?
It's extremely hard relying on mobile data for your only source of internet. Every 5 days I spend like $1 for 1GB of mobile data. I only have probably 200MB remaining and I don't think I can afford spending more on mobile data this month. And yeah it is slow. So this is probably the last time I'll rate games for the month.
Please play my game also:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/black-horizon
I made a timelapse video for the making of my game Final Click ZX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptX11nyt-Ws
If you are interested in either Shoot'em ups or clicker games check it out!
Try this one :D
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tetris-escape-2d
Can anyone beat my high score? Comment if you do!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/late-night-shopping
I'm so thankful to everyone who's played and rated my team's game! We love all of you!
We're working our way through the games of everyone who comments on ours now that finals season is coming to a close for us.
That said, there's so many of you that we probably won't have time to comment on all of them unless we find something really standout!
I'm also running a daily recommendation post with the game's character Ambyst as a mascot. We're trying to give games struggling to get ratings some more attention using our flashy characters! Be sure to comment on ours so I can check out your game because I'm definitely too busy trying to hit every game on that list to go searching for more right now.
Anyways, that's it for today!
How did your day go? Leave me a comment!
While I'm at it, link your Twitter down there too! I'll follow people who made games!
Also, if you haven't already (which a lot of you have now) check out Super Slime Slasher Ultra! I think there's still some room on the leaderboard so give it a play and try to get a highscore!
So, friday night my team and I were on Skype waiting for the theme announcement. We had several discussions of cool games we would like to make for several of the themes. Atypically, this time around, there were actually several themes we were excited about or Ok with… but there were a few we were not excited about. So, 9:00 EST finally rolled around, the theme announcement drops... and a collective groan was heard throughout our Skype chat. “Combine 2 Incompatible Genres” was not one of the exciting themes. In fact, for us, this was almost the worst case scenario.
We spent the next 2 to 3 hours agonizing over the idea. Many ideas were thrown around, discussed, and discarded. Every 20 minutes someone would shout “what is wrong with these people… this is the worst theme ever.” Our designer often bemoaned about how little time we have in a game jam anyway and now they want us to essentially make two games.
Somewhere around the 2 hour mark we finally accepted our fate and decided we would figure out the core theme of the game at least and try and make something work from there. We settled on rhythm being the core element (we actually have a real musician in the group after all) and set to work on figuring out what else? How about a.. Rhythm Platformer? No. Rhythm Racing Game? No. Rhythm Dating Sim, that would be neat, right? No. Be it exhaustion of other options or just giving in to the first thing that we didn't all hate, we came upon Twin Stick Shooter (later changed to simply top down shooter, as we didn’t have time for game pad controls, and we thought twin “stick” might be misleading)... a Rhythm Top Down Shooter… we could work with that.
We didn’t have an artist this time around, our usual one had other engagements, so we were very limited. Necessity being the mother of invention we settled on simple 2D shapes, but that just wouldn’t be enough, so we thought... Geometry Wars! We could just make our enemies geometric shapes and toss a cool glow shader on there! Some time in that same discussion Zombies were mentioned (the AI would be simple, they just bee-line slowly towards the player). This is good, we’re digging this, so we’ll have brightly glowing neon geometrical zombies set to a rhythm.
(As a side note, this is the first time we had a title before we even had the Unity project created… it usually comes out of desperation at 9 o’clock on submission day.)
Ok, so first off, making a rhythm game in unity isn’t the easiest thing in the world... let me tell you. Syncing player input to a beat in a way that feels good to the player is what took up most of my time for the jam. I was going to do a writeup on my process and conclusions, but Tuesday afternoon… well after the jam… one of my team mates linked me this Reddit post. This essentially describes much of the same process I went through and probably would have saved me a lot of time... Still it’s reassuring to see that my solution was basically the same solution that others also found. One thing I did add to what he called his “Conductor” and I called the SongManager was to have a C# event that would be invoked every beat that everything else could subscribe to, as opposed to everything having to check every frame if a beat had passed. Another part I am really pleased with is a class I called PulseToBeat. “PulseToBeat” is a very simple class that adds an Animator to any class it is on, automatically hooks it up to an AnimatorController that has the pulse animation, subscribes to the Beat event of the SongManager, and Invokes the Pulse Trigger on the beat. Now, any object that needs to pulse to the beat can, simply by dropping the PulseToBeat component on the GameObject.
Other than that, to be honest, everything went pretty smoothly. This is our 4th or 5th Ludum Dare as a team (not everyone for every game), so we’ve gotten pretty good at working together.
@Dacri, our other programmer (other than me that is) was able to do basically everything else in the game; the menus, the game over screen, the level selection, and most importantly (in our opinion), a heavy coat of polish. The game simply would not have presented as well and complete as it does without him.
I am quite proud of how our game looks, I think it really stands out. The best part is, it was really fast and simple to do. For example, here is the sprite for one of our obstacles in the game.
Once we had that, I was able to import them into Unity and it was just a matter of coloring them in the SpriteRenderer and a judicious use of bloom and color grading in the V2 Post Processing Stack to get the look we were going for.
@DangerousFat is our designer, but unlike myself and the others, what he does (mostly complains) is a little harder to quantify. He does a lot of the things that aren’t often as flashy, like steers a lot of the discussions and serves as a sounding board. Mostly, he plays the game, sets the balance, and figures out what’s missing; I think the power-ups were his idea, for instance. This time around, down an artist, he took it upon himself to do the sprites. Despite his claims of not being an artist, he was able to crank out every asset in the game in record time. Still, he managed to find the time to design and build all the level layouts and create the level balance spreadsheet, here:
I can’t even read that thing, much less create it.
Last but certainly not least... the music. I am so glad that we chose a Rhythm game on this one because it let our musician @JohnRyanAudio flex his metaphorical legs and go absolutely crazy making songs. I’m clearly biased here, but I think he kicked some serious ass in that department. He was able to write and produce 4 songs over the course of a weekend, not least of which was a kick ass Heavy Metal song using live instruments and vocals that so perfectly fit the game... *it’s incredible. Also, I’ve had that song stuck in my head since Sunday evening and I didn’t sleep at all Monday night because it was that stuck in there! The soundtrack of the game should be up Here in a few days.
So, we got the theme that we hated the most and in the end, we ended up making what is probably our best game yet, and the one that I’m the most proud of. I think it all comes down to the fact that we didn’t like the theme and didn’t come into it with a huge list of things we wanted to do. Instead, we had to really think critically about the game only adding features that the game needed. So I guess what I’m trying to say is thanks to the Ludum Dare community for choosing such a terrible theme, that forced us to become better game developers.
I can try and answer any questions you guys might have, just leave them in the comments below. Also, give the game a try if you haven’t, I honestly think it’s a lot of fun.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/elite-beat-zombygons
So this has been my 3rd bullet hell entry for a game jam (first in a LD) - so I thought I'd share how I generate patterns easily. Note that this is for generic patterns - there are specialized patterns (even in this game) whose behavior you'd have to program separately.
InitSpeed: What speed the bullet starts with
FinalSpeed: What speed the bullet ends at
Deceleration: The rate at which the bullet decelerates.
DecelerationDelay: If there's a delay from when the decel starts.
NumberOfBullets: Number of bullets created in one round
AngleVariation: The angle between two bullets in terms of direction
NumberOfRounds: Number of rounds in one burst (one burst is considered firing once).
TimeBetweenRounds: The time between two rounds.
RateOfFire: The time between each set of rounds
SpawnerRotationRate: The rate at which the spawner rotates
NumberOfSpawners: The number of spawners, equally spaced in terms of angle.
Remember, if you're creating a more danmaku-like game, make sure your bullets have deceleration and a minimum speed. This was used in this game.
And voila - by changing just these values - you can get a lot of variations! You can set these variables to vary based on the current level too to make teh game progressively harder. You can try out the effects in our deckbuilding x bullet-hell entry!
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This was my first game jam and I had a blast! I learned a lot that'll help me plan better the next time around. I appreciate everyone that took the time to drop me a rating! I'll do the same for you as well. Let me know how many zombies you can kill!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/deck-of-the-dead
I'm sitting in my chair, breathing heavily. I press F5 for the millionth time, just in case the theme was announced a bit early, or the clock was a bit off. Three minutes to go.
I'm so excited, I have to go to the bathroom. But I rush it, and when I get back, there's two minutes remaining.
One minute.
Seconds.
It's time.
I slam F5 and the refresh button as hard as I possibly can and wait. And wait. And receive a timeout. 'Server crashed again!' I thought. Quickly I rush to Twitter. No news on Mike's page. No news on Ludum Dare's page. Refresh again. Then, finally, there's the theme.
And I hate it. For a moment. And a brilliant ideas blossoms in my head.
First impressions of the theme were not that great. I tried a lot of different methods to get inspiration, my most complicated of which was to find a random number generator, and generate two random dates. The genres of the first game I could find released on each date would be combined into my game.
Which probably would have been kind of cool. I ended up with Golden Eye and some JRPG released in 2002. But I couldn't come up with an idea fast enough, so I scrapped it.
I though back to my favorite genre: Metroidvania. I'd never made one before, which should have been the first red flag. But I decided to mix that with the most unlike genre I could think of: Diner Dash.
The idea was going to be that you were the caretaker of the West Chesterfield Archives, a massive natural cave system full of old books. Your job was to keep the visitors of the archive happy by bringing them the books they requested. There would have been an indexing system, upgrades, and all manner of comical cartoon bookworms.
The key word up there is 'would.'
10 minutes before I decided to knock off for the night, I realized: I can't make this. It's too big! I played around with other ideas, merging other themes into Metroidvania, like stealth, horror, and art house. But the idea I finally settled on was completely different.
I doodled around on a piece of paper for inspiration (I like to base games around characters that I draw). I came up with this chubby boatman:
He quickly became Elias Muttonhedge, the last of the Conservationists, and before I knew it, I had a plan.
To Be Continued...
You can play the final product here: The Fat Man and The Sea
I just realized:
InvadTris isn't just combination of shooter and block puzzle genres.
It's also a combination of action and turn-based genres.
That's kinda neat.
Wanna shoot these damns blocks ? We got something for you ... We'll be rating dozens of games all the week end, and try to give the most feedback we can !
So far your feedbacks had been amazing, we really put a lot of effort into this game, we happy you like it !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/blocksnblaster-1
challenge yourself!
Try to destroy all enemies and score 8200 points
You can play it in your browser Or download it to your computer (windows) have fun
play the game here =) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/crazy-cube
You can do it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/think-before-escape
Thanks so much for playing & rating my game! Every time I participate in Ludum Dare it's always been a ton of fun! (this is my 3rd LD and 4th Gamejam)
I started off hating the theme, I had a hard time coming up with anything that would be easy enough for me to develop in 3 days, it took me around 3 hours to even think of anything, Until I found a site someone made that generates 2 random genres and mashes them together to give you some ideas. I got Escape The Room + Programming, once I saw those 2 genres I got so many ideas flowing through my head, I've always wanted to make an ETR game, and a game about cracking codes and stuff, So I instantly got to work, first thing I always do is draw basic sprites to use as placeholder and I polish them later on if I have time. Then I lay out the level, the UI, basically everything I have in mind. Then I get to programming non-stop. I usually get the core of the game finished within the first 4-6 hours of development, so that leaves the rest of the time for making the audio and finding music I think fits the game well (I can't make music). After all the audio and mechanics are in place. I polish the crap out of the game.
I love the way the game turned out, It ended up being just what I imagined. Except it being so difficult.. I had planned to fix the difficulty but I didn't have time! But, I think the difficulty is what makes it fun, so i'm okay with it. I enjoy playing the game sometimes just to challenge myself and see if I can beat it quicker than the last time I played it.
If you haven't played it yet, Check it out if you'd like! :: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/escape-1
Sorry for the long post :P Just wanted to say I had a lot of fun!
Hey there, I'm doing Let's play videos on Ludum Dare 41 games this time, with 8 so far, and several to go!
Here are the first few videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKZ-GMNkk6I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnlqU52nHaQ
You can find those on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/vincentlequang2
Want me to make a Let's Play of your game? Just hit me your reply in this thread!
Make sure the game can run on Mac (so it has either Mac or Web build)
Also, check out my game :smile:
Hey guys, come on and try this game out and let us know what you think
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/daxua
Woo! For our first Ludum Dare game jam, we're very happy with the positive feedback we've received so far!
If you haven't tried our short pixel horror yet, you can play it here! Comments definitely welcome! https://davidsheadgames.itch.io/helsing
Our Ludum Dare entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/helsing
Hey all,
We are still looking for some feedback and reviews on our game. If you love the idea of playing with your food and wrecking a once pristine kitchen, please give our game a go!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/chef-yes-chef
Now the game has a censor setting, so you can stream gameplay without getting banned from Twitch! You can even play it at work (don't play it at work).
Tsun Tsun Button Mash also has music now, but it wasn't done in time for LD so we're keeping sound ratings off.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tsun-tsun-button-mash
Finished implementing the scoring system and some bug fixes / improvements.
Try your best to get a perfect grade in accuracy completeness and survival!
Play in the Browser or Win. Standalone
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-magic-shotgun-coloring-book
With this joke I made, Roundabout was born. But let me rewind a bit.
Every Ludum Dare, we try to gather the gamedevs from our city in local sites to keep ourselves hyped up, cheer one another and provide quality feedback for our friends. This is awesome and I love these guys. However, the theme hit us like a brick in the face and we were all bummed out when we first heard of it. No one had any good ideas and we couldn't stop joking around and complaining.
In the middle of that, something fun happened: When I made that joke, I got to know that Felipe was dying to try to code a card game. I threw in my passion for roguelikes and it looked like we had a good idea for a fun game.
We were counting on a local musician friend to help us out with that, but we were crushed to receive the news he wouldn't be able to - he's busy with another awesome game's work (and we are SO happy for him). We thought to give our best anyway and try to finish early, so we could leave sunday+monday only to learn and work with sounds.
Comes Saturday morning and we had a working alpha. I grinded Photoshop to make all the sprites as soon as I could and have time to test and work on balancing. I was drawing with one eye on my screen and another on Felipe's, pointing out changes needed as I was delivering musicians, enemies, card arts and background previews. Sometimes I had to stop and write the HP and Damage number progression, how the targeting system would work and more. we only had a couple discussions about how something should be played and how to give visual feedback to the players. It was a lot of work, but the work was going on fast and quite smoothly.
On Sunday we were able to contact Murilo, and he pleaded allegiance -caham- to help us, even if he only had a couple hours to work on that night and a couple more in the next morning. He delivered all the sound effects for the cards and lent his awesome voice for our Vocalist. We improvised he rest of the solos with what we could find and edit.
By Monday morning we were only empty shells of ourselves, smelling like redbull and coffee. Felipe had college and work. Murilo had to work as well. I did my best to publish the game and spread the word to streams and more people, until I came back to work on tuesday and didn't have much time to play or rate others games until now (but I'm anxiously looking forward to the weekend for that).
And today I'm impressed to see we surpassed 40 ratings and have a lot of nice feedback on our game's page.
This is actually the first time I can deliver a finished product for a Game Jam that was my initial idea and something I was really proud to work on.
It gets even more rewarding from the fact that I have been tied to a dozen projects that never got to see the light of day. I wrote countless pages of GDDs, animated pixel characters (and I suck at animations), made concepts, talked to teams... and somewhere in the middle of the project, someone pulled the plug.
I genuinely cried when I hit "Publish" this time.
Because it's another step towards my dream of living off my games.
It's me getting a little closer to being sure that I can be a gamedev.
And it's also a great reminder that I can't quit.
I really hope the HUGE amount of work we did this last weekend can give you all a couple minutes of excitement and entertainment. I hope it can make you laugh with its bad jokes and puns. I hope that it makes you feel challenged and rewarded for overcoming those challenges. Above all, I hope that it makes your day a little bit better and fun.
Because this is why I want to keep making games.
Thanks for being an awesome community. Love y'all. <3
It started as pride. Ha ha ha, players are finding my game challenging.
This turned to a bit of frustration, since so many people seemed to be unable to complete it.
The most recent emotion was horror, after watching @rebecca-kremer play it on stream, when I discovered that through a perfectly normal interaction players could accidentally render the game unbeatable. :frowning2:
It was a simple bug: Cores were deactivating when their shields reached 0 without checking if they had been activated or not. This meant players could accidentally repeatedly deactivate the same core, which borked the music layers, severely handicapped their tower inventory, and ensured the chain in front of the victory doorway never opened.
So yeah, that's fixed now.
In other news, I'm working on a post-jam version with some cool changes, some of which are environmental:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/happy-quiz
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 !
Hey everyone !
My game, Dungeon of High School Romance reached almost 40 ratings, thanks all who leave a comment.
I'm currently at work, but as usual I'm gonna play and rate some browser games during my lunch break, in about 3 hours. Send me your games available on browser (no download sorry, I use my office comupter) and I'll try to play and rate as much as possible.
Oh and also you can still play my game, comments and critics are always welcome : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dungeon-of-high-school-romance
Thanks for the theme, this was a blast to code!
WRECKLESS RALLY, where you drive your tow truck around a race track, playing some kind of Bejewelled along the way. Drop off wrecked cars for points, but mind the frog! 🐸🏎️🏎️🏎️
https://youtu.be/V3wt-auXdIg
Put together a trailer just for fun. :smile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgTUz4eYZ9k
Hello!
Please check out my compo entry - Lands of Hello!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hello-go
It is a mix between FPS and RTS where you contol small army gaining control over the map.
Hey everyone !
I’m currently at work and figured I have some free time at noon where I can play & review some games. I'm currently on a macbook but I prefer playing browser games. I’ll try to play and rate as much as possible. As I've mentioned before, I'm loving the submissions so far but I feel like the reviews have been lacklustre this year. Lot's of copy/pasting going on and I'd love to change that.
If you'd like to get some more ratings stop by my submission and I will gladly return the favor!
Here’s a short list of undervalued games that I played and really enjoyed. (& left an ellaborate review):
* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/delve
* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/type2flap
* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/shuffle-climber
* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ultimate-game-simulator
First off, yay 20 ratings! <3 Thanks everyone who's played.
Now, I knew before theme voting was even happening that I wanted to do a game where you somehow drew what was in it. The original idea was that you would just draw the player character and maybe I'd somehow animate that via code? I was hoping for the "You start with nothing" theme, because it's the one that seemed to fit a drawing game the best, but I was going to try to shoehorn my idea in anyway I could. I was pleased with combining genres too, because heck, drawing can be considered a genre.
I decided this time around, I was going to stream my development if I was able. I'd never done a dev stream before, didn't really expect anyone to show up, and half expected that I'd find I was unable to code while on camera. But I wanted to try it anyway.
Friday
Friday was the only night of the jam I didn't have to work, but unfortunately the theme drops late in the evening for my timezone anyway, so I ended up having to do all my coding super late at night anyway. Ended up waiting until two in the morning to start, because I wanted to stream as much of the dev as possible and that was when I would be free to do so.
I managed about two hours of work that night. The entire time was spent getting a rudimentary drawing mechanic down and working out how to save it into a sprite. My original plan was to outright save a screenshot of the drawn area, and then get gamemaker to load it up as a sprite. But that meant html5 was out. But then a friend nudged me in the direction of utilizing "surfaces", a concept I still don't totally understand but that let me directly copy part of the screen into a sprite, which was amazing and let it function on html5. Kinda. There were other things preventing it from actually functioning properly on web, but it wasn't the sprite saving.
Went to bed pretty happy that night.
Saturday
Full day of work. Yay retail.
Anyway, did some art after dinner. Improved the current ui from boxes and lines, to something that could remotely pass as an art app. Paintbrushes and canvases, all that. Also got some fonts in place.
Started streaming and seriously devving around midnight. Went for about five hours that night. Built most of the drawing stages. Got them all assigned to different objects in the game. Figured out what was causing html5 to crap out - apparently html5 is a lot more sensitive about the ways you create your arrays than the windows builds are. Which is fine. Annoying, but fine.
Then spent a bunch of time picking out colors to overwrite the enemies with. The hope was to pick colors that would be distinguishable, even if a player was colorblind, but that still looked good otherwise. Friends helped me google and we sorted out a pallet that we think would work. Didn't really have anyone to test it on though, so it's more of a fingers crossed kinda situation. Also took away the color black so that enemies would have to get a color, and added little feet shadows so you could always see the color they were even if they were drawn all in dark grey.
Ended the night by starting work on the shooting mechanics. Enemies were given a random color, player was given ability to walk around and shoot. A slightly awkward control scheme was born. WASD and Arrows, I dunno, seemed like a good idea at the time, though I think people may find that a little confusing at first.
Sunday
More work, woo.
By this point, I was utterly exhausted, having gotten maybe three hours of sleep each night. Decided that I probably couldn't stream AND dev at the same time that night and opted to just code privately. I knew I wouldn't have time the next day to do much more than last minute bug fixes, so it was going to have to be a "work until it's done" kind of night.
Did some default sprites. What? Bet you didn't know you could skip some of the drawings if you just couldn't be bothered. Or more to the point, I wanted to prevent invisible enemies in case someone hit done by mistake or something. Drew the sprites in the game itself, so they'd have the right (terrible) look, but turned them into actual sprites via screenshot and Paint.NET.
Got walls in place - originally wanted to have a more interesting arena, but that ended up scrapped for time. But players couldn't escape the box they were in, so there's that. Added two more drawing segments so that the walls could be semi-randomized. If I do any updates to the drawing part, I may mark these two as optional. Because you can totally skip one or both and the game is fine with it.
Walls gained the ability to be painted. Got some really simplistic enemy ai in place. They literally just run at the player. Nothing fancy, and I definitely think it could be improved to look more natural. Buuuuut, it worked. And I got a level timer in place.
Then level definitions. Decided on ten levels. I don't know why ten; it just felt like a nice round number. Levels are actually stored in an array...where every line of the array contains another array. Enemy spawn rate, and the chances for each enemy type. There's probably cleaner ways to do it. I didn't really have any time to really balance this; my only goal was "not impossible", and I think it ended up on the easier side once you get the hang of the controls.
Once all of the game mechanics were in, I started working on the more polishing type things. Ground got painted when you missed a shot. Title screen was created. And KEYBINDINGS! Goodness, I've wanted to do proper keybindings forever. And they worked.
Music and sounds were sorta last minute. Using Sfxr was easy enough for the actual sound effects, but music was more of a challenge. I'm not really a music person. I tried composing a few things on BeepBox, but by this point it was 4:30 in the morning and everything I wrote sounded exactly the same and was really annoying. So I opted to generate some music on Computoser, and I think that worked out well. And while I was polishing things, I added buttons to adjust the music volume and un/mute the sound effects.
I was all set to release.... But then, of course, the html5 version basically explodes on me. No. Really.
By this point, it's 6:30 in the morning. Strongly considered just releasing the windows version and trying to fix the port later. But it wouldn't stop bugging me. Manage to get the images to stop skewing by messing with texture groups - just let me tell you, while I love Gamemaker, there's definitely some unintuitive wonkiness with the html5 exporter. Now, the sprites were fixed, but the text on the controls page was still screwy. Lots of digging and experimenting, and it comes down to the html5 version not reporting keyboardlastkey properly, which was going through the "key to text" script I have, and parsing so wrong it wouldn't even display anything. More experimenting, and finally (FINALLY) I get it working with keyboardkey instead.
Finally, by eight in the morning, I had a completed game that worked, looked and sounded good, and had more polish than I'd ever put into a game before. Swore I wasn't touching it for at least a week. So of course someone had a good idea and I had to put it in last minute. And then a few hours later, an unfair bug that damages the player for no reason, so I had to fix that.
Conclusion
Ok, so sleep deprivation is bad. But in this case I don't regret it, even if I'm still feeling the after effects a bit. I learned a TON from making this game. I will probably be referring back to things in it for ages.
If you'd like to play, you can do so here on my game page, though I do have my 20 ratings and you're welcome to pass by if you're looking for people who actually need ratings. And you can find my stream archives Here on youtube if you care, and on the rare occasion I stream I can be found over on Mixer.
Here's a video of me struggling to complete my own game on easy! You can play it here and do much better. Has a web version! Whoa!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVTGOYJv0-Y
Also: If you want to make your capture files needlessly huge then a film grain and chromatic aberration post-process is perfect.
If you haven't already, you should definitely check out our combination of Tower Defense and Farming Sim.
Looking forward to your feedback!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQNof9kU-P0 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/guardian-of-the-depth
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ssss
Hey there XP users, are you there? Anybody? If you want to, you can play this game and please add a comment if you use Windows XP, this micro-poll would be interesting to have for our discussion about deployment which raises the question what to support in your game.
Also note that XP is only the minimum OS target, you can play this on ALL Windows versions.
Here is the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/no-brain-jogging
Thanks everyone for taking the time to play my game and give very valuable feedback. That's how we all get better bit by bit creating games for Ludum Dare.
I've reached about 20 ratings in most categories and that's awesome. Here is some gameplay if someone is interested:
I'm free to play a lot of games this weekend so feel free to leave a comment and a rating on Age of Pacman and I will definitely check out your game and give constructive feedback! :smiley:
Play Age of Pacman!
I'm really near to the 20 ratings ! help me to get them ^^
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dancing-car
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXaeY3K3fVA
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/turbostunts
Hi everyone! Today we are going to talk about the desing process of our puzzles - runner game, Fat Panda!
After we decided how the scene-view will be our designer started to think about the puzzles you will encounter in the game. This is how the designer write about how it will be (It is in spanish, sorry 😉):
And this is the mockup that our artist make to specify how it would see in the game:
And... Do you want to see how it was finally implemented on the game? Check it out our game!:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fat-panda
Thanks to everyone that is rating our game, your feedback is very very very much appreciated!
(We are working on what you are telling to us about the game, thank you very very much!)
It means a lot to us and we want to improve it after the event is over.
You can check it out here if you missed it: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/you-have-my-word
Why hello there reader!
Following is a brain dump from my perspective of making Jeff From Accounting.
@hi-im-greg has covered a lot of the art process in his post which you can find here - a recommended read if you wish you know how to do a jam after having appendicitis... sometimes I think that boy is actually a machine.
I’ll be digging into the game design, gameplay systems and technical challenges I dealt with during the jam.
The Unity project - including code and assets - can be found on github here
[Spoilers] If you've not had a chance to play our game yet check it out here
We started pretty late on saturday - around 12pm - with a coffee and fryup at a local café. Over food we discussed the theme but initially we were frustrated by the inherent juxtaposition of combining impatable things. We toyed around with some ideas we had pre-jam in unlikely pairings such as making a Dungeon Keeper clone rhythm game, but nothing really felt right. Greg was keen on making an FPS, something none of us had done before and I had been thinking about typing games like the classic ZType and Typing of the Dead. So we spun on that for a while and out popped the idea for reloading what you type, which led us to a typewriter gun and subsequently the office theme. Offices are boring though, and inspired by Davey Wreden’s excellent ‘The Stanley Parable’ we decided to go for a surealist styling.
Our work was kind enough to lend us office space for the jam so we cosied up in a meeting room and assaulted the whiteboard for an hour, sketching out the floor plan and trying to scope out features.
After setting up the github repro and doing a bit of IT Crowd style admin we set off to work. Wanting to get something quick and dirty up and running for Greg to be able to move around the environment he was building I started with grabbing the default Unity StandardAsset FirstPersonCharacter. This turned out to be a total letdown, and I ended up spending a large portion of the day rewriting chunks of it, adding enumerated states, head bob blending, refactoring the step cycle to reset correctly on idle and rewriting Get functions that modify state.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Next up was the weapon and damage system, I’ve written damage systems many times before but as we wanted to shoot letters I had to build around string buffers and character parsing to allow for non alphabetical skipping (spaces in names for example) and case insensitivity. This was relatively simple and pretty fun to write, and it was quick to get Greg’s first pass of the weapon in afterwards. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to finish writing the projectiles so by the end of the day we had some menacing looking enemy capsules with health, but no way to hurt them!
Dale had finished the first bit of music and a load of sound effects, while Greg had roughed out Jeff’s office by the end of the first day, so my initial priority sunday morning was to get these setup up properly so we could get a feel of the character in the environment.
After helping Jeff find his office I moved on to reloading. I expected this to take ages as Greg wanted all the keys to move… but as it turns out I can write some pretty dirty code when I want to. Key GameObjects were found by name and bound to Unity KeyCodes on the assumption that they start with the prefix “Key_”.
KeyCode alphaStart = KeyCode.A;
for (KeyCode alphaKey = alphaStart; alphaKey < alphaStart + 26; alphaKey++)
{
Transform keyTransform = children.Find(t => t.name.StartsWith("Key_" + alphaKey));
if (keyTransform)
{
GunKeyBinding newBinding = new GunKeyBinding();
newBinding.keyCode = alphaKey;
newBinding.transform = keyTransform;
newBinding.originalZ = keyTransform.localPosition.z;
gunKeys.Add(newBinding);
Debug.Log("Found key: Key_" + alphaKey);
}
}
Using these bindings I could then loop over Input.GetKey(keyCode) and animate the keys.
Once we had a functioning typewriter it was time to start shooting things!
My first pass implementation for the projectiles was rough and ready, firing text meshes from the muzzle of the gun and ray casting delta moves, getting Health behaviours from the hit object and applying damage. But not having made an FPS before there were a few classic mistakes I made... more on that later, I could now shoot things!
So I grabbed a chair from Jeff's office, made it an enemy, and called it Greg Greg Greg Greg.
The rest of the day was spent tinkering with HUD, Text and weapon shaders, more player movement tweaks, a Music+SFX fading/queuing/pooling system and implementing a GameManager to help control some of the the more global game logic. I also hacked in a UE4 style "spawn at scene camera" helper to speed up game play iteration time.
Monday was a late start and coffee was essential, so we made sure to stock up before heading into the office. By the time we all made it there things were feeling a bit tense; I had the core combat done with basic path finding but we were miles behind on what we wanted visually and Greg had only finished modelling the office, corridor and lift. Audio was in a good place though, Dale had been firing SFX at me faster than I could put them in the game and he had already written the elevator music. So I took that as a sign to get cracking on the "elevator experience".
We wanted the elevator to act as a calm before the storm, after the first bit of corridor combat against the now family of chairs. It would allow the player to take a breather, enjoy the surreal decor and absorb the mechanics they had experienced so far, ready for the next bout.
I'd not used Unity's timeline before and was surprised at how flexible it was, setting up trigger volumes, sequencing the audio, animating the doors and hooking up music queuing took less than an hour! I'm looking forward to using this more in future projects.
After a quick chat over yet more coffee we decided to scope back our original plan to have smaller rooms off of the main chamber so we could focus on polish. So Greg finished off a quick pass on the floor geometry and I rebaked the navmesh and started setting up enemies in the level.
Next I went back to the gun play, added a reticule and raycasts from the camera to resolve fire direction, but quickly ran into what I now realise is a classic FPS problem, if the muzzle is inside something your bullets shoot backwards! As we rendered the player in a second pass this was initially hard to debug as visually the gun was not intersecting anything. In the end I wrote some debug rendering for the projectile motion and hit locations, which highlighted the problem immediately - bit of a face palm moment really...
The next few hours are a blur, lots of stuff broke, got fixed and broke again. Many tables were flipped, more coffee was drunk and finally, miraculously we squeezed out a build for submission.
For a start we were all exhausted, but more than that, proud. It wasn't quite as epic as we had planned in our heads, but giving ourselves time to polish made a big difference to the final presentation and allowed us to address more subtle niggles like text fading, prompts for reloading and lighting.
As I alluded to earlier the projectile implementation was fairly naive, and resulted in a frustrating bug where projectiles would sometimes pass through enemies - something a number of commentators and streamers picked up on. After a day or two of R&R I got a chance to look it over and discovered the issue stemmed from a subtle and annoyingly simple issue with the motion cast.
If an enemy was moving towards the player and the projectile stopped just short of hitting it, the next frame the cast might start within the enemy's collider, resulting in no hit response from the raycast. I feel like this is probably a typical problem with simulated bullets and my quick solution was to offset the trace origin backward by the delta move each frame. Of course this might result in incorrect hits against bodies moving perpendicular or faster than the projectile, perhaps solved by a secondary cast backwards, but a quick fix was all I needed :)
``` private void FixedUpdate() { float distanceToMove = speed * Time.fixedDeltaTime; m_distanceTraveled += distanceToMove;
if (m_distanceTraveled > maxDistance)
{
OnExpired();
}
Vector3 castMoveDelta = m_castDirection * distanceToMove;
Vector3 traceOrigin = m_castPosition - castMoveDelta; //we trace from one frame back to avoid missing objects coming towards us
m_castPosition += castMoveDelta;
float castDistance = Vector3.Distance(traceOrigin, m_castPosition);
//do cast
RaycastHit hitInfo;
bool validHit = Physics.Raycast(traceOrigin, m_castDirection, out hitInfo, castDistance, hitMask);
RaycastHit damageHitInfo;
if (Physics.SphereCast(traceOrigin, damageRadius, m_castDirection, out damageHitInfo, castDistance, damageMask))
{
hitInfo = damageHitInfo;
}
if (hitInfo.collider)
{
OnHit(hitInfo);
}
} ```
We have been completely overwhelmed by the feedback you guys have given us and would like to take a moment to thank you all not just for your kind comments but also for the critical feedback on our and every other game this Ludum Dare. This will have been @hi-im-greg and my 7th Jam together, my 13th since LD26, and @dale-smith's first ever!
Lumdum Dare is a fantastic opportunity, pulling us back time and time again to help us grow and test both our creative and caffeine consumption limits :)
We are hugely grateful to all the hard work put into the event by organisers and admins behind the scenes.
And until next time, may Sittatron the Magnificient First of his Name keep watch over you all!
Aaron
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fire-duck-football
try cool football with ducks!
Thankful to https://www.twitch.tv/videos/254855593## and grateful for entertainment, music cheered me up!. . .
Soon coming games. dhfjgadslfghasdljfhagsdjfkasd=8gfhhhahhhshdhjkafjkhsdgjfkhasdkjyfgasdjkfaghsdkfijahsdgfkasgdfasjkdhfgn
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ssss
but stay on pause then. coz you have to break your brain to understand what's going on.
Ever dreamed about dating barbarians ?
Discover Axe and Roses, a barbarian world in time of peace where epic warriors have to find a way to spend their free time.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/axe-and-roses-a-barbarian-date-simulator
We have updated the AI in the post-jam version. Please have a go and give us your feedback.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/battle-bots
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mechasnek
Say hello to Mechasnek a 3rd-person-Snake-shooter!!!! Please rate, comment, enjoy and post your high scores!! :)
http://www.inverseblue.com/LD41/index.html (Web Version)
If you want to get some mood of happiness and some story then play this game. You can save the princess and end the game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/numbness
another round of playing ld41 games in stream! https://www.twitch.tv/siraeron, you can submit your game here! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1r6zX53xdu_Sng6EfnDLoECYvl8xtXvsu4yb3Z2e5P74/edit if it's already submitted just tell me you are watching and i'll play as soon as possible :)
Thank you everyone! It's so cool to see so many people try our game and comment it ! The ludum dare community is perfect ! :D If you haven't try our game you can play it and rate it here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/unbelievabubble
If you haven't already please check out my game!
Make sure to leave a comment so i can check out yours!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dating-clicker
My game nearly has 50 ratings, the most that any of my games have ever had...
If you want to play it her is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/daunting-dungeon
Because this guy is dead :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ssss
So, friday night my team and I were on Skype waiting for the theme announcement. We had several discussions of cool games we would like to make for several of the themes. Atypically, this time around, there were actually several themes we were excited about or Ok with… but there were a few we were not excited about. So, 9:00 EST finally rolled around, the theme announcement drops... and a collective groan was heard throughout our Skype chat. “Combine 2 Incompatible Genres” was not one of the exciting themes. In fact, for us, this was almost the worst case scenario.
We spent the next 2 to 3 hours agonizing over the idea. Many ideas were thrown around, discussed, and discarded. Every 20 minutes someone would shout “what is wrong with these people… this is the worst theme ever.” Our designer often bemoaned about how little time we have in a game jam anyway and now they want us to essentially make two games.
Somewhere around the 2 hour mark we finally accepted our fate and decided we would figure out the core theme of the game at least and try and make something work from there. We settled on rhythm being the core element (we actually have a real musician in the group after all) and set to work on figuring out what else? How about a.. Rhythm Platformer? No. Rhythm Racing Game? No. Rhythm Dating Sim, that would be neat, right? No. Be it exhaustion of other options or just giving in to the first thing that we didn't all hate, we came upon Twin Stick Shooter (later changed to simply top down shooter, as we didn’t have time for game pad controls, and we thought twin “stick” might be misleading)... a Rhythm Top Down Shooter… we could work with that.
We didn’t have an artist this time around, our usual one had other engagements, so we were very limited. Necessity being the mother of invention we settled on simple 2D shapes, but that just wouldn’t be enough, so we thought... Geometry Wars! We could just make our enemies geometric shapes and toss a cool glow shader on there! Some time in that same discussion Zombies were mentioned (the AI would be simple, they just bee-line slowly towards the player). This is good, we’re digging this, so we’ll have brightly glowing neon geometrical zombies set to a rhythm.
(As a side note, this is the first time we had a title before we even had the Unity project created… it usually comes out of desperation at 9 o’clock on submission day.)
Ok, so first off, making a rhythm game in unity isn’t the easiest thing in the world... let me tell you. Syncing player input to a beat in a way that feels good to the player is what took up most of my time for the jam. I was going to do a writeup on my process and conclusions, but Tuesday afternoon… well after the jam… one of my team mates linked me this Reddit post. This essentially describes much of the same process I went through and probably would have saved me a lot of time... Still it’s reassuring to see that my solution was basically the same solution that others also found. One thing I did add to what he called his “Conductor” and I called the SongManager was to have a C# event that would be invoked every beat that everything else could subscribe to, as opposed to everything having to check every frame if a beat had passed. Another part I am really pleased with is a class I called PulseToBeat. “PulseToBeat” is a very simple class that adds an Animator to any class it is on, automatically hooks it up to an AnimatorController that has the pulse animation, subscribes to the Beat event of the SongManager, and Invokes the Pulse Trigger on the beat. Now, any object that needs to pulse to the beat can, simply by dropping the PulseToBeat component on the GameObject.
Other than that, to be honest, everything went pretty smoothly. This is our 4th or 5th Ludum Dare as a team (not everyone for every game), so we’ve gotten pretty good at working together.
@Dacri, our other programmer (other than me that is) was able to do basically everything else in the game; the menus, the game over screen, the level selection, and most importantly (in our opinion), a heavy coat of polish. The game simply would not have presented as well and complete as it does without him.
I am quite proud of how our game looks, I think it really stands out. The best part is, it was really fast and simple to do. For example, here is the sprite for one of our obstacles in the game.
Once we had that, I was able to import them into Unity and it was just a matter of coloring them in the SpriteRenderer and a judicious use of bloom and color grading in the V2 Post Processing Stack to get the look we were going for.
@DangerousFat is our designer, but unlike myself and the others, what he does (mostly complains) is a little harder to quantify. He does a lot of the things that aren’t often as flashy, like steers a lot of the discussions and serves as a sounding board. Mostly, he plays the game, sets the balance, and figures out what’s missing; I think the power-ups were his idea, for instance. This time around, down an artist, he took it upon himself to do the sprites. Despite his claims of not being an artist, he was able to crank out every asset in the game in record time. Still, he managed to find the time to design and build all the level layouts and create the level balance spreadsheet, here:
I can’t even read that thing, much less create it.
Last but certainly not least... the music. I am so glad that we chose a Rhythm game on this one because it let our musician @JohnRyanAudio flex his metaphorical legs and go absolutely crazy making songs. I’m clearly biased here, but I think he kicked some serious ass in that department. He was able to write and produce 4 songs over the course of a weekend, not least of which was a kick ass Heavy Metal song using live instruments and vocals that so perfectly fit the game... *it’s incredible. Also, I’ve had that song stuck in my head since Sunday evening and I didn’t sleep at all Monday night because it was that stuck in there! The soundtrack of the game should be up Here in a few days.
So, we got the theme that we hated the most and in the end, we ended up making what is probably our best game yet, and the one that I’m the most proud of. I think it all comes down to the fact that we didn’t like the theme and didn’t come into it with a huge list of things we wanted to do. Instead, we had to really think critically about the game only adding features that the game needed. So I guess what I’m trying to say is thanks to the Ludum Dare community for choosing such a terrible theme, that forced us to become better game developers.
I can try and answer any questions you guys might have, just leave them in the comments below. Also, give the game a try if you haven’t, I honestly think it’s a lot of fun.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/elite-beat-zombygons
Here's the link https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/my-first-game-in-ld
https://youtu.be/QBhSGeDN0RQ
A minimal example of pulling through when block are starting to pile up in awkward ways. Of course there are worse cases of clutter than this, but with some faith and fast reaction anything is possible.
My tradition of doing a little post-jam write-up on some technical aspect (usually graphics) of my game continues with LD41! This time I'll talk about two ways I used gradients for my game Shutin, for the draining bars and this day/night cycle:
Here are some of the earlier jams I've done write-ups on:
LD40: Mallio Cart | LD39: SPACEJAMMED | LD38: Blomst 🌻 | LD37: Lock and reload
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It's a little weird to have one, considering I didn't actually put any windows in the apartment, but as the game keeps ticking day by day, it was a good way to represent the change!
Maybe you can see it, or maybe not, but there are two different light colours being used to illuminate the scene: the ambient light and the directional light. Each has a different gradient that it cycles through during the 24 hours of the day. Both of these gradients are baked into one image, like so:
This has been scaled up eight times from the actual image. Top row is for the ambient light and bottom for the directional one. Figuring out the exact colours was just a matter of running the cycle, looking at it, and making adjustments until it looked good!
The most obvious way to do this would perhaps be to pass the texture to the shader and getting the interpolation for free on the GPU but it felt unnecessary to sample that for every single pixel of every single object rendered with lighting instead of just finding the right colour once per frame on the CPU and passing the precalculated value along as a uniform. Since I made this game in Unity, I just modified the colour property of the actual lights so that I didn't have to modify the shader already using those.
This meant that I had to calculate the tweening myself since I didn't want the colours to just snap from one pixel to the next on the texture. Unity's colour struct has a nice lerp method built in, so I just used that.
Using somewhat simplified pseudocode:
``` // Calculate the daytime progress between 0.0 and 1.0. float progressTime = timeCurrent / timeTotal;
// Calculate how far into the texture this is. float pixel = progressTime * countPixels;
// Get the closest two pixels. int i = floor(pixel); int j = ceil(pixel);
// Save the second value and wrap the index. float progressTimeCeiled = (float)j; if (j >= countPixels) j = 0;
// Find the progress between the two pixels. float progressPixels = 1.0f - (progressTimeCeiled - progressTime);
// Do the lerp! return lerp(pixels[i], pixels[j], progressPixels); ```
Finally, to top it off, the light is rotated 360 degrees every cycle to make the shadows move around!
Might not be how everything realistically works, but it's good enough for me! 💃
Nothing much to add here, but I did basically the same thing for those stats at the top left corner of the HUD:
They go from greenish to reddish through a yellowish passage. The gradient looks like so:
Unlike the light gradients, this one of course does not wrap around since the bars stop at zero.
That's it for now! Might write something up about the paint shader later. In the meantime, please do try the game! 💜
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.
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.
Because I barely had time over the jam weekend to work on my game, I took note of the time that I worked on my project with more attention than usual.
| Day | Pre-Jam | Post-Jam | Pre-Jam Cumulative | Post-Jam Cumulative | Milestone | |--------- |-----------|------------|---------------------|---------------------|------------| | Fri 4/20 | 0 | | 0 | | | | Sat 4/21 | 1 | | 1 | | Design doc | | Sun 4/22 | 13 | | 14 | | | | Mon 4/23 | 3 | 5 | 17 | 22 | | | Tue 4/24 | | 5. 5 | | 27.5 | 1.0 | | Wed 4/25 | | 7 | | 34.5 | 1.1, 1.2 | | Thu 4/26 | | 7 | | 40.5 | 1.3 |
So, by raw labor hours, I'm close to what I could have done if I had been constrained to working only during the official Jam weekend.
I like to follow up on my projects and try to take them as far as I can after a jam, especially for fixing bugs, but also to add features, and tweak mechanics. I'll generally do that as long as the project stays interesting to me, or until I paint myself into a corner and realize that to continue it would be better to start over.
I have still more planned for InvadTris, and so far no end in sight to my interest and motivation to work on it. I'm really enjoying it a lot, and each new pull request, each new release I'm becoming more and more pleased with how it's turning out. I think it's probably my best game to date.
Once I get sound implemented (hopefully tonight) I plan to take a couple days to play and rate games, until I'm caught up with that, then I'll go back to developing the project further. I always rate anyone's game if they leave a comment, so if you need ratings, rate my game and leave a comment so I know who you are.
Two more days of working:
| Day | Pre-Jam | Post-Jam | Pre-Jam Cumulative | Post-Jam Cumulative | Milestone | |--------- |-----------|------------|---------------------|---------------------|------------| | Fri 4/27 | | 7 | | 47.5 | | | Sat 4/28 | | 4 | | 51.5 | 1.4 |
As of Sunday, I switched to playing/rating games, so I'll have more updates eventually, but not for a few days.
Hello, Could you rate our game ? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/midnight-demon
We will rate your game back don't worry :)
Sems like another game breaking bug has been encountered : The buldings in the building panel can't be selected ! Our little code robots will work on it as soon as possible, unless the uprising reach them first !
As requested in the feedback I have received, here are the multiplatform builds of my LD41 compo game. If you haven't tried it out, now is easier than ever! ->Danmakoïd LD Page<- Have fun!
On a side note, I am currently working on a post-jam v2 with music, better balancing and more content!
Thanks to everyone who gave me links to their games to play in front of my class, I will be playing more of them next week. If you think your game would make a good lesson, let me know.
Thanks @rainysolar for your links and game, made an interesting lesson.
If you feel like playing my game (the game was just myself collaborating with friends this time, not students) feel free https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/miss-piss
I’ll be playtesting your games on my Twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/nufflee ! The stream will start at 6 PM CEST/2 PM EDT. I will try to play as many games as I can but I already have a lot of submissions. Also make sure to check out my game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/droneout :P
First I'll play games of people that are in the chat currently, in the order how games were sent in, so I can give them direct feedback and after I'll play other games. Check out the queue here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15f10c6ZBUY9VUgsCdQxWdLv5w0fbNhrA7Kzaf29fmlM/edit#gid=1857248605 .
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/happy-quiz
What it's happening ?! Come to play to discover it !
