We are very happy: this was our first Ludum Dare, this was our first video game working together (as Robot & Muffins), and we get really positive feedback!! Thank you so much!! We are only 3 more rating to get to 20!! So, our last request: please rate. We will rate yours in return! Here is the link!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/pepe-the-power-plant

Thanks!

Hi there I made a little runner in a retro world for my first Ludum Dare ! You can go check it here ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/runn-score Ratings and feedbacks are welcome !

We may have surpassed 20 ratings, but we really want all the feedback we cant get! This is our first published game and we want all the help we can get to improve ourselves. Thank you so much to all of you who rated and left a comment! At the end of the rating period we will be taking all of your feedback and making one final update to polish our game! If you haven't played it yet, please check it out! All of you guys' feedback is much appreciated!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/lichometer

You can also check out a sneak peak of some art for the update we are working on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riYB7PY8CXg

Whew! Finally had a bit of time today to write a quick post-mortem which you can read HERE!

Excerpt from blog post:

Power Insufficient is, at it’s core, probably closest related to 4X games such as Stellaris, Endless Space and (the only 4X game I’ve ever played, really) Master of Orion. Basically, you spend resources sending ships to certain locations to gather more resources so you can send more ships to more locations so that you can one day expand to rule the entire universe. At this super basic level I think the game succeeds. You can in fact spend resources to send ships to certain locations to gather more resources so that you can send more ships to more places and eventually expand your civilization throughout the universe.

Thanks to everyone who's played so far and left awesome feedback! I have quite a few ideas on how to improve the game for a post-compo version already because of you guys and gals!

If you haven't played the game yet and would like to try it out you can find it HERE!

Thanks to all the comments I have seen a few problems with my submission and there are some questions that keep returning. Thank you for all this information.

I updated the description of my game to further describe the things people seemed to be confused about and I could not have done it without you all. So if you played and rated my game and still wonder what every button did and or is take a peek at the updated description, even if you did not play head over and see what it is all about (and if you are there anyway why don't play it for yourself ;) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-or-die

As this was my first LD I enjoyed it very much, even if I did not feel my game was finished (and I still think that) I decided to submit it anyway partly because I did not want to lose all the work I had done, but also to be able to learn from all the feedback I would get. For me, this Ludum Dare has already been a success because of you all, and I learned a lot.

I will definitely be back for more.

I'd like to share the first "document" of Powerless Miner. Don't mind the typos and all of that :smile:

For my first game jam ever this has been an amazing experience and I would just like to thank everyone who's played and rated my game. I know it's not perfect and everyone's mentioned it's really short (only one level :() but I was really trying to build a solid base that can grow into something bigger. It was awesome to get so much constructive feedback and I'm really looking forward to implementing these post LD.

Cheers!

I need only 12 ratings to go. I'm so unclose! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/the-box-of-power

OK, doesn't matter. next time gonna do better.

Hi all ! afer all those rates (almost 40 ! wich is huge with all of our restrictions ^^)

We took the decision to continue this game, and we'll make it more fun and accessible ! :D All the feedbacks were really interesting and helped us to upgrade the game.

You can check the prototype here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/inkrease (Require 2 Xbox controller to play)

Here some new stuff :

• Adjusting character movement
• Playable menu
• Keyboard controls
• 4 Players mods
• New graphics/UI (more diegetic information)
• A dash for avatar, to dodge shot or leave dangerous position
• The freakin timer
• hiding the gauge of territory to keep the tension at the maximum !

Hope you will follow the project ! Bye all !

Here's some character design, with diegetic information :D

Some LD pattern in progress, don't judge please !

Few. The last week was insane. We've finished our game literally 15 minutes before the deadline. Since then, we have been anxiously reading reviews (and obviously writing our own to others) and we have made some conclusions and did some things. First of all, we would like to thank everyone who left a review - most of them are very positive, and those that aren't were helpful too. So thank you for playing and rating our game!

The feedback we have received was mainly split to two: 1. Great concept - most people have said that the concept and ideas behind the game are fantastic and that it is generally pretty fun and will make a great game with some more work. I can't express the joy that comes from all these comments, it's just thrilling. You guys are motivating us to keep on working and make this into a full game after the jam. Thank you so much! 2. BUGS - no idea how this slipped our attention when uploading the game, but there were some very major bugs in there that caused to game to break (while it never crashes, it at very certain occasions decided it doesn't wanna go to the next turn). These problems turned out to be very simple fixes, and we have updated the game. We did not update any content, or tweaked anything at all - the update was purely bug fixes, and the game looks, sounds and plays just the same.

So here we are now. The game is working and we are insanely proud of it. Thank you to everyone who reviewed and commented! If you haven't seen the game yet, check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/kings

I don't know why they are glitching so hard after optimisation, but it's kinda fits the theme and artstyle :)

PLAY HERE → PRAY FOR TESLA

And let me know what is on your mind.

Hello! Before I start Here is the actual link to the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/led-adventure-running-out-of-power

As you know, I keep doing some updates in my game some minor fixes that some users addressed to me. Here it's another one! I fixed the issue where you can't notice if you hit the boss or not. I made a simple animation and alpha controller for now on him. So here a picture. I will upload pics as I keep working on the game. Also I'm preparing myself for a long journey trying to make a complete platform game with this.

Hello! My team have decided that we are going to continue development on our game, Inferno after Ludum Dare. We already have a large set of new content planned, here is a sneak peak for some of the new weapons!

                                                 ASSAULT RIFLE

                                                 NEON BOOMERANG

We plan on releasing a new update that adds these weapons in the game some time this week. We hope you are all excited!

DOWNLOADS

• Download Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/inferno
• Soundtrack: https://soundcloud.com/jackassmusic/death-march-inferno-ost

I just got back from vacation (left the day after Jam ended...) and got back to some incredible responses from the LD community. This was the first LudumDare which anyone on my team has participated in, and we're still a bunch of students...so we didn't really know what to expect. But either the people here are incredibly nice or we're doing pretty well! So thanks!

Now that I'm back home, I think I have a lot of other games to rate in the coming weeks. If you're interested, I'd love to hear from some more people...While it's been positive, we're still only at 12 ratings. Still, 65 downloads on itch.io makes me overwhelmingly proud of the team.

Link to Inverteb: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/inverteb

Hi there ! Go check out the little game that I made for my first ludum dare here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/runn-score it'a little retro runner where you run to keep your power ! Ratings and feedbacks are welcome ! Here is some screenshots !

Thought I'd do a quick postmortem of my game The Hall of the Sorcerer King, a choose-your-own-adventure where you have to choose what spells to cast to avoid running out of mana.

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot!

What went well

I knew I wanted to use Twine for LD39 - I had limited time and didn't want to worry about graphics, and I wanted to be able to focus on story. But unlike my first LD game, The Frog Prince and the Iron Heart, I wanted something a little game-ier than just an interactive story.

I'm really happy with what I came up with: offering multiple spells to cast on each obstacle, and tracking mana and health so that you have to think about what to do when.

I wanted the game to be tough - after all, if you played through without ever running out of mana, it wouldn't be a good fit for the theme "Running out of power", would it? So I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the game so you have to be pretty clever to make it to the end.

If you've played it, I'd love to what you thought of the difficulty - I heard from a couple people that it took them multiple tries to come up with the solution, which is exactly what I was going for.

Since the idea was for people to have to experiment with various choices to beat the game, I didn't want them to have to play through everything over whenever they wanted to try something new. Initially I was thinking people could just rely on Twine's built-in Undo button, but the more I thought about the nature of the puzzle, the more I imagined wanting to jump back to a specific point in order to change your choice.

So I built the breadcrumb sidebar that tracks all the rooms and what spell you cast in them, and lets you jump back to that point if you want to try something different. I think this turned out really well and I've gotten good feedback on it.

What didn't go so well

I have this issue every Ludum Dare. For Formicary, it was the digging mechanic. For Schoolhouse Note, is was the idle animations. For The Hall of the Sorcerer King, it was the breadcrumb sidebar - that one feature that I really want, but that I end up spending five times as long on as I should have.

I'm really happy with how the sidebar turned out. But I wish I had been smarter about accounting for the time it would take, or been able to stop and think if there was a better way. Oh well, there's always next Ludum Dare to accomplish my goal of not having to stay up late, right?

I wanted this game to have a fun gameplay mechanic, but one of my goals when I decided to make a Twine game was to write about interesting characters. My favorite games are always focused on characters and relationships, and it's something I'd love to be able to do myself.

When planning The Hall of the Sorcerer King, I initially thought I'd give the villain more of a backstory and possibly connect him to the main character. I thought I'd go back through the game and hide more hints about what happened that players could discover as they explored. But by the time I was writing the ending of the game, I was out of steam. As much as I want to create compelling stories and characters, I find coding easier and more fun than writing, so I usually end up prioritizing it.

In general, because of the rushed nature of LD - the need to add gameplay people will like and polish that will attract people to your game - it seems hard to pause all that and focus on story and character. I'll keep working on it, though!

Thanks for reading!

If you have any thoughts on some of these topics, leave a comment or send me a note on twitter! If you haven't played The Hall of the Sorcerer King, I hope you try it and let me know what you think. :purple_heart:

Check out Invaders from the Next Planet Over! I'd love to get some more constructive feedback as I'm hoping to build on this project in the future.

Preview:

Entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/invaders-from-the-next-planet-over

Title: PoweRL postmortem Category: Articles Slug: powerl-postmortem Tags: games Status: published

Ludum Dare 39 fell on a weekend when I wasn't busy, and I wanted an excuse to learn a bit about Apple's game libraries, so I made another roguelike, PoweRL:

I wasn't in the mood for stress, so I set my standards very, very low. Ironically, the result is more commercially viable than most of what I make! That might not be apparent from the screenshot, but maybe this new version with updated art will convince you:

Swift, SpriteKit, and GameplayKit

"iOS engineer" is part of my normal job description, but in the past I've avoided using Swift or Objective-C for jams because it isn't cross-platform. But since I didn't really care about the outcome of this jam, I let my curiosity about SpriteKit and GameplayKit win out over portability.

I'm really glad I did, because after learning the frameworks, I spent almost no time worrying about the engine! My last Ludum Dare game, Rogue Basement, needed a lot of up-front work on the engine to get running, and then optimization work after completion. But with PoweRL, SpriteKit made for an efficient renderer and animation system, and GameplayKit gave me structure for gameplay code and a few nice utilities like pathfinding.

Iteration

Swift is a great language for iteration. In a lot of ways you can treat it like a dynamically typed language, but still have a lot of problems caught by the compiler. Even though there's a compilation step between writing the code and testing it, I think I iterated more quickly than I do with Python because I never hit a typo at runtime.

GameplayKit's entity-component system is well designed and honestly taught me for the first time how that kind of architecture is supposed to work.

SpriteKit's SKLabelNode let me write almost the whole game in old-school roguelike style, with letters representing everything instead of graphics. But at the end, it was very easy to swap in bitmap art.

Evolution of the design

Ever since starting to play 868-HACK on my phone, I've wanted to try making a game in the same genre (pocket roguelike). The SpriteKit template in Xcode immediately gives you a codebase that runs on macOS, iOS, and tvOS, so right from the start, I kept in mind a control scheme that could work on keyboards and touch screens alike. Swiping would move your character, and tapping would do something else.

The theme of the jam was "running out of power," so I did something dumb and obvious: I made a robot with a power meter. I put it in a level filled with walls, batteries, and "power drains." When I went to bed Friday night, that was it: a game about getting from Point A to Point B without running out of power, over and over again.

That's an interesting set of mechanics by itself because the player already has interesting decisions to make:

• What path should I take through the level to minimize power loss?
• Should I pick up all the batteries? Is that worthwhile?

The next day I added the butterfly, which moves one tile diagonally per turn. I added a health bar and some health pickups. Then I added a turtle, which moves one tile non-diagonally every other turn. Over lunch, I pondered other enemies I could add, and ultimately plopped in a literal chess knight.

These changes added a second dimension to the gameplay, which introduces new questions and tradeoffs. Players must now constantly decide whether they value power or health more, and act accordingly. They would be asking questions like this:

• Should I pick up the battery, even if enemies drain my health along the way?
• Can I make it through that pack of enemies?
• Should I run through that line of power drains, or make it past those enemies? Do I value health or power more right now?
• If I beeline for the exit, will I be able to recover the power in the next level, which is more difficult?

The enemies seemed to be able to get the best of the player too often, so I finally made use of the tap control: bullets! I added ammo pickups and a simple Bresenham line-based instakill shooting mechanic.

This change added an element of long-term strategy. Players could pick different values for these strategy-axes:

• Never pick up bullets to avoid wasting energy, or pick up all the bullets?
• Shoot everything on sight, or only shoot in dire situations?
• Use ammo early, or hoard for later?

With all the mechanics in place, I played through a few times for balance. I tweaked the level generator parameters for number of enemies, amount of health/ammo/batteries per level, number of walls, and movement cost. The game got too hard after level 8, so I added a win condition at level 8. And that was it!

Influences

Two things influenced my approach toward designing this game. The first is Jesse Schell's book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. It helps frame a lot of important questions. The second is roguelikes in general, which at their core are about creating interesting decisions for players every single turn of every game.

Music

I spent an hour or so in Logic Pro with my 25-key MIDI controller, electric bass, and the Logic Pro Auto-Drummer. I started with the beat, added some bass, added some synths, wrote a new part with the bass, filled in with synths, and then shuffled it all around until it felt passable.

That's my normal way of working when I have limited time for music. For Rogue Basement, my last game, I wrote two songs just by holding down a single note for 5 minutes in an arpeggiating synthesizer and adding some occasional notes on a pad synth on top of it. Another Rogue Basement song was just a piano improvisation jam. When you only have 48 hours to make a game, you have to take as many shortcuts as you can get away with!

Art

I used Apple's beautiful emojis for enemies during development, but I felt that it wouldn't be in the spirit of Ludum Dare to use them as my final sprites, since they are finely rendered illustrations that I did not create. So I vector-traced them by hand in Pixelmator, added bad gradients, and called it a day, finishing about 20 minutes before the deadline.

Those sprites are fine in that you can tell what's what, but I really dislike the aesthetic. Over the following few week nights, I redid all the sprites in 16x16 pixel art. It's more of an explicit 868-HACK ripoff with that style, but it's also the only style I can use myself to create art I'm happy with. I bet that's true of a lot of programmers.

I can't use the new sprites in the Ludum Dare judging, but I can at least use it as the canonical version when judging is over, and recover a bit of self-respect.

Parting thoughts

I took a lot more breaks this time than I did in the past. These days I value my weekend chill-out a lot. But by being smart about tools, game design, and assets, I ended up with something I'm proud of.

For the next Ludum Dare, I'm going to try to join a team.

Hey everyone! I hope you all had a great Ludum Dare!

I know some of you are keen for another jam, so I'm hosting the Music Game Jam in September, where you create a music-related game in one weekend!

It's not limited to rhythm games - you could create an 8-bit tribute to your favourite band, an interactive music video, a Beethoven RPG, or an FPS musical - it's up to your musical imagination!

So whether you're a developer, artist, or musician, if you've got an awesome idea, want to try something new, or if you simply like winning great prizes, it would be great to see you take part!

Please express your interest by clicking 'Join' on our jam page!

You can also stay updated with the official Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MusicGameJam

Cheers! :smile:

I'll be playing and rating LD39 games for the next few hours. Come and hang out!

https://www.twitch.tv/cudabear