It's been a week since the event, during which the verysoftwares entry ZETPACK-99 has reached the necessary 20 ratings. To celebrate, here's some notes about its level design, which has been very well-received.

But before reading, perhaps you want to try it yourself: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/zetpack-99/

(1/5) During development, one important thing was making a solid level editor first. I worked with a database of reusable pieces, which made fast prototyping possible. I planned to include the editor with the game, but left it out for usability reasons. Certainly something for future versions.

(2/5) A key theme coming directly from the main mechanic was backtracking and reusing spaces. Besides being interesting as individual sections, each room also had to work as part of a larger strategy of power conservation. In the end, I felt like I succeeded - and also got positive feedback on this, which is a relief.

(3/5) Lots of iteration went into the progression of the scenario. I made sure that gameplay elements are introduced one at a time, even cutting out rooms that seemed to teach too much at once. This way, each game element is explored thoroughly, and the locations become more memorable. With as little explanation as possible, you are naturally lead towards more complex uses of your trail.

(4/5) The way rooms are loaded into the game isn't just a visual effect. It also allowed me to design open spaces, proper for your zetpack ability. If the game world were static, I would've had to limit the player's progression with walls and tunnels a lot more. Loading also made the world build up as you play, which is delightful.

(5/5) Whenever there's a new ability or object, I made sure the player can't progress without using it in a safe environment. It's an interactive method of learning by doing, familiar from metroidvania type games.

Well, it's good to write down these making-of thoughts before I forget. I am overall satisfied with my LD39 entry, it's quite a complete experience in itself but also has potential for further development.

BONUS: Currently doing LOWREZJAM, carrying the creative momentum from Ludum Dare - I enjoy designing virtual environments, and this time I'm doing so in a tiny raycasted world. Here's some sneak peeks:

Beautiful stick figures

Before making all of my actual art and animations, I made a mostly-functional prototype with crappy placeholder images. Does anyone else have any funny placeholder or "programmer art" to share?

You can also play my game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/mountaintop-groovy-robot-laser-battle

We're almost hiting 100 ratings. We couldn't be more happy with your feedbacks! Thank you Very MUCH ❤ A neon hug to you All!

Thank you for all your votes :smile: :kissing_heart: :thumbsup: Also thank you for all your kind and usefull comments.

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

I've been playing and rating games all weekend, the amount of work and talent is as always incredible.

For my 12th LD game, I made a bullet hell with a unique absorb mechanic, and I'm so proud! I wonder if anyone would like to read a post-mortem on it, I'll gladly write one

<3

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/fuse-cell

Congratulations everyone, once again!

I'm live streaming games on https://www.twitch.tv/timbeaudet so join and come hangout. I prefer to play games while the developer is in the stream so that takes precedence over other games in queue without developers.

Come join!

I've been working on a better version of our XenoSiphon game over the last few days.

It will be set in a crashed ship (which could be a model/diorama) with the camera focused in designed positions for each 'room' - so that gameplay can be more like a traditional platformer. Still trying to get to the escape pod before your power runs out and avoid the XenoSiphons who are attracted to any elecricity.

I've blocked in the rooms of the ship and started the whitebox layout of the medi-bay and a joining room. I wrote a bezier spline editor and a spline follower component to make it really easy to string this little demo together (off-site gif link).

We still need a few more ratings on our Jam entry - play it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeHwpuF6EaQ

We are very thankful and really surprised with all the positive feedback we have received. If you haven't played our game, try it here

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/lost-in-translation-at-space

The idea of using only voice commands was risky, but we've been thinking on it for a while, and what better opportunity to try it than a Ludum Dare. The game currently works only on Chrome (Desktop and Android) because it uses the html5 speech recognition api, and also you need a microphone to play it. Because of those restrictions we uploaded a gameplay video for those who are not able to run the game on their machine. You can find the video on our entry page

We have lots of ideas on how to improve the game, and we definitely want to make a post event version, so any feedback is welcomed and encouraged.

Thanks in advance for trying our game, and congratulations to all for the amazing games this community is creating :tada:

Hey. I made some changes according to the feedback I received from the first version of my game. Here is the updated game link: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/697238. Try it out! Also post games in comments for me to rate please. Thanks, PhasedEvolution

Every jam, we follow a certain tradition - we say "we're gonna make something minimalistic so we can do a more relaxed jam" and usually end up with "this is the farthest thing from minimalism". This time was no different. The only difference this time was in the sense that I had even less time to work on this (work on Monday, had a gathering to attend on Friday), so it was effectively 2 days. This also compounded with our usual problem of teammates being 6 and 12 hours apart from each other timezone-wise.

Instead of the usual detailed what went wrongs and right list, I'll mainly talk about our process this time (from my perspective as the programmer / designer).

Post theme reveal, ideas were thrown around - starting from kings losing power to running after batteries. Someone at some point mentioned grappling hooks like the ones in Attack On Titan (maneuver gear) are cool. And everyone else was like YAS GRAPPLING HOOKS ARE COOL WE'RE GONNA MAKE A GAME WITH THAT!

Didn't take long to come up with an idea around that, since we went with the least nuanced and most literal interpretation of the theme. Our original idea had the player running, jumping and hooking around, building, recharging and upgrading turrets, as well as attacking enemies with the hook.

This may have been our first mistake. We built a game around a feature because we thought it was cool, cramming the theme in. We didn't ask "Why do we need this feature again?" (I asked it actually, the reply was because it's cool.)

This was a mistake, not because it's a bad idea - but I spent almost the entire 1st day getting the player movement and hooking just right, trying out several combinations.

This left the 2nd day for... literally everything else from turrets, AI, player attacking, recharging, a building and upgrading system etc. Around midway through Sunday, after I programmed the system for turret upgrading in, I decided - screw this. I wouldn't be getting enough time to balance anything with different upgrade levels, seeing as I'd barely have any time to finish programming all of the systems. I could forget about designing a level and waves.

At that point, we decided to scrap the upgrade, building and player attacking systems (even if I had the upgrade system programmed in). We'd be doing just the core running around with hooks (cuz it's fun), recharging turrets and managing resources. We decided to take away control from the player.

This led to our 2nd mistake - taking away agency from the player to some extent. The player never had any direct interaction with the enemies, and basically once enemies ganged up - you'd have nothing to do but hopelessly watch things get destroyed (it also didn't help that it's not the most balanced game, considering I had like an hour to program the waves).

By Sunday 4 am, I finished programming everything - but the game looked like this.

I had to go to sleep, and the artists in our team are 12 hours away from me timezone-wise, so I told them that I'm gonna go to sleep and you guys need to make it beautiful by tomorrow.

I woke up to this.

Quite a change huh? I love having teammates I can trust without telling them what to do. :) (Ignore the background, it's controlled through code.)

And I proceeded to upload the game after that, which is where the jam version is at. Sure, the artists changed some depth layers over the UI and you can see the UI arrows going beneath walls in the jam version, but that wasn't a big deal considering I had to push the level's design almost entirely up to them this time. Are we satisfied with the end product? Can't say on behalf of the others, but yeah - to an extent for me. I keep thinking whether we should've kept all the features and removed the hooking, or kept the hooking and removed features (like we did). Giving weight to these tradeoffs are the hardest decisions in a jam.

Protip for next jam: Make it minimalistic for once.

Oh, and you can play our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/zapdune

Thanks for reading!

DEAR GOD! There where so many little bugs in my game that made it impossible to run on some computers! Finally it will run on all of my test computers! Do my a favor and go try it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/plasma-arena

Bug fixes, balance, difficulty levels and intro/game over screens!

The game is finally starting to match the epic (and ridiculous) vision I had in my head.

I would love for some experienced game devs to play and give me some feedback + tips.

Now I'm off to bed 'cause it's almost 5am and I'm about to collapse!

Edit:

Oops, forgot to add a link

Click me and chase some cats!

After the jam I did one small bugfix and some porting, so there are now both Windows and OSX versions available.

But, I also realized the game page was really bland, so I worked up some character art for the Doctor in my game!

As well as recording a final gameplay GIF to show off what you're gonna be playing before you download!

I'm short on votes, but have had good feedback from the people who have played so far. Hope I can make the minimum before voting ends, so please help! I'm trying to play as many of everyone else's entries as I can, too. There are so many great jam entries to enjoy!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/patient-out-of-time

If your game is a web game, send it to me! :D

This is my second LD, and luckily, this time I knew the rules about the voting system (unlike last time). So this time I reached 60 votes :') (unlike the last time, where I barely made it to the minimum limit right before the result day. I'd almost given up hope of seeing any final results). Seeing these ratings is no less than getting paid for a tough task you did, and it feels great :D. I want to thank the community for being awesome, and also everyone who has spent time playing and rating, especially the ones taking time to leave long and detailed votes. Thank you everyone :D

By the way, here's a product placement. If anyone wants to play my game, here it is: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/motherboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikouUdeEFRY&feature=youtu.be * https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/fuuuuuuck * https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/fuuuuuuck * https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/fuuuuuuck

The year is >2063. Refrigerators have become self-aware. For the first time you can experience a mind-lifting adventure of a refrigerator running on batteries seeking the meaning to existence.

"Oh, and don't forget to drop a comment/feedback so we can return the review-favor!" - Bosch KGE36BW40, year 15 of the Refrigerator era

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/is-your-refrigerator-running https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/is-your-refrigerator-running

It's as the title says, you can now play Scrapjunk Couriers in your browser right here: https://rebtf.itch.io/scrapjunk-courier

It also does technically work on mobile devices but the window size doesn't scale so unless you have a massive device then you'll have half the game cut off. You also can't press any keyboard buttons so if you lose you'll have to reload the page.

It was a super simple change as well, I made the game in Game Maker Studio and I did already have the HTML5 export but when I tried it during the jam it was super laggy and all the sprites were on the wrong objects. Later on I did a bit of research and found that I literally only had to press one button, to clean the project asset compiler cache, and it worked perfectly.

So if you haven't already played my game or were previously unable to I'd love it if you could check it out!

This is my second Ludum Dare and my first time compo

I'm too excited to create the Post-Jam version so I need a lot of feedback.

Comment your game so I can rate and give feedback too.

Game Link:

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