I've uploaded a timelapse video for creating my game, Tesla Defence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5JXVyRnerM

My game is based on real life events.

I live at a place that gets super crowded during the summer holidays, so running at a place like this is quite challenging. The sidewalks here are really narrow: I can pass one pedestrian, but if there are two or more they always try to use the whole space up, so it's impossible to get through them. Sometimes there are other obstacles like garbage, a pile of bricks, a parking car, and so on. Another random encounter are eldery people, who just completely stop moving when I get nearby. With all my respect, but could they just at least... try, maybe? Occasionally??

But my all time favourites are dogs. Tiny, tiny dogs with very long dog leashes, preferably with their owners talking on their phone, looking at something very interesting far, far away. The dog is on the right side, its owner is on the other. What do you do? Do you jump the leash and risk hurting yourself and probably the dog too? Do you rather run over the dog, or the owner? Or maybe you choose to run on the road instead...?

Dogs, get outta my way!

From time to time I've felt more like a video game character who has to jump away to avoid hitting other people and stuff. I regard this is as a test of my willpower. I've felt like this was a perfect fit for the current Ludum Dare theme, "Running out of power". So, this is the back story of my game. :)

If you think you'do better (hah!), give it a try: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/long-distance-runner

Hey if your game still needs a few rates, just write a comment. Then I'll check your game out! Maybe you can also try mine https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/powerman. SO go ahead and write a DIRECT link to your game into the comments!

Thanks to Zack West @zwrawr who created some wonderful live charts of our rating progress, you can see some examples of his charts below.

Keep up the good work: playing, rating, and leaving quality feedback. Remember if you need ratings, the best way to get them is to get out and play, rate, and leave quality feedback. The sorting algorithm does a really good job!

Current Ranked Percentage

Burn Down Chart

Boring technical guy from Volcanic Giraffe is here. If you don’t want to yawn while reading about coding stuff - better check our Galvanica game. It is much funnier that its source code :)

A good thing in JS-based open source game engines like Phaser.js is that you may patch them if needed. Phaser.js has structure obvious enought and lot of in-code comments which very help to understand what is going on. Some things could be configurable, but they are not for performance issues. Well, we are programmers here, aren't we?

One of problems we met: if one sprite is added to another one as child, it is drawn OVER parent sprite. That’s very useful if you want to draw a gun or some clothes. But we wanted to draw a shadow, and it shall be drawn UNDER parent sprite. Why to add it as child? Well, we’d like shadow to «inherit» some properties of main object (position, alpha, rotation, etc.). If not adding as child - we’d have to apply sprite’s props to shadow manually on every update.

Here how it looks by default:

What we did: overriden _renderWebGL method of Phaser.Sprite in our BaseItem class and changed order of rendering

So, how it goes now:

Much better, isn’t it?

Did you even fix/patch your game engine code during LD? It shall look like burning spaceship furniture in its furnace while flying… oh, wait, this is what Galvanica is about!

I can't even believe what I'm seeing. I want to thank everyone for playing my game and leaving feedback and rating it. It means a lot to me.

WOW! OMG!

Play my game on windows. I appreciate it: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/the-box-of-power

A lot of comments about my game were about the lack of feedback of my gameplay, and I agree, that's totally true! You can't make this kind of game without giving feedback to the player and I regret not having the time to implement it earlier.

So I found time to make a new version way more enjoyable, and I do think it is easier with feedback (I tested it too much to know if it's hard :sweat_smile:)

Then... I would like you to meet... brand new glowing arrows!!! And there's a score display too!

I also added some noises in the menu so you can understand that I put an Options menu without having any options yet :face_palm:

You can play my game here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/till-the-last-spin

The updated version is in the... Update section :sweat_smile:

If you already played my game, don't hesitate to give me new feedback about how it is now, it would be adorable!!

I have been using my Postmortem to collect all my thoughts about what went well and what didn't go so well. One thing that became very evident from the feedback was that Art/polish makes a massive difference in the reception of a game. I took some time after the jam (6-8 hours) to do some Art/polish. Those few changes made the game into almost a completely different game even though the base mechanics are exactly the same. You can see the difference below.

So have you had any similar experiences?

Jam Version

Post Jam Version

If you want to play the before and after, you can find them here: Artifact Dive (Post Jam is in the downloads on the itch.io page)

Play Funkotron 5000 <3

A procedurally animated rhythm game where you scare away a monster with the power of Funk!

Play Funkotron 5000

Any feedback much appreciated. Also tell me if you feel like the audio is lagging behind on your system.

If you want me to rate your games: Just add yourself here!

Hi guys! Our game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/last-job) is almost reaching 50 ratings! Thank you for that!

If you have not tried our game yet, we will appreciate if you do it and you give us feedback as we want to continue working in this idea. It will be nice if you vote us too ;)

Cheers!

Link to the latest game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/nightwalk