https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/underbreak

Dying is a thing. Escaping from hell is another.

As a newcomer in hell, you'll try your way out of the underworld. Shoot the imps and get the keys to go higher and closer to the surface. But freedom has a price, and some pacts with demons will need to be signed…

Will you spend your life wisely enough to get through the circles of doom? Or die trying?

Underbreak is an Action/Shooter game with rogue-like mechanics, where you have to deal with demons on each level to improve your character (but at a cost : - )). More than 28 different runs !

Our team will review games until Monday, and we plan to make a special Twitch live to review every Ludum Dare game we see : - )

Postmortem:

We are a team of Portuguese developers. We really tried to push ourselves to our maximum production on the limited time we had on this one. We quickly settled on a basic idea since the theme did not give room for our creativity (yea we had no ideas basically). We went for a basic sidescroller slash-em-up type of game, which we knew was easier to make because of the simple controls.

Because we only had one programmer to implement everything that the artist and the sound designer had created, he had to stay up right until the end of the jam and barely had time to sleep so he was a bit overworked :sweat_smile: (he's fine though)

The game was made with Python using PyGame, which is our programmer's favorite library for 2D games. It has everything that we needed and the syntax is clean, meaning it was easier to read code done at 2am.

The color palette for this game is extremelly minimalistic having only seven colors, and the whole artstyle and control scheme was made to simulate the feeling of old consoles like the Gameboy or the NES. This minimalistic artstyle also helped speed up the production of sprites (there were more than 100 sprites done)

Full Palette:

But definifely the most impressive part of the game was the music. Composed fully by our sound designer during the 72 hours of the jam, it has a lot of that 80s vibe to it and we got blown away by it. He used synths to create a feeling similar to 80s horror movies (John Carpenter for example). The main gameplay soundtrack had to not distract the player from the game itself but also had to not be repetitive and keep progressing as the game goes on. The music was inspired by comtemporary synthwave artists like Com Truise & Carpenter Brut.

Soulcore Animations (currently unimplemented)

Even if it does not have all the features we'd like it to have we are still proud of the work we did, and plan on making a postjam version of the game soon. The game currently only has an endless mode because we knew it would be easier in the longterm and would give a lot more replayability to the game, but we hope to implement a story mode as well in the future.

One of the enemies we did not have time to implement was the Werewolf:

To finish: We had a lot of fun making this game, even if it was quite stressful at times, but that is always part of Ludum Dare. We hope that you have fun playing it too! We want to thank everyone for the feedback on our game so far, we are super grateful!

:videogame: Link to the game page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifelust :videogame:

:notes: Link to our musician who made our amazing OST during the 72 hour jam and completely knocked it out of the park: https://soundcloud.com/kamaraum :notes:

I added some rings and a trail of suns to help keep players from getting lost when they scroll super far out.

Also remember: the farther out you scroll the faster you go. The farther out in space you go the longer your laser beams become.

I will add some PvP "rooms" at different zoom levels this weekend I think. So you will be able to grind on the mobs in the center for HP/ammo and then you can go battle players at max zoom among the stars.

P.S. It is super easy to chat now. Just hit enter for a prompt

LET'S HELP EACH OTHER! LEAVE A COMMENT IN OUR GAME PAGE TELLING US ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK OF OUR GAME AND WE WILL DO THE SAME FOR YOU.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mr-mage-and-the-bag-of-coins

About My Game:

You're a young entrepreneur being bombarded by tough financial decisions. You find yourself literally stuck inside this huge coin (there are 5 of them) that you need to roll from side to side (juggling good vs bad decisions) in order to get into the red door. Be careful not to roll it of the table though...

The unique designs of the coins allow for interesting platforms to jump on and to deliver sage financial wisdom :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:

Screenshots:

The most prestigious of summits to conquer.

Really good financial advice. Mr. Moose knows what's up.

Terrible financial advice. Believe me! (also don't roll the coin that way)

Ready for some sea battles ?

Here is a link to the channel: https://www.twitch.tv/raymoclaus Join the stream and send a link to your game. Priority is given in order of received links and to those currently watching the stream.

I started streaming for this Ludum Dare, and figured I'd continue the trend by streaming myself playing your games! I've created a Goolge Form where you can submit a link to your game; I'll be playing through them first come, first served (but priority given to folks in chat) starting at 9 PM PDT. I'll be rating and giving feedback on every game as well. If I get through the list I'll just play games out of my queue, but it would be great to interact with the games' creators in the chat while I play!

Google Form here: https://forms.gle/vFx6xkTzBJzLTKby5

Streaming at: twitch.tv/carlsonandpeeters

Hope to see you there and looking forward to playing your games!

See a reaction of ElysiaGriffin on Danko! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/danko

Some hot content! :hotpepper: :hotpepper:

https://clips.twitch.tv/SneakyStormyFinchPoooound

As usual, I decided to learn something new for Ludum Dare. Last time I learned Go, really liked it and wanted to use it a second time. Learning Vulkan had been on my bucket list for a while, so this was the perfect opportunity to do it. Why use Go + Vulkan? Go is garbage collected after all. Well, what could go wrong?

Some weeks before LD44 I started writing a Vulkan renderer in Go (vulkan-go). I knew I would have to get this done beforehand as Vulkan is very verbose. You essentially start by selecting your physical GPU and then specify everything you want to do explicitly. There are swap chains, render passes, graphics pipelines and lots of different buffers. You have to allocate memory for your buffers and copy the data onto your GPU. All of your draw commands have to be recorded to a buffer beforehand. Doing all of this is both liberating and restricting. I actually settled on using the same command buffer for the entire game, with a separate draw buffer so that I wouldn’t have to re-record anything of the fly. By Friday I had the core renderer done that could render colored triangles in only 1600 lines of code. I decided to use my LD40 WebGL engine as a base for this one.

After the theme was announced, I got to work on depth buffers, texture loading and obj parsing. Now I could finally render textured triangle meshes! The rest of the engine was much easier to do as I could essentially copy stuff over from my previous engine. I ended up adjusting a lot of the physics code as physics simulation is something I’ve always struggled with. I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing your own 3D physics as this is generally a difficult problem to solve. I use convex hull intersection for collision detection. You can calculate convex hull intersection simply by taking a dot product of all the faces and figuring out whether a vertex is inside or outside. This can be used for concave stuff as well if we assume that all geometry is convex locally. Only do intersection on the closest triangles and you should be good. The physics simulation itself just calculates the velocities directly, does a position correction and adds some damping. I wouldn’t get involved with iterative methods or LCP. You just hope everything doesn’t explode.

I settled on a game idea fairly quickly as I thought this would inform my technical decisions. The game would be about a grim reaper’s job collecting souls and trying to make ends meet financially. I didn’t want to make levels manually so I had the crazy idea of generating the levels procedurally. First I started by generating random 16x16 triangular meshes, but pure randomness just doesn’t look very nice. So I created an implementation of the venerable diamond-square algorithm. Chunks of size 16x16 would be generated and then stitched together at the sides to make a continous level. Continous generation of chunks would make for an infinite world. I struggled with this a lot and you can still clearly see the edges of the chunks. I had never created infinite 3D terrain, so I’m still pretty happy with it.

The actual gameplay was very rushed as I had little time left. Balancing was a guessing game and I ended up leaving lots of bugs behind. I had no working Windows machine, so cross-compiling took a bit to figure out. In the end it all worked out and I’m pretty happy I did it. The Ludum Dares that leave me learning something are the best.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/worked-to-death

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Description

Deep Space Prospector is a mining/survival/exploration/space shooter with a nice mood to it (I hope). Roam the vast space of the cMonkeys Empire for precious energy. Upgrade your ship during your adventure to survive scavengers and be able to pay the Empire's energy tax. Punishment for not paying your tax is death!

We've made a itch.io page for it also, for the people who'd like to check this out:

https://cmonkeys.itch.io/ld44

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This is my first jam I submitted a game for (the last one was unfinished and I did not submit it).

MEGATOID is a side-scrolling shooter with 25 waves, a boss coming every 5 waves. With your remaining life, you can purchase upgrades. Each play is randomized, so no two runs are the same. Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/megatoid

After having a rough and buggy start, we were able to find and squash two gamebreaking bugs!.. as well as doing some more minor fixing, which should make the gameplay, errr, decent.
As we did last time, we've left the original version up for those willing to play that as well.

We really like our concept and are likely to continue working to get a (more) balanced and expanded post-LD version.

Game link: Yodin Defense

Sorry for the self-promo, but this was my first gamejam and I need as much feedback as possible. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/vitalgun

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/underbreak

Underbreak is an Action/Shooter game with rogue-like mechanics, where you have to deal with demons on each level to improve your character (but at a cost : - )). More than 28 different runs with 9 unique demons, and two differents endings !

This year, we wanted to create a mood, so we used the theme as a narrative inspiration, and we tried to blend 2D graphics with 3D levels : )

Style Low Poly and Pixel Arts

My team's game, Vital Operations, has received a few minor but critical updates to fix some things that weren't intended during release:

• You now regain all your limbs back when you go to the door rather than just one (and still being charged for that number of limbs lost).
• Victory and game over music no longer overlap with the game and menu music.

(Thanks to @IJZM for the fixes!)

More changes are detailed on the game page. I also got the soundtrack available on Bandcamp, and it will be uploaded to my YouTube channel soon.

We also have a web version of our game available now. :grin:

Check out our game down below! I look forward to playing more of your entries. :slight_smile:

Vital Operations

Does anyone actually download and play the games that they rate anymore?

Come check out our game!

Also, make sure to leave your entry in the comments and I promise I'll get to it in a reasonable amount of time!

Hey, guys, we just updated our game for some bug fixing and balance (check the Change log).

* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/necroblood *

The game will be updated in the future, but probably outside the Ludum Dare.

Hope you guys like the game!!

If you have any ideas, sugestions, critics or so on, Please, leave a commentary.