Ramadan Kareem from Jana Games Studios!

Thanks so much everyone for playing our game! This is our first ever game and first Ludum Dare, and we're so excited to have reached so many people. If you haven't checked it out yet please take a look! We really appreciate good feedback and try to play and rate the games of everyone who comments on ours :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/money-cabin

Hey LD jammers!

Do you have ancient projects, discarded prototypes, or experiments you grew distant from?

We want to celebrate those with you!

Come join Fragment Jam (June 1-30) and release your unfinished games to the world! 🕊️🛸🆓🌏

What is Fragment Jam?

Fragment Jam is a game jam focused on admiring and sharing unfinished games (fragments). Maybe you want to revisit these projects someday, maybe you want closure and to move on, perhaps you want to make a fragment for the jam. Fragment Jam is here to help sort it out and to provide a platform for celebrating and sharing our fragments.

Other cool things:

• ~$200 in Game Prizes awarded randomly to participants!
• YouTubers and Streamers organised to play your entries and give feedback!

▶ Join Fragment Jam!

▶ Follow FragmentJam

▶ Join the Game Jammers Discord community

Hope to see you there!

As we mentioned in other posts and in game's page, here is a brief post mortem about how was the LD44 for us, our creative process through last weekend and what changes we've made mid-project. It's probably not eeeverything we wanted to share, but it's a good barebone if it all.

If you haven't played the game, here is the link, you are very welcome ;)

I and @RodNasca were working at my place. We really believe that working in the same room does really well for the work pipeline, as it does become faster and our "deadlines" felt much more accurate.

At the start, our brainstorm brought some general themes, like: - Life is mana - Time as life - Trade market items as blood - Planet harvesting (profit over planets exploiting) - "Reigns-like" with life meter

We've set a couple of hours as a limit to come with a decision and the conclusion is literally what you can see in the game. As we noticed since before LD time, we were short of design-power, as I'm most of a programmer and RodNasca an artist, so we agreed on doing "time gates" to align expectations, decisions, and design choices, and we'd continue doing our individual work between these hours.

At first iteration, the game was simple and very close to the final one: The AI controlling the ship's energy and choosing the best usage for it, as humans travel to their new planet. And the gameplay was pretty much about it, energy usage by choices and minimum turns to get to the good ending. The energy drop didn't have anything to do with the time and there weren't any optional endings. Just one goal. After this step, we've adopted Google Spreadsheets as the main tool to organize the dialogs and choices, and from that, we've exported it as .csv with the cells separator as tabs. It was then imported to the Unity project and deserialized to populate our Dialogs and Choices models. This table is definitely much larger than this, lol

The first time gate discussion between us was nearly only about it and how it was an empty premise and felt stale and "numb". It was like the player didn't have much weight on his decisions. So we decided to make it change the fate of the ship's crew, even if he only realized that at the end of each run. So this was the birth of the "Hope" and "Chaos" hidden traits around the game run. It felt only natural that we needed other values, aside from the energy one, as the problem was pretty much we had only one value to work around the "win-lose" attribute.

As time went by, the first gameplay prototype was done and working, but we haven't decided on any narrative and characters, just the stage and mood we wanted. So the second time gate discussion was about the narrative among the dialogs and choices. After another brainstorm, we had many pieces of paper scattered on the table, each one containing a dialog, and, after that, many pieces containing characters. It was like a jigsaw to us, getting characters and dialog together as they seem fit. After it was done, we've chosen some characters to have a more developed narrative, like the Alien and the Doctor, and created the unlockable dialogs by previous choices. Many narratives were aligned on the table, like this one (written in Brazilian Portuguese, btw)

At this time we had less than 6 hours and many things that we've planned were lacking: main screen, sound control, these "quality of life" features. So as RodNasca, as he had many characters to create and animate yet. We've decided to create the characters in separate pieces and animate directly in Unity animator, but as the time was short RodNasca resorted to the good old sprite sheet to it, as he finds more simple and free for him to create and animate at the same time. Before sprite-sheets

And so the game was published at the final minutes, with a quick description created in LD website and then replicated to itch.io, with everything uploaded 2 minutes before the LD deadline. Much closer as we expected, taking into consideration the first idea. We've got very excited about the numbers at itch.io and the feedback here and there!

Even with the numerous grammar and spelling mistakes, many because the text being written in a hurry and English not being our native language, and the limited narrative we were able to do, it's wonderful to have that many people playing the game.

[TL;DR FINAL THOUGHTS AND LEARNINGS]

• Start with the game's final goal and how to reach it. Always. It's a basic step that we didn't take and would've made a difference.
• It's a good thing to start with the algorithms that you think you will need. It was a great deal and demanded many hours and debugging into it when we improved the dialog system with more attributes to consider.
• We've had a wonderful time working on it during the Jam and was very refreshing to watch other people streaming their works while we were at it.
• The "fun" and "ending" experience should be taken more into consideration before starting the programming and art, but as there was no time for more robust prototypes, we are happy with the final result and we think that we've taken good design choices by the end of it.
• We're learning many things from the after-jam feedback and considering many changes on the game before improving on it. It's a good practice to iterate with all jams ideas and projects, and literally every game here has the potential to become the best version of itself :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bloody-accord Ok, so New York Times didn't rate our game, but if you haven’t played our game, you definitely should! It’s pretty fun! You have to learn the right tactics to destroy waves of on-coming enemies by buying shop items and using spells. See how long you can last!

I highly doubt it but I was wondering since I do not have my pc only my phone, did anyone make an Android build? If so please leave a comment with the game link!

Hello !

I did the VFX and 3D props on Seaway, and today I'm gonna do a breakdown of the ship explosion.

First, the effects (and the game) were done in Unity, with the standard Shuriken particle system. I also did my shaders in Amplify, a node-based shader editor. However, no custom shader was used for this explosion. Actually, that's only some simple particle work.

*Let's break up the effect in different parts : *

1. Smoke Particles

This is the first part of our effect, that represents the area affected by it. In a more gameplay-oriented approach, this could be replaced by a simple circle that symbolizes this area.

These are quite simple particles made of an atlas texture, expanding from the center and going up afterwards. Those particle movements could be achieved with a huge speed on your particle system, and some dampen to slow down their speed over time.

Also, their color over lifetime needs to be something like this :

The randomness of all these particles was created by giving them a random spawn rotation & rotation over lifetime. This is a very important step to do if you want your particles to be more natural.

2. Explosion Area

The second part of our effect is the 3D one : an hemisphere made in 3ds max was used here. The material on it is pretty much like the smoke particles, except it has no textures. Basically, the colors are the same. The more important thing here is the transparency at the bottom of the hemisphere : it's necessary to think about how your meshes are gonna blend with the floor (if it's a ground explosion), so I had to make some kind of transparency gradient on my mesh. I did that by painting vertex colors in 3ds max, that are automatically detected as transparency by the standard shaders of Unity particles.

This is a nice method to add transparency to your meshes for VFX other than doing it with an alpha texture. Pretty useful for sword slashes, etc...

3. Burst

The burst is nothing more than a few particles having a very short lifetime. Their role is to amplify the "boom" feeling of your explosion. Without this component, my explosion would feel very flat. The textures used here are really simple shapes made on Illustrator :

The color over lifetime is something like that :

4.Smoke Trails

This one is particularly useful in the "dissipation" part of the global effect, that comes after the climax (the burst). These smoke trails symbolizes the impact and the power of the explosion, and could be some debris that are ejected out. The method to make them is pretty simple : I have an emitter who emits nothing, but is only moving, and attached to it, a sub-emitter who emits world-space particles : with this, I can make a trail of random smoke particles. Also, they are using the same material and colors as the first particles.

5.Sparks

Sparks are quite subtle, and are only here to amplify the global effect. Being faster but smaller than the smoke, they add another layer of detail to the explosion. The only difference between them and the first particles despite their texture comes from the way ther are rendered. They are not particles, but trails. This way, they are able to "curve" themselves when moving and being affected by gravity, making them more smooth and giving them a cool motion.

6.Some tips

-Don't hesitate to use HDR colors (colors that are brighter than pure white) with post-process like bloom, this will spice up your VFX and make them better !

-Also, don't hesitate to duplicate your effects and make variations with it. Change the colors, the timings, adds more emitters, etc... With one well-crafted effect, you can make tons of cool variations ! Here is an example of mine where I only changed the colors :

I hope this breakdown helped you to understand how our VFX were made ! Thanks for reading :]

Don't hesitate to test Seaway !

Give it a try! It turned out well. Let me know if I should continue it. WebGL and Win https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifeforms-in-space

Do you like typing games and/or platformers? Oh boy/girl, do I have a thing for ya!

Type your way out of tricky situations in DEADline

Feedback is greatly welcome as I'm thinking about exploring this idea futher. I'll, of course, return the favour.

I knew I wanted to try my hand at making a First Person Shooter for this Ludum Dare. Problem was, I was stuck on what aesthetic to go for or what weapon the player would wield. After building most of the mechanics, I found myself halfway through the Jam with no art assets or aesthetic whatsoever. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: "Use that old brass gauntlet that I made a long time ago!" So that's what I did...

This gauntlet is one of about eight that I constructed a few years ago when I was more into banging around in the garage than making video games. It's made of 0.22 gauge Brass sheet, each piece hand cut and shaped. The pieces are all riveted onto a red deerskin leather glove, and there's a leather forearm strap to secure it in place.

It was really fun photographing the gauntlet with my phone, photoshopping out the white background, downscaling the image to look like pixel art, do some basic editing, and make a simple three-frame animation out of it.

I only wish that I had more time to make more hand gestures and movements-- maybe another spell cast motion, maybe a melee "claw attack." I plan on releasing a post-jam version (hopefully in the next week or two), so I think I'll take some more gauntlet-gesture photos and make more animations for that. So please stay tuned if you're interested!

Please consider playing and rating my game if you haven't already! Thanks so much to everyone who's played & rated, streamed, and/or given valuable feedback, I really appreciate it!

Please Play Here

I just discovered an accidental movement tech in my compo game Jumpcoins: if you walljump, then immediately jump again the moment you land, you keep your high x-velocity, and it doesn't use a jumpcoin either. Definitely not intentional, which makes discovering this really neat! If I were to develop this into a full game, it'd be cool to make this technique less frame-perfect so I could teach it and use it in level design!

It's a feature now :]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLmKJkRrky8

One of the things our game gets the most comments on is the art style, so I wanted to write a bit about how I did the main character for our game, Pigsy Bansky. One of my goals for our project was to use Tilt Brush (a drawing program in VR that I worked on in my day job) to create art assets. It's a fun way to create 3D geometry that has a hand-drawn look to it. If you've got a VR headset and a copy of Tilt Brush, it's pretty easy to import your creations into Unity (it looks like you can also do this for the Unreal engine as well, but I'm not familiar with it):

• Create your asset in Tilt Brush.
• Inside the app, upload your creation to Poly.
• Use the Poly Toolkit for Unity to bring it into your Unity project.

That's the basic idea for static geometry like the mossy rock block and piggy coins I made for the game. But for anything that's articulated, it's a bit more complicated. I had to save each part (the main body, the snout, the different eye shapes, the wings, and the legs) in a different sketch and then I procedurally animated each of them in code. For example, there's a bit of idle animation where Pigsy will blink and snort occasionally, her wings flap in a little sine wave, and she'll squint when she takes damage.

It was extra work but I think it added to the charm of the game. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Experience a world never seen before in a video game.

Master amazing arrow techniques in Arrow of Light, playable in your browser or as a Windows download. 1, 2, 3, 4!

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/a-n-d-y-r-u-s-exe

You can, Try wraping your head around our game, and be protected ^^

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

The man, the myth, the legend (and good personal friend) @jenkinz94 has officially beaten the dev high score in Knit Worth!

Think you have what it takes to dethrone him?

Try it yourself at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/knit-worth!

...Now if you don't mind, I have a top spot to reclaim...

Check my game and rate ad then I also rate your games.

We did a major update on all the aspects that you guys comment on our game page! We hope that this is way batter than the first versio! Thank you so much! We learned a lot!

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

If you din't play yet, here is the link! We are playing and rating as well!

Looking for a quick webgl game? Then play this! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/enigmadeath