As a small tradition, each of my Ludum Dare entries contains a reference to my previous entry. For my LD44 entry, 15 Minutes to Live, I included Joe, the protagonist of my LD43 entry The Gods Are Angry, as an NPC. (It's obviously not the same Joe, because - spoiler alert - he yeets himself into a volcano at the end of The Gods Are Angry.)

But 15 Minutes to Live also includes a reference to the game I'm currently working on. Give it a play and see if you can guess who or what it might be...

I know we still have 12 days of voting, but I just get too excited!

Hi everyone! I'm part of a team of two (@Greon) very passionate developers, and we're happy to announce that we are working on our entry to Ludum Dare 44 Jam towards a full game! It's called Death Got Your Girlfriend, and you can check our updates on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Hermitao10

Thank you for everyone that is playing our (very rushed) LD44 Jam entry and giving us feedback. We are using your comments and lack of time restrictions post-Ludum to develop it into a better, more fun, and complete game. We sincerely didn't think it would be such an amazing journey to participate in Ludum Dare, and we're learning a lot, and having a lot of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEoEeRZm6Ho

You're a big squid monster 🦑 They're all of human history 🤷‍♂️ You got this!

I put the effort into making a trailer so this was less shameless of a plug... 😉

🕹[ Play Now ]

Type in key combinations with ← and →, space to send. Enemies attack on-beat. You can block an amount of damage if you time it right

Calling all Commanders! The Ludum Dare fleet needs you! It's time to step up and do your part!

WebGL and Win Play Lifeforms In Space

Our team was struggling with the WebGL build but it's now available to play (and rate <3)! Try it out if you haven't yet, and try to get onto the leaderboard! >:3

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-battle-for-slime-king-on-slime-mountain

Direct Link: http://troydpatterson.com/go2019/slimeking/

Did you find it? :D

In a kingdom whose currency is the chicken, you must lead a brave chicken in his journey to take over humans.

I'm quite happy with my 2nd Ludum Dare, even though it has some glitches (be warned).

Play Chickenarchy! (web)

And rate here.

Play Chickenarchy! (web)

And rate here.

This Post-Mortem was overdue so let's do it.
I participated in this 44th Ludum Dare with my teammate and sister, mirialena. The theme was "your life is currency"

# Day 1

We spent our first hour reflecting on what we could do with this theme.
We knew we wanted to make a 2D game.
We had two ideas at first:
-First was to make a platformer game about a girl who owed money to mafia guys
-Second was to make a game where you had a certain time to live and could work to gain lifetime, but working was making you old and if you reached a certain age, you'd die.

We chose the first idea because, to us, it was easier to make it.
First we wanted to use Unity 2019.1 to make it but we quickly discovered every scripts I made didn't work with it, so we decided to not waste time figuring out what was wrong with it and use Gamemaker studio 2 Trial edition instead.

With that in mind, mirialena and I began to make the charset for the main character and the first drafts of the ennemies. During this first day, we also used the drag and drop to have the player and the ennemies move since neither of us knew C++ much. We also decided goal of the character would be to go to work safely.

Day 2

During the second day, mirialena made the art for the platforms and the charset for the enemies.
She also made a first draft for our background. She also made the gameover screen.
What I did on this second day was the health/money/debt things. The idea was that everytime the character lost health, it lost a bit of debt too, but I never got that to work.
I also had the enemies inflicting damages to the character. I also made the main menu screen and buttons.

Day 3

The third day, mirialena finished the final version of our background. (we only had one level due to this version of gamemaker studio 2 having so many restriction, and the number of maps was one.)
She also made the credits image. I finished the menu, the character inflicting damages to the enemies, the dialogues and the replay button. All that was left was to add the music and to have this losing health=losing debt mechanism.

That was the moment I checked how to upload our game. And that we discovered one crucial detail we ignored: you can't do that with the trial version of gamemaker studio 2.

We discussed details and decided we didn't wanted to abandon but with 12 hours left there wouldn't be much we would be able to do.
We chosed to have a fresh start with a new idea: a cursed wallet that transformed life into money then if the character lost that money, it would lose health.
We also decided to use Rpgmaker MV for this new game since it's really easy to use and it comes with native assets and menus.
I made 70% of the maps (the main path from the village to the witch's home). mirialena made all the maps that aren't on the main path and the credit map.
I also wrote all the dialogues, made all the events (rpgmaker's native programming), chosed the music, made some enemy group, nerfed the enemies, made the wallet and money as items and made the wallet curse into an existing condition, I also had to translate all terms in english since our version of rpgmaker isn't in english.

conclusion

What did work

-Main character of both game.
-Enemies of both game.
-Maps of both games
-Battle of second game

What didn't worked
-Unity 2019
-Battle of first game due to the whole losing health=losing debt that didn't worked
-Some messages weren't translated
-some tiles were bugged
-transitions were bugged

Also you can play our game here

I want to play more of your games! We still have just under 2 weeks to go before the results so we have plenty of playtesting sessions left in us. I'm making my way through the list but if you get around to rating mine then I'll be sure to give your game a go in return! My game, The Poor Rebellion, is reaction based and all about turning peasants into nobles, only to tax the money back off them!

Now playing and rating your LD#44 games on twitch!

CLICK HERE -> BattleCrafters On Twitch

I had the game scaling up to match the screen size, but that was causing it to be harder on small monitors and easier on large monitors. So now I've just went ahead and locked the canvas size to 1080p so it's a standardized playing experience! I also figured out how to embed it on itch and run it automatically. Feels good.

Play SPENDOTRON (itch.io)

Life merchant small update!

Hello weveryone!, Life Merchant received a small update, hearing all of your feedback!.

Have you played life merchant already?? If not, you can do it here!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/life-merchant

Update

• Added fullscreen
• Reduced keystrokes by keeping movement key pressed
• Fixed some dialogs
• Reduced toast time for old age dialog
• Reduced time to sleep guards

Despite the set backs with my recent drive failure, Fools Fortune is code complete today! Featuring a full options menu, credits sequence, progression through repeat runs seen in heirloom and event cards, an android version and hours of gameplay!

Now with that said Fools Fortune isn't finished and ready to be released, we're only at 35 scenarios (out of 166), 78 card arts (out of 166), and placeholder music. I have a writer working on the scenarios and waiting on an audio tech to get back from vacation

As soon as I have audio I'll be releasing a demo version featuring only 11 scenarios (a single run) over on itch.io and the google play store!

Don’t forget to play and rate Fools Fortune here; https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/fools-fortune

You can follow Fools Fortune’s post jam development and get the demo to be released over at:

Twitter;https://twitter.com/Gear_Steak

Itch.io;https://gearsteak.itch.io/fools-fortune

I want to save my post-mortem until after the judging period is done, so until then let's pre-mortem! I think the majority call these "dev-diaries" but pre-mortem is obviously a much cooler term.

Formulation

Like all games, it started with a notebook and various existing chat threads. A lot of my IRL friends are at least vaguely interested in game development (some of them even participating in past Ludum Dares!) so it's incredibly valuable to bounce ideas back and forth.

I've wanted to make a terminal-esque game since at least LD42, so I went into this expecting to force whatever theme won into my game, rather than the other way around. "Your life is currency" was a little tricky until I figured I could stretch the meaning of "currency" to expand to "current-ness", which is really just a long-winded way of saying "now". That's what I'll do: a narrative game set in a terminal that plays with the idea of "now". I'll also put money in the story or something to make the connection a bit more concrete--there's a bit more to it than that, but I hadn't quite formulated it yet.

As to what the heck "ｉｎｖｅｒｔｅｂｒａｅ" even means...it's a cooler, less correct way of saying "invertebrate". And "invertebrate", while having a specific scientific meaning, could also be literally translated as "spineless", which is how I'm choosing to interpret it with regards to the game's themes.

Inspiration

For story inspiration, I looked towards one of my favorite visual novel series, Zero Escape. In particular, I was most focused on the second in the series, Virtue's Last Reward; without spoiling too much, it also has a focus on getting information between multiple in-game timelines. I didn't really want the plot of my game to revolve directly around time-travel, but the idea of being able to use information gained from "bad ends" stuck.

In terms of aesthetics, I can't for the life of me find the original picture, but a while back on Twitter I saw someone post their custom Linux desktop setup and was absolutely enamored with it. As you can probably guess, their terminal was a deep blue-black with golden-yellow text.

Implementation

While making an actual terminal game would have been neato, it was imperative that my game could run in the browser this time around. And with my day job being a front-end React developer, it really only made sense to just build it with React. Plus, this gave me an occasion to make a full=fledged project with the recently released React Hooks, which if you haven't heard are essentially a monadic-ish effect system for React components (hopefully that cleared things right up).

It also meant that I got to take advantage of some of the great tooling in the React ecosystem, such as react-dnd. This made the drag-and-drop feature mostly straightforward to implement, although funnily enough react-dnd has some problems cooperating with the React Hooks syetem, so there was some time spent trying to get the two to make peace.

One cool thing I like about how the game is built is that the "engine" is mostly separate from the story. As many people found out, the entirety of the story is actually within a singular JSON file that the game engine loads at runtime. Theoretically, if you like the mechanics in my game but were meh on the story content (don't worry it's fine), you could actually clone my repo, edit the story.json file with your marvelous creation, and boom you have Twine but with drag-and-drop!

Music

I learned from my last two Ludum Dare games that music honestly might as well be mandatory (and my first game even had music, albeit mixed too quietly for anyone to hear). As fun as the game is, playing something with absolute silence in the background is just never going to be an optimal experience. And even if you don't have a musical bone in your ear, there's so much free software these days that's so immediately approachable. Plus, the circle has swung back around and minimalism is cool again, so you can totally get away with arpeggiating a chord into infinity.

For the music here, I used Groovebox, a really fun synth-sequencer program for iOS. If you have an iWhatever, stop reading and download it right now--it's free!! I spend so many bus rides now just making short little loops. And much like gamedev, while 99.9% of games don't quite hit the mark, the 0.1% that do make it all worth the while.

Before I leave you...

During the compo, my sister pointed out that the font I chose kind of looked like a cleaned-up Comic Sans. Whoops.

You can play the game through your browser at This link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7tueq-DMJk

Where there's smoke was featured in "Best Ludum Dare 44 Games" by Randomise User on YouTube!

Don’t let the music stop. Get coins!

Play in the browser: Here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n09a77RMqE

We as a team decided to film ourselves making Knit Worth during the entire weekend of Ludum Dare!

Join us as we note every single milestone and setback with quick notes and annotations throughout the video. From brainstorming, to development, to completion, it's all there and documented!

Making a game in a weekend is a lot of hard work, but that doesn't mean that it can't also be really, really silly.

We plan to make this a Keyboard Cowboys tradition for future jams. Hope y'all find it both entertaining and informative as a goofy documentary of sorts!

If you'd like to check out the final product, you can find it at our game page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/knit-worth

'Til next time! :pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:

Hey folks! As we're passing the midway point for rating time, I've decided to compile some of my favorites among games I've seen this event. It's by no means comprehensive, as I've only played 30 games of the 2537 games this event. However, I think every title on this list deserves its spot, and I'll expect to see some of these games high up in the rankings come results day.

Without further ado, here are my favorite games so far, per category:

Fun

Timezone by @joemanaco (COMPO)

This fast-paced platformer is just an excellent game to play. You're forced to continuously kill enemies in order to survive, and the level design, visuals, and music are all excellent. There are only three levels, but they're each fairly long and difficult, so the full experience is really rewarding.

Innovation

Demonic Dealings by @paul-nadan (COMPO)

Is it poker? Is it guitar hero? Is it Pokemon? This think-quick playing-card-collection battle game mashes up a number of elements from different games into a surprisingly cohesive game jam experience. After the devil beats you in a hand of cards, your character is forced to gamble for the souls of others to repay his debt.

Theme

Pucamuc by @mors (JAM)

You play as a lopsided pink rectangle who crushes the life out of children in this punishing puzzle-platformer. Need to jump extra high? The cost is your own blood. It's a solid interpretation of the theme, in addition to having charming graphics and music.

Graphics

The 7 Cents Deal by @probe31 (JAM)

In this game, you play as a Catshier, giving change to the feline customers who frequent your shop. The game plays like a traditional cashier simulator with a twist, but the illustrations and animations have an incredible amount of scope and polish for a jam game.

Lousy Life Lessons by @awesomealliterationalliance (JAM)

Because the choice was so difficult, I included two games in my list for graphics. Lousy Life Lessons puts the player in the shoes of a cat stunt double, who slowly spends his nine lives in a series of increasingly dangerous stunt acts. The game integrates comic-esque illustrations and a voice-over narrative seamlessly into an action platformer where you have to always land on your feet.

Audio

Zugzwang by @riv-roy (JAM)

Looking at my graded games, I was a little surprised to see this at the top of my Audio list, because the game is so memorable for other reasons. It effectively plays like chess, from some alternate reality. You have five pieces with specific movement, and you get points when they die that you can use to cast special abilities to gain an advantage. In addition, the SFX are great and the music is haunting.

Honorable mentions for my audio spot include the aforementioned Timezone and Lousy Life Lessons.

Humor

Collecting Really Nice Cats! by @cheesepencil (COMPO)

You play as a disgruntled aging woman named Gertrude in this semi-physics-based cat lobbing simulator. You are tasked with literally herding cats while also avoiding young lads with baseball caps. The audio pushes it over the allegorical cliff of absurdity, and the combination of various cat noises, grunting, and voice acting makes it an overall great experience.

Mood

The Tenth Item in G4 by @daniel-alhadeff (COMPO)

This is probably the best game I've ever played featuring a sentient bag of raisins.

Conclusion

Not featured on this list, but still quite noteworthy, is utsvulten by @ditto. It doesn't fit nicely into any of the other categories because... uh... you just have to play it for yourself.

Also, all the jam games I've mentioned above definitely have multiple creators, although I've only linked the one that appears on the rating review page! Make sure to apply due credit when tossing the names and links of these great games around.

What great games have you played this Ludum Dare? Drop some of your favorites in the comments, and I might reevaluate my top picks.