A strategy game in 3 days- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/dental-dosh

You are part of an experiment to save the mouth from plaque, bacteria and ulcers. You can move around the mouth and place towers - Toothpaste Tower, Toothbrush Tower, Mouthwash Monument, Floss Fortress.

The enemies drop teeth they have acquired - use the character to pick them up.

If you run out of teeth, GAME OVER!

Keyboard Controls

Arrow keys - move the character

X to interact/show tower menu

Enter/Mouse Click to build tower

Gamepad Controls

Analogue stick - move character

X to interact/show menu/build tower

Thank you to everyone who rated this Game to get it over 20 ratings :smile:

Play the game here

GOD MODE let's you skip days and other stuff, although it is really basic at the moment. It's now easier to get different endings! Try getting the best one!

Squishies contains quite some things I never tried before! It was an interesting compo for me so I decided to document the process.

The theme and brainstorming!

For me the theme was announced at 3 AM. I woke up at 7 AM, full of energy to start!

"Your life is currency". Hmmm... what to make with that? Like last Ludum Dare, I found the theme quite hard. I don't mind though, it forces me to think of completely new game concepts. I don't want to make just any type of game though... As usual, next to the theme, I had some restrictions of my own:

• I wanted to make the main characters really cute. I never made a game with cute characters before and it sounded like a fun challenge.
• I didn't want to work with Health Points (HP) or any other kind of number. It might feel like a strange restriction, but I didn't want the player to constantly have to look at the HP bar to play the game. I wanted him to look at the actual gameplay, levels and graphics, whatever those would become. In general I simply like to avoid UI in games whenever possible.

Cute characters is still ok as a restriction. Not having any kind of life points is a lot harder with a theme like "your life is currency". Uh...

I started brainstorming.

One of the first ideas that came to minds was: "You are a bunch of cute characters with abilities". Cute, check. Each character could only use the ability once and "died" after that? Theme, check. No HP bar, check. You just need enough cute characters for the player to use, really. :smiley:

But what would the gameplay be? The above idea did not really limit gameplay options. It could still become almost anything. It could be some kind of "war game" where you have two camps? On the paper I used for brainstorming I had "Tower Defense", "protection mechanisms" but also "shape-shifting eggs" :smile: written down. I was thinking of some kind of civilization of "blobs" where the player would be a god. I thought of "infinite runner" with a whole bunch of cute characters. Anyway, as crazy as it sounds I actually liked the idea with the "shape-shifting eggs". Maybe they could transform into a gaint fluffy block which you can use to continue in the level? With those blocks, the game could become a nice "puzzle platformer game".

I decided to go with that idea.

Having a puzzle platformer with a lot of cute characters would be hard though. How to control them? You cannot control all of them with the keyboard. Maybe I could just select a bunch and point them where to go? That would mean they would need platformer pathfinding and some AI which could jump those platforms... I don't think I have ever seen something like that before. It could be something fun to try though.

Below some quick scribbles during brainstorming... In the beginning the squishies had feet! Also, in the image below the shape-shifting "eggs" became square! :smiley: There is also the word "hopping" as an idea for movement and a big "Squishy".

I was also thinking of making it physics based. It could be fun to see the characters tumble over each other. That would make the AI part even harder though...

Time to upgrade Unity?

It is 8:30 AM now and I just started my computer. I wasn't very well prepared for this Ludum Dare. I had been thinking of streaming the development but I did not prepare that. Instead I downloaded some simple screen recording software "Chronolapse" which I had seen somewhere on this site. I also wanted to try out the new Shader Graph in Unity so I started downloading the new version.

Downloading the new version of Unity during the jam was not a very smart decision. It also did not help that my hard drive was full. I ended up not being able to use it at all because it gave some strange error message when starting up. Luckily, I still had Unity 2018.3 installed so I used that one, but I definitely lost some valuable time. Hmmm...

Art!

While Unity was still downloading I wanted to start with the art (9 AM now). First, I spent around 40 minutes looking for references (work of other artists) on the internet and deciding on a color palette. I am using a tool to keep those reference images on the screen called Kuadro Beta (0.8.5) and to draw I am using a wacom bamboo mte-450a pen tablet (so an old model, but it still works).

After that I opened Krita (2.8) and starting painting. The whole process you see below took a bit more than an hour.

New Unity Project & Time to upgrade Krita?

Still using the older version of Unity, I started importing the "blob" into Unity (11 AM). I wanted to import all layer groups from Krita separately so I had more control. However, apparently my version of Krita was too old and it did not support exporting all layer groups separately. I could export all layers manually, but if I wanted to draw other things I would have to do that for those as well. So, of course I started upgrading Krita... :slightsmile: I don't learn, do I? :sweatsmile: This upgrade ended up going well though...

I wanted to make the blobs a bit ... err ... squishy. I thought it could be fun to have them stretch and get squished together on impact.

To be continued...

Since this post is already getting long and I didn't even start with the squishiness, hair simulation, path finding and AI, I will split up the "origin story of Squishies" in a couple of posts. Stay tuned for more!

In case you are interested, you can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/squishies

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

Play Mind Over Matter Here

Thanks to your feedback, I have managed to update MOM. There weren't any game breaking bugs. The following features are more like improvements to the quality of gameplay.

1. Camera Improvements Camera Y-movement is fixed. Additionally, you can also press down to peek whats beneath you. This'll help with any unwanted suprises. Camera horizontal offset is increased. This makes it easier to look at what is ahead or behind you.

2. Platform Improvements - Some platforms were impossible to navigate. This is fixed.

3. Psyhological Conditions: Self-doubt - Now you need to press Q around 5 times. This makes it less annoying. This also occurse less frequently. Depression - A sound primer will be heard before depression occurs. This will prepare you for the decrease in speed and jump ability. Claustrophobia - Made the areas of darkness more visible to balance gameplay.

4. Rain - The rain particles are more visible.

5. Level Progression - The Red UI in the main scene is animated.

I also cheekely added some links to my other LD games in-game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-shifter-machine The shifter machine by Uniday Studios is great! Sadly he hasn't had time to rate any games, but it is still a great game!

Hey my friend AffinitChris Is currently Streaming Ludum dare Entries on twitch. If you have game that you would like him to play. Come and join us! Everyone is welcome!

https://www.twitch.tv/affinitychris

In lieu of a full Post Mortem, which I definitely want to put together later, here's some thoughts on the visual design from our LD44 game, Signal. (Also, if you'd like to play it, you can do so right here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/signal)

The game features an Earth abandoned by most humans, where Robots and AI Systems inherited the world they left behind. And in this new robot society, some of the robots have run amok and need to be disabled and repaired! Since we didn't have much time left for dedicated story-writing, I wanted to do what I could to convey some of these setting ideas through the visuals.

For one, I wanted to make NPC robots be "normal" models of the enemy robots, with different monitor colors and expressions, to help convey the "buggy robots" problem. Since we also wanted enemies with different behaviors (walking, jumping, flying, chasing, stationary, and so on), I tried to design different models, to communicate a little bit of what they were all about! Dogs chase, rabbits hop, etc. Really enjoyed the challenge of figuring out their designs, and making them each look unique, but similar.

(P.S. I love all my chunky lads, but the expression on the croco-dog Chase Robot is perhaps my favorite)

The setting was an abandoned Earth inherited by machines, which was a big idea we really didn't get much time to play with... especially since we had bitten off a big challenge, in making a metroidvania in a weekend! We had a lot of design notes about the setting and story behind each zone planned, so I tried to at least keep the story in mind while designing some of the environment tiles too.

Each zone was designed to have it's own theme and core mechanics; a blend of tech and natural areas for an old ai-managed arboretum run wild, junk-heaps and shiny metal facilities around an abandoned factory, caves with ice from a faulty climate control system, and various bioengineered slimes run amok, etc.

I'd have loved more time to polish the aesthetics, and play around with the tiles as I worked before we started building levels with them... but we didn't really have the time to put off level design until the graphics were done. There were places where things were visually busy or visually samey, and I'd have loved to have some more time to fill out areas with details and variation too... but I was pretty happy with how everything came out, all in all.

If you've played Signal, I hope you enjoyed it, and it's visual design, too! And if you haven't and think you'd like to, feel free to head on over to our LD Page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/signal

https://www.dwitter.net/d/13750

c.width=99 T=t?T+1:0 X=99-T%120 Y=40+9*S(i=T/110) T&&y<99&!(X>0&X<24&(y>Y|y<Y-19))?y-=W-=.03:(T=W=0,y=25) for(j=2;j--;x.fillRect(X,Y-125*j,19,99))onclick=v=>W=1 x.fillText(i|0,19,y,9)

After you play that, check out my LD44 entry SPENDOTRON: 2019!

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!

I finally decided to start work, with the first on the line being... improved blood stains!

We decided early to make a game that challenged us technically and we knew beforehand that the game would be incomplete because of it, given the short time of 3 days. Thus, our goal this jam wasn't to make the most enjoyable game but instead something that is rather unique / uncommon.

Making the world spherical had a lot of time consuming challenges. From the start we used a sphere object, made our own gravity system etc. At that point, the world was an actual globe. However, half-way through we decided that using what Unity calls Terrain objects, would be really nice for making different levels, especially the feature that allows mass placement of trees, making hills and drawing textures on the ground. It's basically a great level design tool.

From what we know, no body has made a curved world from the terrain object before. So we had to make our own custom shaders for every different type of object in the world including the terrain, which the latter has no documentation what so ever and it needs to support drawing multiple textures on it (which it now does!). As if that wasn't enough, every regular object needs a different custom shader to curve along the terrain. And every particle effect also needs yet another different shader to to follow the curved world.

By using the above, we could also use Unity's physics engine instead of making our own hack like we did initially with the gravity. (Because the world is actually flat, but renders curved to the player.) The result turned out pretty good technically speaking. However, level design, music, bugs etc had to suffer because of the little time left over in the jam.

The reward for all the trouble is knowing that future level design and game mechanics will be so much better and faster to make if we decide to continue developing the game. However, I'm personally unsure whether a spherical world adds to the fun or not for the players. Maybe it is more annoying than cool?

If you have any feedback regarding whether a spherical world look and feel good or bad, we would appreciate it.

Please note, we have not made any post-jam releases to fix any of the bugs. (They're still present)

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

This post is very focused on the curved world but there was a lot more to the game than just that. So I would like to hand out special thanks to my team who made the UI, skybox, , characters, animations, scripting etc.

but the list keeps getting longer

AAAAAAAAAAA

Play A.N.D.Y.R.U.S.exe here

If you were scared a bunch of Greeks are gonna jump at you when you open the gift that's the standalone version of the game, then good news - I've added a web version.

DEADline :keyboard: is a platformer in which you create the platforms by typing them out.

You can play DEADline here in the safety of your own browser

Play it now, on this suuundaayyy!! (Or whichever day you are seeing this :3)

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

Our entire team is on vacation, so unfortunately we haven't had the time to play & rate your games! I am catching up now, rating your games :) (Post your game here if you want me to play it)

We also need more ratings for our game, Venatio: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/venatio

So...

This is the current aiming system for my game, EOTS, and as you can see it's a guy pointing a gun at cursor (pointed at by the arrow).

However, on certain backgrounds it can be hard to see, therefore im thinking of adding a laser sight.

What do you think?

IF ONE DAY...

Link is here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WiAKceXvukCkJjEC30ZVSZZIbPOItE2P

And the background music is from MUSOPEN.

Its performer: Papalin

His or her music: https://musopen.org/music/performer/papalin/

Thanks^_^