You can go play Tunnel Bug and give it a rating when you get the chance. I love Ludum Dare, but honestly, I wasn’t fully aware it was happening until the week before when theme voting was about to begin, and it happened to be on the weekend where I had no urgent plans. So as the days drew nearer, I made my preparations for a 48-hour game dev session.

I’ve said in the past that I’m pessimistic about the theme voting during Ludum Dare, where none of the themes I really wanted would get chosen. So it was a bit of a surprise that one of the themes I did vote for in the final round was chosen: Your Life Is Currency. It wasn’t my favourite of the +1s, but I did think the idea of stuff being worth your life was a good one for game opportunities, at least until it got to thinking of one. I think I ended up with the idea that most people ended up having: using your health points to buy stuff instead of an actual currency, which makes a novel mechanic but not really a full game concept like the other ideas I voted for.

Following from my Game Jam rules, I aim my scope for at least three mechanics to focus on. With using health to buy stuff being my main mechanic, I needed two more mechanics. I figured a game about travelling through a winding path where you cannot touch the sides would be fun, so I went with Lunar Lander style controls (minus gravity) and curved paths. The lunar lander controls are fairly simple, two directions and a button to apply thrust, so all I had to do was implement two buttons to change the angle of the player and one button to apply a forward velocity in the player’s current direction.

The curved path was a bit tricky, I actually use the tilemap class in Vigilante to carve out the path with Cosine Interpolation. I did initially want to use Cubic Interpolation to have smoother curved splines, but the algorithm I was using didn’t really seem to generate a path from the start and end point I wanted, while the simpler Cosine algorithm did. I also wanted the number of points on the curve to increase over time, which would have been more difficult to implement with a cubic method.

If I had more time, I would have most likely used cubic interpolation or another interpolation algorithm to handle an infinite amount of points, plus implemented an object to handle rendering and collisions of the path, probably using a physics engine. One advantage with the carved tilemap approach was being able to manipulate the tile IDs to create fancy patterns when it came to working on the graphics.

I used a lot of shaders, my bloom effect shader as well to the point of being almost standard in most of my games (and has barely changed since I used it in Gemstone Keeper). To add a retro look, I wrote two additional shaders fo apply what’s been described as both a Gameboy and Pipboy tint, as well as a line-pattern shader for the dot matrix screen appearance.

The title screen was done after the base game was added, and was particularly fun for me to do. It took a while to get the menu options to appear right in a horizontal axis as opposed to the standard stack. I also used the Cosine Interpolation with two moving tilemaps to get the wavey line moving in the background. The line pattern is completely random, apart from the ends which took a bit of trial and error to get right.

Music and sound effects were done with LMMS and Chiptone, although to try and move away from chiptune I used a few assets to implement a trance style vibe. While I also used cgMusic to generate a melody, it feels a bit refreshing to have something that doesn’t sound too digitized.

As of writing, Tunnel Bug has gotten over 30 ratings and reached the 20 rating threshold in less than three days. I’m hoping to see if I can get a good ranking, as I did with Tank Gauntlet last year, but we’ll see.

Hey, everyone! Once again, Tech Valley Game Space is live-streaming right now!

• twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace
• youtube.com/c/techvalleygamespace
• facebook.com/TechValleyGameSpace

...all at once (cause we can).

To have your game in consideration for playing and judging, you can sign up on this form: forms.gle/UPL87CT1QgQExLCT6

As the form states, we do enforce a Code of Conduct in our live-streams. As such, we do reserve the right to cancel streaming and rating a game for any reason.

For reference, the recording of our last live-stream is below; expect the same quality commentary this stream as well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsydYDMYaj4

Recently our game Arrow of Light reached an important milestone: over 100 ratings given and received!!

To celebrate, we made an amazing lyrical version of the ending theme from our game. Sylvie wrote the lyrics, and Hubol sung them, remixed the music, and even made a cool music video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-22ubIgEiaM

WARNING: The above video contains spoilers! Go play Arrow of Light before watching the video!

Thank you to everyone who played and rated our game! You are great!

Don't forget to check out the postmortem and Hubol's soundtrack writeup as well. 1, 2, 3, 4!

Just as I did for LD43, I'd like to take a little time to write about some of the more technical aspects of my LD44 entry, 15 Minutes to Live, and some of the design decisions that went into its creation. Hopefully, it'll prove useful and/or interesting.

The basic world concept - your lifespan is a currency that can be bought, sold, or stolen - was borrowed from the movie In Time. As for the gameplay, I've been playing a lot of Shenmue recently, and I think that's where the free-roaming gameplay and focus on NPC dialogue came from. (I wanted the player to be able to interact with objects in the environment, similar to Shenmue, but simply ran out of time for that.)

The first thing you'll notice, upon starting the game, is that there's no main menu or title screen. This was a deliberate stylistic choice - a main menu would have been unnecessary as "start the game" would have been the only option, and I didn't have time to make a fancy-looking title screen. So I decided to just cut out the middle-man and dump you straight into the story:

NPCs are stored in a single two-dimensional array, where each row contains an NPC, and each NPC contains a spritesheet index, X and Y co-ordinate, and a "flag" value. When you hit Z, the game draws a hitbox and checks if there's an NPC inside it. If there is, it passes their array index and flag value to a dialogue() function, which queues up the appropriate dialogue and handles any necessary changes to NPC flags, your inventory, etc.

To give you an idea how much dialogue there is in this game: 15 Minutes to Live contains 29.8 KB of Lua code. The dialogue() function accounts for 20.9 KB of that. The Lua code for my LD43 entry is only about 10.3 KB!

The game map was put together piece-by-piece, with roads and buildings being added as necessary until I felt I had a large enough area for the game's plot to unfold within. I tried to ensure there was plenty of variety in the designs of the buildings, and how the roads were laid out. This was partly to reduce the possibility of getting lost or confused, and partly so the map wouldn't look boring.

I tried to use subtle graphical cues to indicate which buildings can be entered and which can't, so you don't waste time running into closed doors. As an example, let's look at the bottom-left corner of the map:

The red "Vic Vonald's" building is a unique red colour, with a unique sign on the front, and a brown door with a nice, inviting golden handle. All of this indicates it can be entered. The office block has a sign too, but it's the same sign as all the other office blocks, and the doors don't really stand out from the rest of the building. You can't enter it. The brick building to the right has a dull greyscale door, and no sign at all. You can't enter that either.

I'm kind of torn about the graphical style I ended up with. On the one hand, I feel like it's too bright, and doesn't fit the (mostly) serious tone and cyberpunk-inspired concept of the storyline. On the other hand, some of the NPCs and their interactions are too lighthearted to fit with that kind of aesthetic.

...in the game, that is. Since 15 minutes ended up being more than enough time to complete the game, I don't think anyone's seen the death animation yet. So here it is:

It looks kinda dumb, but it's much more effective in-game, where it's accompanied by a loud, high-pitched "BEEEEEEEEEEEEP--", like the flatlining of a heart monitor.

Thank you for your time; I hope this was interesting or informative in some way. If you haven't played 15 Minutes to Live yet, please do! I hope to get around to playing as many entries as I can during these last few days of the rating period.

Help Bob and Larry to summon the BLOOD GOD here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bloodlines

I have been doing a bit more to my entry Skeleton Arena There is now a title screen and settings menu. The game also defaults to full screen.
Some players had a problem with not being able to see the health bar due to the windows size. this should address that issue. More weapons and armours have been added. Also everything is now textured for a much better look.
Still no idea why the wall was blue in the compo version. I just exported the dds file and it fixed it. We also have shadows. Yay.
The gameplay is pretty much the same. I have tweaked a few things with the combat and added a knock back effect when hit.

Also sound. I added sound. I usually get sound working during the competition, but my sound engine was broken.
All fixed now ready for the next Ludum Dare.

Not really sure where to take this game next other than adding some more graphical effects and some player statistics.
I thought I would upload this now before the rating time ends and everyone runs off.

Hello LD Peeps,

I just wanted to extend my thanks to everyone who's reviewed my game, as this was my first ludum dare and I'd say it was a success! I'll be writing a postmortem after my finals this week. I'm pretty happy with how the game turned out though, and proud that I was able to finish it after almost falling asleep nearly every second on Saturday (sleep is important people, remember that).

If you'd like me to play your game and leave you a review with some feedback and hopefully constructive criticism, pop a link in the comments.

If you'd like to play my game and (optionally) leave me some feedback, here's a link to my game. However, A Controller Is REQUIRED to play!

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

And of course a gif of the game to catch your eye.

Play Dweety Dweet 3 on Dwitter

This is a game that fits in a tweet! The javascript code...

c.width=99 T=t?T+2:0 i=T/160 X=99-T%160 Y=40+9*S(i*2) Q=S(i|0**2)>0 T&&y<99&!(X>-49&X<15&(Q?-y+Y-14>0:y-Y>0))?y-=v-=.03:T=v=y=0 x.fillRect(X,Y-120*Q,59,99) x.fillText(i|0,9,y,9) onclick=_=>v=1

If you think that's fun, try my LD44 game (Runs immediately in browser)

We how have a volume slider!

your ears are now saved!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ld48-paylife

Welcome ! Paylife (Ludum Dare 44 Theme: Your life is currency) is built in plain HTML5/JavaScript with a framework I am developping.

I challenged myself creating this game in only 24h instead of the regular 48h !

Rules :

• it is a mouse-only game

• you have 60s to break your best score

• clicking on cards cost life

• cards increase life per second releasing hearts

• catch hearts to gain life

• when an heart flies away, you lose 1 life

I'd like to :

• add sfx

This was my second Game Jam, so I hope you'll like this game. Thank you for your support.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ld48-paylife

I managed to submit for the 3rd time (an ARPG inspired by Diablo and DOOM), and based on the feedback, I made some predictions :slight_smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge5JEZpJTzc

Do you think you can get there?

Come and try playing GTApp

I've been very incredibly busy for the last few days, but now I'm back into the LD groove! Did you miss me (or even notice I was gone)?

I wanted to remind you that my game exists, Sigillis! You draw on the screen, then the game recognises your drawing to cast a spell. It's actually really fun, you should try it if you haven't yet! It all works surprisingly well for something made in 48 hours, which was a happy surprise!

If you're interested, you can play the game here!

I hope you enjoy, and if you did (or didn't), please leave a rating, and maybe some feedback? All the comments thus far have been incredibly useful, so thank you to everyone!

Also, there's a devlog coming out about the drawing algorithm... About that, it's delayed... Real life has been very busy, so sorry... I'll keep working on it in my free time, and will continue striving to get it to you asap. Super sorry for the delays. It's definitely still coming, and the LD results date will be an absolute deadline for me (I hope). In the meantime tho, I wish you all the best, peace! :v:

Well now you can!

Check out our Jam 44 game, Where There's Smoke, a beautiful RPG adventure through a harsh environment.

Here's one of our five story characters, Big Lumba!

Yes, we brainstormed about this during the jam, we wanted to choose the best evil minigames for Zoltan. We managed to finish only 4 games for the jam, but...

we are making new minigames to add to our post-jam version.

If you are a cat owner how much would you score out of these 18 misdeeds?

Your cat: 1. scratches you.

1. scratches sofa.

2. hangs to the curtains.

3. throws cat litter miles away from its box.

4. pukes around (in the worst cases pukes from a high shelf of inside your backpack).

5. sits on your laptop (with or without you).

6. covers everything with fur.

7. knocks small objects down the edges.

8. meows to get you open the door and then he doesn't go out.

9. wakes you up at 6 am putting his butt into your face.

10. desappears for hours until you find that he managed to slip under the covers of the bed you had just made.

11. shreds the toilet paper.

12. eats your plants to the roots.

13. establishes a reign of terror over your other cats.

14. Sits in front of the tv especially if there are subtitles you want to read.

15. robs food from your table.

16. chews your clothes.

17. sleeps in the sink.

Does your cat do anything else we didn't mention? Let us know!

Then play this game here

Hey people, here to thank everyone for all the feedback about BOB, and to notice that we are very close to reach over 1000 views on itch.io! Come and play BOB to help us reach this mark and, if possible, leave feedback here on Ludum Dare, or on the game's page on itch.io. You can play it on Android, Windows and even on your browser. Every comment counts, wherever is possible!

Give our game a try if you can, we had a lot of fun making it! Make sure to post links to your games so we can check them out as well!!

https://nightember.itch.io/heartstring https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/heartstring

Perhaps for the last time, the title tells it. So.. Hello..?? If you still have under 20 ratings, why are you reading this and not linking the game..?? LINK! LINK! LINK!

Oh and you know I gotta plug plug: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/a-life-at-stake