Does someone know whether there's avaiable list of themes we voted on? I would be really glad if someone shared it :smiley:

This is the first LD where I have published an android version. I would really like to play and rate as many android submissions as possible. Send me your links.

Watch my little demo which was captured from my android device. Sound is a bit rubbish but you get the jist.

https://youtu.be/fKZ_RHPR8B4

I used Polybrush in Unity, to texture the ground of my planet combine with a fully procedural substance designer material with many parameters !

Come check the result here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/my-little-planet/

If you like short point and click games you might want to look at my game.

Unfortunately because of losing and recreating levels some polishing is missing.

First time of working with godot + gdscript was fun and easy to learn.

ps. see the comments for a link to a walktrough in case you are stuck

Do you feel stressed?

Maybe play a game that will make you think about your life?

Or grab something stronger! (not recommended!)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/extracted-souls

--

Wanna try a Hotline Miami-ish game? Come and play here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/enemy-of-the-state8

Hi , I am a young game developer 14 years old. I started game development one year ago. I just love to make games. But i feel very bad when no one here to play my game. However this is my first game jam in my life. And i like to win this game jam with some position. But you and me already know that its just my dream. I like that you just checkout my game and give your suggestions and rate my game as you like. I hope you will check now and share my game if you want to support me more.

Game Link :- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/boxes-rush-1

Thanks

Play 10 unique levels of a challenging yet fun platformer, and see if you can escapse the castle you were trapped in! 🏰

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ballsy-escape

Hi , I am a young game developer 14 years old. I started game development one year ago. I just love to make games. But i feel very bad when no one here to play my game. However this is my first game jam in my life. And i like to win this game jam with some position. But you and me already know that its just my dream. I like that you just checkout my game and give your suggestions and rate my game as you like. I hope you will check now and share my game if you want to support me more.

Game Link :- https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/boxes-rush-1

Thanks

Download here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk23dofa9wA

Hey, lovely LD community, based on the surprisingly positive feedback on my compo entry Angry Planet, i'm thinking about continue the development of this concept.
To be frank, the idea is not one i came up with during the jam but a old one i drew from my 'folder of undone games', where i archive my game ideas (a habit i can heavily recommend). In this case it even was an idea i once pitched to a publisher but got rejected.
Originally it was meant as a mobile game (Funnily enough exactly what commentator @dani-desa proposed).

So for a first decision making i would love to hear your opinions about those questions: 1. Do you think the concept would be worthwhile being turned into a full game 2. Would you prefer the concept as a mobile or a desktop game? 3. Would you prefer a fleshed out game with rather short, highscore-based game sessions (comparable to the jam entry) or a more complex longer lasting game experience?

Thank you all for your ideas in advance!
all the best,
grllle

(bump for commentators i would love to hear their opinion: @fm-studio @zubspace @notb @mrpiedpiper @anstabo @inkyglow @sarneh @dani-desa)

Hey guys! whats up?

This is our game in LudumDare 44! The first in this group.

https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo

We really enjoy made this game and we hope you enjoyed it too!

Even though our group has passed the same problems as everyone doing a Game Jam, like no spleeping and eating too much junk food... we are very proud of the result.

So, if you like what you see, download and rate it, thank you! https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo

Ziiam1.png https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo

PLAY GAME HERE https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bravebelly-funny-dystopian-thicboy-runner-with-dark-undertones

The game is now a bit easier. We also increased the readability of our timer + WASD controls! Feel free to give it a try :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/stranger-coins

Hi! Yesterday I released an official gameplay video (in portuguese, but the game also have a 100% english version) of my LD44 game:

https://youtu.be/gF-baNXBSA4

Of course, if you want to check it out:

Play Here!

I'm interested to know if our game 60 Second Supermarket Sweep is worth continuing development on. To do so, it would be great to have some more detailed feedback from you, the people who have played our game.

If you have a few moments and feel like leaving us some detailed feedback here are some questions we'd like answers to:

• Did you enjoy this game? Would you play it again, or recommend it to a friend?

• Would you like to see the concept for this game expanded?

• What elements of the gameplay do you enjoy the most?

• What elements of the gameplay did you not enjoy?

You can leave your feedback here, you can comment on our game page instead.

Thank you in advance for your feedback, it is really appreciated. We will play and review your game in return.

It's been some time since our games are possible to evaluate, each of us wants to judge the games of others and wants his game to be evaluated.

That is why today I am creating this post, knowing that our games do not always appear as high as we would like, that anyone who wants to be sure that his game will be evaluated, could leave the link in the comment under this post.

Our team promise that we will evaluate and try to leave a valuable feedback under as many games as we can play, especially I would like to see the comments of those creators whose games have not yet reached 20 ratings.

It's good to help each other, that's why I also have a request for you to judge the games left in the comments and if you have some time, rate the game of our team.

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

Play 10 unique levels of a challenging yet fun platformer, and see if you can escape the castle you were trapped in! 🏃🏰

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ballsy-escape

Hello everyone! SirAeron here! today i'll be streaming some more ludum dare 44 games, come to say hi here: https://www.twitch.tv/siraeron, i'll be waiting for you!

Here we are. In my last post I briefly introduced some quick ways to get familiar with animation. But if you are new to it, in the time of a jam you can't stop and study everything. So...

have a wide choice of reference material

I had to be quick! So the first thing I did was gathering any kind of visual reference I could find on cats. I have a cat, but it's just impossible to make her pose for a picture, let alone for a videogame sprite!

steal secrets!

What you can do is looking for animated gifs,videos you can stop to copy poses or just photos of poses you'd like to reproduce.

artists do it

What many people miss about art in general (and I missed this too!) is that artist don't have everything perfectly clear in their minds since the beginning. If they have to draw a cat and never stopped to watch a cat closely, they (and me) probably only can tell you that a cat has 2 triangular ears and a tail, but they need to look at real cats photos, draw, make mistakes and redraw in order to get to know their subject and what makes it what it is. So just try.

I was sure I would have made a mess, and my first cat was terrible, you can see it here. But then drawing and erasing I got the hang of it (kinda).

create Frankenstein's creatures

Give yourself a chance a draw something you never drew and if you are not sure about some part of it, copy and paste it from a reference in a layer under the one you are painting on. You can create a Frankenstein creature made up of pieces, it is shorter than you think :) and you should not consider it cheating: tracing over an outline will build muscle memory and it could be that next time you won't even need a guide.

want to check the final result? Try out Zoltan's Idea!

coming up next: trace the actual frames of the animation!

I put together a Time Lapse of the development of Wizard of Worth. I would love if you gave my game a try... if you rate and leave a comment, I will also return the favor and will play/rate your game as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN9dMLsfD88

Can someone help convert an exe file of my game, Enemy Of The State, to a mac .app? I would but the Clickteam Fusion Mac Exporter is just.... a lil too much for me (RM 95, Jesus). I also tried converting it on Windows, but it seems Wine only runs on Mac/Linux.

Comment here if you can, sorry for the trouble.

I've been playing heaps of amazing games this LD, and they're all so good! I just wanted to share mine with you; Sigillis!

In my game, the only form of input is things you draw on the screen. Cast spells by drawing symbols, that the game will recognise and perform, which is some pretty neat tech (if you're interested, a video dev log is in the works, and should be ready in the next few days). I'm so dang happy with how well the pattern recognition actually turned out, it responds really well. I just finished making a neat new banner, looks pretty snazzy:

Anyways, that's my opinion, and obviously that's biased. So try it out for yourself on the web then if you have time, tell me what you think and rate it (pls)!

Thank you to everyone who has already played and left feedback on my game, it's been so valuable! A bug patch has been released to fix all the stuff you guys reported, so your comments have been very useful. I hope you all have a good day / night, JUSTCAMH over and out, cheers! :smile:

Hello everyone!

I posted a small patch to display the tutorial and support the QWERTY keyboard.

Change Log: - Fix reset Button - Fix Spaceship window Z position (Now you see it ^^) - Fix spray Fx on Docking - Fix Tutorial button. - Now Qwerty is suported.

Let's go try the game here!

Wasn't really able to submit my game but here is it! I would like to hear your opinion about my game.

Cutter Static is a Third-Person Shooter Tower Defense Game.

Beware! The Electric Mosquitoes are coming. You, a hummingbird skilled in electromechanical stuff, depends on electricity to survive. Your only line of defense against the electric mosquitoes are the towers you've built long ago for keeping away the electric mosquitoes. Use your gun to pass your electricity to the towers for you to survive the waves of Electric Mosquitoes!

Controls

WASD - Movement

Mouse - Look

Left Mouse Button - Shoot Electricity

Link

https://kristian-david.github.io/

Took into account a bunch of feedback from fellow Ludum Dare devs - spent about an hour on these:

• Fix fullscreen mode WebGL.
• Reduced player slipperiness.
• Reduced mouse sensitivity by 30%.
• Added controller support.
• Added reason for dying on the game over screen.
• Added mini-map.

Thanks for reading!

Little upadte for Post-Jam version. You can replay our games without refresh your browser. If you still havent try our game, you can try it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/seed

Please give us your comments so we can try your game as well.

Come on over and try out my game Orcan Harvest, a game where you sell your own organs for money!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/orcan-harvest

Come Play and rate our game !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/warlock-soul-war

Heya! If you are not on Windows and you want to play my game, you can now finally do that! I have managed to fix all known bugs in the HTML5 build and it should run smoothly now.

You can find the game here.

Come play and rate!

--

You betray country? Stay right where you are...... https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/enemy-of-the-state

I began worked on a complete version of my game; Escape from Hell, starting by created a better system and complete the game concept.
If you don't try it, please have a look and help me to upgrade him by leaving a comment ;)

Go to game page

I'll give you some news soon !

After a very tiring weekend of Game Dev, I submitted my entry! A game where you run around procedurally generated dungeons, collecting staffs, fighting enemies but most importantly... sacrificing your blood! I would really appreciate any feedback, thanks!

View Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/sold-soul

Play 10 unique levels of a challenging yet fun platformer, and see if you can escape the castle you were trapped in! 🏃🏰

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ballsy-escape

My boss told me if anybody beats him in my compo entry, he'll give me a raise! (Please do!)

Try it!

.

.

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

I made a small teaser trailer thing for my game HONC! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/honc-the-building-blocks-of-life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtZBD7-zF4

In the planning phase of our game we were a little over-motivated and decided we need a random generated world for our cats to cruse in. Therefore we (@lina and me) used Perlin noise based random generation to make each game run unique.

So after we got a terrain suiting our game, we had the need to write a population algorithm because populating by hand was no option anymore. We took way too long to write a quite complex algorithm with a lot of parameters to tweak. After us nearly losing our minds, we finally got it working and threw together a quick test setup which was astoundingly natural looking and was used till the end of the development phase.

Shortly before release we added more tree types and changed some numbers. In the end we reverted the number changes because some seeds looked more like a forest and less like the park-style we were going for.

Nevertheless we're proud of our accomplishment. It took us long to get it running but it payed out in the end.

Please check it out yourself at:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/cats-without-cars

Thank you all that we tested and commented on your game, it makes us very happy!

And for those who have not tried it yet, here is the link of our game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/piggy-bank-1

I don't wanna spam, had a bug with posting sorry :') i'm trying to delete

We have a new game cover!

Heres the old one:

not very nice is it, slightly confusing in my opinion and not very contrasting. As expected from something slapped together at 3am.

Now... heres the new one! :

Is it better? Thats you to judge.

Curious as to what the Hammer and Sickle is about? check out Enemy of the State!-https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/enemy-of-the-state

Did you ever dream of abducting cows in a flying saucer? Is there something you have to settle with a friend?

Don't look further, we have got you covered with our latest LD game!

Local 2 Player battle? YES! Upgrades? YES! Controller support? YES! Advanced cow AI??? YES! YES! YES!

Just give it a try and rate us here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/calienows

Play it here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifeless-treasure

Going into my first LUDUM DARE I had no idea what I would do when the theme dropped.

The first twelve hours I did nothing but think of ideas and went through old prototypes trying to find somthing that works.

I eventually came up with the idea of have a robot(Robo.io) give other robots life (Life is Currency) to proceed trough a maze of puzzles. I'm proud of my accomplishment. Help Robo.io through the maze before he runs out of battery life. It's a race against time.

There are a lot of things i would have liked to add in the game but time caught up on me and i had to cut a few corners.

Check it out it has a clear ending and it's not hard to complete. Leave a rating and some criticism in the comments. Roast me if you like i can take it. I would appricate if you rate on itch.io as well.

Link:-https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/saving-robo-io

You can play without worry now !

We are waiting for your feedback and comments ! 💪

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/419223307

At 25 minutes of the video Ursagames is playin our game!

Come take a look and leave your feedback, this is just the begining of a bigger project and every single comments is important for us!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/les-pattesthe-legs

--

If you haven't, please come play Enemy Of The State! Its worth your salt, I'll play your game if otherwise, thats a bet! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/enemy-of-the-state

You grow older and older in sweatshops. The only way to keep you young is to fix broken machines to get wages. Can you get out of the factory alive and break the capitalist plot? try it!: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/sweat-shop

I worked very hard this jam making something fresh.

*The result of this is Sigillis, where the only game control is drawing on the screen. *Depending on what you draw, a different spell will be cast. It's a simple system that has some fun consequences! Innovation had a price though, I had to create a complete pattern recognition system and a game in under 48 hours, and let me tell you, it was not easy.

Anyways, I'd like to invite you to play the game on web, and if you have the opportunity, I would love for you to rate and leave some feedback!

The help I've gotten from the community thus far has been invaluable, and I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Cheers, hope you enjoy, and have a good day! :smiley:

Play 10 unique levels of a challenging yet fun platformer, and see if you can escape the castle you were trapped in! 🏃🏰

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ballsy-escape

There is a giant update on LIFELINE WARRIORS:

Generic Map Generation Patches of the Upgrades UI update Bugfixes

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifleline-warriors

I tried doing my best creating this game and added some new stuff like camera shake and particle effects . You can check it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/space-rabbit

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

Face for Death is a 2D runner platformer videogame developed for the April 2019 Lumdum Jam.

You play a double faced coin that have to scape from a city plenty of evil rich dudes.

Dont let ‘em catch you and enjoy it!

This is our first ludum dare and we are super happy that we could finish something. It was a very exhausting but fun experience. Thanks to all of you who gave us already feedback to our game. We appreciate every feedback we can get. So if you are interested, please play our game and share your thoughts with us:

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

We want to share our development process in a Post Mortem post, so here we go:

Preparation

On Wednesday the 24th of April Philarmon and I decided to try to make our first game at ludum dare. The last theme voting round was currently running and we sat together and talked about every theme and which ideas we had for each one. Our favourite themes were "Limited memory", "Your life is currency" and "Ridiculously overpowered".

Day 1

We met at my home and started to setup the development environment. Our setup included Visual Studios with MonoGame, the library Nez and Tiled. For source code management we used github. We know from our previous brainstorming were we wanted to go with the game, but a few details were missing. Our goal was to make a basic 2D dungeon crawler, where you lose health constantly and get life back if you kill enemies. You also could buy upgrades with your health. We decided to implement basic combat and only two-way animations (left and right). At the beginning we used some sprites we found on the internet. We finished the first prototype at the end of the day. It consisted of a character you could control, an enemy which stands still and you can hit until it dies. We lost some time to search for sprites and learn how to use the Nez library. But it was a solid start.

Day 2

We only slept a few hours. At the start of the day we split our work into two main tasks: AI and map generation. We worked for a while and constantly exchange our thoughts and process. Then we decided to look for some better sprites, eventually we bought one. We found a really good looking sprite sheet from Pita on itch.io. This was a 4-way sprite sheet for the characters. So we decided to give it a try and implement 4-way combat/movement. This was a very frustrating at first because we finished some of the combat mechanics already. We used this time to refactor our code, so we can work better. At the end of the day, we had a few rooms, an AI with 3 states (patrol, chase and attack) and the UI.

Day 3

We had no death animation, so we decided to implement a blood explosion. This took a while, but it was very fun. Then we tackled to implement collectables for upgrades. We chose to test this with a simple gold asset. There was not much time left anymore so we left the gold and decided that the gold adds additional points to the high score. The upgrades and shop were scrapped. There was so much to do: start screen, game over screen, many rooms for the generator. We focused on this for a while until we were satisfied. We had 2 hours left and wanted to do one additional feature, but decided to only make a short intro sequence and fix some bugs. We were afraid if we added a "bigger" feature that we make it very buggy because we were sooo tired.

Conclusion

It was so fun and we are very happy that we decided to submit here at ludum dare. There is so much we have learned, so much that we will do differently the next time. We love the ludum dare experience. The coding, the frustration, giving and getting feedback, playing your games, reading and writing posts. We hope you had at least the same fun we had!

Final version:

With no materials:

Hi! I decided to remove the materials of the game (just for fun) and I surprisely liked the white/no materials version. Maybe an idea for my next game? Who knows! :smile:

If you want to play the game:

Click Here!

Find out in Beyond the Slot! (Hint: It's action and puns)

Playable directly in your browser! (except your browser is Safari, the browser on your 3DS, Internet Explorer or some other suboptimal browser experience)

Try Seaway !

I don't get people whos saying really god game and giving 1 star for almost every category... I mean, what the hell are you saying when you are giving 5 stars ??? Really excellent perfect very good game????

If you think game is shit, just say it and mention why.

Farming Simulator 2019 has nothing on me.... now with web playable mode https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/in-the-night-garden

Comment on my game and i will try and get around to playing all of your games to...

For this being my first time participating in LD, I've gotta say I've had a fantastic time. I've never rated so many games before during a jam (sitting at 30+ right now and about to do more).

Our game has received so many kind remarks, and it's super encouraging. We are debating about continuing work post LD, but we'll see.

Really just wanted to share for those that have played our game already (Force of Nature), we've made the onboarding process much better!!! If you haven't played it yet, please consider doing so here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/force-of-nature

Anyway, happy rating and congratulations to all who submitted a game. :)

We have colected your advices an we're polishing the post jam Nameless Hero.

While it isn't ready please play and rate the jam version of the game (and keep in mind the we had a limited time to produce this, so some stuff isn't as good as we wished for).

Well, glhf :DD

King's Alchemist 😄

                               Check out our LDJAM44!

                          PIZZO TYPING HAS ARRIVED!

               💸💸 TYPE TO PAY SICILIAN MAFIA 💸💸

                                         CREDITS:

                        💻 Ignacio Muñoz Márquez

                        💻 Miguel Melgar Reyman

                      🎨 Antonio Carpintero García

                      🎶 Ricardo Roldán Fernández

                                       CONTROLS:

                                      JUST TYPE!

                             💕 Thanks for playing! 💕

                             📤 Thanks for sharing! 📤

                               You can play it HERE!

This weekend I took part to the Ludum Dare #44, like all of you. Now that 3 days have passed, I think I can write some kind of a post mortem, more like a recap. I usually wait many weeks before taking a step back from my productions, but since the game here was made here in 48 hours, I feel like 3 days is enough. Firstly I'll recap my 48 hours of working on Rashness for those who are curious about it, then I'll talk about the goods and bads of the weekend, and what I plan for the game's future. And I'll add some fancy memes.

DISCLAIMER : I'm not english native, so there might be some english errors or curious syntaxes, please forgive me for that !

CONTEXT

So I'm a forth year student in game development school, and during the weekends of Ludum Dare or Global Game Jams, my school stays opened for students who want to take part to those events, and this time I was the one who got the key and the responsibility of the school and getting the weekend right. Pretty important weekend to me ! Also, during jams I usually work with people I've never made games with, I think it is a great opportunity to discover people, how they work, what they think, etc. But this time I decided to take another step forward and, somehow, to discover myself by doing the Ludum Dare alone ! For my 4th time doing the Ludum Dare I wanted to try submitting a compo game.

SATURDAY 3 AM - THEME ANNOUNCEMENT

I didn't sleep until then, and I was happy that this theme was chosen. As a bad game designer, during the previous week I have thought of games for every theme that could be selected to prevent myself from losing time searching for ideas, and for some themes I had game ideas I did not feel confident with. But for "Your life is currency", I did find 2 ideas :

• a platformer where you have to sacrifice your health to unlock some areas, so the goal of the game would be finding as many areas as possible without dying before
• a boss fight where you can trade initial health for upgrades

And I decided to go for the boss fight, because the platformer would've need level design, lots of tests, probably different environments, and to my opinion too many things to do for me in 48 hours. However, I was a bit confused because I've already done a similar boss fight game last summer (self promotion time : here's the link), and the idea of doing a game like one I already did is sad, but this was an opportunity to see what I could do with 8-9 more months of programming experience, along with testing out my ability to make art, sounds and music for a game. I then started to write on paper for some powerup ideas, but above all for different attacks the boss could use because I didn't want it to be just a health mountain that just shots basic bullets.

SATURDAY 4 AM - UNITY PROJECT CREATION

I always start my game jams doing that : I create my Unity project, setup the things I'll need, folders, physics settings, etc, then I start programming. Only the core gameplay, some of the powerups, not all the boss attacks, no art, and some placeholder fx. I do that so I can quickly know if the game is going to be fun to play or not. If I realize that it's not and I have to change my game idea, then I can go to sleep and hopefully during my sleep my brain will find some nice other ideas ! I could have also gone for the platformer idea in that case. But I did not have to worry about changing my game because I liked the shooter I built and I felt it could become a nice jam game with the complete powerups system and some art. And so I went to sleep for 2 hours and a half.

SATURDAY 7 AM - HARD TO GET INTO IT...

And at this time I had to face the most difficult part of my weekend : being alone :cry:. Of course this is the spirit of the compo and I knew that it would be technically hard, but here I am talking about motivation. Usually when I do jams with a team, first I sleep more hours, and when I wake up, there's some work that has been done, the production has gone a bit further, which is motivating and encourages me to get in Unity as fast as possible ! Here, I was just in front of the little code I wrote a few hours sooner, still no art, only 20-30% of the powerups, nothing more. And it took me a moment to really get into it and retrieve all my will to work, especially since, all my schoolmates who were there were all working in teams, so I was the only one alone and it didn't help motivating me, obviously :laughing:

So how did I keep the motivation ? Well first I was responsible for the weekend in school, so I could not leave. This did not force me to do the Ludum Dare, but it would've been stupid staying at school and not work on my game. Another thing I did was talking to people before the weekend, and tell them I was going for the compo, doing a game alone in 48 hours. Not to be pretentious, but it was somehow a commitment I made, and I would have been ashamed if I could not hold it. I did not want people to tell me "so you could not do a game alone ? I thought you were confident about that ?", and I kept on working.

I then did all the powerup system, and tried it a few times before going back home to take a break (all hail the driving licence), and to wash myself because more than a game developer, I am a clean person. At this point I was feeling a bit bad, with headache and strong need of sleep incoming, so it was the right moment to take a break.

SATURDAY 17 PM - PIXEL ART TIME !

Back to work, fresh and motivated ! Unlike the morning when I still had lot of programming to do, this time I had the core gameplay working, so I was ready to work on the characters ! After looking for graphic references, I created the sprite sheets for both the boss and the player, put them together to adjust the colors, and then I put them in Unity to see how the game would look like with them. And I was not disappointed ! The animations were not perfect, some collisions needed to be fixed but it felt cool controlling a pixelart warlock/magician and face a demon that has fire getting out of his body. Adding art is always a great motivation boost and from that moment my motivation was at its maximum ! Also I added feedbacks, explosions, some lights on the characters, changed the background color, because I always want my game to be as close as I want it to be at the end when I test it. And I worked on all that, slowly but surely, during lots of hours.

Then, I did a mistake ! I did not want to go to sleep because I felt I could still work a bit. And I could, but I decided to work on something that just made my brain explode : the music. Using Bosca Ceoil - one the softwares I have lot of fun using btw -, I tried several melodies, drums beats and other different things, but everything was just a disaster, so I lost like 1 or 2 hours doing this, to finally delete everything and go to sleep with horrible music resonating in my head and the feeling of having lost my time. And oh boy 2 hours is precious during a 48 hours jam ! :worried:

SUNDAY 9 AM - FINALLY GOT THAT MUSIC

After 3 hours of good sleep, I stood up in front of my game music and I was ready to do it properly, with a fresher brain than sooner. So I worked on it more slowely, I searched some inspiration on YouTube, thought of melodies in my head, and finally I came up with something ! The track I composed is really, REALLY not extraordinary, but I was happy I did it myself. It would have been pretty sad to make a whole game alone for a compo submission but not having my own music. Then I did all the sounds with SFXR and added all that in the game ! Once again, this was a step that help me keeping my motivation for the last day.

SUNDAY 13 PM - PRODUCTION END

Start of the final rush. Nothing special to say, I did the UI art, fixed the bugs I found, then I tried to balance the game a bit. The problem is that you can not balance your game by playing it yourself, this is impossible and I realized it for real a bit later.

SUNDAY 19 PM - PLAYTESTS !

So because we were around 40 devs in the school doing the Ludum Dare, we got together in a classroom, and every team shew others their work. This was really a great moment, seeing what everyone came up with from the same theme is really interesting, and some builds were still bugged so it made us laugh (imagine 40 tired people laughing for nothing...). When I presented my game, I asked if anyone wanted to give it a try. Someone did, and just killed my boss on first try, after I said it was a hard fight... Funny moment tho, but then I knew I had to work on the balance before the deadline.

So as I said, I tried to balance my game myself but I could not. The prices I chose for some upgrades that I thought were well chosen, were actually pretty stupid, the boss did not have enough life, the "burn damages" upgrade was waaaay too overpowered. And that's why I want to say that you should always have people to playtest your game, even during a game jam, because they will always find some bugs, or break your game somehow, and having other people trying your game is always positive.

MONDAY 0 AM - LAST 3 HOURS

After cleaning and leaving school, getting back home and washing myself, I opened my project and worked for it for 2 hours. During this time I balanced it more, I added some tips displayed on screen when the player loses, so that he doesn't have a frustrating "DEFEAT" text but he has some tips to make him want to try again and give him confidence. The game might be hard, but it doesn't want the player to ragequit. I also fixed a few more bugs I found, added credits, leave button, etc.

Then I created the itch.io project, along with writing the Ludum Dare post for my game. I took screenshots, made a key art for the vignettes, a game icon, and after I uploaded everything, I went for a night of well deserved sleep, feeling happy with my weekend and proud of the game I just finished !

CONCLUSION

So here's how went my first compo : a great weekend, with a difficult start, a motivation that took a while to come, but that finally ended up with a game I am proud of and that is complete and polished. However, I do not think I will do solo jams again, it is way better to work with people than working alone. I mean, I like working alone on my games, but not with such short amounts of time. Still, I'm really happy I challenged myself with that, it was very interesting and made me think about myself, my ability to work hard, keep motivated, in fact it taught me more about myself than game creation I think :laughing:

So if I had to list the good points / things I did great : - Overcome demotivation - Be responsible of an event with around 40 people when everything went well - Make nice pixel art sprites that I think are pretty cool, along with FX, UI, menus, etc when it's not my thing - Make a music myself. Just a 1 minute simple loop, but still something I did not think I could have done - Publish a complete and polished game in time, with clean itch.io and LD pages presentations

And the bad points : - Keep on working while being too tired too work. Game jam or not, compo or not, sleeping and taking breaks is too important to be forgotten, and I slept 5-6 hours from friday morning to sunday evening, which is too few hours, I got headaches, I felt bad sometimes, but I kept on working and that is a bad idea - Making a simple game was a good idea since it helped me keeping the scope down and completing the game, but in my opinion I could have exploit it a bit more and make something more interesting than a simple boss fight. The theme was good enough to find more ideas, and I should not have been afraid of the compo and the time I had. More than a contest, Ludum Dare is a way to bring fresh game ideas to life ! - Some things I could fix but did not even realize : a trail that is not rendered in the correct order, a bullet spawn position that is wrong, the "quick tip" that sometimes doesn't show any tip... those are details but, details are what make a game polished and great, and I pay a lot of attention to that, so I consider that a bad point

As I said I was happy of my game. However I did not expect it to be appreciated this much by people, I only got nice comments about the fun, the art, the music (I swear I did :sunglasses:), some feedbacks of course about things that need to be changed, but always with a positive touch, so huge thanks to anyone for that. It is currently the 5th most rated game of this 44th Ludum Dare, and that is just crazy. I don't want to be boastful, I simply want to show that even if you're working alone, or don't feel your game to be able to reach such scores, it actually can, and that's really cool.

Now what I will do is wait for the jam to end and fix the bugs I already need to fix, then I think of maybe improving the game, making different bosses, maybe some levels with 2 bosses at once, teleportation powerups, new things like that. What do you guys think ? Would you like playing that, or have you any ideas of what I could do for the game ? Or do you think it is good as the jam game it is and that I should not keep on working on it ?

Make sure to tell me what you think about that, and about my post, tell me if you had a similar or completely different experience :) Thanks for reading, best of luck ! Rashness is available HERE, every feedback is much appreciated !

Test your luck in Hot Slots: All In.

Finally, I have some free time to write a brief postmortem about my very first Ludum Dare game Big Fascinating Mutants.

Although I've been working as a game designer for years and have broad experience with crunches, I made a lot of silly mistakes. However, I'm happy with them as it's a valuable experience for my team and me. What kind of mistakes did I make?

Firstly, I suggested a redundantly big idea. We were planning from at the beginning to develop a colossal game for LD, e.g. we wanted to make: - 8 weapons; - 5 different enemies; - 1 boss fight; - 4 battle arenas with different level design; - 2 different player characters with unique abilities;

I was so excited at the start that I couldn't asses the volume of the work. Fortunately, our team managed to scale our ideas, but not very fast.

Secondly, I failed miserably with UI and UX. I have a lot of experience working on UI and UX alone as a game designer. However, this time I forgot to create a proper User Flow of the game which could have helped our programmer; as a result, our UX and UI awful.

Thirdly, the programmer had forgotten to make GIT for the project before the jam. Thus we lost a lot of precious time. We could have better spawner and AI, but we have what we have. Anyway, the programmer did his best and did a lot of work.

On the other hand, other game designers and I managed to make a lot of GD stuff, e.g. mutations design, level design (which we cut off) and balance table. Speaking about the table, it was beneficial when I had a hand in the game build for the first time. Unfortunately, it didn't help me make the game easier.

Although the problems we faced, I enjoyed the process and atmosphere of the jam. First of all, because the first two days of Ludum Dare 44 we spend at the creative space for indie game developers Indikator (RUSSIAN LANGUAGE) in Saint Petersburg. If you are in Saint Petersburg, you should visit this place. Additionally, I love seeing so many good games here on the web site. Hope, next time I'll be better.

Hey, we need new workers for our company!

The only job you need to do is to fix the machines and gain money from our generous boss!

What are you waiting for? Come and join us!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/sweat-shop

Heya everyone! Make sure to try out our game! We are aware of some bugs and a little lack of UX, but we felt that updating the build after the time limit was unfair, so it will be as it was when we posted it. Please leave a rating, we hope you enjoy it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/warlock-soul-war

I will be playing and rating games on my stream for a few hours. If you want me to play your game, join the stream and send me a link to your game:

https://www.twitch.tv/amastryukov

Leave a link in the comments and I'll leave you some feedback.

If you'd like to return the favour and play our game that's awesome, or you could play something from the list below, that's awesome too!

https://youtu.be/bQaf8x8qcR0

The hell theme by @ioleoso

play Zoltan here

Try our mini metroidvania game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/garua

I made a new banner art now that I got enough sleep after the jam

Here's a bit from one of the many boss fights! (Just kidding there are only 2 boss fights)

19:00 BST, 14:00 EST - 4 hours of LD games!

We got through 20 games on Tuesday and would like to get through another 20 tonight! I try and give some honest verbal feedback whilst enjoying your game! There is a queue system, check out the !queue and !submit command in chat for more info.

Hope to see you there at https://www.twitch.tv/honestdangames

Stamp sheets, open boxes, submit forms, earn credits, do your job or die!

  You can play it here!

Life Delivery Service

Hey guys,

I would like to play your games and are live streaming right now :)

https://www.twitch.tv/rahtainka

Just add me a link in a comment.

The only condition is that your game has a web version.

Thanks :heart:

https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo

Heyyy! We made an 3D platformer inspired by games like Mario Sunshine! Rate us!

https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo

Just played a few games on this ludum dare and there's been some very funny ones in today's batch. Major kudos go to Your Life is Collecting Really Nice Cats which had me laughing a lot on top of being a super fun entry. Try it out! As for my own game, I'm at 15.75 reviews in! If you want to try an NES game I did in 48 hours, feel free to check it out here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-stranger-1

To begin with, I created a sketch of what our logos and potion bottles will look like.

First step

The idea with a bottle of "skull" or the emblem of "shield and sword" were not bad, but in order for all the elements to look organically in our game, it was necessary to abandon the details.

Second step

This is how the second stage of the picture looked, with which the programmer could already work, but, of course, were not ready. Well, the result was such a result 😁

Third step

As you can see from the picture, we decided to change the view of the last bottle to the cake. Becouse this element is not a subject for sale, but it restore player's HP. Therefore, it looks like something edible, and not something that can kill "Snow White" 😖

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

Now that I've had a few days to breathe and think about what I did for the compo, I wanted to share a more in depth look at how I approached making a game in 48 hours.

Game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-oarsman

Friday

I think this was the most important night for me. I actually didn't do any prep for this and had no prior ideas what I wanted to do with the theme (I did for the color and shelter themes, but that was it), so while I thought of a theme, I did art. Specifically the characters sprite and the animation for running, jumping, falling, and backward dashing. Those two mechanics were the only ones I knew I wanted in the game - dashing and jumping. So on to setting up controls.

Playtesting vs Personal Preference, Accessibility vs Comfort

I play a lot of platformers with keyboards, so I know what I like. I like tight controls and fast movement. Therefore I balanced controls around that. Another thing was going for accessibility or comfort. For me, these are the same thing, but I know some don't feel the same. I wanted the whole game to be able to played with one hand so even if someone has problems using both hands, they can still play. I also thought it was intuitive to be able to dash in the direction you are moving, so combining movement with dash direction made the most sense to me. I intended to put controller support here, but it skipped my mind with all the other stuff. It's here I had the idea to put in a backdash when standing still, but because of time constraints, after the movement was further refined, it was left in because I didn't have the time to take it out.

Once I got the basic animations and controls down, I made the general use auto-tile template I use to speed things up. It was originally colored black and white as I hadn't settled on any kind of color theme let alone what this game was. At this point, I just knew I had this ghost like figure and wanted to save souls.

Adding shadow effects

Finally, before I went to bed on the first night, I wanted to get my shadow effects on the character (inspired by the Castlevania games I played as a child). I accomplished this by creating a brand new sprite every frame, adding it to a node which I had preset in the level template, and adding a script to it to force it to fade and delete itself after a set amount of time. This allowed me to constantly add the shadow but not add an endless pile of objects and create a memory leak. That was my biggest fear - creating memory leaks and bugs with this stuff. I'm happy to say I avoided that.

Saturday

This is where I got the bulk of my work done. I had thought of the color theme I wanted, a simple purple and blue background. That translated to night, therefore my game was now at night. I wanted it to be outside so I could use layered parallax backgrounds to make. So that was my first step. I created the night sky by simply coloring a large canvas a dark blue, adding a ton of noise, and then zooming into the noise to make the stars. The clouds and mountains are really just blobs with some layering. The trees are inspired by Shovel Knight's trees, but really it's just one tree layered and flipped. The moon is what I was most proud of, it was simple, but it's my favorite piece of art I did for this game.

At this point I added the dash animation you see in the picture above and with that, I started making traps and obstacles.

The theme

After this was all done, I finally decided on the mechanics for the theme - you must sacrifice your life to interact with objects and to save souls. With that, I went through and created the three basic interactions - souls, doors, and switches. I had added hearts to the UI at this point and had this all hooked up quickly by using groups and placing all the code within the player's script so I didn't have to do much if any scripting for objects.

Next, I needed to add danger.

Taking shortcuts

I don't know how to do AI that well, so creating enemies were out of the question because I didn't have time to teach myself that, so the solution? I'm making a platformer, let's use traps and spikes. The classics of the platformer genre. I took a few shortcuts with this. For example, instead of determining when they hit, all of that is done via collision within the player's script and placing all things that damage in a "danger" group. Next, I had built platforms at this point, so for moving traps, I simply attached the spike traps (a trap without any scripts) to a platform, and voila - I now have a moving trap that I can adjust to go horizontal or vertical, change distance, and change speed all from the ui thanks to exported variables.

I took he exported variable root with my range traps as well as you can see below where the direction Vector2 dictates not only the direction of firing but also the direction the sprite is rotated in.

Level Design

At this point, I started putting together a single level.

I wanted to show off just about everything in the first level, but still make it extremely accessible. All balancing was done without any power ups, so if I couldn't beat a level without power ups, I didn't think it was a good level. Placing a switch outside a building with the wall and soul all in view was to show the player the interactions. A hidden room with a lantern was clearly visible underground to try and show that there are hidden rooms to upgrade. Once I had the basic level design, it was already 3 AM, so I ended my night there with less than a day left to complete this.

Sunday

All the small things

So I had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. I woke up at 8 AM and immediately started working on sound effects and music because those add the most atmosphere. I used Bfxr and BeepBox to make 8 bit sounding music. At this point, I also wanted to put in an effect from one of my first projects I ever did - lanterns that disappeared and had light intensity that goes with the music. Godot doesn't have a lot of tools for this, so I used 6 different music channels each with eq values set to only pick up one range of sounds within the music and then used range_lerp to change it to the within the range of values I actually needed.

At that point, it was just playing with colors and lighting. I try and add some reference to either the bisexual or LGBTQ+ community in all my games, so I made 6 colored lanterns that I would use later all with the pride flag colors and mapped them to each of the 6 EQ busses I had set up with a white one for the music bus. From there it was creating victory music, creating level transitions, and various other small improvements to help the feel like shaders for the water and the bullets. Things that no one is going to stop and really notice unless they were missing.

The second and third levels

I originally wanted to do a level editor to make levels quicker, and if I had been doing the jam and had the extra day, I would have, but for the compo I didn't have time. So I reduced my scope from 8 levels to 3 and wanted to show off every feature I had put in within those three levels.

Level 2

I put in 3 souls and only required 2. Because of how agile the player is, movement wasn't a problem for me and if you grabbed upgrades, you would be even more agile - so I balanced around base power until I found it fun. I wanted platforms to disappear on a timer, so I added that and then placed the warning sound in a global audio node rather than a 2D one to give the player warning. This one was supposed to be difficult, but not impossible.

Level 3

I doubt many will notice, but it's actually just a big turtle with teeth. This was going to show off everything. I wanted it in the water as that was the original reason I wanted the water effect. I made this one - admittedly - very hard unless you had upgrades. Still beatable, but very hard.

Finishing up

The UI was the last thing I did. Adding sound options, credits, menus, and the theming were all done within about 2 hours total. This is the part I feel is the most rushed. I wanted to put more indications on what happened when you interacted with things and more indication what the coins did, etc. Mostly I ended up relying on sound design for that, but I don't think that was sufficient. I needed visual feedback, but I didn't have the time to put it in effectively. One of the nice things about how I design levels, is that playtesting was pretty much done at this point as I playtest as I create - section by section. There were still more things I wanted to add - options for various hearts, controller support, and better UI placement, but these were all lost due to the time crunch.

Post release feedback

This is where I think I've gotten the most value from this experience. It was my first ever compo and I've only been making games for about 9 months now, so this is the first thing I'll have published for more than friends or people who watch my streams get to see and give feedback. There have been extremely helpful feedback that's shown the faults of the game that I didn't even consider. All of it reinforcing the idea that player testing is not only important but necessary.

Overall, this was super enjoyable and something I'm going to do more of - though maybe next time I'll be able to improve thanks to the experiences from this one. This one was kind of a "let's wing it" experience, the next one - I hope - will be more planned on my part.