Here are some analytics from my keynote!

If you haven't seen it, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdq-IYxhByw

People shared my video over SMS and Whatsapp, that's cool!

Here are the videos my video was recommended on and got clicks from that, I circled some of the funny ones:

Here are the devices people watched it on:

Some people watched it on their TVs and game consoles, that's amazing!

Sad. (No ads though, so it makes sense)

Not bad at all.

Makes sense.

Maybe you watched our development process on twitch...

If you got a minute come check out the final result!

Available as HTML 5 and Windows Standalone.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/no-life-no-game

(But stay clear of the spikes, they do sting)

My NES compo game, The Stranger, has finally passed the 20 review threshold! Thank you for taking your time to play my game and for the feedback, really happy that people are enjoying something I created :).

If you haven't tried it yet, you can try it right here -> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-stranger-1

This time, I'd like to give a shoutout to @64mega and his DOS game he made for the Compo, Venture-Out, also coded in Assembly! Check his game out too if you have time :)

Play in the browser: Here

I also like this new format better.

--

Please come and try out Enemy Of The State! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/enemy-of-the-state

It's the weekend, which means the end of working on nofun things, and the beginning of working on yesfun things (work is inescapable). Got a post-jam update out for ｉｎｖｅｒｔｅｂｒａｅ with a couple of quality-of-life fixes suggested by friends, family, and the great LD community:

• Makes keywords bold so they stand out a bit more. Everyone's got different monitors and different eyes, so the previous level of contrast wasn't always terribly obvious. Hopefully this helps!
• Enables double-clicking words to move them alongside drag-and-drop. As the title states, drag-and-drop is very cool and fun and I don't regret adding it. However, when you have a loottt of words to try out, it's a real speedbump towards iteration. This speeds things up a ton.
• Wrote some less cryptic help text to the help button for people who are actually looking for helpful help.
• Does a bit of automatic scaling for folks with smaller screens (or high DPI scales). Some people were reporting the game loading cut off for them before they manually zoomed out, hopefully this alleviates this.

Thanks to everyone who's played and given me feedback so far! If you haven't yet, and you like stories and puzzies, feel free to check out my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/invertebrae.

You can play the game online here: https://hugimugi7.itch.io/elevator-pitch

Thank you for all your feedback so far! -AG

After some feedback, I've added more of a description of the game to the entry page so it is a little easier to tell what is happening in the game.

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/unbalanced-silly-slot-game

Could you reach the final boss ? Mister Hairless !

Don't forget to get a skill at the computer !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/survivor-2048

!

PLAY IT HERE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/dead-frog-tell-no-tales

We created 40 different cards illustrations for Dead Frog Tell No Tales. Try to find them ingame!

We are amazed by the feedbacks we got so far from the community. It's truly a great event to be part of!

If you're looking for a challenging action arcade game, check out Gold Digger 2084! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/gold-digger

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/gold-digger

Go play Sword of Hearts!

At 9PM CET I will be streaming the remaining games in the queue: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17mRJVxMr7kskJ5fzjgauDcnkkmccfsjjGpaWdNfyM6Y/edit?usp=sharing

And you'll be able to submit your game as well.

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

At 10PM I will participate in the One Hour Game Jam, so come and watch me if you want :)

You can also try doing it as well!

Can you help to one hasty tombs robber to not die in the Mayans temple? Yes I know, he shouldn't become a tombs robber in the first place... but you got to help him, if he will die he won't be able to rate your game :( So please help him get out so he can rate your game :)

Hey, I got a train ticket to the temple for you!:

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

Now you can kill piggies and sell their skins wherever you want! Awesome 🐷

(except on iOS, because you know, pigs need to die to earn money, and an iPhone is pretty expensive)

🐷 Download and rate the game here!

Follow us on Twitter (EN) | Follow us on Facebook (FR) | Follow us on Instagram (EN)

From paper research to digital 2D creation Style Pixel Art

The software used: Asprite (animated sprite editor and pixel art tool) and Lospec (procedural pixel art genarator)

Available HTML5, Window and Linux https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/underbreak

Looking for more reviews and feedback on my solo jam game, Proton!

Proton is a mini-puzzle game about a Battery Bot trying to restore power to a robotics facility, but he must use his own charge to activate the panels, doors, and conveyor belts that stand in his way. Along the way there are electrical hazards and recharge tiles that help get you through.

This was also a study in character animation, interactive effects, and audio -- I'd love to hear what you all think! All ratings and feedback very eagerly encouraged!

Find the game and more information here!

"The strange life of Bill the postman"

First post-jam modifications based of feedbacks :

• Speed up character
• Less box resistance
• Change or add some scene elements
• Change some text

You can play and rate it here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-strange-life-of-bill-the-postman

You're a necromancer that uses your own life to summon creatures and defende your tower, luckly you have an alchemist partner that can make potions to heal you, but them both need to hurry, the human army is relentless and won't stop their attack until their king is dead.

Make items combinations to craft potions and summon monster to defend your tower.

The Alchemist can craft potions to heal the Necromancer and cure some status. The Necromancer can summon minions to fight foes.

Note. When your life bar is green, you'll lose hp over time, but the alchemist can craft a potion to stop this.

Combos

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

Hey you……

Yeah you… Com’ere,

Closer…

A’ight listen to me. Are you interested in some goodies? yeah of course you are hehe… Want some shit that’s off the market? you looking for stuff you can’t get on Amazon? I’ve got something for you… eeeehhhg…

Go to this website… you won’t regret I tell ya: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lucis-little-trinkets

Just keep it in the deal okay?

Come hang out and get your game played:

https://www.twitch.tv/adroitconceptions

If you're a fan of robots, puzzles, or platformers, come check out our game, Coin-Op Kid!

Play it HERE!!

Our first Ludum Dare submission, a technical puzzle-platformer where certain actions shrink (and eventually kill) you, is available to play download free here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/an-american-blood-clot-in-techno-athens

We're very proud of the comments we've received, and would like your feedback as well. I'm about to head back into the trenches for another flurry of rating your submissions -- please feel free to drop a comment here and ask me to play yours, and I'll get on it ASAP!

As an aside, our first LD has been an absolute blast and I can't wait for the next one.

May the 4th be with you when you challenge Snowball and the others to a CATastrophic fight of life or death ;)

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

After a long work week, we have quite a few games to play of all the awesome people who rated our game!

HeartString

If you have not checked it out yet, our game is HeartString. A dungeon crawler, with a powerful weapon, that has deadly consequences..

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

Hey, just announcing that we have an android build now. Our game is a puzzle, so it works very well with mobile!

I love looking at the initial scribbles after finishing a game. It always surprises me, how recognizable the game is, how little it apparently changed in development. Not sure if this is good or bad.

The title screen. In the scribble you can see a mouse in the garden, and a bird in a tree, if you have a little imagination.

The ingame map view. Yes, those strokes are meant to be a fence. The house didn't make it into the game, which was my mistake on unclear communication.

And the screen when finishing a level. The most important part is in, the petting of the cat! A few things didn't get done, like the average score, or a list of animals hunted in that level, or the amount of treats you got for those animals. On the outside, the resolution is noted.

The mouse behaviour was the first thing that was designed and implemented in the game. 4 hours into the jam we could already hunt mice (with placeholder graphics and instant movement).

Hard to tell what's the game version and what's the sketch!

This is the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/fluffensnuff

One week after its production, Rashness is heading to 200 ratings... A number I never expected to be so close to. Make sure to try the game if you didn't, the link is HERE, every feedback is appreciated so that I'll improve the game after the ratings time. I also keep on playing games, leaving as much as possible useful feedbacks !

Hey! Copper Aardvark here. My entry for Ldjam was made completely alone in the compo and I am really proud of it. If you haven’t seen it yet, come check it out!

The game is a platform era shooter where you are trying to rob the worlds most secure bank. The amount of cash you have acts as you health and your coins act as your ammunition. There are a variety of guns in the game that can be found in store rooms. To purchase them, you must spend either your cash or your coins. You must be careful of taking damage and overusing ammo, as both are very important for later progression in the game.

That’s basically it, if you’re down, come check it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/kill-the-money

Do you think you can get there?

Come and try playing GTApp

I hope you're all having a good weekend!

We had a lot of fun during the Ludum Dare game jam. So much fun, in fact, that we have continued to work on Life Pact since!

The new Post-Jam update is available now! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/life-pact

For everyone who played Life Cycle or is about to play it:

I wrote a Post Mortem including interesting stuff about Unity, a timelapse and some gifs showing the inner workings of the character controller of the game and also more fun stuff. Hope you enjoy it!

For everyone else, here's a comic related to the game:

If you're interested, you can play the game here. Thanks for any feedback!

In Battery Life you play a battery who has to use it's energy to manipulate the environment. The poor battery has to escape through the blue doors and you have to guide it. The game is a top-down action/puzzler game.

Try it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/battery-life (WebGL and PC versions available)

https://youtu.be/6tkJ4xl4Tc0

...and that means COLLECTING REALLY NICE CATS!!! CRNC is pronounced KURR-n-see, by the way...

Click here to play it and I'll happily try yours!

My record is 54 seconds (in the updated version).

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/stay-alive

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/in-the-night-garden

https://simmer.io/@Nate/money-is-life

Bloodmoon Season has reached 50 votes, so I thought I’ll do a breakdown of how our environment was assembled.

Bloodmoon Season is an fps werewolf hunting game. Since the idea was to feel some level of fear from the beasts, the environment had to emphasize this. That’s why I opted for narrow streets, with buildings and archways towering over the player, to create a sense of smallness and dread. The small streets also allowed for great scares, as it was never clear what could hide behind the next corner.

Medieval cities usually have brick houses and cobblestone roads with stone walls. To recreate these small details normal maps were essential. I have also added small stone blocks to the edges of buildings. The standard Unity dark fog was added, with AO and some post production effects to make the area more bleak and dark.

Finally, the lights were put in. Different parts of the town were lit with different colored lights to avoid too much confusion, since players needed to return to the shop frequently. We figured highlighting this area with a unique color was the best solution.

...then we prayed that the baked lighting would look similar to what was arranged in the editor...

If any of this sparked your interest, you can give beast hunting a try here, we would love to know what you think:

Bloodmoon Season

Didn't get much time to post about it over the long week, but here's my my take on this LD's theme sacrificing your life to allow your community to go ahead with their lives in a zombie occupied world:

If this sounds interesting, give it a shot!

Windows / Mac / WebGL

Time to try out the other awesome entries now!

Yo play my game or you will die.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bear-of-symph

I've started working on a post-jam version of my game "People Poker". I want to both add some of the features that I didn't get to include, and respond to some of the feedback I've received, mainly that it is too hard and unclear what to do.

So far I've added several idle animations which were missing, which adds a lot of life to the game. I also have the NPCs turning to look at the player, and shouting advice and encouragement, a great suggestion that a commenter made.

To reduce the difficulty, I added a lot more cover, and also changed the tentacle behaviour so that it is possible to dodge them. I will probably remove cover and increase the speed and accuracy of the tentacles as the player progresses to create a difficulty curve.

It'll probably be a few days yet before I'm ready to release the update, but in the meantime you can play and rate the compo version here.

Oh boy, I think it’s time for a break now. I’ve done nothing but rate games since this morning. Thanks to all who checked out mine!

And if you haven’t checked it out, here’s that sweet sweet link:

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

And not to forget dat juicy screenie

I’ll probably rate more tomorrow, I’m having a great time with ld 44s games. Absolutely wonderful job to all those I’ve rated!

I'll review the game of every person that comment on our page, so check our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-money-hole

The new Borderlands 3 Trailer that got released a few days ago even has them - Hover boards! If you ever wanted to know how the feeling is to cruze and hover over land, then you do not need to wait till mid Semptember to do that!

Just download our game "Cats without Cars" and see for yourself how cool it is to travel with highspeed without touching the ground.

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

This is how we made the islands in Houdini, check it out!
http://blog.borderline.games/tutorials/sliced-mountains.html

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

This past weekend I had the opportunity to participate in ludum dare 44 with my friend JohnnyDalvi.

Concepting

At the event’s start, the theme was announced: “Your Life Is Currency.” The first phase of a game jam is to brainstorm ideas and decide what game to make. Initially, we discussed mechanics such as summoning minions through blood sacrifice and using health to pay for actions. However, I have a policy of pushing back against early ideas because other teams in the event are likely to create a similar game (and based on the submissions, there are a lot of ‘pay with blood’ games).

Game jam themes can be taken literally or figuratively. From my experience, the figurative / metaphorical entries usually score higher. Gameplay that incorporates the theme is not enough – the entry must thematically stand out from the rest of the pack while also having solid polish in all areas – it can’t look like it was “rushed to finish by the deadline.” After discarding the initial ideas, we started thinking of ‘life’ in a broader sense:

• Life as a journey
• Life as a soul, like the soul of a forest

The second idea struck with us and we settled on a game where you play as the protector of a forest who ‘awakens’ trees to fight off loggers. To fit the theme, we decided the awakened trees (‘treants’) would leave the forest – they are no longer part of it after being uprooted. Hence, the life of the forest (trees) must also be spent to defend it.

Production

The rest of the weekend was spent on development. I was in charge of the game look and feel, meaning the 3D models, 2D UI, audio, and visual effects. The aesthetic style I chose was “hybrid poly”, which combines low and high poly assets. I planned to use asset packs as the base for my high poly assets, so I began by creating the low poly blocks using Blender.

I modeled 2 cliff rocks, 2 ground platforms, and 2 small rocks. The base of our level is constructed from these objects, each being rotated and scaled in different ways to break uniformity.

After finishing the level layout, I spent the remaining time modifying content from asset packs to fit our game, setting up post processing, and playing with scene settings to capture two primary moods: “mystical” and “airborne”. Check out the progression over time.

Retrospective

My time allocation looked approximately like this:

• Concepting: 1 hour
• Game Development: 41 hours
• Ice Skating Lesson: 2 hours (yes, I’m an aspiring ice skater!)
• Random Breaks: 6 hours
• Sleep: 16 hours (I didn’t sleep from Sunday to Monday)
• Testing / Tweaking / Building: 6 hours

Those with experience in hackathons and game jams know the actual time a person has to work is about half the allotted amount due to sleep, breaks, and fixing unexpected problems that arise from being imperfect developers. Numerous failed jams have taught me the most important part of these events is agreeing on a concept that can realistically be made in 1/3 of the given time. As my time allocation shows, we missed, and so the testing and tweaking of the game suffered. When this happens, the player experience (emotions, feelings of progress, excitement, etc.) relies largely on the luck of having initially put everything together in a way that creates a memorable experience. See some of the feedback below:

While our game was extremely polished, the gameplay did not have enough variety to entertain. Dullness, or the player feeling ‘bored’ is an experience that overshadows even the best graphics and plotline. What I should have done is drawn the line on polish after the main level was production-ready, then dive into coding to add more dynamicism to the gameplay. We had only implemented a few simple mechanics and none of them (combined with the level design) allowed for interesting emergent experiences.

For example, most game jam entries do not have an Options menu. The time I spent creating this one could have been better spent elsewhere.

Overall though, we created a polished strategy game that even rose to the front of the ‘Popular Strategy Games’ section of itch.io for one week. I’m proud of what we accomplished in 72 hours and am already looking forward to the next weekend intensive.

Play our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/heart-of-the-grove

I need to play and rate more games, so I'm looking for more games to play after I get off work tonight. Please leave a comment below with a link to your game and I promise I'll play and rate it tonight.

I really appreciate all the kind words and helpful tips thus far on my little shooter game, "Darkling." If you'd like to play and rate mine, it would really mean a lot to me! Thanks everyone and have a great day!

Please Play and Rate Here

I wrote a postmortem / long form article over here on itch and then forgot to publish it before linking to it. Sorry for that! https://dignz.itch.io/work-life-balance/devlog/79560/making-of-work-life-balance

A rambling account of the decisions and development process for my LD44 game Work Life Balance..

If anyone can beat 6 minutes 28 seconds OR $3,624.00 profits for the corporation let me know! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/work-life-balance

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

Say something

Don't worry if you can't, Stoks the merchant can upgrade your ship. But at what cost?

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/memories-of-a-captain

Also be sure to exchange your game url in the comments and I will rate+feedback if you do!

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

My submission just got major update:
TWO PLAYER MODE IS ADDED!
So grab your friend and try out Wanted!
Link to the submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/wanted-1

.

If you are into shopkeeping and crafting, then this game is for you! Gather some materials, create potions and make your customers happy. Getting tired of customers? Gift them a potion you brew and see their reaction!

I will return feedback to your game too, so don't forget to leave a comment.

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

*Play in the browser: Here =] *

This blog post starts with some apologies: to everyone that played my game and found some bugs, I'm really sorry.

My game's page is becoming really long, and I don't think it's worth writing this here. So I will take this opportunity and expand on my thought a bit.

You can play S.H.R.O.U.D.. Some of you already did, some of you didn't. It's fine.

I think it's a great game. It's not good, it's not bad, but it's great. And it's massive; it's massive for a Jam game. Let's talk one second about all the mechanics it has. Sorry for the long intro but I think it's needed for the point I'm trying to make.

• Shooting
• Eating and Drinking
• Health
• Radiations
• Using items
• Chests with random loot
• Vendors...
• ...that are randomly stocked
• NPCs
• Buyers
• Drops
• Interactions with objects (signs, unique models, etc.)
• A radiation zone
• Quests
• Selling body parts...
• ...which influences the core gameplay based on the sold body part
• One unique animation for every combination of sold parts
• Lore
• Sleeping
• Multiple days system
• Enemies

You might read this list and think i'm just trying to brag, but I assure you it's not like that. It's not like that because... Almost every single feature in my game is somehow bugged.

I guess that the point I'm trying to make in my post is that the more mechanics you have, the more likely they are to be broken. Especially in a jam, especially with spaghetti code.

And I'm really sad about this, because whenever I build a game I try to do it with passion and with love. For me it's not just a way of having fun while coding, it's not about the competition. I always try to consider as a piece of interactive media; so whenever it's not played at its fullest, it's just awful.

And that's why I'm really sorry when bugs happen. Not only I am sorry for my game, because I delivered a poorly functional product; but I'm also sorry for you, the player, that took the time to play my game just to find it unplayable because of gamebreaking glitches.

So as I did with the features list, I will do a bug list, just to make a point:

• Animations are not triggering correctly when selling body parts
• Ammo is not always spent properly
• When you use your rifle sometimes you use gun ammo
• If you sell the arm while holding a rifle really weird things happen
• Some of the chests have the npc dialogue box and vice-versa
• Sometimes the radiation zone doesn't reset
• Enemies get stuck in walls
• The cavern makes your game freeze (this bug is solved because I completely removed the cave event, but I spent 6h trying to fix it without success, so here it will stay)
• Sometimes you get twice the amount of items from the ground
• One NPC doesn't talk
• Balancing issues

Everytime I watch someone play it, I discover something new. In yesterday's build people didn't even get the final screen, the real reward of the game...

And let's not talk about the empty world, the poorly explained mechanics, and the not that fun or even useful ones.

What I'm trying to prove? A game doesn't need to be big to be fun, it doesn't need to be complicated, it doesn't even have to be innovative. The more you try, the more you fail. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, I'm saying that you don't have to try harder than necessary. Something that we did. During the development, after the first 24 hours, I was still thinking about things I could add to the game.

I was really overconfident, and you should never be.

So once again, I want to do some sincere apologies on my behalf. I know it's the Jam, I know shit happens. But I really feel mortified for bringing you a messy product.

I'm sorry, but I really still hope to see you in the wasteland.

Hopefully in a better one.

Hi! I'm one of the devs of The Necromancer Saga! We received a lot of feedback the past week, and I took a bit of time to do some bugfixing. I hope that new players enjoy the experience a lot more, and previous players are welcome to try it out a second time.

List of bugfixes:

• Lighting is improved. Now you can actually see behind those shadows!

Before

After - Loading screen now’s working as it should (It’s used to avoid that camera flickering at the beggining). - Lowered music volume as it was too high. - Skeletons now fight the enemy that was hit by a fireball, if they weren’t attacking before. - Added particles to fireballs when they collide with an object to provide more feedback on the player when it’s attacking an enemy - Enemies were nerfed. (Needs a bit more playtesting, as I find them a bit too easy. I’ll probably do a balance patch later).

Haven't played it yet? Here's the link to the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-necromancer-saga-endless-dungeons

Hope you enjoy it!

As of now the art for the base tarot set (22 cards) and the suit of swords (14 cards) has finished, this means I have the visuals done for 72 scenarios, halfway done!

Whats left for a final release; - 3 more suits of art for the other suits of cards (14 per suit) - A total of 156 scenarios (currently 8 implemented) - Item card art (partly through this) - Change the death/finished run visuals - Options menu - Android testing - Unlocking suits through play - Drawing a run before play begins, ensuring duplicates are not present (can’t be done until 11 scenarios at a minimum are implemented)

That seems like a lot but considering the time consuming parts are the art it's almost done!

I could still use the communities feedback on 2 things however;

The first thing is the potential for an “unhinged” joke set of scenarios; As of right now there will be 154 scenarios that are more or less completely serious, this would mean adding a 6th suit of cards that would consist of 5-7 cards (10-14 scenarios) that would all be humorous.

Now the concern with this is would this break the immersion and feel of the game? any feedback on that idea is greatly appreciated!

The second thing I need feedback on is the item cards; Since the jam item cards have been implemented, these cards are given to the player when they choose an option that boosts a stat, with specific items being tied to specific stats. Now the art for a base set has been done for these cards, the thing is that there are essentially only 8 functions these cards will serve with 5 of them being the heirloom cards that will be hard to obtain (2 heirlooms completed).

If you were playing this and got the same item every time your strength stat was increased would you be annoyed? Would you want more than one item visual even if it did the exact same thing?

As an added bonus visual for this post, I call this card (almost identical to the actual tarot visual) the "Why did I spend all my money on swords" card

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 at:

Twitter;https://twitter.com/Gear_Steak

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

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

THANK YOU!!!

So, if you haven't seen it yet, I'd like to announce my game, Sigillis. In it, you draw symbols to cast spells. It's all a rather neat system, all pulled together in just 48 hours.

If you'd like, you can play it here and then rate it over here.

I would talk more, but I'm too hard at work on the devlog that's coming out some time in the next week. So about that, it's gonna be all about the pattern recognition algorithm, so stay tuned for that. I'm gonna get back to doing that, so have a good day or whatever, and thanks for checking out (and maybe leaving feedback) on my game, I really appreciate it! Cheers, JUSTCAMH :smile:

I added in a couple of the things I couldn't get done in time - mainly AI , the actual gold dropping mechanic, and the movement for the dwarf.

Post-dare version here.

https://johnnysix.net/games/gcpd03/

The time lapse development video for Yen Master is now up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUisv2K4Luw

Entry - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/yen-master

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!

For those of you who haven't played my game, "We Pay In Blood", yet, it is an arena fighting game, similar to the classic “Boxhead”. Before each arena round you’ll be able to use your hitpoints to buy new weapons! There are 2 bosses that you’ll be able to defeat.

Even though the 2nd boss can be killed on level 10, the game can be played endlessly if you wish to continue!

Good luck!

Click Here To Play The Game!

Thanks to everyone who played my game!

It's the first time I finished a game on a Ludum Dare so I feel really happy for hitting 20!

Also, thanks a lot for the good vibes and awesome feedback, It really makes me want to keep working on my game

Again, HUGE Thanks!

It's nice to not have to worry now, but I think I'll continue rating other games anyway-- it would be nice to reach 30+ for the first time!

(TLDR: I created a sweet script that means I don't have to do 300+ steps for our future game jams, find the link to the script below)

Goal: Add 1 new character to our Isometric Game in Unity

Steps:

1. Create sprite strip (make sure all cells are the same width and height)
2. Import Texture2D into Unity
3. Set Sprite Mode to Multiple
4. Click Sprite Editor button (don't forget to save the changes to Sprite Mode)
5. Click the Slice option in the top menu
6. In the Type dropdown, select Grid by Cell Size
7. Enter 16 for width (Pixel size X) and 32 for height (Pixel size Y)
8. Click the Slice button
9. Repeat steps 1-8 for each direction your character is facing for both Walk animations and Stand animations (total of 8 sprite strips)
10. Take a deep breath, because you are not even half way done
11. Right click your Animation folder in your explorer and create a new Animator Controller
12. Click on your AnimatorController and open up the Animator tab in the Unity Editor
13. Right click in your Animation folder again and create a new Animation
14. Make sure to name your Animation object based on the sprite sheet it is going to be associated with (DownLeftWalk, DownLeftStand, UpRightWalk, UpRightStand, etc...)
15. Click and drag the newly created Animation into the Animator tab window that you have open
16. Repeat step 13-15 for each of your sprite sheets
17. Now create an empty GameObject in your scene (or you can use a prefab)
18. Add the SpriteRenderer and Animator components
19. Drag the AnimatorController from step 11 into the Animator.Controller slot
20. Open up the Animation tab (different from Animator tab) while you have the GameObject selected (that part is important)
21. Now you should have a dropdown in the Animation tab that has your list of Animation's, if not, go back to step 20 and try again
22. Select one of the Animations from the drop down
23. Navigate to the folder you have your actual sprite sheet asset in
24. Click the little arrow to open up your sprite sheet and show all of the individual sprite frames in the explorer
25. Shift-Click to select all of the frames out of the sprite sheet
26. Drag the frames from the explorer and drop them into the Animation tab
27. You should see the frames listed one-by-one in the Animation tab
28. Click the play button in the Animation tab to view the animation (don't forget to navigate back to the Scene view) and you can now adjust the speed of the animation by changing the Samples number in the Animation tab
29. Repeat steps 22-28 for all of your Animations for this character
30. (Optional) Our animations looped, so you need to go into each Animation object and select Loop Time and Loop Pose

No biggy. Now just do this entire process 13 times (1 for the player character, and 12 more times for each NPC).

In total, I spent just shy of 3 hours working on this task for our jam (not including the time to actually make the sprite sheet, that part was done by our artist, or the part where I had to actually LEARN how to make all this stuff work in the first place). This list, I feel, really highlights the downside to using Unity for our animation framework. There is just such an incredible amount of overhead to get just a single animation into the game. And honestly, since we only do this process once every few months, one of us has to relearn it all from scratch each time. We've probably all, during one jam or another, sat there reading through Unity docs and watching youtube tutorials trying to figure out how to configure everything just right so that Unity will allow us to play our 2D animations.

I'm sure there is a really great use-case for such a complex animation system somewhere in 3D land, but for all of us who are using Unity in just 2 dimensions, we could really use a better process for this. So, after this jam was over, I decided to investigate how it could be done.

AssetPostprocessor to the rescue!

In Unity, you can set up an Asset processing pipeline where scripts are run when specific types of Assets are imported into the project. After much fiddling, I've found a half-way-decent approach to automate MOST of the busy work.

Check out my gist to get the full file: https://gist.github.com/Kenoshen/494a83028e8c6509087172c21fefcef4 (put it in Assets/Editor)

Instead of doing that entire list manually, this script will run every time you import a new sprite sheet into the project. It slices the texture (given some texture naming conventions), creates the AnimatorController and each Animation, adds the frames of the sprite sheet into the Animation, and adds the Animation to the AnimatorController. All together reducing your work down to dragging the appropriate AnimatorController into the correct GameObject Animator component.

If you were like our team and were constantly battling with Unity's Animation system, I hope this script helps you in your future work.

Good luck and happy Jamming!

PS. Check out our game: 2nd Bank

Looking for some games to check out (I can only play web and mac games) Leave me your link and I will play, rate, and give you feedback

Also, consider playing my own game, Prospector Stanley https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/prospector-stanley

It warms our hearts to see so many people scamming Gam Gam out of her money.

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who took the time to play our ridiculous game and leave such wonderful feedback! We truly didn't expect this much attention.

We are currently going down the list of feedback on our game page and returning the favor as best we can.

In the meantime, feel free to try to beat the current Knit Worth reigning champion @tuhlienn, who currently holds the top score of an absolutely bonkers 7,326,550 points!! Mad props! :clap:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/knit-worth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tifra25PP4U

We have our first world record speedrun for Bet Your Life! Tyescraper did some crazy things we didn't even know were possible! Watch his 1m54s run, then try and beat it 😉 - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bet-your-life-2/

Play and give me some suggestions!

Thank you! :smiley:

I have made a devlog-like video where I show and talk about how I made my game.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dtDzQz4zx4g

Play Tooth, Claw & Teacup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDIFZyRjY8

I'm not going to do that again. It was hard to edit.

Join me live on Twitch for my final LD44 game playing session

There is a !queue but it isn't too long at the moment, and keep in mind I only play the game if the developer is active in chat when I get to their game - so often the queue moves faster than you'd expect. Do remember - if your game is next and you're not in chat, you are removed from the queue and will need to submit your game again! You can get a notification when I go live by following my Twitch channel, or just keep an eye on the clock - silly! :clock3:

So far this year I've played through about 40 games on stream and have really enjoyed the quality & variance in games.

Our first LD has been a fantastic journey for me and @marius-boenisch . From Creation of the game to testing other projects and receiving feedback. We even hit the 20 received feedback score in just 3 days! We are looking foward to the end ranking and wish you all best of luck!

For everyone that hasn't played the game yet and wants to try it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/blood-coins

Just put camera view into the head.

And do not forget to add some fog and post-processing!

=the actual game is different=

Keep getting lots of different feedback and happy that people are enjoying my game. if you haven't played it please give it a go!

will be rating some more games for a bit

The feedback I've had on my game has been surprising, I wasn't expecting so many people to play it, let alone have almost nothing but good things and constructive critiques to say about it. So that wealth of play-test input together with the fact that I really enjoyed making the game and it seems to be a relatively scarce concept (I haven't seen many games like this at least) have brought me to the decision to continue developing it beyond LD.

Well I say "continue". I started from scratch. I don't know about you guys but my rushed code was a HOT MESS. Dear Lord I hope no one actually looks at my source code.

I've got a first Dev Blog video up which I'll stick at the end of the post if you're interested. And if you haven't played/rated my entry, please do. You can find it here; https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/dea-7h

Moving Forward

My game idea involves randomising a lot of NPCs. When I cobbled together my entry I had the most basic sprites imaginable put together in a hacky way;

This was something I couldn't help due to the time constraints, but it severely limited the visual characteristics of my NPCs, which is a problem in a game where you have to identify an NPC based on those limited attributes. So naturally the first point of order was to make more detailed NPCs with more distinct characteristics. I set about writing code that would take in different layers (body, t-shirt, hair, etc) and paint them into one complete sprite, colouring each layer with a random selection from a predefined set of colours.

Adding different variations of those layers (for example, long hair, short hair, balding hair), as well as the option to skip that layer entirely (jacket or no jacket) already increased the visual variation in my NPCs ten-fold.

And before the game is done I intend to have more clothing variations, different body types, and so on. Another thing I want to add in the proper game is distinct locations. My entry essentially just had one "street" that you could move up and down, but I'd like to have different areas the player can visit, which would add both an element of exploration, and an additional attribute to learn about your target, as the NPC you're looking for could be in a specific location.

So that's where I'm at. After a week of casual evenings, I've essentially got the stage I was at in hour 6 of the actual Compo. But I'm cool with that, because it looks a heck of a lot better!

If you're interested in my dev blog video on this, you can find it below. And thanks again for all the playing/rating of my game. You guys have been amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfqE4MCA8yw

Hi all, apparently my game isn't allowed to run for compo because I used someone else music. It pains me a little but I'm OK with changing to jam. My bad I should have read the rules better.

But I just can't find out how to swap to jam. It doesn't seems to be possible. If someone knows how to swap and can help me with it, I will be gratefull. Thanks!

Here are the sets of UnderBreak, made with 3ds max on Unity, during the Ludum Dare 44.

Available HTML5, Window and Linux https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/underbreak

First prototype

First test with art

Final game

I put together a timelapse of the art for my game, "People Poker":

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

We now have a port for Web and Android.

(web does not work well in full screen, but otherwise works completely fine).

Please check out our game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifeless

We try to review all games that reviewed ours so give us some love. :heart:

We have tried our best to make the game, we hope you enjoy it!

And remember, whatever you do. Try not to die, that.. wouldn't be good

Also you can join our discord channel! We would love to hang out with you :smile:

If you are into shopkeeping and crafting, then this game is for you! Gather some materials, create potions and make your customers happy. Getting tired of customers? Gift them a potion you brew and see their reaction!

I will return feedback to your game too, so don't forget to leave a comment.

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

Just a few small fixes...

Changes: - Slightly altered coin pickup sound to make it less painful - Slightly lowered volume of all sounds

Bug Fixes: - Fixed spelling mistake on upgrade screen - Fixed bug where upgrade screen would remain visible if the player died while increasing stats

Haven't played my game yet? Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/everything-is-money

A big disaster thats kind of caused by you. Everybody fights or even sells their body parts for blood!

You can give it a try huh?

Draw bloodlines for the cultists to summon the Blood God! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bloodlines

My submission just got major update:
TWO PLAYER MODE IS ADDED!
So grab your friend and try out Wanted! (Or you can try it alone.)
Link to the submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/wanted-1

.

Can you keep all the gods happy?

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

We still have the original version up that we made in time for ldjam but I finally got the game voiced (which we ran out of time to do) and put that version up on the page as well. If you want to give it a try, let us know how you found it!

https://godline.itch.io/big-tiddy-girlfriend-a-tale-of-romance

Hey guys

We had a lot of fun last weekend participating in this ludum dare. We had a couple of nice feedbacks about the random generation of the temple we made for our game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/xochipillis-trade), so I decided to write a small article about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/bkwlzu/xochipillistraderandom_temple

Hope you will enjoy it:)

Hey you all! My team and I will play your games and give feedback on every game! Stream will start at 5:30 PM CEST (3 hours from now)

Submit your game: https://t.co/dmM9oo5XXx

Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/sdg_ryo

In the time rush of a game jam, we forget to make a cool icon for the game. I just put a screenshot as an icon to solve this problem fast, as possible.

And here what it looked:

Squished and inaccurate to look.

It alienated the players from the game :sob:

In the general table, the icon looked blankly:

After JAM I noticed it and made new proper version:

Look how it pops out in the list of others:

Morale

Do not underestimate the power of the game icon :smile:

The icon can significantly increase the number of players

You can play our game via browser HERE

Let's go try Space Pilot here!

Let's go try Space Pilot here!

Not really a blogpost, more of an update. I got some good feedback after yesterday's post, and that feedback gave me strength to go and fix all the stuff. It's almost bug-free, so you can actually go and finish it.

For the first time I watched a streamer play it without any problems, and this made me very happy. After days and days of struggling, the payoff was great. So now I can actually safely ask you to go and play the game. It's better now.

Also I used this opportunity to implement some interactions with the world. Won't spoil them yet, but I think they add some flavour.

You can play S.H.R.O.U.D. here

Let me know what you think.

I did a little aggregation of all leaderboard entries. There i can see how far each player got in Fluffensnuff.

I found it really interesting, and noted what each "jump" was. The overall "retention" looks good for me, except for the downward jumps i noted. The first difficult level is the last level with mice, where the player needs to apply everything he learned so far. After that, it gets easier, with the birds getting introduced. I think it might be good to add a single level before the downward jump, that eases the player into the setup or difficulty. On the other hand, i also like to challenge the player, and it is pretty rewarding to figure out a difficult thing (out of the box).

Also interesting for me: Less than 10% actually finished the game.

• Level 1-5 -> mouse levels
• Level 6-7 -> bird levels
• Level 11-25 -> rabbit levels
• Level 16+17 -> mixed :)

Do you do similar analysis on your games? Do you have any tips for me to improve the visualization, to look less like "programmer art" :D ?

Sigillis is the game I made for LD 44 in 48 hours, but this one's special! In this game, you create drawings, and the game interprets it. Use drawings to cast spells and defeat enemies, with some twists along the way!

You can play it here and then rate it on LD here.

Thank you to all who have been supporting my work. Unfortunately, the weekend has ended for me, and work is back into full effect, so will probably be a considerable delay before the release of the tech log, probably another week... :sob: In better news, I've been getting heaps of awesome feedback, thank you so much! The techlog's going great, it's just that real life is a bearing significant workload upon me, so delays. Anyways, thanks for reading, playing, and maybe leaving some more great feedback? It truly has all been so useful, and I will continue to cherish every slither of input from my precious community! Cheers, JUSTCAMH. :smile_cat:

Do you feel stressed?

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

Play here: --> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/clock-of-your-life

Or grab something stronger! (not recommended!)