I've been working on the game daily since Ludum Dare ended polishing things and upgrading the systems under the hood to work towards the next biggest challenge the game would need to overcome: functioning multiplayer, where everyone can interact with objects on planetary surfaces no matter where/what the host is doing.

It took a couple days to make it work, but here we are. Though there are some bugs here and there, and finding eachother is incredibly tricky when you have entire planets to search (even just 3km in radius = ~113.1km^2 of surface area to explore, after all!), but it works well enough I was able to run a half-hour long playtest session with two of my friends. We built a giant ramp on top of a mountain that you could just about get into the deep-space reference frame just from jumping off of, and watched the sunrise from on top.

There are now ten buildable objects, and some very basic gameplay in the form of refueling/re-oxygenating by harvesting the various crystals on the planet, as well as gathering resources from those that don't have specific use-cases to construct the aforementioned buildable objects. You can customise your astronaut's colors, and those colors will be applied to whatever you construct. All of this works in multiplayer, no matter who's on what planet, nor when they connected to the server, and without bogging the game down with hundreds of network-update calls per frame as would happen if I just used standard UNet for all objects.

This beta build is not yet publicly available, but if you've played/rated the game and want to see it evolve, let me know in the comments and I'll chuck an Itch key your way in some form - this'll also be free access to the post-jam version when/if it eventually goes commercial.

Additionally, as with before, if you want me to play/rate something you've made, let me know in the comments and I'll gladly take a whack at it - my brain needs a day or two off from crunching out code!

This is a challenge. I am challenging your skill at games and you man/woman hood. Send a screenshot of the end screen if you beat it!

iLoop - a hypercasual 2D endless runner game is now available for download on Google Play Store! Try it now!

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.godotengine.iloop

LD entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/iloop-the-2d-endless-runner-game-of-a-robot-stuck-in-a-loop

The feedback was unanimous, and so I added a Post-jam build with some tweaks! Play 'Quivering' here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/quivering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPZKn9FLwYM

Post-Jam Change Log

• Added a new level
• Updated two levels to make sure they use the screen-wrap effect
• Increased respawn and level change speed
• Increased jump height
• Changed window sprites to indicate they are background entities
• Added Horizontal spikes

I'm tired of browsing "all games" looking to see if anything catches my eye. I'll go with the faster technique: Comment your game down below and I'll play it!

Well, I've been saying for a while that I'd release a list of what I think are the best games this Ludum Dare. It's time for the eight best games, according to my opinions! They're all really good.

(Spoiler alert: I already revealed to some of the developers that they get to be on the list.)

MY EIGHT FAVORITE GAMES:

(Note: most of these are not in order because I didn't feel like picking favorites that intensely.)

-- Anything For You

An emotional narrative game about family and the past.

-- Defuse In Under 5

You don't have long before the bomb blows up! But don't worry, you're stuck in a loop.

-- Office Dating Simulator 2020

Bored of being the mail guy? Try starting a relationship with someone and see how it ends!

-- Save The Prince

An epic 3D virtual board game about the quest to free the prince.

-- Box Hole

Your job: drop the boxes in the boxhole. Do not ever disobey the rules!

-- Stuck In Paris

Try and get out of the Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris without causing an awesome car wreck!

-- Lunar Loop

You're alone in the space station. You have to manage your health and the station at the same time, so make sure to watch out for warnings!

-- Loopamonium

You, the red cube, must master being stuck in a loop to clear the levels!

Well, that's my eight favorite games! Some of these still need some more ratings, so please help them out!

I've played dozens of great games this jam and couldn't name all of them, so if you don't see your game on this list, don't worry! If I haven't even played your game, give me a link in the comments down below!

And of course if you want yet another recommended game, my play-in-the-browser game is

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/outside-the-loop

In the days since the jam ended, I've been thinking about the tools @nikolai-shkurkin and I used to make Boomie, and what I would like to carry forward to the next jam. These are some of the tools I personally used on Windows 10. Nikolai did all of the sprites using his new app FTLPaint, coming soon to mobile!

If you use one of these and have any pro tips, please leave a comment!

Gameplay Tools

Phaser 3 - Highly recommended if you have a programmer on your team

https://phaser.io/phaser3

Phaser is a native HTML5 game engine geared towards programmers. Overall great, and it doesn't have a huge learning curve. Phaser 3 docs and examples are vastly improved from last time I tried using it, about 18 months ago. Things I want to try next time: learning the Scene system, and using TypeScript. The worst part of programming Phaser is debugging - certain mistakes don't throw errors and take ages to track down in javascript. Also, pro tip for Unity people - Vector2 operations in Phaser modify the original vector 😭

Tiled - Recommended for 2D games if your engine does not have an editor

https://www.mapeditor.org/

Nikolai wrote the importer and did almost all of the level design, and I only used it to make a couple of the rooms. The workflow for me was very smooth and visual. It was super easy to go in and make tweaks in the levels too. Tiled is not as integrated as e.g. Unity or Godot's editor, but really amazing for a platform-agnostic tool. Shocking that it is free as well.

Audio Tools

Bfxr - Highly recommended for game jams, basically no learning curve

https://www.bfxr.net/

Ultra fast. I wish I had actually put more time into the sound effects using other tools and Freesound. But with BFXR I had all sound effects implemented within about an hour. Its crunchy style sounds very appropriate for a pixel art game too. There are a few synth controls towards the bottom that I didn't have time to learn, so I will give it some practice time before the next game jam.

Bosca Ceoil - Highly recommended for game jams or playing around, very small learning curve

https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/bosca-ceoil

I found Bosca Ceoil in Itch's recommendations on bfxr. This tool is great for tracking music super fast. The controls are very intuitive and simple. Good built in instruments, and there's a nice low pass filter with resonance that you can put on each instrument. Great options for scales and shuffle tempo. Exporting is trivially easy. My only gripe with this one is there is no undo button, which frustrated me a couple times when I accidentally overwrote my main melody, instead of creating a copy. But if you want to write music fast, and have fun while you're at it, this is absolutely the way to go.

Audacity - Highly recommended for any audio editing on Windows

https://www.audacityteam.org/

This one goes almost without saying. Audacity is a free and incredibly powerful tool for editing sound files. I use it all the time, especially for getting samples from Freesound and combining or tweaking them to create sound effects. Didn't get to use it a whole lot this time around.

Other Tools

Paint.NET - Highly recommended for non-artists who might need to tweak art assets

https://www.getpaint.net/

Been using Paint.NET for years now. It is a pretty straightforward image editor with great support for layers and transparency, so is great for doing tweaks and edits on PNG images. I sometimes use this to make sprite sheets but it isn't really built for pixel art, animations, or digital painting - just editing.

Screen2Gif - Highly recommended for...GIFs!

https://www.screentogif.com/

This was not used to make the game, but it is a super easy way to make GIFs of your screen on Windows. Comes with a ton of options for recording and a little built-in editor so you can tweak your loop. I use this at work all the time to show my co-workers what I'm working on, or to record funny software bugs.

Web Server for Chrome - Recommended for testing HTML5 games

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web-server-for-chrome/ofhbbkphhbklhfoeikjpcbhemlocgigb/

Making HTML5 games typically requires you to host your project on a local web server to load everything right. I found this utility on the Chrome store and it worked super well. You just pick a folder on your computer and press a button, then you can load and play the game as if it was on a website. Next time, if we use TypeScript, I will probably switch back to using Node.js as a system for building and testing. But if not, this will absolutely be my go-to.

That's all for now. We had tons of fun building Boomie and also playing everyone's games! If you have any specific tips and tricks for any of these tools definitely leave a comment 😁

Thanks to everyone who has rated our game and provided valuable feedback! We really appreciate each and every comment that is made :smile: Roller Riches is an incremental game where your goal is to build a roller coaster that coaxes poor suckers (your guests) out of their money.

We're thinking about redesigning and rebuilding this game from the ground up as a fun long-term side project, with a focus on adding more traditional incremental game mechanics (prestige, multiple currencies, an actual semblence of balance, etc...)

Please feel free to post your game, and I promise to check it out! If you're interested and haven't given Roller Riches a try yet, please check it out here!

Hey guys, continue helping some favorite games to find audience and get reviews. Today is a 'good boy'-day. Check and review this one! It's The Leash I Can Do by @kurt-roembke, @those-30-ninjas, @mcovert and @hemlocksoames

𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲:

For the code, I used Construct 3, with only two days of experience from it (along with 1 year of experience from scratch and 2 months from unity) I got the hang of it really quickly! So, if you really want to jam but don't know how to start, use consturct! You can use scratch, too, but Construct is just better.

𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀:

Well, to be frank, for the music, I just used OpenGameArt, but for the sound effects, I used Leshy SFMaker, it is like sfxr, but it is online, so no download.

https://www.leshylabs.com/apps/sfMaker/

𝗔𝗿𝘁

Okay, so that art. The art was made using PhotoShop, my brother made it, if you don't have photpshop, you can use free sofwares iike gimp or paint.net, there is a lot to choose from. Here are the links for the softwared I mentioned

Paint.Net

https://www.getpaint.net/download.html

Gimp:

https://www.gimp.org/

That's it for me, folks!

After a good night of sleep Friday evening I woke up at 5AM and saw what the theme was. "Stuck in a loop". I think like most people my enthusiasm about this weekends theme as neutral.

First I had to come up with an idea because I actually did not have any thoughts about the themes before hand. I came up with an idea where you control a spaceship and loop around planets, but that idea because uninteresting and I searched for something more solid.

That is when I came up with the idea of racing a vehicle on a distant planet almost like the POD races in starwars. After that the game evolved a few times because of some personal restrictions and I came up with the game I release...

Time Rider: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/time-rider

Try it out and let me know. Here are some screenshots of gameplay.

tip To solve the puzzles more easily

You should be stuck in a loop

Three types of loops

1 2 3

Let's see if my tips help https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stuck-in-a-portal-1

Good luck to everyone

The Turning Point

Home, metro, work, metro, home, sleep. Repeat.

Can you break the loop?

TRY NOW ---> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/the-turning-point

"Postmortem" means "after death" so here is Death, the final boss, and the post is after this picture so that's a literal postmortem I think?

This is a quick summary of what I learned from all of this. A longer version is on itch.io.

In the previous jam, I put my game ideas in a text file before theme announcement. Right after I woke up to a big "Keep It Alive" on the front page (not among my favourites), this file was completely discarded. That turned out to be a good decision.

Here, "Stuck in a Loop" was the kind of theme I was quietly hoping for, not because it is easy, but because it is hard! I mean, because the idea in the text file was relatively unconventional. That also turned out to be a good decision.

Morale of the story: there is no superior creative process? It depends not only on you, but also on the theme.

Apart from that, I used Godot Engine, Aseprite and LMMS (with the sfxr tool) for audio. Same thing as before, except I moved from Krita back to Aseprite. The impact on the art style isn't really noticeable.

The game is very well received, with some minor flaws I'm working on. Next release will be right after rating ends, just in time for Halloween!

I think an app for the LD site would be awesome, you could get notifications a week in advance of when an event would start, and just in general you wouldn't have to open your browser to check manually if you had notifications

(Comments on your game, theme reveal, replies to your comments. These could all benefit from notifications)

I think that would be awesome!

Thanks to everyone who has played and rated my game so far!

Play here >>> https://simmer.io/@Sherwinkc/epsilon

WebGL version update - post launch - Some jetpack boost and handling improvements - Initial walk speed increased - Some geometry changes - ‘Press Enter’ changed to ‘Enter’ on Main Menu

"Great atmosphere, for a game made in 3 days it’s magnificent."

"The mood in here is incredible !"

"That was a really beautiful game with a fantastic mood, the artsyle really drew me in!"

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/epsilon-2d-puzzle-platformer

Impact Juggling is a fast-paced arcade game all about keeping up to four balls in the air while racking up points. It also has a rather small feature that I'm nonetheless proud of: an online leaderboard.

Before the jam, I was already toying with the idea of adding an online leaderboard to my game, so I prepared a backend for that and published it here. Luckily, I got to use it! And man, I'm glad I did. Seeing the scores you guys achieved is every bit as awesome as I imagined. I know that people have to play the game to rate it, but now that fact somehow feels more real.

Let's have a look at the current score distribution. There have been a total of 81 submissions. The histogram below excludes the top three scores because they are so much higher that the graph would have been useless.

The mean of all scores is about 911 and the median 470.

Clearly, this game isn't exactly easy :sweat_smile: That's usually the case with my jam games. But most players seem to do really well!

The in-game leaderboard only shows the top ten scores, but you can take a look at the entire leaderboard here.

The current highscore lies at a whopping 13320, which is absolutely insane! I did not expect anyone get a score that high. Congrats ben!

🎾 Think you can beat the highscore? Test your skills here! 🎾

(And don't forget to rate the game!)

Come by and !submit your game :)

https://www.twitch.tv/kuviman

I know i did, in our Taxi driving game.

Marked yellow is the area i initially outlined as the map, and red is what i actually managed to make in the jam. If you look closely, you can even see the buildings in the red part.

It is about 3% of the area that was planned - but still enough to work well for the game. The bigger scope would have required much more complex systems - with the small part, i can keep the whole simulation running and don't need to load and drop chunks, and i can display a readable city map in one screen without scrolling.

Anyway, i always like to see what the initial ideas or expectations are, and how they hold up to reality.

A Loop to Save The World

is a game I made on my own in 3 days from modeling to programming - defeat enemies, blow stuff up and solve puzzles to complete the game and break the loop!

want more of a challenge? try to beat your locally saved highscore!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/a-loop-to-save-the-world

I'm a student and I made this game all by myself in 3 days. There are two levels in the speed run. In total, I was able to complete it in 2 minutes and 14 seconds max. Please play it and let me know your score in the comments. The difficulty level is a bit high. See if you're a good gamer! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/looping