Save time and feel yourself a real ninja in "Timesaver" game!

Link is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/time-saver

Lily the bee is a small and cute game about a bee that tries her best to defend the hive! But there's a twist...

"Cute art and great storytelling, a real [REDACTED] though, [REDACTED] Lily" - Cubiclaw

We had to redact some information in the reviews for you to enjoy the game fully!

"Absolutly great game, love the little story and the voice acting was great (You need a pop filter though :P). the art ist cute and wholesome, and lilys [REDACTED] was so [REDACTED]." - loligxp

We learned our lesson with voice acting, the pop filter will be here next time!

"Very cool game! I like the story and the plot (Bye Lily :( ). I think you could have talked a bit louder instead of whispering.

Overall, youve done a great job :)." - Apfel

Here goes my ASMR career dreams

"Not bad." - daine0

Concise.

"super adorable little game, Lily immediately caught my attention, I’d appreciate Lily’s stinger being a little more visible and maybe a little faster, the little bits of narration between stages was super cute too, nice work!

EDIT: the narrator’s voice was pretty pleasing to the ear as well, just, throwing that out there" - Kassie Kitsune

An appreciated edit

"So cute! Loved the art style, was smiling the whole way through ( [REDACTED] ). An adorable little story. :)" - Kitiliisu

We're happy people found it adorable! (apart from [REDACTED])

The experience was great, and we learnt a lot on game design, music, graphics, and code. We're also really happy most people were able to grasp the hidden layer of the game!

Here is the game if you want to try it too! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/temp

Do you: - Leave it unrated? - Give it 1 star? - Start with 3 stars and take away stars if the Mood or Humor are particularly bad?

I've done all three of these and I'm curious to know what other people do.

🎮 PLAY CONFINED (WEB)

Check out Part 1 here.

Spoiler Alert - if you'd like to play Confined, you're better of reading this afterward instead.

Part 2: How About That Post Mortem?

What I Actually Made

Confined is a linear narrative text game divided in three stages, best (and obviously) described as the start, middle and ending.

The introduction where the player finds out they are imprisoned in a cryogenic stasis chamber for a crime they do not remember. The purpose of this ordeal is for convicted criminals to be rehabilitated in order to safely return them into society.

The player meets an AI named MAA (or the Mnemonic Assessment Algorithm) which is designed to assess whether the player remembers their crimes after they come out of rehabilitation. At this point the player learns that RA, the Rehabilitation Algorithm, is offline and MAA also doesn't work properly, rejecting the player's answers and returning them to rehabilitation no matter what the player says. This process runs three times (or more, if the player gives the same answer more than once) and is meant to frustrate the player. This part was a bit of a risk, normally you don't want to frustrate the player at all, but I felt that looping back in this manner was a solid reflection of the theme. Additionally, even though RA is offline, 10 years pass on each loop.

Once the player has given three different answers they are moved up to PEA, the Psychiatric Evaluation Algorithm designed to figure out of a prisoner is of sound mind. This AI, being more advanced and realizing there's something wrong, provides the player with access to the System Maintenance Network, a back-end system where various AIs can be switched on/off and accessed. The player has to figure out why the system is not functioning properly.

By turning off MAA and/or PEA the player can redirect power to RA and talk with the AI. This starts some back-and-forths with PEA and leads to a dialogue with the Firewall, a watchdog AI that protects an archive named Data Storage. Once in Data Storage, the player stumbles upon a log entry written by the former warden of the facility. Here they learn about the facility and more about who they are and what has happened in the past. (I'll leave this vague in case you'd still like to play the game.)

Upset by what they learned, the player is directed by PEA to PAA, the Prisoner Adjudication Algorithm that has the authority to release prisoners from their stasis. As dialogue progresses, the player is offered an alternative explanation as to who they are, and finally is offered a choice that leads to the end of the game.

The workings of the cryogenic rehabilitation system.

What I Wanted To Make

I had two main goals this jam: 1.) Write a non-linear narrative, and 2.) Code a clever logic system, what turned out to be the System Maintenance Network. Both of those goals were basically failures.

As mentioned above, this is a linear narrative game. That's not what I initially wanted. I was hoping to include branching story lines, giving the player more agency in where the story goes. Writing the story chronologically, I was often as lost as a player of the game might be. I didn't know where any of this was leading. At one point I intended to at least split the player's dialogue points in 'polite' and 'rude', and reflect that metric after you finish the game. All those things turned out to be too ambitious.

Additionally, the depth of interaction with RA and the Firewall was very lacking. I had bigger plans for this, especially planning to have a chance to run into the Firewall upon each algorithm transition once activated, but I just ran out of time.

The logic system of System Maintenance Network was meant to be a lot more advanced. Initially I wanted the AIs to each have various personality sliders (empathy, authority, etc), as it were, and the player would have to rebalance their personalities using the available power to get the correct settings to pass them. Looking back at that idea now, that was very obviously too ambitious.

As I worked on the game, I decided I wanted to change the look of it using the CSS functionality of Twine 2. I hadn't changed my previous Twine 2 projects, Fight a Monster and Grid Game from the default look at all, and I figured I could get the game to feel more like its contents by having a light (#eeeeee) background with big dark text on it.

I wanted to add character symbols for each AI so the player could more easily tell them apart. Normally I am just the graphics guy of our Ludum Dare entries, but given that I was going at it alone for the first time I figured this could be the one bit of clear visual design I could implement. I managed to do this, but I wasn't necessarily satisfied with how some of them turned out. MAA and PAA are a mother (who wakes you up from your sleep) and father (who sets you free in the end), which I was happy with, but RA doesn't necessarily look that much like the Egyptian god, and the style of PEA just doesn't really match the rest. Ideally there would have been a clear single style in which all those personalities were reflected.

To Summarize

I overscoped hard, but there was an acceptable minimal viable product within the broad confines of my concept. I wanted complex story, I settled for simple story; I wanted advanced logic, I settled for simple switches. If I were to go at another project alone, I hope I will remember this lesson: that overscoping isn't necessarily a risk if there's still a satisfactory finished game in there after stripping down its complexity.

All those disappointments aside, I was very pleased that I managed to write a full narrative, start to end. While I've always been drawn to writing, these days I don't write fiction for a hobby at all. The last time I wrote anything complete was many years ago. Sitting down and deciding I needed to do this and then ending up with a story that - judging from the comments on the game - seems to have entertained people, well that just puts a big smile on my face.

Next Ludum Dare I do hope to group up with @daanvanyperen again, but it's nice to know that within these simple confines I can leave my comfort zone and make a cool thing.

Thanks for reading, I hope this was a useful insight.

If you like, you could play CONFINED for a while.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/aboard

Just a little story of how I came up with the whole gravity mechanics.

Thinking that time loops will be prevailing on this jam, I've decided to go with a spatial loop. At first I remembered this film/cartoon cliche, a forest where if you go in some direction, you always return to where you've started. But this gravitated me towards the whole rougelike/timeloop thing, plus I couldn't come up with some interesting mechanics.

And so, I had a vision in my mind. This vision:

After that, things went smoothly.

Because I've read Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" a while back, I immediately knew this will be a game about breaking your stereotypical concept of gravity, thinking of gravity outside the box and using that to solve platforming puzzles.

With that in mind, I started desinging my levels, trying bit by bit to push out of player's head the notion of gravity as the thing pointing down. And that led me to making SkyCrawler: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/skycrawler

* Good luck, jammers, and remember, the ~~enemy's gate~~ next platform is down. *

For every puzzle fan that has not played our submission yet:

CarLooper. A fun little game where you have to build a looping track for your racing car. But hold on! You get MORE score points if you use all the parts that are given to you!

Have fun and good luck!

Pseudogravity

Enter a Door and the Room Rotates

by Nothingness (@nothingness), and Remus Rain (@remus-rain)

What is the game about?

You’re stuck in an endless pseudo-gravity cube. Whenever you go through a door, the room rotates in that direction and you come out on the other side. The goal is to get a cube on all of the switches in a level via gravity. Whenever all switches are activated, all doors become exits to the next level.

Try it in your browser: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/pseudogravity

Hello, I developed my game in the unity game engine, and after the jam I wanted to add WebGL support to my itch.io page. But I have failed, every time I load it up it just shows screen with the backround color of the camera, the thing that bothers me the most tho is that the music loads, but any of the other game objects don't. So if you know how to resolve this issue please let me know in the comments. Also if you want to play my game here is a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/reincarnation.

*And what is this device he invented to display small animation loops? *

His name is Emile Reynaud and he invented the Praxinoscope. And we made a game where you are stuck in this fascinating device.

Play it in your browser here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/emiles-journey

Watercolor style and western atmosphere are stuck in a loop. As graphist in Wild loop I share to you some pictures :

We go on testing and rating your games. If you leave a post, we will test your entry for sure :smile:

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

This weekend i release couple of free tools to develop on windows:

https://misterm.itch.io/mr-effects-to-spritesheet => Generate spritesheet from particle effects

https://misterm.itch.io/mr-gui-generator => Generate quick png with buttons and dialog for games.

If you enjoy my tools, feel free also to test my game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/hamsterloop

Hi, I am making a post jam version of my game And I want some feedback of what I should add because I have a lot of Idea but don’t want to go over board with it. So , I am asking everyone who have played my game and everyone who haven’t played my game to go play it and comment what will make the game better from the list below

• Online leaderboard
• effects (screenshake, particles, etc..)
• Better Sfx and music
• more speed to the player
• tune the difficulty
• powerups ( make the loop(Circle) size larger again, more types of guns, etc...)
• Auto shoot

I won’t add all of them, but I will only add want you think that will make the game better.Comment below what I should add. Thanks

LINK TO THE GAME: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/looped-3

In fact, this game features multiple endings and a simple dialogue too!

You can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/grey-milk

https://youtu.be/oX9KVLGe3CA

Try to beat your own score in a loop !

web in-browser: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stuckyloop

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/purgatory-hospital

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/purgatory-hospital

YOO

I only need 3 votes to pass!! LET US HELP EACH OTHER! Send me your links down in the comment section!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/mugen

I summed up my LD47 experience and added a post mortem in a video. If you want some insight in how our team worked, check it out :wink: https://youtu.be/CRzWVoSyekc

The highest smart balance is currently -2 while the highest classic balance is 255.

Can someone explain why smart balance is always negative?