Come and join me on stream: Mikoziq Twitch Channel

Have fun everyone! :joystick:

Send your game here and I'll play it. If you want to try out our game here it is https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/relive

Glad to see more and more people using the Godot Game Engine. It's a really great engine, and the fact that it's open source and runs on all platforms is worth a 1000 points. Plus, the small size is a huge ++.

Every LDJam, I feel like there are more submissions using it, and it makes me happy.

If your game is made using Godot, post it in here, so I can give it a go.

Here is mine if you want :)

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

Cheers.

I didn't use much tools working on HONK because I always try to keep everything simple.

• Godot Engine. I switched to this engine this winter and I'm happy about it. It's fast, light-weight and easy to learn and to use. Of course, it's not ideal and has its own downsides as well as other game engines. However, in my opinion it's the best for jamming.

• Asesprite. Although I don't make 2D art and work with free assets, I use this tool to work with pixel art assets. I think, it's the best tool to work around pixel art.

• Affinity Designer. In my opinion, it's the best vector editor in the moment, I've used it for 5 years so far.

• GitKraken. I tried a lot of different git clients, and this one I love the most, the only alternative for me is terminal.

In the beginning of 2020 I started with gamedev and watched hundreds of YouTube videos about it and started with unity. I instantly loved it. I've watched many videos about game jams but never felt ready for a jam before. This time I thought: "Nah, why not." and I'm so happy about it. I've never thought that I would receive so much feedback for my first game jam game and the whole process to create a game and publish it in so short time was connected with so much learning.

Thank you all guys! :)

Here is my game btw: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/loophole-4

I'm now live on Twitch for the next 3 hours to play your Ludum Dare games! I'm happy to give constructive feedback or just have fun with it. I’ll also be rating every game I play (but not while I'm live). If you want me to play your game, type !submit url/of/your/game in the Twitch chat.

If you miss today's stream, I'll be on every Saturday (6 PM EDT) and Sunday (3 PM EDT) during the rating period. I hope to see you there!

We're at 17 ratings, and we only need 3 more. Here is our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stranded-1 Hope you like it!

So I solo-made this little 2D frenetic circular platformer called ‘Counterclockwise’ for this edition and it’s playable in HTML. Check it out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/countercl0ckwise

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

While working on our game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/its-the-leash-i-could-do) one of the features we really wanted to make sure to include was some character diversity. Since our game is about helping people find relationships (however abstractly), we had two core concepts we wanted to make sure we included in the game: 1) Same-gender pairings 2) Multiple represented ethnicities

The first was really easy. Our artist (Andrew) made a sprite for both a female and male-appearing character and we simply spawned & matched the characters at complete random.

The second was more involved - it'd involve either a lot of sprite tinting and copying, or some clever palette swapping tech.

As an engineer/programmer (and someone who works on mobile titles for a day job), the answer was obvious here: Have the artist make one sprite, and palette swap it.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, palette swapping is conceptually relatively simple: every pixel of a certain color in the source art becomes replaced with a different color based on the new palette.

There's a couple different ways you can perform this swapping, but for various reasons, I decided to try to accomplish it in a shader. I settled on a paradigm: Since every pixel in an RGBA32 texture is 4 bytes, each color channel is represented as a value from [0-255]. I'd take the value of one of these color channels (specifically the 'red' channel), and index into a long thin texture 256 pixels wide. Whatever color I found at the index would be the replacement.

And it worked great - here's an early test case of me swapping two of the greens of our tree sprite (one of the first that was ready) with some yellow and red (forgive my color choices, I am not an artist):

I went ahead and attached this to our npcs, and set up a whole bunch of code to dynamically mix different color 'sets' (for example: a clothing set, a skin tone set, and a hair color set) to generate a combined palette texture programatically. Here's an example of our interface for swapping these:

And it worked (but, sadly, I have no screenshots of this brief golden era). And then I implemented our NPCs animations - really, just a simple sprite swap every .1 seconds. And then I went to bed.

And I woke up the next day to reports that the palette swapping was... sorta broken. Animation was causing artifacting, and certain colors were just never swapping. The problematic colors included skin tone... which was most of the point of the feature. Zooming in also showed color bleeding, which totally shouldn't happen with point filtered textures - left is the swapped character, right is the unswapped character. Notice the strange 'outlines' on some of the pixels. Here's a shot from when I briefly had the skin tone swaps fixed again, showing the color bleeding issue - note both characters are using my palette swapped shader, but the right one has a 'blank' palette swap applied (i.e, it just renders the original image):

So I spent a few hours debugging this, and couldn't actually isolate the issue. Instead, the longer I debugged it, the less reasoanble the issue seemed to be - pieces of the problem seemed to start and stop occuring with no rhyme or reason. I knew it was tied to the larger texture sheets we were using, and I suspect interpolation is problematic somehow, but nothing I tried seemed to fix it. Normally I'd give myself a day or two to 'reset' on a problem like this and come at it from a fresh angle, but... no time to do that in a jam.

So our team talked about what to do, and decided to just live with the current state of the art when we went live. So that's the story of how palette swapping totally doesn't work in our game, despite me wasting ~8 hours on it.

The cheerful upside is that in the week since, I rewrote how I handled all of it. I built a few components that generate a mesh from an input sprite, and assign it vertex colors - these are working great, and I look forward to using that approach next time.

Would you want to play the game? -> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/please-just-leave

Feel free to leave your game links here and I will play them as well :)

Play In Browser Here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/lunar-loop

Overview

A small survival management game.

A lone astronaut stuck on a space station needs to maintain various systems and survive 15 Lunar Loops until a rescue mission arrives to take them home.

Browser Playable Here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/lunar-loop

Let’s Bring The Community To Twitter - We should all follow each other!

Are you developing your game further post-jam, or maybe working on something entirely different? Let's keep the conversation going even after Ludum Dare has ended!

Comment your handle and we should all follow each other on Twitter! I can’t wait to see what you make.

I’m Tom, and you can find me on Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/DeveloperTom1

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

Sushi Ink uses a conveyor belt in every single level. *level 5 even has two.... if you can reach that far ;).

The problem with conveyor belts however is to achieve the smooth curved loops we wanted in the game we needed to use connected bezier curves (a series of mathematical equations). Our team had only one programmer but everyone would need to share the load in level design. Either because of that... or maybe just because I hate myself, I decided to create a conveyer belt tool during the jam. This allowed everyone to easily place, drag and drop control points within the editor and get real time feedback on how it would look.

You can see the results above which I'm pretty proud of. It was a tough call with only 72 hours to get things done, but i think taking the time to unlock the rest of the team is what helped us to produce 5 levels within the jam. Despite some rough edges this is definitely something i think I'm going to take from this jam, polish up, and use in other games.

are there any assets, code or ideas are you going to take away from the jam and implement in another project?

You can play Sushi Ink here!

If you want to know anymore about the different tools we used for Sushi Ink or if you want me to check your game out just leave a comment below!

Play here: https://thepeat.itch.io/escape-a-curved-world

*Rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/escape-a-curved-world *

Post Jam Development

Hello there fellow Jammers!

Milmalissa and I are developing our game post jam and are improving it with our own not included and new ideas but also with incoming feedback. :) Above you can see a logo Milmalissa worked on that weekend which we are including in our Title Screen. We are still looking for more constructive and quality feedback, so if you got any you can just leave it here or at the rating page :)

Thanks! :)

The Timelapse for our card game art. Its importante showing the making off and game steps developer. :)

https://youtu.be/QP0RRX7M6TE

Play and Vote our game. Its very important for us:

(HTML 5 VERSION): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stuck-in-a-christmas

If we were to do anything post jam, should we do these changes and what other changes should we make? 1. Make jump space and make kill e/q 2. Better lighting for ghosts 3.More levels 4. More cosmetics/outfits 5. getting rid of this level 6.Actual music 7. Wires that run along walls 8.fixing bug fixes (such as ghost rarely being very slightly off and spikes that come up on you don't kill) 9. Fixing broken levels 10. What else?

Hi there! We started working on a post jam update for our game, Suicidal Boyfriend. We really love to see what we can work on to make the game more playable for you, after the voting periods ends. We're currently have a TODO list that I'm posting here:

• Put a Video tab in Settings menu (with resolution selector, a fullscreen toggle and a high contrast subtitles toggle, that are set on ON by default)
• Put a Graphics tab in Settings menu (with graphics quality selector and Vsync toggle)
• A graphical way to see in-game how to skip cinematics
• A few more clues for some methods
• An Extra menu tab, to see cinematics in every moment or see all the concept arts that we made for our game
• A way to make "How to play" font bigger.

So, please, try our game, rate it and comment on how we can improve or beloved creation!

As people were having complaints and issues playing the game on PC using a mouse, I have spent today to create a more elaborate version of the game !

UPDATES

• 2 additional types of zombies
• loops stay longer, reducing the need to continuously circle enemies
• upgrade events are now bound in a shop, allowing players to chose a powerup at any time when they have enough points (stack amount is limited)
• slightly rebalanced scores
• fixed difficulty ramp bug
• added more sound effects

Feel free to play this version here ! The original version is also still available. Ratings and feedback are ever so appreciated!

Aside from this all, I have been streaming daily for the entire week and today my throat was a bit sore and I don't want to bother you with a shot voice and stuffy nose. I still plan to do streams to rate entries though ! Keep an eye out at twitch.tv/drjavasaurus or drop me a DM when I'm not online :).

To all you jammers, you rock and thank you for making this Ludum Dare and the process of rating amazing !

Cheers !