Honestly, I you want to rate some games, go search Danger zone. It's 10 days left and there still are some games below 20 ratings.

But if you want to help me achieve this incredible milestone (which is actually a first time in my Ludum Dare experience, or any gamejam for that matter, when I get more then ~30 ratings) you are welcome to check out my game, SkyCrawler: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/skycrawler

Hey gang

http://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

Drop me a link

Welcome to my pep talk, fellow jammers. I'm Moski, Whales And Games’ lead artist and I made the artwork for our park protecting game Woofice Chair!

For this Ludum Dare, we assembled a team of four. Two programmers, from Portugal and Brazil, an audio composer currently in the UK, and me, the graphics artist, from Mexico. For three days, we poured our hearts, soul and sweat into making what started as an inside joke about dogs and office chairs into an actual game. That meant, for me, three days of constant work and arm pressure!

But I've got a confession to make regarding how I made art for the game. I did not touch the game until a day after it was finished and submitted. Yet, I worked with the team fluidly, like a well oiled and battle-tested machine. This comes as a result of a long time of mutual understanding, following certain guidelines and experience.

I want to make this quick, simple and digestible, so let's quickly go through some things that have helped my team iterate and implement things fast enough. Whatever your role is in the team, this may be of use to you, and it can help pack and polish as much as possible during a jam!

Teamwork boils down to Communication! :speech_balloon:

If you're in a team, you need active communication between each other. It may sound obvious, but you may want to take a moment to think if you’re in the same channel as your teammates! Talk about when to cooperate and when to coordinate!

Our team is all over the world and are busy or sleeping at different times, meaning we need to know what everyone needs from each other as early as possible. Sure, you'll talk about what the game will be about during the first hours, but the artist's interpretation of the assets can be very different from the programmer's plans.

It's important, then, to only start actually working in the production of the game when there's a proper agreement of what's actually being done. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time making assets or concepts that won't get used or don’t match the rest of the team’s vision.

Our team tends to make very quick ugly doodles to demonstrate what we're brainstorming. This tends to include perspective, mock up of characters, gameplay screens, mechanics, and so on. These help immediately establish a vision across the team and which leads to my next point.

Total trust! Delegate and have faith! :dog2:

Once everyone is on the same page, stay communicated, and share files around as they're needed. In my role as the artist, my first assets tend to be placeholders for the bare minimum necessary that would allow the programmers to experiment with mechanics and playing area of the game. Simultaneously, they give me feedback on the things that are needed, like the resolution of the assets, the camera size of the area I'll be drawing, and so on!

But when this inevitably happens and people need to go to work or bed, those that are still available should still have the tools necessary to continue working. Once we had the basic assets, I had the opportunity to work on more dogs, more weapons, more enemies, make changes to the map and even make some UI with little to no input from the other members. Since drawing was my sole role, it meant three days of doing just that.

However, remember that you’re working with a team. Mind other people’s needs and skills, and adjust accordingly. Preferably, make some rules and protocols!

Some mild organization goes a long way! :file_cabinet:

There’s really very little time to work with during a Ludum Dare. You should use the opportunity to develop your skills and learn methodologies! With some agreements about file names, adjusting assets to constant sizes and organization, you can save on time that would otherwise be used in tweaking, fixing and finding files!

Our team was able to easily add the assets into the game and tweak them without issues because of our consistency and methodologies. Most files were properly named, organized and sent in batches. All the sprite sheets of the same category had the same size for the panels and canvas. We knew what UI assets we’d need since we’ve done this before. We’ve found out that we can do a lot more when we have basic discipline.

This discipline is learned with time and practice! As you participate in more jams, you’ll find better ways to organize your archives, make folders, share them with your group, and adapt to whichever project is pursued. Talk constantly with your team, learn what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll soon find out that you’re doing plenty of the tasks without even thinking about them!

Working multiple times with the same team has its merits! :construction_worker:

There are merits to learning to adapt to different teams. Experimenting is always a good thing! But knowing the people you’re working with is also a fantastic experience and can go long ways! This goes beyond getting along, having fun or synergy. Actually knowing how others work already helps a lot with avoiding common team-struggles, and helps push the project even further.

For example, I know what my team is looking for when they need animations, or when they need particles, elements for UI, the project resolution, and many more. In the same vein, they know the kind of assets I can make, how I can deliver them, how to ask me for tweaks in small mistakes and the like. I didn’t need to play the game to see if my assets would work because I know what to send them to experiment with. In bigger projects, I may need to have a direct input on how things are being used, but on jam games, this connection with the team works great!

But one may think, a bigger team should be able to make a bigger project, right? Well, not necessarily.

Too-many-cooks syndrome! :cooking:

Our team of four has done wonders. I’ve even experimented with another short team at one point and had a great time! But the one time I joined a larger team, things didn’t go so well.

Communication is very important in teamwork, but it’s more difficult to manage on larger teams! I thought that a big number of programmers with plenty of artists would result in a lot of artwork being made and implemented. However, there were clashing styles, mixed ideas and people went missing for long periods.

I’d recommend being practical and sticking to a smaller team for jam games! While a big group can make a lot more content independently, when put together, there can be a lot of miscommunication, overlapping and it becomes harder to control scope. To some, working with bigger teams may be fantastic, but I would suggest sticking to smaller ones for your first few jams!

Wrapping this post up! :muscle:

This was likely the jam where I had the best balance of quality and quantity of assets, and it was only possible because of fantastic teamwork, mild organization and methodologies!

I believe that these things I’ve mentioned before can do wonders to you regardless of your role in the team. Not everyone needs to be doing everything and constantly supervising at all times. There may be moments when “all hands-on deck” may be necessary, but constantly needing everyone’s input will reduce everyone’s independence!

While this post was more about team experience rather than my usual actual art insight, I’ve posted in the past about artwork design before! Consider giving them a look! * Ludum Dare 43 - Super Sellout's Art Asset Sweatshop * Ludum Dare 41 - About making assets and bad guys * Ludum Dare 41 - My role as the artist of Wizsnooks * Ludum Dare 40 - Two days of drawing characters for Jazzy Beats * Ludum Dare 38 - Krita - The free art program I used for 3 jams

Now that it’s all said and done, in behalf of my team, Whales And Games, I would like to invite you to hang out with us at our Discord server! Come share your game, your experiences, and maybe prepare for the spookiest time of the year!

*Other than that, have a great time, and keep on rating those games! Here's the link for ours again if you haven't cheked it out yet! Cheers! :whale: *

How It Started

How It's Going

Play Lucky Lefty Loves Loops here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/lucky-lefty-loves-loops

That's right, Tech Valley Game Space is live, playing your Ludum Dare games! We'll be streaming today from 5 - 7 PM EST on twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace and youtube.com/c/techvalleygamespace. If you've missed it, we'll also be streaming again on the 24th at the same time slot as well.

To have your game in consideration for playing and judging, you can sign up on this form: forms.gle/kbUdacxVfnVaGrq17

As the form states, we do enforce a Code of Conduct in our live-streams. As such, we do reserve the right to cancel streaming and rating a game for any reason.

If you missed it, last week's stream is available below: https://youtu.be/Ck6Q4MK7Xcw

Put on something warm and come enjoy the snow :)

Where are you?

You wake up in a dark corridor. Wires drape along the walls as smell of copper and plastic fills the air. A dim red light calls you through the only open door, as in your heart you realize - you are trapped. The only thing you see is a mysterious panel, and the only thing you feel is an inexplicable urge to create sick beats.

Gameplay

Navigate a series of rooms in this first-person musical puzzle game. Follow mysterious instructions in each room and, hopefully, find your escape.

Create

Make up your own beats in sandbox mode, and don't forget to share your creation with the community by posting a screenshot in the comments!

Thank you!

We've really enjoyed making this game for Ludum Dare 47, and being a part of this awesome community! For the better part of last week we've been playing tons of great, creative games of all shapes and sizes, leaving and receiving lots of feedback, and of course, reassessing mistakes made and scopes over-ed. Can't wait to see you all again at Ludum dare 48, and happy gaming!

P.S. Follow UnvrsllyAbsrd on Twitter for news and updates on our future projects!!

did some major performance fixes on my game looper! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/looper-3

Thank you to everyone who rated and commented on my entry. The concept was very inspiring for me, and even though I couldn't get everything I wanted to into the Jam version, I practiced an important skill of scoping small.

I'm still having a lot of fun with this title, and I've been adding improvements and more modes, including a new Sandbox mode! The improvements make the below much easier to achieve. So if you'd like to see more, the link is now added to the Jam page.

Next, I'll be working on an Objective mode with levels. I've also been toying with multi-star systems, which is interesting, but I haven't yet found that it yields stable orbit patterns. More to come!

Cheers!

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!

An HTML game made with Babylon.js.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/star-crossed

Well, Play/Rate is starting to wind down and I, like a genius, haven't started rating other people and advertising my game. So, to try and get a bit more interest (especially since the game shouldn't be bugged almost beyond being playable anymore!) I thought I'd give a little development postmortem! I know it's long, but I thought it might be helpful for some people to see how other people work. If you don't want to read the whole thing (understandable!) you can jump right to playing my game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/minotorus and leave me a rating!

Unused Ideas

Like everyone, I had a fair few ideas that I ended up striking for one reason or another. I wrote them all up in one long list so I could add new bits onto them and see which one got the most fleshed-out.

• Loupe - it's a pun! On a magnifying loupe! But it's pronounced like loop! Maybe for use in a hidden-object escape-the-room on a very strict timer? Rejected for requiring puzzle design.
• Hamster-ball platformer - the player would be stuck in a "loop"/hamster ball and be platforming around to try and break the ball. I'm glad I didn't go with this one, because I saw someone else doing the exact same thing! Rejected for requiring platforming level design and also because hamster balls are spheres, not loops.
• Weird spaceship thing - orbits are loops, and so maybe you're on a spaceship stuck in orbit around a black hole (thus causing time to go weird) and if you can't fix your engines fast enough you fall into the black hole and die. Rejected because I thought most people would be doing something similar, but it was my second-place idea.

What can I say, I love to make long lists!

The Process

The way I work best is by making lists of tasks, then breaking each of those down farther and farther until I get to the smallest bits. I made my first task list in the same document as the ideas, because I didn't know how many sub-tasks I'd have to add under each task. Once I was fairly confident I had a complete list, I wrote it down on the legal pad I keep by my computer for this exact reason. I really like being able to physically cross tasks off the list when I'm done with them or be able to quickly jot down extra tasks or notes to the side. It helps me feel like I'm actually accomplishing things, and I can tell what's next at a glance.

After planning, I got to coding. Down the list I went! But the task list isn't the law - I wound up switching some things around because I didn't want to have to go to bed halfway through implementing the maze generation! I also did a lot of research to make sure I knew what I was doing at least a little. This was my first time doing procedural mazes and multi-phase boss fights, so I needed to know the options I had for how to implement them. I decided on using Hunt-and-Kill for the maze and animation-based attacks for the boss, but while I was looking those up I also learned about C# Events. You'd think maybe I would've been taught about them during my 4-year game design degree, but nope! First time hearing about them! They're very useful and I'm sure I didn't use them quite right but it was great to be able to just have the player health say "Hey! I died!" and everything else say "Oh, I heard that, time to reset!"

At some point, I realized that I didn't really have a full game loop where the player navigated the maze, died to a timer, did it again until they found the Minotaur, did that until they defeated the Minotaur, then won the game and saw the game over screen. I was taught to always have a game loop and just add extra stuff onto it so you've always got something playable, so I had to get that set up, which involved quite a lot of things, like the timer, timing UI, Minotaur spawning, getting the golden thread actually saving between runs if you hit a checkpoint, all sorts of little details like that.

With the game loop done, I now technically had a complete game. Not a terribly fun game, but it could've been done there. Because it was fully playable, it was time to add in the last few mechanics. I added in the dialog UI, then skipped over making a dialog outline and went straight to the actual final writing, including communication between the dialog and the game code to know when items have been earned. The last mechanic to do was the boss phases, which I super didn't want to do and kind of dragged on designing and implementing. But I eventually got it in, and then I had all of Monday to really polish up.

I decided the most important part of polishing would be adding the story so it was clear what was happening and why. All that involved was adding in an extra conversation with Athena on the player's first death and some text to the opening and ending screens. And speaking of the menus:

Be careful who you call ugly in middle school.

After menus came, in order, sending it to friends for playtesting, finding passable character models, adding animations, putting decent materials on everything in the maze, adding dramatic lighting, and making the UI look just a little better. With about an hour left I found the first BGM and SFX that sounded okay enough, slapped them in, and submitted! Done! What a good jam! A total of 37 hours of work and a pretty good game!

The Bugfixes

Except it turns out the WebGL build was very broken! In the Windows version and the Unity editor, I had the mouse sensitivity set to 10, which felt good. Apparently, WebGL handles mouse sensitivity differently! After trial and error, I realized the better number is 0.75, which is rather significantly less than 10! This meant that the WebGL build was basically not playable, because the mouse was so overly sensitive that you couldn't really look around. And while fixing that, I learned that the golden thread was actually not working as intended at all and wasn't saving between runs! Joy! But I got it fixed and reuploaded, no problem, all good!

Except it wasn't! The mouse sensitivity was now fine in the antechamber, but for reasons that I absolutely cannot imagine, once you got into the maze it was still unplayably high! And at some point the player's animations broke entirely, which meant the attack animation wasn't playing, which meant that the player literally couldn't attack. So I went again and fixed it again and while I was there I fixed the game being the wrong resolution.

The Lessons

1. If you're going to use a source control, do it in the very beginning and also know what you're doing so you don't waste an hour trying to get it to work.
2. Bugfix in every platform you're publishing to, don't just assume if it's fine in one it's fine for all of them.
3. There are actually consequences to getting not enough sleep! It might be better to "waste" time sleeping so your brain functions better and you don't actually waste time staring off into the middle distance thinking "Wow, I'm so tired!"
4. I did this for fun. When it stopped being fun and I really just didn't want to make a multi-phase boss, I should've thought of a different idea that would've been more fun to implement. I like game design, and in something like this where I'm only beholden to myself, I should be doing things I like!
5. Games break! Especially games made in 72 hours. Be nice to yourself, and recognize that a lot of people probably have bugs in their games! But also test test test.
6. Just do your Play/Rate at the beginning when most other people are doing it so you're more likely to get people to play your game. I did this last time I did LD and I'm doing it again here because I am a procrastination gremlin and I'll probably just do it again next time I participate, but maybe if I write it here I'll learn a lesson?

We're playing your games here!!

And don't forget to play our game, Sisyphus Beetle Takes His Daughter to Work here!!

https://youtu.be/CgSDB1zXtAc

While playing a lot of your amazing games we've found some time to put together a trailer for INSIDE THE LOOP! Please give it a go if it looks interesting and rate us, we're still some ratings away from qualifying! Any comments & critique welcome, check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/inside-the-loop

Peace and enjoy this gamedev celebration! Lots of cool stuff got made, keep on keeping on, everyone!

Play Here

Hey look, I'm actually remembering to include a link to the stream this time!

Come on down to the Keyboard Cowboys' stream happening right now, and we'll play your games while chatting about utter nonsense!

Priority will be given to those who submit on stream and stick around in the chat while we play, but if we see no submissions we'll just continue to plug away at the list of people who have already commented on our game, Dude Ranch.

Hope to see you there! (...And sorry in advance...)

:pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:

Directive 399WH is a… we’re not sure exactly. You are woken by your ship’s AI as there is an anomaly causing time loops aboard ship. The AI has a plan and he has chosen you….. for some reason?
The game is kind of a Puzzle/Exploration/Narrative game…. Just play it for a bit and tell us what we have made. Please… we’d love to know :sweat_smile:
If it feels like two different games jammed together at a certain point, you must be mistaken :innocent:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/directive-399wh

We were a bit slow to get rating other games so missed the rush. I will be happy to rate your games as well if you leave a comment :smile:

Thanks!

Update of Timesaver is available now!

Check it out here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/time-saver

!

All right, everyone! Making gifs of your games, characters, development stories, or whatever is one of the most fun things. Anyone got recommendations for gif-making software that meets my criteria?

• Free
• Simply upload or record a video and convert it to .gif
• Not a scam

I'd really appreciate some gif maker recommendations! Speaking of recommendations, I need some games to play since my famous to-play list is down to a mere 8 games. Post your links if they are HTML5 (web)! (I'll tolerate Windows download links too, but downloading games is getting tiresome. I've already downloaded like 30 games. HTML5 is preferred.)