My games usually put much emphasis on the mood and story.

This time my intention was to give more focus to the game-mechanics.

I prepared a platformer-engine with a unique grabbing-mechanic as my base-code for the COMPO. I hoped that I could somehow tie the mechanics to the theme, but I kinda struggled with that as usual.

Gotta say, I wasn't very happy with the theme when it was announced!

This was the first thing I scribbled in my notebook when I saw the theme. You could say it's quite an accurate depiction of my feelings at the time.

- "From all the alternatives, we had to go with this!"

I was sobering up at a local pub, and reality was just about to sink in. (It was 2AM in my time-zone)

Quite an ideal time and place to reflect on the state of being Stuck in a loop!

After a night of not very much sleep, my first day started quite slowly.

Even though the chosen theme was one of the least inspiring ones for me, I had already been throwing a lot of ideas in the air during night. There was one particularly good one I came up with, but I didn't (ludum) dare to go for it. It would have been an awesome concept, but I didn't see myself succeeding in something like that in such a short time.

Obviously I wasn't feeling very energetic. Starting out with the gameplay-side didn't motivate me at all, so I decided to begin with a intro-segment featuring this otherworldly spinning typewriter!

My LD-entries usually feature a FMV/stop-motion intro. This time I even considered skipping the "tradition", but it came out very naturally.

I had absolutely no idea how it would even relate to the overall game (besides being an obvious thematic motif). It felt more like a separate lump of creative anxiety I had to get out somehow.

I was in a figurative and literal writer's block, and apparently I ended up making a game about that experience.

And in a weird way things started to click.

I decided to use the sketch I drew earlier in the pub, and so "the guy with the blank stare" became the player-character.

The sketch was scanned and then colored in GIMP. I really like the end-result.

Gameplay-wise my entry is a very regular platformer, where the catch is a unique mechanic that lets you move and stack boxes.

During development and even after finishing I wasn't entirely sure how well the intro and the actual game would fit in as a whole.

To my surprise the end-result was seamless enough.

I was very happy to hear that there were people who enjoyed the experience on a emotional level, and this particular comment by @bereg was quite heartwarming. I don't think I was even fully conscious myself of all the juxtapositions in the game-play and overall symbolism there actually is.

Hearing that your work makes someone reflect upon their own existence is the ultimate praise for a person who considers themselves an artist.

I think given different circumstances (= those being some other theme being picked and me not drinking the night before!) I might have created a more polished game that would've utilized the core-mechanics further and in more clever ways.

In other words: A better game in a technical sense.

But since the starting point was a struggle for me, I somehow managed to tap into a strange creative space where I could express something that seems to resonate with people on a deeper level.

And in that respect, I don't think this Ludum Dare could have gone better for me!

Once again, thanks for the jam everyone!

The Keyboard Cowboys are still at it, playing your Ludum Dare games for one more weekend!

As usual, we'll prioritize anyone who submits their game and is still in chat when we get to it, but if we see no takers we'll just plow through the rest of our list of people who were kind enough to rate and comment on Dude Ranch.

EU folks, rejoice!! While today we're starting at our usual time (aka the middle of the night for y'all), tomorrow we are looking into doing an early afternoon stream by popular request. Time is still TBD, but we hope to see you there!

Until then, we look forward to anyone who is willing to subject themselves to the madness tonight (and we apologize in advance for it).

'Til next time! :pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/roller-riches

Thanks to everyone who has rated our game and provided valuable feedback! We really appreciate each and every comment that is made, and we're grateful for the positive response :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 going to redesign and rebuild this game from the ground up as a side project, with a focus on adding more traditional incremental game mechanics (prestige, multiple currencies, an actual semblence of balance, etc). If you have any suggestions for how we could develop Roller Riches into a fuller incremental game, let us know!

Please feel free to post your game for myself and others to check out. If you're interested and haven't given Roller Riches a try yet, check it out here! Thank you!

I was taking a look at my list of the best games this jam and I was disappointed to see that one of my top favorite games is only at 15.875 ratings! Hurry, everyone! Save this incredible game by @brainloaf-studio !

Hi all!

I had so much fun working on my very first game in my very first game jam! I was able to finish the bare minimum for a complete functional game within 48 hours, but there was so much more I wanted to add, but just didn't have time for.

So, ever since the jam ended, I've been working hard on completing my vision for the game! I've added lots more visual effects, some animations, sound effects, platforming, extra (and secret) dialogue, lots and lots of polish and bug fixing, and I even made my own sound effects and background music!

I especially had fun creating the music, I've loved listening to videogame soundtracks all my life, and making my own was a really special experience. I'm sure you'll hear the influence of Zelda, Night in the Woods :3

It's been really great to keep iterating on the game, and see it go from the bare minimum to something I'm really proud of.

I know its super late in the ratings cycle, but I'd love it if you try out the post jam version and tell me what you think! There are still some things I'd like to polish, and a few bugs I need to fix (if you play your cards right, you can end up at the Butcher's Shop with three coins, and he'll have no idea what to do about it!), but I'm very happy with the current state of the game, and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it :3

Entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/plague-friends-deathly-journey

Post jam game: https://sakura-magika.itch.io/plague-friends-deathly-journey-post-jam-version

With only 3 days left until the deadline, I haven't received enough ratings! If you have time, please give it a try.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/looping The rate period will end in three days. My game has only earned 15 rates and I need 5 more to get to 20. If you have the time, try to play it!!

Hey! Ludum Dare is coming to a close, so I want to help some of you who still don't have 20 ratings! So hit me up with your games, there's still time to get enough ratings to get results!!

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

The title says it all, submit your games then I'll play em live on stream! I'm excited to play as many games as I can before results are released!

And we're finished! Thanks to everyone who came, I had fun like usual! Here's the VOD for anyone interested; https://www.twitch.tv/videos/780254814

Seems quite a few people would like to see my LD47 game get expanded in the future.

To do that I would probably have to rewrite most of the game's systems from scratch, this would be done so to make the game more efficiently expandable, my ways of setting this up for Ludum Dare were extremely hacky, and would probably be laughed at by more experienced gameplay programmers. Also would probably redo the graphics style completely, and remake the character controller a bit less floaty.

If I end up expanding this I would consider having several overall levels, with 3-6 sub-levels between them. The game so far is like one of what would be an easier overall level, with 5 sub-levels to finish. In the expanded version, there would be a save system, optional collectables, maybe enemies and dangers (not sure if that fits the design vision).

Again, I want to say I can't guarantee this is going to happen, right now I am waiting on my Ludum Dare results, to get some idea of how people rated it overall!

Anyway if you haven't seen the game yet and randomly come across this post, here's my mini YouTube trailer of it:

https://youtu.be/u38gFpGP0OA

Thanks for reading and have an awesome day!

Hey guys I'm a bit late for the reviews if any of u want me to check out your game (if u need more reviews or just want as much feedback as u can get) please drop in the links to ur game in the comments below. I'll be playing them all tonight and in the meantime if u have time could u check out the game me and my friend made we've been extremely busy last few weeks and the algorithm kind of did it's thing hah.

It's the last weekend you can rate Fancy Trash before results! Go check it out!

Gallery

INSIDE THE LOOP > https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/inside-the-loop
Don't forget to get the little orbs :-) you can play on WebGL (HTML5).
Happy to know that people out there are trying the game !

Trailer :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOusKeuwKVo

BUG FIX VERSION AVAILABLE

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/ouroboros-paradox

Hey all, Thank you so much for giving the game a try. The team did an awesome job, creating an awesome array of things for this game, a number of which could not be shown off. Especially all the music and audio effects, we have multiple effects for 6 different weapons hitting different surfaces, effects for the gunfire, effects for the reloads. The Audio guys did an awesome job and we just barely got to show of about 10% of all their awesome work.

We also didn't get to show off all the room variations, all of them has been created, but for some reason things just didn't go together as expected at the end.

But now the GOOD NEWS We have re-released the game! https://ld47-webhost-postjam.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html Now with 100% more bug fixes - no new features - so it should be inline with the rules if you want to re-rate the work :) but I will understand as well if you stick with your original rating.

Bugs that were fixed: The infinite loop just ended after the first boss room - The code had been written, but had not been hooked up in the release, but had been hooked up in private scenes (Unity) Gunshots - There was a bit of trouble with this, as it had been implemented multiple times - it's been corrected and the raycast system hooked up. The Boss floating in midair, I just dragged him down to the ground. The particle effects when oyu hit an enemy kinda sucked - this is because webGL looks different to unity's inbuilt player, so you couldn't see the sparks very well. We tweeked the particle system so you can see the sparks better. Game AI - It was confusing to the players, so I trimmed some of this down. World lighting - There were far too many lights in the scene, and they were making things very dark. I removed a bunch of them, and added one to the player to fix this bug. You now have light so you can see what's happening

MOUSE SENSITIVITY - The game is so much more sensitive on WebGL, the code for all of that had been written, but not correctly connected.

VOLUME CONTROL - I added some sliders for later development, but didn't hook them up, so this is purely graphical on the menu, and not a feature

I also attached the Health system to a couple of objects that had not been hooked up correctly, and shifted a few objects around a touch to stop different bugs, like running through walls and the AI wondering through closed doors.

I hope you like the game!

We decided to base our game on a screen wrapping feature to match this game jam's theme, but its implementation wasn't as straightforward as expected.

Using Unity, playing with screen borders was far from impossible, but still took some time.
We opted to use trigger colliders to know when the player went out of bounds, but we had to change dynamically the size of that collider for every window resizing.
Fixing the aspect ratio was also important, otherwise players with different aspect ratio would have different ways to finish the puzzle levels.

Player teleportations had to be smooth; we did not want to have a blind spot where part of the player could not be seen.
One thought we had was about using cameras to focus on the part of the player we needed and print it at the right place; but given the many unknowns we had about such a system, we went for a simpler system.
We created fake characters to display when straddling two or more screen borders. After a while we decided to always keep 9 characters existing, separated by the screen height and width.

By teleporting the player when he went entirely out of bound, we were sure we would always keep all needed character models in screen.

We still have to take care about the collisions: the 9 characters could not use collisions at the same time, but by activating only the colliders visible on screen, the relevant collisions were present. The only special case was when only one side of the screen ended on a wall: to avoid a character appearing within a wall, we created an invisible collider to simulate the wall on the other side.

Overall, what made the feature harder to control was the player controlled camera. By choosing to allow camera moving, we added a more original feature to create richer levels, but also encountered a few buggy situations.
Fortunately the game ended up being playable, and building the prototype around that feature gave a pretty satisfactory jam game for us.
Here is the link if you want to play "Blank Tape"

The unseen work of the programmers

Hellooo fellow jammers~ :fallen_leaf:

*The second post of the 'Screenshot Week' is a bit different from others,

as it won't be about the art of Led Astray but instead about the art of coding~*

screenshots from the forest level that I promised to upload, also help this b i g post look friendlier (:

Few days back, we were talking about the comments we got on our page and reading this message from @pulni

became the motivation to create this post...

From that point on, I realized while reading comments here and there that it's true! Programmers seem to not get as much noticed as artists and designers do. They generally seem to be getting much less praise... and mostly get noted when something... doesn't work correctly... :sweat_smile: (pooor people :confounded: )

I don't like admitting it.. but i also tend to honor artists and designers more... so to compensate.. I decided to publicly thank our programmers @pulni @lyrcaxis and @bloodystupidviktor :cringy_narrator's_deep_voice: for their remarkable ability to bend :bug: the :bee: elements :beetle: of :ant: coding :spider: in order to complete the difficult task of giving life to Led Astray and so many more!

And to all the programmers out there... we might not talk about it very much but we are indeed secretly cherishing you~! Videogames wouldn't be real without you, so thank you as well!! :blush:

Plz, don't forget to give some love to the brilliant programmers out there too! :greenheart: :yellowheart: :purpleheart: :heart: :blueheart: :yellowheart: :greenheart: :heart: :purpleheart: :blueheart: :greenheart: :yellowheart: :purpleheart: :heart: :blueheart: :yellow_heart:

Really struggled to get to 20 ratings this time around, would love it if anybody could drop a rating for my game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/rebeat

I've been super busy IRL, but with only 3 days left, it's time to dive in and rate games and GET ratings...

Try my double-implementation of the theme: Office Routines pokes fun at the work loops and mundane tasks we sometimes have to perform. But, it's also an infinite runner where the level constantly repeats!

Try it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/office-routines