Thank you all!

Go and play their game @moski, it’s really fun and involves dogs spinning on chairs to defend against squirrel and pidgeon bodybuilders !! What more could you want??

Our team created this casual top down shooter where you shoot zombies and escape the loop.

Two days, and just a few more ratings to get to 20! Please feel free to checkout our game and leave comments on how we should improve, and I'll make sure to checkout yours as well!

The jam has been wild. So far I've seen countless clever mechanics that involve time and position loops, and the more emotional, theoretical conceptual loops (stuck in a futureless life, stuck in mini-purchases, etc.) As a programmer, I've seen game mechanics implemented in impossibly simple yet expressive ways. First time LD jammer and this entire experience is such an eye-opener. 10/10 will jam again.

In this post, I'll talk about the development of POKKO and how it's received.

What is POKKO?

POKKO is a short puzzle-platformer game, made by 4 people. You control a boy who is stuck in a Game Boy game. When you collect a Game Boy, a clone of you gets spawned, who repeats your past actions. You need to use him to solve the puzzles.

POKKO is currently played by 1857 players. It's available for WebGL, Windows, Mac, Linux.

How it started?

I'm a member of a Turkish game development community, called ÜNOG. It has a Discord server and channels dedicated to Ludum Dare. I'm a programmer and designer, I was looking for a team of visual artists and musicians. One of POKKO's artists, Deniz Eryılmaz, was also looking for people to work with, he shared his portfolio in ÜNOG's channel and I thought "I must work with him!". Thankfully, he also chose me to work together. He also mentioned his friends who we could work together; another 2D artist (Emir Çetinkaya) and a musician (Kağan Morkoç). I loved their portfolio, too, I am glad that they joined our team.

The tools we used

Unity 2019, Visual Studio 2017, Aseprite, FL Studio

The idea

We had wanted to make a pixel art game. After the theme was announced, we came up with the idea of a boy who is stuck in a Game Boy game. A clone of boy would get summoned when we collected a Game Boy. I offered a time limit to the game after the clone gets summoned, because the computer's (browser's, to be exact) memory could not be sufficient to keep an infinite number of player positions. Also, this time limit could make the game more enjoyable.

What went right:

• People loved the visuals of the game. I think visuals are the strongest part of POKKO.
• The visuals and sounds could be completed in time. In fact, there are some sprites and a cutscene that we haven't used in the game. The artists created a cutscene which would play on game over, but I thought it would be annoying if a cutscene played each time we failed.
• I could program the game good enough to be released as a Ludum Dare game.
• Clone system works fine. Technical details: Player's positions get stored in a Vector3 list at each fixed update. The clone's position is set to those values in his own fixed update.
• People liked the twist at the game's end, which fits to the theme of LD47.

What went wrong:

• There are some problems with the coding of the game. The protagonist can't jump if he's standing on his clone and the clone is jumping, for example. I had made some platform games in the past and used the same techniques, but those games weren't complex enough. I couldn't find time to fix the game's controls even after the jam ended.
• Apparently the idea of summoning clones is not unique to POKKO. I have seen about 3 Ludum Dare 47 games that use similar mechanics. There is also The Company of Myself.
• I used Unity's own video system for the cutscene. It didn't work on WebGL and Linux the first time I tried. I had to spend some time on it.
• I couldn't find time to create more levels, as I was working on making video work in WebGL.
• Pixel perfect camera caused some problems, the game didn't run correctly on 1366x768 resolution. It turned out that I had to make some settings.

Conclusion

I'm really glad with the game we created. I just wish I could program better platform mechanics. I expect a good rating on Visuals and Audio categories.

Hello Guys, I'm few ratings away from reaching the minimal score so I really appreciate the help and feedback and I hope you enjoy, Thanks in advance! Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/the-breakable-spiral

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/ouroboros-paradox Bug Fix notesS: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/ouroboros-paradox/bug-fixed-version-release

To anyone willing to give this a retry, my humblest thanks from me and the team.

I know a lot of you haven't rated our game yet, but that's okay, you still have time to get laid!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/a-repetitive-disaster

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

We made a game where the corridors loop and extend infinitely as you walk throught them, unless you find the way to break out of the loop. I wish I had put in more levels but I like the resulting mood and mechanic.

We're looking for some more ratings, as we got barely more than the minimum of 20. If you have 10 minutes or so (the game is HTML5 and very short), we would love the feedback.

You can also leave us your game to try here in the comments.

The title says it all!

It was a great experience for Revetoon and I to participate in Ludum Dare 47, and the awesome feedback we got for Mobodo made us so proud :heart_eyes:

For those who would like to, come and play Mobodo right now! It is a cute and atmospheric point-and-click game about changing your character's daily routine with a better one :slight_smile:

What an honor to have an art-piece drawn by the prolific @moski!

Looks like a pretty darn good interpretation to me.

If you wanna beat up these dummies yourself, give it a shot at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/bust-a-loop

If you haven't played @moski's game yet, check it out at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/woofice-chair

A fun little puzzle game about two froggy friends; one just plodding through life trying to get to the next level, and another with super jumping skills, an interesting relationship with the fourth dimension and a tenuous grip on his own place in the space/time continuum. It's a classic story of friendship.

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

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

Try it!

Twitter: @PixelProphecy played the game

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/781773613?t=00h20m48s

Was very cool to see them play, but this is the buggy version, if you play ;) play the bug-fixed HTML version.

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/ouroboros-paradox Bug Fix notesS: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/ouroboros-paradox/bug-fixed-version-release

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/day-1

Thank you so much to everyone who played Hyper Hamster and left some feedback, the response has been so positive! :hamster:

Although this was not our only game idea for the jam, this was the one that we felt had the simplest fundamental elements and would be relatively quick to prototype. This saved us a lot of time to focus on visuals, sound, and game feel to make the game as fun and satisfying as possible.

Here is the actual design document of the game, annotated just for you!

The only things missing from this early document are the actual goal of the game (reaching hyper velocity!), and what obstacles would actually be, but most of the inner workings were set from the start.

Here is what obstacle spawning looks like in action:

It was of course important to make sure the player never sees this, so we split the wheel in 4 segments and only spawn obstacles in the one right behind the camera.

Obstacles are placed using a vector that goes from the world center (which is also the center of the wheel) to the pink trigger, we then rotate that vector along the wheel with a semi-random angle to determine obstacle positions. Obstacles may then be shifted along the X axis for more variety.

There was actually a fair bit of math involved in the making of this game, even something as simple as the speed meter uses a Sin function for the oscillation and a square root to make the progress feel more accurate/fair.

As mentioned above, one of our main focus was game feel and making the game as satisfying as possible despite its simplicity. This is done through a myriad of little details, like the aforementioned speed meter, the dangling apples on the HUD, the "SPEED LOSS" and "SUGAR RUSH" blinking texts, particle effects and distorsions using FOV and chromatic aberrations, sound effects, and of course that signature Hyper Hamster front flip.

This is all of those things in play, minus the sound:

And that's all of the beans I'll spill for now! :hamster:

Feel free to play and rate if you want, we're always happy to read more of your feedback!

Help 3 little ghosts to have a party together. They're all stuck on 3 different islands.

Can you help them find a way to get together? 👻🎁👻👻

[Play now] or [Rate]

We should be able to get AT LEAST 300 more games over 20 ratings! Lets go yall! Lets work together and get these entries over the finish line!

Bus Bump is my compo entry for LD47, which I'm really happy with. You knock your head on your way to school. No matter what you do, you keep waking up at that specific point where your bus took a hard bump. Like in the movies, you try to uncover the mystery of your school to break this never-ending loop.

Try Bus Bump: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/bus-bump

Are you running short on ratings ? I'd love to play your game too ! Send me your games and I'll try to play them ! (Altough preferably HTML5 or web)

Another shout-out/huge thanks to @moski for giving out incredible sketches of games!

My simple game Outside The Loop:

@moski 's extreme talent:

Thank you so much @moski ! And thank you to everyone who has supported my game! Happy gaming and developing, everyone!

Because of the lack of tutorials in Godot, I left it. I went to construct, though, it only allows a certain amount of code, which I quickly exceeded, so, I am back to Unity, in a hope of not leaving! :)