you are a soldier, and you are losing the war. But will you really leave your injured comrades behind?

link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/none-left-behind

I've made a timelapse for my entry :smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sinkqyFWZsY

You can play my game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pug-panic

If you want some ratings for your game just post them here!

Pls check my game:https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/floccy-land It was my first game jam so it wants more improving!

1998 OR2 is an asteroid which is inching it's way closer to Earth. The world is going to come to an end.

Keep it alive!!!!

This is true news.

Photo credits: NASA

Earth 2.0 is a fast paced - 1 minute game. Play Earth 2.0 and keep Mankind alive from the asteroids!!

Also thanks to all those who have rated my game and got it to a hundred ratings!!

We're grateful to them for sharing it! You can try out and rate the game here!

Help Mike Save the Jam [HTML5]

Try yourself in a boots (feathers?) of @pov. Controls - WASD/Arrows/Space bar.
Pictures are loaded from Ludum Dare page through my little server, so please be gentle :)

Made it yesterday, not a Ludum Dare entry! But you are free to check and rate our team's games for LD46:

Until we freeze by @icxon
Abandoned by @graal
Unit 21 by me

Guide the last spacecraft from Earth through the immensity of the Universe in search of a new home for the few survivors of an Earth unable to sustain life. Until you reach your unknown destination, keep the crew hydrated, fed, heated and don’t let the ship drift without power. Keep an eye out for radar. It tells you where to find the resources you need to support yourself until you find a new home for humanity.

Play in the Browser

Thank you so much for 100 reviews!! We're super proud of our game that we put a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and pollen into, and we're so glad that people liked it!!

If you still haven't played our sexy plant game, Faire L'Amour aux Plantes, you can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/sexy-plants

Thank you to everyone who played and rated our game! It's been a while since we participated in a game jam, but this has been our most successful one yet. I'm proud of the game we made. The feedback we're getting has been awesome, highlighting what we did well, and giving lots of great suggestions on how we can improve. I've already implemented some of the changes and will be uploading an updated version after the rating period is over.

If you haven't yet please check out our game and let us know what you think: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/root-quest

This is also the jam where I've played the most, and I'm very impressed with so many entries! Here are five other games I think deserve some extra attention:

The Drown

Tower defense / action shooter hybrid. This game has incredible production value: it's fully voice acted, has an introductory cut scene, awesome pixel art, and amazing atmosphere. I can't recommend this one enough. Even the game page they made is well formatted and provides detailed instructions. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-drown

King's Table

A tower defense compo entry with a very interesting twist. One of the most engaging games I've played in LD46 for sure so far! I think this one could be developed further and made into something really special. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/kings-table

Lights Out

Their first jam entry, and it's really well-done! Good art, good sounds, and a great atmosphere. Looking forward to seeing future jam entries from them! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/lights-out-2

Lifeform

A strange puzzle game with dynamic music where you solve puzzles to stimulate growth in your alien life form. It's hard to describe exactly, but it's a lot of fun! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/lifeform

Abiogenesis

Strange, atmospheric endless runner style game with a classic arcade feel. The music is excellent once you get going, with a heartbeat-like bass drum that makes this feel a bit like a rhythm game. I found myself playing this one for quite a while, and I genuinely hope they continue developing it further. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/abiogenesis

We heard you all! We included a soundtrack to the game.

We changed from an endless mode to a fixed 250 year mode for the highest score (endless mode can still be selected at the start of your game)

We also added some specific and new hairstyles to each House!

Checkout the patched game on itch.io: https://extra-nice.itch.io/noble

You can still vote and test the original Ludum version here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/noble

We would love to hear your feedback!

Hey everyone!

Due to popular demand I've decided to share the dog model from my LDJam46 game: Lamps

We've got roughly 216 Ratings, which is absolutely insane O_O I Can't thank everyone enough for playing and rating our game. Hopefully this model helps other artists out there become familiar with good practices for modeling, rigging and animating animals.

And, if anyone still hasn't checked our game out, here's a link:

LINK to Lamps

Comment A Link To your Game And I'll Play It

Just Comment your game's Link and i'll Play, Rate it, and maybe Write a comment. I want to try Playing them all.

If it's ok from you, Please consider Play and Rate my Game "Message" too. it will help me alot.

Comment A Link To your Game And I'll Play It

Just Comment your game's Link and i'll Play, Rate it, and maybe Write a comment. I want to try Playing them all.

If it's ok from you, Please consider Play and Rate my Game "Message" too. it will help me alot.

played like 62 games till now lol.

As the main programmer of Literal Games, I spent most of my Ludum Dare weekend figuring out how to draw pixels to a texture in Unity and writing bad cellular automata. You can now watch my progress over the weekend in a condensed, timelapse form!

https://youtu.be/oKq72juHeec

I had a blast this Ludum Dare, and I've had a great time reviewing games as well. If you fancy giving Bonsai a go, click here. It's a slow, peaceful game about growing and taking care of Bonsai!

I'm in the process of writing up a post-mortem as well, which should be coming soon. I've got lots of things I want to write about - how the bonsai growing and rendering works, why we spent so much time on transitions, and what we got wrong in terms of time management.

Submissions are open!

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

Hi there! Today I decided to do a little post about the art & story of The Consequences of Gardening.

First of all, a quick word on how the team came to be, and how we chose what the game would be.

Team

Kalarth, Thorqueor and I are friends from University, and we followed a Game Design course together few years ago. We worked on couple jam projects too. Maus3r came to work with us in a jam last year, I knew him from Flying Oak Games Discord server. The idea of doing the jam came from him, and we decided to all join as a team. Eqkter, also a friend from Uni, who I've been giving feedback to for few tracks in the past couple weeks joined the team as well, bringing his sound designer friend Moondude along. Kebab, latest addition to the big team, worked in the same room as a few of us during a jam few months ago, and we were keen on working with the young talented dev.

Organization

We had a pre-jam reunion talking about global organisation, what everyone's working habits were, how we would work, and what we were expecting of the 72 hours. Since all of us didn't know all of the others, we introduced our backgrounds in turns, had a round of questions, and a little explanation on what role we would play (music composition, sound design, level design, art, or dev), and how we wanted to handle the jam. The goal was to produce a game while still enjoying nice breaks and sleeping (almost) normally. Going in chill. We would think of ideas on our own, then meet for a brainstorming session on Saturday at 9am BST - 10am for the majority of the team in France, 9 for me in the UK, but far too early for Moondude in Canada, so he left his ideas in written form, then joined us when waking up later in the day.

We had written most ideas we had had during the night, and we set out on what to go for rather quickly. In an hour, we had chosen a setting, the kind of gameplay, and what the devs would need to do - each dev focusing on one important part of the code. We seperated to work on our own at that point, regularly exchanging on the direction and vision other had for this or that. I acually spent most of the week-end drawing while listening to Eqkter streaming the tracks he was composing.

Story

As stupid as it may sound, the main concept behind the game was this article about a young lad with tons of plants, and being torn between a very cute little plant-watering simulator or a gory game where you have to keep a demonic-looking thing alive by feeding it all sorts of things - people being an option. We eventually went for both, but the watering the plant part was sadly not added. To make a gameplay that works well in a short amount of time, we discarded anything nervously dynamic, and looked at more posed gameplays like puzzle, strategy or management.

There, we had the baseline. Old-school point-&-click with inventory system, dialogs, and things to look at & grab.

The creation process for characters was iterative and Thorqueor's ideas and mine got intertwined. I drew Kaz, the main character, and thought of what he was like. Thorqueor designed the puzzles. He also thought of chracters & their behaviors, objects, base dialogs, and what place a scene would play at. I then drew the characters, a flattened version of scenes, and worked on the pixel art version of all these.

Eqkter and I spend couple hours reworking all the dialogs, him in French, I in English, exchanging ideas on how characters would actually interact with Kaz, the main character. You read it here first : there is a full French localization for the game, we just have to figure out how to make it easier for us to implement.

Art

Here is a look at some of my scribbles. Everything was drawn on paper with a ballpoint pen - my weapon of choice for quick drawings. The process : from there to pixels, basically. The appartment was the only scene I put as much details in right from the start, with couple items chosen by each member of the team to fit in the background.

Guess which ones? :smile:

This is the base lines for the pixel art of the flat and what the flat looks like once done. I work with aseprite, in one file to have a better sense of the scale. Every element is on a different layer, making it easy to copy / paste to another file for animated or pickable objects.

Since 72h would make it a bit tight for me to be able to draw 4 scenes, animate 5 characters & a plant, and draw "HD" versions of faces for the dialog box, the ballpoint face were scanned, cleaned a bit, and kept as is.

Pixel Kaz v1 and v2. V1 did not look like I imagined, too mugshotty. Had to be more blasé, and kind of cute-ish. Despite what people might think, he lived through some shit and wasn't always like this. He just accepted the situation and now he does not care for anything else than his plants.

I'll just add a couple more sprites that you cannot see too well in the game : the icons for the different locations, and the sprites of the pickable objects (originally 50x50px).

>> Play the game here

Cheers!

J.Mad

People claim that graphics in Abandoned game is something from 1996.

Here how it looks now:

Ok, I agree: my pixel art is still not great.

I've spent some time after LD trying to find better vision, and here is how it may look like:

What do you think? I'm going to create post-LD version with updated graphics. Would you be interested in that?

My girlfriend tried my game and she liked it! :D Getting real life feedback is super satisfying, although my cat was less impressed. Who do you agree with ? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/brainstorm https://shakedimus.itch.io/brainstorm

PepeHands

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

TAKING SUBMISSIONS:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScwyAj1WLkFEPwi1PnOiywtBVfvVxzYfehu2psY6tDFPA-DIQ/viewform?fbzx=-1292295655891380072

My first LD-team-effort I I R O features four mini-games.

But to access them, you'll have to solve a nightmarish puzzle first!

If you want something completely different, this just might be your cup of incomprehensible bewerage.

However, maintaining your sanity after this is solely your own responsibility.

Enjoy!

I listened to your suggestions and feedback and I now I can proudly present you a new, better and more epic version of MR. Cheesy ! 🥳

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/$190298

New version with added features:

• Lucky Power-Up boxes!

• Mouse Traps..what else can I say..you now have mouse traps!

• Backround changes slowly color after reaching specific milestones!

• Available as WebGL build!

So I've listened to what people in the comments were suggesting and finally got to update my game. Time of the enemy turns is halved now and there is also a restart command when the attacker dies, so that the player doesn't have to watch it's party being killed one by one.

Feel free to try the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/have-mercy

Dear Diary:

(Link to our game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/biorunner )

So the moment the LDJam theme was announced the programmer and I (Gfx/Sfx) had gone for a walk for a hour to try and think of a idea, and we had some 'kind' of concept. Other than the small thematic details that were floating in the air- it was hard to actually picture what our game would be like. We are both pretty ambitious in our own ways so looking at it now, we had a 7 day project we wanted to do in 3 days.

Multiple Terrain types, More mobility options, Weapons, 5 baddies and a Boss. Of course by the end of it- We had one terrain type, One gun, 4 baddies, A barely finished map and a actually interesting gameplay mechanic added to our sort of escort A to B styled game.

But i think in the end the fact that a shield was added to the thing you were trying to escort, kind of had a reverse effect on how stale escort missions can actually be. And since we couldn't get multiple weapons in time, We decided to try and make the one weapon we could have look and feel pretty good. Along with the added effects the programmer designed for the shield, gun and screen it was starting to look like something interesting.

Of course by the end of it we were both pretty damn exausted, I was so tired by the end of it i could even answer basic questions properly which is why the map has probably got some noticeable flaws.

But more importantly i was looking forward to this as a good exercise for our collaborating skills. When it comes to videogame development we but heads on half of the things we want for our game so it was pretty refreshing for once to put something together we both liked. Even if it meant we we're a bit grumpy in the end.

I think it definitely sharpened our dev skills a bit more in the end and hopefully the next one will just be as much as a fun mess lol.

Why not try out my compo submission, "Defend the Loot!" The objective of the game is to protect your treasure chest from waves of enemies. Before every wave you have a minute to build up your base. There are 10 levels and each level consists of 10 waves.

You can find the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/defend-the-loot

We initially did our Ludum Dare game in C++ and SFML. But we saw that C++ & SDL could be compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten, so my teammate @elvaka did the whole porting SFML -> SDL, and made it compile to WebAssembly, and now the game can be easily played from itch.io, instead of downloading the binary!

You can give it a try: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/who-let-the-doggos-in.

Direct link to itch.io: https://albertnez.itch.io/who-let-the-doggos-in.

Hi there! Today we are starting a series about the three days of the jam and how we went about creating our game!

We thought about putting some method to the madness with two steps. So each of us individually wrote down 5 concepts related to the theme (Keep it Alive!) and got it into a canvas. The funny part is that each of us went about it in different ways. One of us wrote down mechanics, another wrote down a stream of thoughts, and so on...

We gathered on Discord friday night to discuss the theme right after it was released. For many in our quartet (with the exception of @panoramix360) this was the first time making a game in a jam. We read together the rules so that we understand how everything works. Then we were off to brainstorming.

If you can read in Brazilian Portuguese, you can spot the seed of Bro Loving in the top right corner ;)

The next step was selecting at random (we used an online number generator) to select 3 concepts and try to come up with ideas for games using those. Each of us take a shot at it and we ended up writing down the best ones.

We used Notion to write everything from this point on. After we went for 5 rounds of this we had plenty of ideas. But there was one image that made us all fall in love and we wanted to make a game about it somehow:

Great week everybody! See you next time!

Also, checkout Bro Loving if you haven't already!

Creating Man Need Fire was an interesting experience in many ways. This was actually my very first time participating in Ludum Dare, where the majority of my game jam experience was with Global Game Jam, which was usually done with a team, but now I had the chance to do things on my own. I learned to make some music, which was something that I had always wanted to do. I was also able to flex some of my level design skills and to learn some good project planning skills. As a programmer by trade, I don’t usually get the opportunity to be fully involved in the creative sides as well as project planning, so I was super excited to be able to apply some theory to my work. I wanted to discuss a bit about the project now that I’ve had some time to reflect, and have come down from the high of the jam.

So let's talk about some of the restrictions that I wanted for myself right off the bat. I wanted a very simple palette of colors to work with, because it would force me to become creative in how I applied the colors. My other self-imposed restriction was to use 8px square tile for everything.

The Good

Things went really well with the character design, I had an idea in my head of approximately what i wanted the character to look like, drawing inspiration from some more abstract designs

as I've always found this to be very appealing. Obviously the character didn’t end looking like that, but this generally simplicity was what i was targeting. The character that is in the game now, was actually the first thing that I had drawn out, and I really liked it, but didn’t want to go with the very first thing I drew. I created 2 more concepts for the character (which looked bad enough that i honestly didn’t even bother saving them) before finally just caving and returning to that original concept. I didn’t have my final palette at this point, so the color scheme was definitely still in the air, but I was happy enough to move on.

I was able to find a fantastic website for pixel art palettes(which upon my research after the fact found out multiple people actually recommend it for exactly what i had used it for) . So originally i would’ve tried to tackle a palette on my own, and I would be lying if i said that i had a perfect understanding of colour theory, but after watching the GDC postmortem give by Adam Robinson-Yu about his game A Short Hike, Adam talks about his palette selection and what he used for the game, and I wondered why i never came to the same conclusion as it seemed so obvious. So I went on the search for what I wanted the game to look like, and settled on .

It offered a wide range of color options, which i thought would be very easy, but making good use of the colors actually was quite challenging to be able to showcase some of the depth and lighting on the objects in the game. I would use colors that I wouldn't have ever thought to apply, and they ended up working in my favor, giving a lot of personality to the environment. To start out and pick the colors that i wanted to use for the environment, I pick a set of 10 colors that i thought would work well, and walked the character around to see what worked well and what didn’t, settling on six main colors I wanted for the environment, which were the base colors and highlights for: Grass, Dirt and water. We can see in the images how I went from bare bones, to way more fleshed out. Notice how simple the boulder and bush were at that time, and how the highlights really just make them pop.

The music was a ton of fun. This was my first time doing any music work, but it's always something that I had my heart set on. I browsed the tools recommended for Ludum Dare, and downloaded all of the music ones. I wanted to get a feel for which might be more what I was looking for, for both my skill level, and understanding of what the heck i was doing. There were lots of great options, but I settled on Bosca Ceoil and oh boy was that a good decision. I’ll be honest, starting out to figure out what the heck was going on was tough in terms of controls, and layout, but once i was over that learning curve it was smooth sailing. I would describe myself as a music lover, so i was ready to apply my ear to the task. I experimented with so many different instruments within the application, and wanted to find the feel that complimented the game. I knew in my head what I was looking for, but needed to play around a lot to get to where I wanted to be. I knew some simple setups for music from my days of listening to drum and bass, where I heard a song describing what pieces to add, and how it changed the sound (I cannot find the song, though this really only applied to percussion in the end). I was able to settle on 2 instruments that gave the more tribal feel I was looking for, and had a great sound, The Marimba, and the sitar. Both sounded great, of course i had to play around with the sequences, but i found patterns that I thought worked well together, and in a way that would loop effortlessly. I created the Jungle song first, which was actually my favourite because it's so simple, and yet sounds great. I feel I stumbled more so on the later songs, as if I were trying too hard, and was no longer in the flow of creating the songs, which you can see in the Desert song. The menu song was actually one that turned out pretty well, as it set up a feel or expectation for the game that just complimented the visuals so well, while still trying to communicate the seriousness of the players early predicament. Finally the home song was created. I didn’t originally plan to have that but as I was creating that final level, I didn’t want to have that conflict song, I wanted something light and cheery that communicated to the player that they were now at peace, or all is well in the world.

Check out the Songs of Man of Fire Here

The level progression setup was also something that I knew I wanted to pursue early on. I had grandiose dreams of all of the mechanics and fun things that i could add, but they weren’t all able to be included. I will review those things in part 2. When i was creating the levels they were all scattered, as i was just vomiting ideas into life in no particular order. There were mechanics that I wanted to include, such as catching the bushes on fire, needing to throw your torch, and moving boulders, and everything was based on those main ideas. As I would do the play-testing though, i found that some levels made more sense if they appeared before another, then I began to remember some of the things i learned from watching Johnathan Blow, and GDC talks (Which specifically i cannot recall) about only introducing mechanics one at a time, and allowing the player to become comfortable with what we are showing them.

So for example, I needed to show the player that their torch would extinguish the torch without penalizing the player, one of the levels begins with the player falling into water, where they would then need to move to a fire pit to re-light the torch before they can move onto the next level. This also presented an opportunity for me to be able to have a more interactive menu, where all the basic mechanics can be found in the menu, as well as the simple instruction of which controls players can use, and what the objective is. To even exit the menu, the player must pick up the torch, light it on fire, and bring the lit torch to the waypoint, which is the entire game, so that presented itself as a great way to teach the player. Another way I was able to teach the player about a new mechanic, is for the boulders.

The first desert level, the player is dropped in and gives no other option than to move towards the boulder, upon which the player would see that move, and instilling in the mind of the player that these boulders can and should be moved. The very next level, which is very simple, solidifies in the players mind how to push the boulders, as they need to move many to get to the end of the level. It felt like a great overall execution of designing the levels. Once i got to a point where i knew that i wouldn't be able to include all of the mechanics i wanted, i wanted to blitz as many levels as I could. Loading the levels was a surprising dilemma, as i wanted to load each one based off of a specific ID, where i would set the Id to load as part of the component. This was fine when there were only a few levels, but adding more and testing soon became a big pain in my butt, not to mention how I was going to handle restarting levels. I settled on a basic incremental system, where the order in the hierarchy off the scene would actually dictate the load order, which made it incredibly easy for me to move levels around after they were made. Loading levels also turned into an interesting solution, as I instantiated the levels from a prefab that existed within the scene disabled. I wouldn’t normally do this in a project, as I feel it's very abrasive, but it worked well for the time restrictions. I would keep track of the current level as an index, and instantiate that game object, enabling it, and moving the player to the set start location, all within the same load function. One of the other important things i wanted to include as I was nearing the end, was a conclusions, leaving the player hanging wasn’t something that sat well with me so, adding a new end level and moving it to the last level in the list, meant that no matter how many more levels I added (placed above the final level), there would always be a conclusion. This saved me so much stress, this is definitely a technique I will continue to apply.

The final important piece was to do with play testing. In most cases I end up doing the majority of the testing with my games, mostly because I think that others will not understand what I am doing, or am too self-conscious. Having seen so many tips and recommendations though stating that I need to be testing early and testing often, I thought that this was a perfect opportunity to put this to the test. Oh boy did I realise what great feedback I was missing. I was able to understand which parts of the levels were confusing, or what bugs may exist. For example, in the burnt bush level, which is the first time the player interacts with the burnt bush, it was originally appearing after the first bush burn level, I had my significant other play through the game, where they specifically avoided the bushes where I intended to teach them that they should go through them. This was super important to be able to progress in some of the later levels, so i decided to use the same idea that i did with the level where the player falls into the pool, but having the player spawn on top of the burnt bush to not only force them to break the first few, but then has them walk forward breaking many more bushes before exiting the level. Though my SO is not a gamer, or a game developer, watching them play, to see where they stumble or become confused was invaluable to ensuring that my level design and progression was clear and straightforward.

In my next part I will cover some of the topics that I thought went wrong in the development, things that I would change for next time. Stay tuned. I also would certainly appreciate any feedback on Man Need Fire or this post.

Yes its hard.

Yes its a bit buggy.

But its fun! Give my game a try if you havent, see if you can get past lvl 1! The GIF above show its possible :P

I would advise trying the downloadable if you are on a weaker PC/laptop the WEBGL build has given some people problems

Play it here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/my-friend-phil

https://youtu.be/Mh3c5Sga764

These are my plants that were sitting on both sides of my laptop when I was making my game! They gave me the idea of protecting a plant and keeping it alive. 😁

The left one in the image is the inside of a rape plant. The right one is the inside of a lettuce. They were both very small at first, but after 3 weeks they are growing well.

Want to see the plant in game? LINK: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-a-plant 😁

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

Heres the submission:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScwyAj1WLkFEPwi1PnOiywtBVfvVxzYfehu2psY6tDFPA-DIQ/viewform?fbzx=-1292295655891380072

You are RX74. A life-system care unit, otherwise known as a Blaster. Your job is to defend your Heart on an outpost in the middle of nowhere. The only sound being that of gun fire, and the constant beating of the Heart. You must defend the Heart from meteors. Where do these meteors come from? And why are they only crashing into the Heart? No one knows. Well, you don't at least. Their aren't many people for you to ask.

Enjoy your stay. You're never leaving! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/heart-combustion

Thanks to everyone who played our game so far, and if you haven't yet, I'll just casually slide this little link over here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/it-came-from-below

Anyway, as the title states we've started moving forward in completing a 'finished' version of this game. We'll still keep it small and simple overall, but the plan is to expand (more levels, more creatures, more combinations) and polish (tighten controls, clean up the design).

One of the reasons for this post is to take any suggestions people might have for the new creatures and more specifically, their abilities! Wall climbing, double jump, plant-based travel are a couple of the things we've had in mind, but we're curious to hear from YOU.

Link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-them-away

PLay and rate our game !!!

Link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-them-away

Helps a file survive being deleted forever! Play here :D

That's an order hehe jk jk do it :laughing: entry for LD46 Jam!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaCuNP5K8A4

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/wormsworms

https://saucygames.itch.io/wormsworms

I want to thank everyone those who have been able to play my game.

This is my third time been part of the Ludum Dare and despite that in this opportunity i couldn't dedicate it so much time, I am very happy with the result.

I would like to invite you to play my game, please leave me your comments, they always help me to continue improving.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/save-the-torch

We are Garbage soup Studio and us proud to present our game to you.

A Balloon's Journey is the game that you will be a plane that tries to deliver a mail inside the balloon to the other side of the world. So, please take care of the balloon :)

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/a-balloons-journey Hope you enjoy our game, Good luck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yr8inUlKgU

Garbage Soup Studio.

Rate and comment on our game and we'll do the same for you!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/manifest-destiny

In this new version we changed the art to a brand new style!

Check it out! You can find the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/guns-n-violets

Also we added a new item to the Wave Mode Shop! The Drone, it will help you to protect your Violet!

You can find the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/guns-n-violets

I wrote a short postmortem about my experience working on "The Wrecker". It includes my thoughs about using Wwise with Unity, making heavily physics-based gameplay, and using Illustrator to make art. You can read that right over here: brianmacintosh.com/blog.

Launch meowmies with your slingshot to stop the birdie burglars!

Team Cocoa Moss is hard at work on the post-jam version of Birdie Burglars, as well as the upcoming mobile port!

In the meantime, feel free to play and rate the jam version: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/birdie-burglars

Soundtrack download is also now available!

Hello! We received lots of positive feedback about the resource-management of Perish Alive so I thought I'd share my Designer's Tricks: Why those Numbers? ! :smiley_cat:

• how much should a room cost?
• how much should upgrades cost?
• how often are resources generated?

Hope this helps someone!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/duck-crossing

We've been surprised and a little overwhelmed with the response to our silly little shooter... We're very close to 200 ratings!

If you love ducks with guns... If you've always wanted to shoot stupid little gnomes in their stupid little faces... this is very much the game for you.

Check out For Ducks' Sake!

A cute little retro 8 way endless shooter.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/for-ducks-sake

I got a game and it's my first game it's also on HTML5 and it's kind of suck so if you want to play a suck game go check out my game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-it-alive-39

Hello, I'm currently in the process of reworking my code from the ground up since I want to develop a full version of my game. In this post I'd like to talk about the "proper" ways of mantaining and refactoring your code. (Proper is in quotes since there's actually no proper way of doing it, some ways are just more manageable than others).

First of all you can find the JAM code here: https://bit.ly/3d5z4sP (Carefull, it's a mess!)

What I did wrong

The main problem of that code is the fact that it was really heavily scene dependant. You can see this mostly in the Player script where I have this mess: void Start() { if(!tutorial) StartCoroutine(FadeImage(true)); r = GetComponent<Renderer>(); anim = GetComponent<PlayerAnimator>(); controller = GetComponent<Controller2D>(); shoot = GetComponent<PlayerShoot>(); torch = GetComponent<PlayerTorch>(); if(!tutorial) shake = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag("Shake").GetComponent<CameraShake>(); }

I had to add a boolean just for the tutorial level and find all of the special cases where the components were not required. This is clearly an example of bad architecture.

Then I tried but failed to use the Chain Of Command pattern as you can see here:

The Player class has some delegations but that code is a mess. It also doesn't follow the Single Responsibility Principle, that class does too many things.

Another mistake is that my code was too sparse

``` public class PlayerAnimator : MonoBehaviour { private Animator anim; private Player p; // Start is called before the first frame update void Start() { p = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag("Player").GetComponent(); anim = GetComponent(); }

private void Update()
{
    anim.SetBool("isResting", p.isResting);
}

} ```

This was my animator but as you can see it does almost nothing, the rest of the animation logic is scattered around various scripts (mostly Animation Behaviours)

And lastly my coupling was terrible.

``` public class MainMenuScript : MonoBehaviour { GameObject p; public AudioClip boop; public AudioClip woosh; public Button startButton; public TextMeshProUGUI tutorial;

public void Sound()
{
    AudioManager.Instance.Play(boop, transform, .1f);
}
public void StartGame()
{
    Camera.main.GetComponent<CameraFollow>().player = p.transform;

    p.GetComponentInChildren<Light>().intensity = 2;
    p.GetComponentInChildren<Light>().range = 20;
    StartCoroutine(fadeButton(startButton, false, .2f));
    AudioManager.Instance.Play(woosh, transform, .1f, 2.5f);
    StartCoroutine(ShowTutorial("Use WASD to move"));
}

} ```

For example my Main Menu had to know about the player, the buttons, the text, the sounds etc. That meant that if only one of those things broke, everything else (probaby) did as well

What I did well

Luckily this not being my first jam I had some experience with this sort of things so I managed to do some good stuff.

First of all everything was (at least in the beginning) neatly organized

Separate folders for Art, Scripts, SFX etc... This might seem a small improvement but it really makes a difference when you have to find stuff

And the second thing that really helped me was the use of interfaces. For example I defined one single IInteractable interface

public interface IInteractable { string Name { get; set; } void Interact(Player p); }

And implemented it to every object the player could've interacted with. For example:

``` using UnityEngine;

public class WeaponPickup : MonoBehaviour, IInteractable { public string Name { get => itemName; set => throw new System.NotImplementedException(); } public GameObject weapon; public string itemName = "Magical Bullet"; public void Interact(Player p) { p.AddWeapon(weapon); Destroy(GetComponent()); Destroy(GetComponent()); Destroy(this.gameObject, 1f); AudioManager.Instance.Play(pickUp, transform, .05f); } } ``` (Ignore the destroy mess! This happens when you don't decouple classes! :P)

And the Player a really simple interact logic

``` void OnTriggerEnter2D(Collider2D collision) { if (collision.gameObject.CompareTag("Usable")) { obj = collision.gameObject.GetComponent(); itemTextBox.GetComponent().text = obj.Name; itemTextBox.SetActive(true); canInteract = true; } }

private void OnTriggerExit2D(Collider2D collision) { if (collision.gameObject.CompareTag("Usable")) { itemTextBox.SetActive(false); obj = null; canInteract = false; } }

void Interact() { if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.E) && canInteract){ obj.Interact(this); } } ``` (They can be simplified even further!)

What Am I doing now?

I've spent the last 4 days rewriting my old code with zero progress, this is because I wanted to turn it into an easily expandable code with the same functionalities. What I did (and am still doing) was:

• Reducing coupling between classes
• Implementing Events for most of the functionalities: This correlates with the first point, if I have a class that sends an event and another one that listens to it the two classes are essentialy independant!
• Separating the Audio and Animation logic from the base classes: I'm doing this using events as well
• Splitting the Player class into smaller Components (this applies to Unity but other programs as well, check the Single Responsibility Principle!)
• Using Scriptable Objects to add a layer of abstraction between Classes: this also reduces coupling. Let's say my Player class writes to a HealthScriptObj and my HealthUI reads from it. The two classes are now decoupled but the functionality is the same!

If you came this far, thanks for reading, hope you learned something useful! If you want to check my game you can find it here: Solar

Then this may not be the game for you. Either way, you might find it cathartic killing virtual viruses in times like these.

Play Germ Warfare

This is my third ludum dare and my 9th game i've made overall (literally all in jams). However, since the last Ludum Dare I've basically only made UI-based games. This is why I resolved to make something satisfying and action packed. I made the game more relevant to my own interests by theming it around a sea captain. I spent around half of the jam obsessively making combat feel crunchy and like an actual naval battle - I allowed the player to spam to recreate broadsides, I added a fire sound effect, I added copious particle effects and I added screenshakes. This is probably my best Ludum Dare entry. However, it's not my best game overall. The combat is a bit too spammy, the AI is stupid and looking at the compass means you have to split your vision between the bottom right corner and wherever your boat is. However, I think I nailed that "crunch" and made firing broadsides very satisfying.

Play "Ahoy!" here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/ahoy

We barely mannaged to complete it. Its left a little unpolished, but hope you still enjoy! :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/save-your-wife

I made my game with processing, I have a windows/linux/macos version. Feel free to play and to give me your feedback !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/space-mercenary

My game has got almost 50 ratings! This is way better than any of my games have done before, so hopefully this and the great feedback will be reflected in the results.

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pug-panic

Will you be able to keep the patients alive? Check out our game here.

[CORNY module activated!]

They say that I look like Vivi, so please, be... be my friend... bzzz...

They say that I look like a heartless, so please, warm me with yours... bzzz...

[CORNY module deactivated!]

BzzzZZZzzZZzZzZZZZzzzz

Now come on yo' all, fleshbags. Yo'd better come hyar an' git me some coins.
Farm @ https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/robotanic-mayhem#create/195724/post

Thank you to everyone for the ratings on our first ever Ludum Dare entry. We had a great experience and are already looking forward to the next one!

Find our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/a-wizard-worth-fighting-for

Colonise planets to expand your empire and keep your species alive!

Will you master many planets or fight for your survival jumping from planet to planet?

Play the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/continuity Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/continuity

Hey there!

@gelgavish and I made in this LudumDare 46 a game called "RushBomb".

In short, this game presents a hacker that attempts to save his city, Metropolis from a nuclide bomb. That bomb activates by a system. Our hacker needs to break into that system to stop the bomb.

Unusually, this game is not a game that made with graphics, it made with text.

I hope to see you try our game and send us feedback :wink:

Screen Shots:

=======================

You can try it here:! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/heartbreaking!

In this puzzle game, you will learn how to get along with the peculiar rules of a mysterious island.

Music is the key!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/to-Leave

https://5imon.itch.io/to-leave

In each level, you will have to find the 5 matching platforms and activate them.Then you will be able to gather what you need to get to the next day.

I love you all the same!

Choose a favorite that gets to live, or be a great bird and save them all:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/blackbird-lives-matter

"Come and help us dance" says the leader of the Bobbleheads.

You can find the Bobbleheads here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/bobbleheads-want-to-dance

Doctors say you have to eat 50g ketchup everyday. But doctors also say if you can't eat ketchup you can get 50g ketchup dose while playing Keep Yourself Alive. Here is the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-yourself-alive

You're welcome

If you have a few minutes to check out my game i would be amazed! You can play in coop as well!

download: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/water-it

Please come check out my game! Post a comment and I will rate your game as well!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/look-after-larry

Thanks for all your feedbacks on our game ! Given the craze around Mathilde's crazy story and as many of you loved our prototype, we are continuing the adventure with more refined content and a more complete scenario :)

WIP then, here is the new animation of the supervisor's walk

Check out our project here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/cheat-or-die

Right now I need about 7 or so ratings more to go. If you have a few minutes, I would love some constructive criticism in the comments! LINK: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/exterminators

My Time Lapse video for LD46... which includes the development of 2 games! The first one was abandoned after Day 2, and the second part of the video shows the development of what will become Insect Infestation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPIh_PuywU

I don't know if a lot of other people feel this way, but I mostly just review games that have a web version. And I really appreciate games that have mouse only controls. It just makes quick testing easy. I made sure to do that for my game this time around, and I'll probably aim for that in the future. If you use keyboard controls though, I think having the instructions in the game is key. Anyway, you can try my amazing game here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/star-keeper-ludum-dare-46

And please leave a comment so I can check yours out as well!

Hi, folks!

Randomize User just played my game on his Best Ludum Dare 46 Games and it was amazing! (The last one in the video): https://youtu.be/aYz2oHxCQrw

Bandsmen GAMES also featured Dr. Noir on his Top 10 Itch.io Games of the Week (thank you!): https://youtu.be/yxSD7WlzUjg

And Nakarama played it as well: https://youtu.be/a21KlaRydQ8

That's amazing, folks!

If you want to play Dr. Noir, you can!

Play it For Free here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/dr-noir

I'm really curious. While I found tons of great games, I havent' found a single one that made me say "Wow, what a fantastic interpretation of the theme."

Almost all games seem to be just plain "Keep [yourself/your friend/your pet/your plant/your fire] alive through regular gameplay, just like in all other games of that genre."

Looking through my list, I think the only game that received a high theme rating from me this jam is Pass it on. "Keep a message alive while mutating it" is pretty nice! Which ones wow-ed you?

Play as Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life

The balance between nature and human beings is very delicate. Your goal is to make them coexist, even if you have to make some sacrifices.

Play in your browser https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/gaia

I am thinking of making another "making of" or post-mortem video like I did at LD45. Explaining the process of development, how things were put together, what things were cut, etc. Would anybody be interested in that?

LD45 vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mSHOofXIio

Hi there

The combat in our Game is hard to understand at the moment. In the current version you are not allowed to click several times with the right mouse button, because it will stop the attack again and again. only if the mouse cursor turns red, you can click again and the combo mode starts. it gets stronger the more often you get the red cursor and click correctly.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/cthulhu-the-cult-must-survive

i know it is not really user friendly at the moment. for this there will be the post-jam version later with improved combat system and many other stuff.

thank you for playing our game. we have learned a lot from your feedback.

This was my first Ludum Dare and since the ratings for my game have slowed down XD, I would like to thank everyone who played my game and blew those aliens to kingdom-come.

My game has 56 ratings as of writing this post and I'm greatfull for all of them. A big thank you to everyone who played and provided feedback.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/tower-of-boom

Drop a comment in, and I'll try to do as many as I can :smile:

It is my first game jam and I am already happy that I managed to give a playable game in only three days. I am surprised that enough poeple played and liked my very simple game. I just finished to paint something inspired by my new electronic creation, as I am a professional drawer and painter first, and video game maker for fun.

Please try my game and see my other artworks:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/dumbulance

http://www.juicelizard.com/

I will probably rate your game if you feedback mine. (But it must be playable with a Mac.)

Hello there,

Our Ludum Dare 46 game is now also playable on Mac.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/checkmate

Hi everyone, The Boredom Ministy is proud to take you with us on the journey of the creation of "THE PATH".

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We would like to push further the game and add several levels.

After 4 days of pixel pushing I finally got around to finishing the first stage of the assets for the long version of the game.

We now have 124 tiles of base background. This is just the underlayer. I now need to design the sets and little details that will serve the scenario by giving the right mood and to ultimatelly give life to the land.

Next step: flowers and vegetation.

Have a nice day everyone !

You can play the game here and don't forget to rate us !

We had an awesome time in what was (for most of us) our first Ludum Dare. We wrote up some notes on our experience in a post mortem here: https://stephan-gfx.itch.io/across-the-lake/devlog/141410/ludum-dare-46-post-mortem-across-the-lake

Now we're having fun going through and playing all the awesome games everyone made. Thanks for the great game jam!

Every time the metrics update for your game there is a logic circuit controlling the loading symbol. XD

Check out my last entry on gate delay: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/tyson-lee-keep-it-alive-edition/how-to-use-gate-delay-to-advantage

Come tinker and play at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/tyson-lee-keep-it-alive-edition

We're happy to announce a post-jam version of our entry Crab It Alive! New version includes fixes for some of the issues you reported after playing our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/crab-it-alive

Changelog: * Add toggle fullscreen option. * Fix bug when grabbing trash at the bottom of the screen.

We’ve also released the source code under GPLv3 license, and all the assets under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. You can find a link to the source code in our entry page.

Finally we’d like to thank all of you that are playing and commenting games. Ludum Dare community is awesome :yellow_heart:

Now with a native OSX version (incredibly late, sorry about that). We are also hard at work with a post jam version that is going to be fixing a lot of issues/bugs + adding in a lot of the content (and then some) that never made it into the game. A big thank you to everyone who has played, rated and commented on our game!

Try out and rate our game Feed the Fire if you still haven't!

Can you last through the night?

LD 46 Feed The Fire

https://youtu.be/qN7DgnYRDCw

I built u died, a game that mixed sinister, atmospheric and hopefully deep text adventure with challenging old-school platforming, wrapped up in a neat lil package.

Play it here

It's now been over a week since the deadline, and I've finally found myself with enough time to write an incredibly long-wided piece about my first game jam experience, and what I learned from the whole thing.

Part 0: Understanding your limitations

Waking up on saturday morning to see the theme was a mixture of emotions for me. Throughout the previous week I ha started thinking about what I could be doing to prepare, was there anything I could make in advance that would fit any theme? Was there an engine or framework I should familiarise myself with? How am I going to create art? It can't be that hard... right?

But I had never really made any plans, any creative blocks or little worries about how I was actually going to execute something I would just defer it and kick the can down the road to "something I'll sort out at the time". So saturday morning was tough, because I suddenly realised I would have to confront these questions and the reality of the immense amount of work I would need to do to finish an entire game I would be proud of in less than three days dawned on me. I started brainstorming ideas and linking them to the theme. My first three plans were:

1) A resource-gathering game 2) A strategy game which involved protecting something 3) A text adventure revolving around protecting someone

Obviously each of these approaches followed the theme in a slightly different way. It became clear really early in, scanning online repositories of free art assets, that I'd either make art myself or not have any - and I have no artistic talent whatsoever, so I settled on doing something with pixels and/or text. I decided that, actually, I could combine the second two ideas: a text adventure, but replacing the horrible combat system that cripples many of my favourite games like Zork with a strategy minigame. I wanted it to be a little bit of a homage to John Conway too - someone else whose work deserves to be kept alive - so I sketched out some ideas for something with minimal graphics based on cellular automata. A bit later, I got worried that a text adventure combined with essentially turn-based strategy would get a little too tedious, and decided to introduce a platforming minigame as well which would add a bit of that "one more try" phenomenon to the game.

I've been trying to complete SMB1 warpless recently... not that that's relevant

Here was my first mistake/limitation I failed to understand... time. The project was quickly becoming very ambitious, essentially implementing three different games from scratch - and it was already past midday on day 1. I wanted everything, and didn't accept I wouldn't have time to make everything. But now we're at the point in the story where development starts.

Dawn of the first day: 60 hours remaining

well... closer to midday but, you know, its the thing

I would probably argue that this was my most productive day. I've always loved the feel of the terminals in the Fallout games - the way they have that phosphor glow, the subtle bulge of the CRT display; they're really quite entrancing, so I wanted to have the main game interface along those lines. I opened Unity and couldn't wait to get started on building these graphics.

That was when I remembered. I have no clue how to use Unity. I last used it three years ago to make an arcade game about explosive goats called CS:GOAT. I like to think I've matured a lot since the age of 14, and I've definitely forgotten any semblance of the knowledge I built up on how to use the engine since then. That was my first crisis of confidence, and another limitation I needed to understand. I hadn't prepared at all, I was going in blind and trusting my future self to figure it out as I went along.

I got up, made some coffee, and sat back down again with a fresh piece of paper to brainstorm technologies I knew how to use. It quickly emerged that the only thing I could actually build graphics in would be HTML5 - so that was what I did. I tried to replicate as much as possible the text effect I had wanted to make in a proper graphics engine, but just using pure CSS. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good looking CRT bulge to work, and decided that a monochrome terminal was fine for occasional encunters in an expansive open-world RPG, but maybe not for an entire game. So, I switched to drawing RGB channels of everything on screen seperately, and having them move subtly out of sync to get a VHS-like "glitch" effect.

Once I had got a basic terminal I could write to and read from up and running, I moved on to building the platformer. I knew I wanted it to be as uncomplicated as possible. The best feeling playing any retro platformer for me is fluidly executing tricky jumps, uncluttered by anything else - so that's what I wanted to aim for, as well as reducing the complexity of implementing it. I began writing my 2d physics engine, starting with objects that can move around, adding collision detection, then gravity, friction and acceleration. At about 11pm that night, I jumped around in SMB1, timing mario's jumps, how long it took for him to come to a stop, the difference between a small jump and a big jump until I had fine tuned the gravity, friction and input acceleration into something that felt really good to just slide the rectangle around.

So by the end of today I was feeling pretty accomplished, I had got all the boilerplate written to start making the first two aspects of the game - or so I thought, and here's learning experience 3: boilerplate is not a framework. I could read and write to a console, but I was nowhere near controlling the narrative flow of a text adventure, I could move a rectangle around another rectangle, but I couldn't build levels or anything like that yet.

I started playing around with sequencing audio as I fell asleep that night but, alas, I never finished the 8-bit tracks I started composing :( maybe another time.

Dawn of the second day: 41 hours remaining

this time it was like... 9am, so closer i guess

This was the really challenging day. I had an informatics olympiad round from 12-4 and if you know what that's like, you can probably tell why I wasn't massively psyched to get going on writing code again afterwards. In the morning I fit in a bit of work, getting the camera to follow the player around the platformer inbetween segment tree practice problems. My basic idea was that, by the end of the day, I would have the boilerplate finalised for the strategy game element, and restructured the platformer and terminal code into something properly useable. Spoiler alert: I didn't

I decided to prioritise the platformer and text adventure over the strategy game, at this point I was starting to come to terms with the fact I hadn't started it yet, and would need most of monday to actually put content in the game. Somehow I managed to spend the entire rest of the day, working until midnight, refactoring some of the existing code and finalising the layout of the platformer. It was at this point that the way I wanted the text adventure to work really crystallised, I would have a dialog system combined with console commands hailing back to the first adventure games to control the character, such that the words on the screen, the dialog, the commands and your movement were very interchangeable, trying to build an atmosphere of not knowing what was truly real.

To quote Super Hans: "What we really need to do is create a powerful sense of dread"

I wanted something very atmospheric, that felt like you could be playing dungeons and dragons but also made you profoundly uneasy. I wanted player choice, but also one that railroaded them into a certain course of action, with a single ending. It definitely felt like programming fatigue today meant I spent more time hypothesising than I did actually working, which was very, very, very slow. It's writing this that I wish I had used git - I must have done something on sunday but it kind of escapes me.

Lying in bed, I drew out a map of three floors of the game, two of which made it into the finished product. Learning experience from today? REASSESS, REASSESS, REASSES. I kept on blindly thinking of cool twists I could add to the stragtegy game component when I hadn't started it yet instead of actually working on building a story for the bit of the game that would end up being finished.

Dawn of the final day: 17 hours remaining

So monday morning, I realised that the three-part model of the game was a pipe dream. I sat down and wrote out an hour-by-hour schedule for the day. It looked a bit like this

9:30-11:30: Write text adventure framework 11:30-12:30: Design + Implement first platformer level 12:30-1:30: Encode ground floor as text adventure 1:30-2:30: Over lunch, encode landing area and ground floor dialog in text adventure 2:30-3:30: Room 1 3:30-4:30: Room 2 4:30-5:30: Room 3 5:30-6:30: Boss fight level 6:30-9:30: Top floor (dinner) 9:30-11:30: Final boss (+ ending) 11:30+ Bugfixes, audio

Yeah, there's no way I'm adding another gamemode. I wish I had done this at the very start of the project, looking REALISTICALLY at what I wanted to achieve and itemising it. Learning experience 5: itemise. As you can see if you've played the game: this was also wildly optimistic - I didn't get to do a top floor, I didn't get to do a third platformer level, I didn't get to do audio, I didn't really do much bugfixing! Let's talk final bits of code and then I want to talk about actually writing this thing.

I looked over documentation for ZIL, Inform and Ink to see how they handle interactive fiction. Broadly, I went for something like ZIL for the text adventure bit, and something like Ink for the dialog. The dialog was state-based, events in the game would trigger state changes, and every action had a chance of eliciting a dialog response based on the state and also demeanour of the speaker - demenaour could be changed by being nice or aggravating the speaker. The text adventure aspect was based on rooms, connections and objects, with flags denoting their possible interactions, and specific routines to run in the case of certain interactions to override the default. Fairly standard if a little bit hacky.

Writing the story and "what's it even about?"

Next time I do a game jam, I think I'll stay away from story-driven. I love narrative, I love video games conveying narrative - but I don't think its right for here. Allusions to a story - yes! Making it thought provoking? Also yes! But actually trying to convey a story? Maybe not.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT. If your interest had been piqued, play the game now! If you don't want to play it, or don't mind having the story revealed, read on

BEGIN NEEDLESS PHILOSOPHISING

I wanted to really add detail, flavour and atmosphere to the world of the game. Every object was meticulously described to add a little bit more to that atmosphere. Ever read the yellow wall-paper? If you haven't, you should, and if you have - I referenced it in here. The last line isn't mine either, and I'm not comparing u died to The Waste Land, but I didn't reference Hamlet for the sake of it, the last line Hamlet speaks is so important to the play. Fortinbras arrives in Denmark as a revenging son, to continue the cyclicality of the narrative, but it is nearly completely eclipsed by Hamlet's, the audience's touchstone for the play, death and deprivation of a voice to focus us on. The words in the line sound cool in my game, but I was trying to use that reference as a shorthand for something that can't be conveyed in just four words removed from their context. I don't know how effective this was, and I'd love to explore it more developing the game further.

You never use your inventory, there are four collectables in the game and you use zero of them, but they're there to feel like you're doing something. The bag of coins is the adventurer's reward you expect the fantasy RPG to give you, the pen teaches you how to use a system that is never relevant, and the dagger gives you a sense of progression; the acquisition of your first weapon is a milestone in any game, but really you are nearly at the end, and the dagger will never be used. You can say anything you want, but the person you're speaking to never really interacts. I can't decide how much I would change that. If I had infinite resources, I don't think the character would ever properly react - they might change more based on dialog, but not change the game's linear pathway. You're given freedom to move how you want, but revisting rooms doesn't really help you. You are part of a narrative that never changes, no matter how hard you try. This is something I really really wanted to explore: I would have loved to in more detail, and I would love any feedback on how I could do it more effectively building on the game in future.

END NEEDLESS PHILOSOPHISING

After that interlude, let's get back to writing the story and my learning experiences. The grand vision of branching dialog I had had was never going to happen, I really wanted the experience of feeling like you're not alone on this adventure, but ultimately my construction of dialog was minimal, moving the action along in points, and reminding you of their prescence and the prescence of your quest if you got distracted. I feel like I managed my expectations of this pretty well, but I think it ended up being one of the worst and least polished bits of the game - pretty essential to my vision and immersion, but the hardest to get right. I might adapt it to more of a choice-based system like other RPGs, but I'm not sure. Possibly "suggested" choices which will always get a meaningful response, but you can type whatever you wish. I'd appreciate feedback on this too.

Now to the rooms. MANAGE EXPECTATIONS. Coloasal Cave Adventure is 100 odd rooms. Going to bed on sunday night I thought: "well I'm not going to do that many but maybe 20 or so? That sounds about right.". I managed 5. The troll battle was the first battle as I wanted to set it up as a traditional adventure game where the troll is always the first fight, the shadow was originally intended to be just a smiling man who you were encouraged to kill and could spare or not - the "fighting yourself" level would have been his - he was defenseless. It was meant to be your first sign that this wasn't going to be a normal game. You'd then go through and have 5 or so more fights before the final boss being the voice (aka yourself). I wanted to drop hints throughout the game that he was really you, but I was constraned by time too much :/ - again, definitely something I'll build on later. I knew the dialog system wasn't going to be great but I was always more optimistic about the actual rooms, wanting to add more floors even as close as a couple of hours to the deadline. So it goes.

So what's it about? It's about being trapped in a fictional prison of your own creation, the dagger represents feeling like you can destroy the parts of yourself you hate, but its always futile. The yellow wall-paper is more important to the plot than you might have originally thought! So mny of my favourite things, text adventures and Peep Show included, are forever slightly tainted by an association with my emotional low points where I've turned to them for comfort, so there's that association for me too. But really, it's a metaphor for whatever unsettles you most, that was more the aim.

Thanks for indulging my philosophising once more

Part -1: Pride and a conclusion

So I'm really, really proud of managing to get through my first jam experience with something I'm pretty pleased with coming out of the end. Final tip: don't judge yourself by the metrics of others. There are teams of developers out there, some of them might even be professionals with degrees in helpful fields. Play and enjoy their games, but don't put yourself down because yours isn't theirs! This is, first and foremost, fun, and that's something I've come to realise with a little bit of hindisght now. There are things I would do differently, of course, and I hope you've come away with a bit more of an insight into me and how I did things, and how it can help you out in the future, but I know that the next time will be just a little better than this one.

Thanks for entertaining my ramblings, if you want me to play your game, go ahead and recommend it to me and if you liked or didn't like my game, drop me some feedback!

Peace

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/mr-cheesy

You want it you got it! The new version is available now for you to play in the browser! (entry verison still downloadable!)💎

Share your feedback to help me make the game even better for you! Idea for the next update are much appreciated!💖

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/mr-cheesy

Hello! This was my first game jam and really the most complete game I have ever been able to make so I wanted to write about the experience a bit! I'll be making a new post every day detailing what happened throughout our Ludum Dare weekend!

If you'd like to try our game you can do so here make sure to leave feedback if you do!

we're looking to learn as much as we can from this experience thank you!

Introduction

We had messed around making some small projects before but they weren’t very impressive or complete (perhaps I will make a few posts on past projects at some point).

Game development is something I have been interested in for years. It is actually one of the reasons why I began programming when I was younger, but I was never able to fully sink my teeth into it.

I thought Ludum Dare would be my chance to finally do that.

Preparation

The way Ludum Dare works is the week before the Jam starts there are 4 days of voting for themes. The first three days will each have a unique list of themes and then on day four the most popular themes from days 1-3 will be chosen and voted on.

We took some time during the voting week to get together and discuss our ideas for possible games we could make relating to the themes so that on the day of the jam we could get to work as fast as possible.

Some of the highlights from these discussions were:

1. 1 minute to prepare: PvE Auto-battler like Teamfight Tactics / Dota Underlords where each round your economy, levels, and pieces reset. Then, you have to choose how to spend your money before the round starts.
2. Side effects: Each action you take slowly closes the side of the game screen in on you, when it gets too small you lose.
3. Outdated Technology: You’re a master swordsman who has just been attacked by a group with guns for the first time ever, so now it is a stealth game.
4. Momentum: Dynasty warrior type beat em up, every enemy you kill increases the speed of the game.

These were our favorite ideas for the other themes that even though we didn’t get to pursue this weekend we may look into making in the future!

In the end, the theme ended up being “Keep It Alive” which admittedly was not our first choice or one we had discussed much, but we were determined to do the best with it regardless.

Expectations

Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect of myself, my team, and the game jam itself. I had never finished a game over the course of years of trying to. As a team, we had only made a halfway functional tower defense game over the course of a month so I wasn’t sure how we would fare on such a limited time frame and with the stress of that deadline hanging over our heads.

The only goal I had for our team and myself was that this time we complete a game. I believe this is a crucial skill to develop in and of itself and it was something that I had never accomplished.

Because of this, I had wanted to sway the team towards creating a very simple game that we could feasibly complete within the time frame. In my mind, the simpler the game idea and mechanics the better.

That is not how it turned out.

The Day Of The Jam

So the time has come for the theme to be revealed and we’re less than enthused about the “Keep It Alive” theme, but we had to get to work regardless of that.

Now this is where things went a bit off the rails.

We had decided we would make a roguelike RPG with a few survival mechanics as our game jam entry.

Remember when I said I wanted to do simple? Well, we threw that idea away almost immediately.

This decision still baffles me because instead of sticking with the plan of a simple game we could complete, we somehow made the decision to make a more complex game than anything we had attempted prior.

In any case, it was time to get to work.

Development

There are a few key factors to a roguelike game

Procedurally generated maps
Permanent death
Loot

Many of the older games in this genre also have a tendency to use grid-based movement and turn-based combat along with random item generation to make the loot more interesting.

The first and arguably most important thing we would have to accomplish to make this work was the procedural generation of maps.

So I began coding our GridGenerator script which would handle all of our map generation. I would say this is where I spent at least half of my time during this game jam.

In the end? We made it work well enough to make it one of the features we received a good deal of positive feedback on.

Next Post I will go over how we accomplished our map generation and some of the challenges faced along the way.

Cacophony: The Ballad of the Celestial Goblin-King is a procedurally-generated roguelike dungeon crawler created in 72 hours for Ludum Dare.

You can try the game in your browser here.

Check our game out here! Here's a brief overview:

Planet Xenov-81 is under attack.
Can you save its people?

Xenov: Ascension is an isometric voxel tower defense game, with roguelike elements, in which you are a general in charge of protecting a city from foreign invaders. Prepare your defenses, and keep the city alive for as long as possible.

Hi there! Our game Mount Ookie is all about the wasps. Chasing wasps, picking them up, and throwing them at each other, at obstacles, or into the Ookie's mouth.

Wasps are arriving randomly and land at the Ookie's huge body, in a gradually growing pace. Since each landed wasp drains the Ookie's life, the game also becomes gradually harder.

In the post I want to share how the wasp mechanic work, and how we used it to make the game challenging yet fair, random but with a sense of progress.

Let's start!

Part 1 - WHERE the wasps land?

See the following blue-ish recrangles on the Ookie's body:

(This is the editor of Godot Game Engine)

The wasps are allowed to land only inside these rectangles. When a wasp is scheduled to arrive, its final location is randomized by the following algorithm:

1. Calculate the enclosing rectangle of all the areas (that is the tightest rectangle that contains all the small ones). Do this once at the beginning of the game.
2. Calculate a random point on the rectangle.
3. If the random point is NOT inside any of the allowed areas, try again (i.e. go back to phase 2)
4. Snap the point to grid (e.g. so the wasp will be aligned with the platform.

After the wasp final location is picked, then the wasp is created at a random point near the top border of the world.
Then its location is interpolated (i.e. the wasp goes 5% of the remaining path in every frame) until it arrives slowly but surely to its final point; then when it almost at a full stop, the wasp digs into the Ookie's body. You can follow the wasps in this gif to get the hang of it:

Alternatives

Initially, the wasps could land on the entire body of the Ookie. This made the game harder because some places were hard to reach without platform below (e.g. to the top and left of the Ookie's head), or were directly below platforms which required a drop-and-catch maneuver which was a little to much to ask from Jam players that make a quick look on every game. So I altered it to (as you can see in the image above) - only directly above platforms or in a jumpable area from platforms.

An alternative to the location-choise algorithm would be to pick a rectangle in random, then pick a location on it. I could make it a weighted random by the size of the square. This would save the recalculation of randomness when you "miss" the allowed area and must try again; but the current algorithm worked well and never caused frames to "get stuck" because of recalculations, so I kept it.
Also, picking a rectangle would not allow me to use overlapping areas, which was the case at start (when I used the entire Ookie's body as allowed area).

Part 2 - WHEN the wasps come?

The wasps arrive at random intervals. After each wasp comes, the time until the next wasp is calculated with the following formula:

rand_range(1, max(5, 8 - game_time*0.03))

And in people's language:

The time is a random value between 1 sec and a number that depends on your progress in the game. At the beginning, the time is between 1 and 8 seconds (meaning an average of 4.5 seconds, a slow pace that is easy to handle). Over time, the wasp pace becomes faster. It's still random, and can still have larger or smaller gap, but the average time gets faster. That is up until time 1:40, then the pace settles on random between 1 and 5 seconds, meaning an average of 3 seconds between wasps, which is quite fast. This pace is kept until the end at 2:30.

See an example timeline (left to right) of when the wasps are spawned:

Note that: - The pace is always random, but still has a controlled average that gets faster. This makes a nice distribution, where are some natural "clusters" of wasps that arrive quite close together, and sometimes large gaps between them; - The pace is getting faster very gradually. Because it's still random, it's hard to put a finger on it; but players will still feel the tension built. This feeling is familiar to anyone who had worked at a food stand, and saw the tired dripping of customers gradually becomes a fast flow when lunch time gets closer.

Alternatives

Usually, good defense games have waves. This will allow building of tension, then letting the player have time to gather their strength before the next one.
Maybe Ookie could use some waves in it; however it was intentionally a short game, probably not short enough to split it to several waves. I'd like to see it as a game with waves, but only one of them :) If we were to extend this game further, we would definitely do some waves!

Another thing we could do is not to make the pace grow gradually faster, but make some specific points where we let the player know that the pace "escalates". This could help build the tension; but could also be distracting and hurt the "zen" like feel of the game. Eventually we chose the gradual way because it means that we only have one parameter to balance (the final pace) which was easier to experiment with at the time of the Jam.

Hope you liked this post! Have a go at Mount Ookie and let us know what you think of the wasps behavior and balancing. Enjoy!

Made this gif when I finished the little bird animations on the saturday morning. Check my game to see the final version of it! It changed a little since then.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/peck-beach

Some of you might have already played our little game about fishies and worshipping evil underwater plants (yes, you've read that correctly) Well, we just fixed a few bugs and also adjusted the controls! they're still not perfect because were still working on those but definitely feel different now and the fishies don't get stuck anymore! :) Will play and rate games in return <3

This LD, we made this game called: Save The Fox (The controls are bugging somethimes tho)

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

Submit here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScwyAj1WLkFEPwi1PnOiywtBVfvVxzYfehu2psY6tDFPA-DIQ/viewform?fbzx=-1292295655891380072

Can you save all the sacred turtles and defeat the evil cultists? There's only one way to find out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/turtemple

Try, play and rate!

This is the version I recommend playing for rating. It fixes some game breaking bugs.

Sadly some were discovered after several features were already added. So here are the changes you do not want to take into account: - purple enemy added - 2 extra health points added - energy counter added - wiring kits, wire boxes and power plug expansions added - tweaked player parameters

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/sly-as-a-fox

Hello everyone, tonight I plan to create an update using your comments.

If you haven't played it yet, I'd appreciate it if you did :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/save-the-torch

Do you like clever and solid puzzle games ? Try my entry - Keep Your Faith Alive. This is a procedural project which I did using only code - no more (no rigidbody, no light, no raycast, no collider). Leave a comment - this way I can rate your project too. I wish you the best. Thank you ++

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-your-faith-alive