Is there a sign up, or do I just go for it and post the game here? Also I'm probably going to use this as my first big stream!!

I'm in for this Ludum Dare #45! This is my third game jam, but this time I'm trying to do it solo. It will be both fun and aweful xD Good luck to all of you, have fun!

Hey guys, we're team NOT UNDERTALE, and we're going to definitely not be making Undertale this LD! We're a team of 5, with 3 in San Francisco and 2 out in the hinterlands of New England, or something.

Here's a choice quote from each of our members!

johnfn: "I'm pretty excited for this LD, mostly the parts where I make Miyo learn coding, cnnmon and fawnblue do 3d modelling, and finally force oasiris to come out of retirement to write a boss theme!"

miyo: "i feel like half the words i type are "oh god" but that's because everyone around me is continuously doing dumb things"

oasiris: "(maniacal laughter)"

cnnmon: oh god

I come home to this"

fawnblue: "tfw u don't have anything interesting to say"

Yep, definitely sounds like it's going to be the best LD ever!!!

Here's a wallpaper I made for the jam.

I'll be using Unity, Aseprite for art, MuLab and Audacity for sound, itch.io for hosting.

Excited.

https://prf.hn/l/64oXaer

Let's all have a great Ludum Dare 45!

all of us can do it

we all can do it

Bora fazer joguin

I'm (probably) in! Haven't done LD for about 5-6 years. Gonna use Unity for the game and Ableton Live for any sound/music.

Let me start by stating how excited I am to participate in this upcoming jam, LD45. My experience in game development is almost non-existent, except for the few half-baked games I copy-pasta'd from Godot tutorials (Thanks UmaiPixel). Part of me thinks that I shouldn't even enter this year, but instead wait until I'm a "better game developer". But when is that?

My brain has come up with plenty of reasons to keep me from trying to enter LD45. "You don't know what you are doing", "You can't code or make art", "You have to work on top of a family event this weekend". I don't really care anymore. I feel a need to see a project "to completion", and Ludum Dare provides the perfect platform for this. I have little to no expectations entering this weekend, but I'm so excited! I'm sick of just watching tutorials....it's time to create!

So here's to LD45, where I won't be making something grand, interesting, or polished. But I will be making SOMETHING. That's been the goal all along. Progress in learning. Putting these tools to use.

Thank you Ludum Dare. Without you, I probably wouldn't have a reason to jam.

<3

I've been down in the dumps for a majority of this year. I'm hoping this weekend game jam will spark joy in me once again. It has been far too long since I have had any energy or desire to work on games.

Here's hoping for a reignited passion for making games!

I'm innnnnnnnnnnnnnn

DDRKirby(ISQ) here, reporting that I'll be in for LD45, this time in the solo Compo division! My partner-in-crime @xellaya is out for this one so I'll be doing my first solo LD since LD37 where I made Ludum Dare: The Game back in...2016!

I've been super duper busy over the past couple weeks, partly trying to get a bunch of other stuff taken care of, but mostly because I've decided to try out Godot Engine for this entry! My previous 11 games have all been done in Unity, but I know that Godot has come a long way since I first tried it out (wayyyyy back when) and wanted to give it a spin.

I spent a good portion of the past week ramping up on Godot and GDScript with a fun little Mega Man platformer demo, called "Mini Mega Man"! I know we don't do official warmup game submissions anymore like we used to, but if you'd like to play it, you can try it out here. (soundtrack download will be out later)

Doing an actual full warmup project was a lot of work, but taught me a ton of things and helped me sort through numerous issues and quirks that would have bogged me down during LD otherwise. Things like:

• How to set up integer pixel scaling
• How to setup Autotiling for tilemaps
• How to best utilize the built-in kinematic physics APIs
• Whether testing for input works properly during physics updates
• How to handle playing sounds from objects that are destroyed
• Whether the WebGL export actually WORKS
• ...

Not only have I been ramping up on Godot as an engine (and GDScript as a scripting language), but I've been frantically trying to put together a lot of base code this week as well. My base code comes in two parts: a project template with a bunch of predefined project settings and some boilerplate for an intro/menu screen/etc., and a library of reusable scripts/scenes that are common things that you end up needing.

For Unity I built a similar library of reusable components and scripts, everything from 2D platformer physics to Audio management, rhythm game timing functions, scene transitions and fading, text outlines, an easy way to flash or pulsate text, site-locking copy protection, and more. This kind of stuff comes in super-handy and is ultra-reusable so I've been trying my best to at least build SOME of it out in the remaining time that I have.

Here's a nice shader-based screen transition effect that I implemented, for example:

So far Godot has been really good to work with! I'm impressed with how clean, lightweight, and snappy it is, (no more having to have a separate machine around just to chug through the WebGL export process for infinity hours). Even more than that, I'm surprised by how much game functionality WORKS with so much less of a hassle. Things like basic kinematic platformer movement, automatic pre-rendered text outlines (though the opacity seems to be iffy), LOOPING AUDIO SEAMLESSLY IN WEBGL (thank the heavens, it JUST WORKS), 2d tilemap lighting with occlusion and more. All of these things are more or less =possible= in Unity, but they require a ton of effort to set up correctly (hence the need for so much library code to deal with everything). If you're experienced you can definitely drive your way around to make something polished, but it just takes so much work....Godot is such a breeze to work with in comparison

It isn't perfect however. There are certain pain points that worry me a bit, namely things like:

• There's an unfortunate inconsistent issue where sometimes the WebGL export just fails to start -- refreshing the page and trying again usually makes it work though, it's very intermittent.
• Neither the built-in script editor nor external integration are super great even when static typing is used. I get that it's a scripting language but I really just want to be able to have intellisense autocomplete/documentation show up everywhere, it helps a lot in the coding process.
• Although on-the-fly script hotloading works way better than it does in Unity (partly thanks to GDScript just being a scripting language), interacting with the running game instance to debug and tweak parameters is way more cumbersome than in Unity, so in order to test things I basically should assume I need to restart a scene almost all the time. (On the plus side starting playback is way faster...)
• Everything is very decoupled...I mean VERY decoupled. This is neither a bad or a good thing, flexibility is nice too, but we're talking about passing around strings referencing method names everywhere and dependencies on nodepaths, etc. It should be fine, but it warrants being a little more careful.
• The feature-to-feature documentation is pretty sparse at times, the docs have a lot of good info there but if you come across a random property on some node type it's very likely that it's not documented at all.

All that said I'm really thinking that this is probably going to be the way to go moving forward. I'm pretty excited!

Since I'm working solo for this project, I also just want to focus on something old-school and fun. Whatever it is, it should feel like some old gameboy game with awesome chiptunes and such...

My overall goals for this compo:

• Have a good time using Godot :D
• Try to make a nice aesthetic using a limited palette -- maybe 4 colors, or maybe 8 or 16 if I'm feeling adventurous.
• Make something fun in the oldschool way :)

I unfortunately still have a couple things missing from my starter code -- things like site locking, etc. that I might try to cram in, but I've also gotta catch up on sleep at some point...........

I'm also practicing speed-composing tonight at One Hour Compo in a bit! I'll try putting together a dummy soundtrack in a single hour for practice.

Phew...thanks for reading. See you all at the starting line!

PUMPED! This is my fifth Ludum Dare! My first two Ludum Dares, I made my game in Stencyl. The next two I used GameMaker Studio 2. This time? This time it's Unity. I'm gonna stop being scared of it and dive in! And I'm gonna make the crappiest little game ever and it's going to rule because it's MINE and it EXISTS! YEAH!

Hey, Godot users out there! I created this Godot project starter to help us get started on new projects. It's helpful for game jams too. It comes with the the following:

• Standard scenes for Title, Credits and How To Play
• Per scene soundtrack manager
• Transition effects between scenes
• Screenshot and signal managers (see readme for details)

You can download or clone it from https://github.com/jhlothamer/godotprojectstarter. Just copy the game folder to your working folder and your good to go!

Let me know if you use it and if you have any issues with it! I'm always looking to improve it.

Thanks! And happy jamming!

PS I've updated the project starter to include key bindings for AZERTY for actions ui_up/down/left/right. It also didn't respond to wasd either for these, but now it does. Maybe at some point I'll add a key bindings scene to allow users to choose since supporting both wasd and zqsd at the same time limits some possibilities.

SUPER excited to be part of another Ludum Dare! Hopefully I can do better than the last four, but the main thing is having fun!! I'm a 35 year old hobbyist game dev who has been doing this for a little over a year now. Here are 5 "anti" tips I made..

• Big scope, make a huge ass game, has to be an MMO, MAKE sure you add Battle Royale mode at the last minute
• Wait until the last minute to make it playable, game-play is not important, you want photo-realistic graphics bro!
• Avoid eating, sleeping, drinking(water) and never take breaks. That just gets in your way.
• Wait until the last minute to add audio, it's not that big of a deal.
• Nobody cares about UI and neither should you. Default buttons are fine and if the player has to unplug their computer to end the game, they won't mind, it's all good!!

Disclaimer These are tips of what NOT to do, and trust me, I've actually been guilty of doing all five.

I shall be live-streaming regularly, and most likely post-jam I will do a sign-up sheet if people want me to play their games live and give constructive feedback. I will put a link to my Twitch as well as my Discord!! Good luck to everyone, I look forward to seeing and playing some awesome games, as well as meeting new people!!

https://www.twitch.tv/zombievirals/

https://discord.gg/kGH4rvf

Also this is the first time in a while I haven't seen Floating Islands be a theme.

Hi! I'm Ghost! I'm also very anxious! I haven't done much game-making before, I want to do it for a living at some point and I've played around in Unity a bit, but I've never made a project I'd call finished. I'm hoping a time limit and guiding theme like Ludum Dare provides will help give me motivation! I know whatever I make might not be very good, but it'll at least be finished. Let's just hope I can squeeze in this week's homework along with all the jamming :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:. Good luck all!