We have added a new WebGL version of Needle in a Neighborhood here. It’s not our recommended version (that would be the Windows one) but it works well enough. If you play it, please remember to give it a score and a comment on our Ludum Dare page! Thanks!
36 games rated (plenty more to come), here’s a few favourites thus far:
Here’s the track I created for MachineBlaster compo entry
Entry : MachineBlaster
Hello! I made a game for the Ludum Dares 37. It’s called Carlander and you can play it here!
I interpreted the theme as “only room for one” because I didn’t want to make Minimalismism again, which I think explored this (very prescriptive) theme quite handily. You may regard this as illegitimate but you can vote against it for that I guess.
I also made a video that shows me making it which you may enjoy.
Hello LDers!
I finished processing/uploading the timelapse for my entry, flipper:
The timelapse represents only ~14h of footage. Give or take some 2~3 hours that I may have forgotten to capture, I worked less than 17 hours throughout the weekend. I’ve made a previous post about how I felt through most of Saturday. That somewhat explains why I slacked off so much.
Still, another point was probably that I couldn’t see how to implement the main mechanic properly. I originally had thought about making a game like Umihara Kawase, but whenever you tried to leave the room it would flip in some direction.
Even after implementing the grapple mechanic, I still somewhat lacked motivation to finish. The game IS quite broken, and it would only be another bad game on my list of LD entries. At least, the game is so badly broken that you can enter walls by using the hook… which enables finishing the game in a few seconds. 😀 (since I’m really into speedruns, this is a plus)
But finishing something and submitting it to Ludum Dare is so much fun that I was able to motivate myself and finish it. Now, looking back at the game, I’m really happy with how it came out (given how little I worked on it) and I’m considering further developing that mechanic some other time (and in another game).
But now, on to play, rate and comment and your games!
Hi all,
It has been amazing to see some great stuff made in such a restricted time period! It’s great to be a part of it.
For all of you who played my entry (**this one**), thank you very much! It means a lot for me.
It is even better to see that there are some of you kind enough to leave a comment, and it has been great to hear your thoughts (I got it. no control in the air is bad… BAD!!! :P). I am motivated to keep working on the game after this, and it’s all thanks to you.
For all of you who didn’t try Bruce, the escaping ant yet, please give it a shot! 😀 The link is right here: (as they say: Third time is a charm)
Thanks again!
Pedro
Spellbound is now playable on browser. Check it out here!
My homage to old-school puzzle room games is done! In true LD style, I had to code most of the actual game part in the last 12 hours, having spent eons finding the right textures and sounds online. But I like the final result! The game is finished with mostly any real UI or title screens missing due to lack of time. I like how this ended up though so I’m going to make a post-compo version.
I hope the actual room puzzle is not too obscure. I feel all the clues are there and the solution is rooted in patterns and association. Unlike modern games this title does no hand-holding at all. Just letting you do whatever until you get it right and then you get feedback. This was mostly due to lack of time but I like the Myst/Riven puzzles where you can click on stuff as much as you want with the game not really acknowledging that you’re trying something. “Eh, click on that some more, why don’t ya? I don’t care.” the game seems to say, if it could talk.
This game needs a fairly beefy graphics card. At least an Intel HD4xxx/5xxx with discrete cards much preferred. I’m using my own 3D framework and I haven’t yet built lightmaps ‘n all that so all lighting is dynamic and it still needs some good old optimisation. In the post-compo version I’ll do that and add a quality setting, ran out of time.
Sound is an integral part of the game, it really adds a lot to the atmosphere, please play with sound, it really enhances the experience. Thanks.
With all that said, have fun playing and rating games and:
Hey so this is like nineteen posts in one, because after the Ludum Dare I spent the next day cleaning and packing and then made the long trip back home for the holidays. I was bored of the loneliness of Uni.
So, I present to you our submission: Tempus Machina! Personally, it is my seventh LD entry, and quite possibly my favourite. It is also the first entry of mine to have bespoke music! Courtesy of Lopodyr! Thanks again, buddy.
The wonderful art was done by SmartWilliam and the punchy sfx was done by Birdmammoth. I did all of the techy bits.
You play a time-travelling robot (like the Terminator, but cuter) and you must kill as many cyborg soldiers and velociraptors as possible by switching instantly between the past and future to plan your positioning. There’s actually a bit of a hidden story to the stage by way of some exposition in the future stage, but what good is words when pictures are worth a thousand? Woo, Gifs! That’s like a million words!
The other awesome thing about the game is that, for the first time ever, I’ve gotten online High Scores to work in GM:S! So we’re running a little competition. Whoever is on the Top 10 high score table at the end of the judging period will be awarded our Terminator Trophy, with the Top 3 each getting a special version of it!
The current leaderboard is mostly comprised of myself, and since I suck, it’s not hard to beat me. The artist is much better at it, so (don’t tell him I said this) please do your best to kick him off before he gets too smug!
If you would like to play Tempus Machina, you can do so >>here<< (opens in a new tab)
Now, the other half of this post is that, at some point this week in daytime GMT, I will be spending a few hours streaming entries. I won’t be able to get through a huge amount because I like to give each game a fair shake, but I will be doing more streaming in the third week of judging as well (Next week I’m off to Spain!).
So, if you would like to have your game judged on stream, please fill in this handy form!
You can find my Twitch Channel here (click the well-drawn picture of me)
Alrighty, that about sums it up. I’ll be writing up a post-mortem, at some point. Can’t wait to play your entries!
Thanks,
Taha
PS: This post took like two hours to make haha. Was it worth it? Probably not.
Since the start of the current VR revolution I have been more interested in how the technology could be used for creating games rather than just playing them. It should come as no surprise then, that one of my favorite VR apps are Tilt Brush, the 3D painting program that allows for a completely new way of drawing that gives depth to your doodles.
I finally got my own Vive a couple of weeks ago. Since Ludum Dare was around the corner, I decided to make a game where all the art was drawn in Tilt Brush. I thought it would give the game a unique look, and also be a fast way to create 3D content, an important aspect when doing a game jam. You can find the game called The Trans-Interdimensional Laboursaving Transportation Service entry here, as well as on Game Jolt and Itch.io. I couldn’t find anyone else who had tried to use Tilt Brush this way, so I decided to write this post on how I did it and my takeaways from the process.
Terrain, some flowers, and sleepy blobs painted in Tilt Brush and rendered in Unity
The setup
Turns out the pipeline to get Tilt Brush sketches into Unity, which is the engine I use, was very straight forward. From inside Tilt Brush you can export an FBX of your sketch. I thought I would have to write my own shaders, but it turned out the Tilt Brush devs already provide a set of basic shaders as well! You still have to manually assign this shader to the imported models in Unity so I ended up writing a small AssetPostProcessor script that would automatically handle this when the FBX file was copied into the project folder which made it easier to adjust the look of the game since all brush strokes of the same type would share the same material. This would sometimes still break when Unity had to split up the imported mesh because of it’s 65k vertex limit per mesh but it still saved some time. Here is the source if you want to check it out yourself.
What worked well
The game ended up with the unique look I was after. You can clearly see it’s been drawn by a person which I think gives it it’s own charm. So aesthetically I’m very pleased with the result. Since you can’t really animate a Tilt Brush sketch other than its rotation, scale and location I choose to make a game, where you see a lot of different static environments which worked well.
Earth, so boring
Pocket Dimension #321754-B, so weird!
If you want people to play your jam game it’s a very good idea to make a build that can be played on the web. I was really surprised how compact the WebGL build was. I haven’t gotten any complaints about the game relying on beefy GPUs to run either which was a nice surprise as well.
Lastly my assumption that it would be a quick method for making art turned out to be mostly correct. Drawing the art inside Tilt Brush was quick, but there was a lot of hurdles getting it into Unity as explained in the next section.
What didn’t work so well
The shaders provided by the Tilt Brush devs only cover the most basic brushes. All the more VFXish of them such as fire, lighting and disco are not supported. You don’t get normal maps either, so some brushes such as Ink and Oil look flat when imported into Unity. There’s also no shader to to get the non lit strokes of the Marker brush to show up correctly. I know It’s a simple shader to write, but at the end of the jam I was too sleep deprived to sort it out ,so I ended up just using the premade shaders and calling it a day.
Pattern in Tilt Brush
Same Pattern in Unity
As you can see the shape of tapered strokes also didn’t match how they look inside Tilt Brush. It’s controlled in the shaders with alpha cutoff, but there wasn’t a value that made them have exactly the same shape as inside Tilt Brush.
There’s some positive news in the horizon though! The team behind Tilt Brush are going to release a set of resources that should make it a lot easier to import your sketches into Unity in the near future so really looking forward to give that a go.
The other main hurdle is that Tilt Brush is really more geared for sketching than for actual content creation. It’s designed to be approachable and playful to interact with. As a result it doesn’t have many of the features you would expect from a program appealing more to professional users. For example you can’t group your sketch into layers making it tricky to delete strokes. The biggest issue though was not being able to set a custom pivot point for exported drawings as shown on the picture below.
Tell me of the pivots of your homeworld Usul
I compensated for this the standard way with using a GameObject parent as the pivot in Unity, but it was something that I had to spend more time on than I would have liked. Other
features I could also have used, was to just export a part of a sketch and overwrite existing sketches from inside Tilt Brush. Tilt Brush has never crashed on me but I didn’t want to take any chances so I saved fairly often which filled up the gallery really quickly.
Where Tilt Brush also excels is really in creating organic shapes with free hand brush strokes. My concept relied on creating a bunch of objects with harder edges which proved to be fairly time consuming. There is an option to use a straight edge tool, but it took a lot of trial and error to get the stroke orientation correct.
I spent way too much time on drawing the hard edges of the box the player is placed inside while playing the game.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed making the art for my game with Tilt Brush. Even though getting the sketches into Unity isn’t a perfect process yet it was already a very powerful and quick way to create 3D content. With the new tool chain promised by the Tilt Brush devs on the horizon it will only get better. Next time I’m doing a 3D entry for a game jam I’ll likely use this approach again.
PS!
I’m planning to organize an online game jam for making games with Tilt Brush around February next year after the new tool chain has shipped. If you think that would be awesome to participate in follow me on Twitter or Facebook to stay tuned!
Hi everyone!
I’ve just updated my entry. All urgent bugs are now fixed, i hope.
Any feedbacks are very welcome!
Tick Tack Shoot is a game where you shoot all the x’s. You use wasd to move and LMB to shoot. Play Here
This is my first game! I also started late so I only had 28 hrs. Please give me constructed feedback! Also can you point me to some coding tutorials!
The Lock is a puzzle adventure game, and my entry for the LD37 jam. Try it out if it inspires you.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=21736
Tags: html5
Tree House Quest is a RPG, telling the story of Jacob fighting his evil brother Cid to take his tree house back. This room is everything to him. So will you help him to fulfill his quest?
My first finished LD game, pretty happy with how it turned out.
Tricky but quick sliding block puzzle game about moving furniture into your friend’s one room apartment.
Different pieces have different rules that must be satisfied. eg. Bookshelves can’t block windows and the books must be accessible. TV must be connected to a power outlet, and Lounge must be able to see the TV.
16 puzzles to try, see if you can beat your friend’s scores by getting it in fewer moves 😉
Would love it if you can give it a go and give your feedback! Might continue it post-LD as well, keen to make more puzzles with a bit more sleep first.
http://static.impbox.net/ld37/movingin3.mp4
This is my LD 37 entry. It’s a puzzle game, not too easy, not too hard.
The game consists of 5 areas in total, in each one, ONE ROOM has the solution.
If you have time, please try it out, you won’t regret it!
Link to the entry: Click here
