Bat Cave is a simple shooter I created for Ludum Dare 37, and this article attempts to document what went right, what went wrong, and some general thoughts on the entire weekend.

Looking through the list of potential themes Friday evening, I put together some ideas. Bat Cave was hashed out and was my choice for a few themes, including “One Room”, which was ultimately picked.

Once the theme was decided, it was time to get to work. I spent a lot of time the first day working on designing the room and testing collision detection. Not sure why this took so long, but around 3:30am Saturday I had working collisions, and decided that was it for the evening. Saturday morning rolls around, and it’s time to work on some art, and get to coding. Sunday was spent finishing up the game, tweaking options, and adding sound and title screen.

I used Unity for this compo, and the actual coding went rather well. I like to use my simple object pooler script to handle the management of game objects, and I created some controller scripts to handle the audio, game management, and enemy management.

• I released a playable game!
• “Keep it simple” is definitely the way to go.  Since you have only 48 hours, don’t bite off more than you can chew… if time permits, you can add some features. For me, I had a couple hours left and added the scrolling background, looping bats, and audio manager. I also wanted to add a “boss” character, but time ran out.
• I now know the difference between stalactites and stalagmites!

• My art skills are “meh” at best. I did manage to animate a bat though. I wanted to draw and animate a person instead of the gun turret I used, but I was spending too much time on it and it was not anywhere near what I would consider good enough. While I think the art is good for this game (other may disagree!), I need to keep this limitation of my skills in mind for future compos.
• I did’t think the entire game through, and I realized some issues while developing:
  • I wanted the power-ups to be lowered down a mine shaft and have the player pick it up to use. I don’t think I would of finished that, so they just randomly drop at some interval.  If you look at my time lapse video, you might see a mine shaft in the game for quite a bit of time before I decided to remove it.
  • Once a stalagmite forms, it was impossible to shoot any drips coming down since you had to be under the stalagmite, and that would cause instant death.  I decided to add a bomb to remove stalagmites, and I also allow the player to jump/shoot over smaller ones.

Another successful Ludum Dare for me… I had a great time developing and releasing Bat Cave, and even though there were moments of doubt, I continued on. I hope that this game rates higher than my previous two entries… time will tell.

Tags: postmortem

I finished making the game about 30 mins before the Jam ended. Check it over here : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=110057

This is my 2nd Ludum Dare and I’m more satisfied with this entry compared to the last one.

Forgive me if the art is horrible, but I tried my best.

Made it for a different reason, but since it’s done, I’ll share it here. It shows the basic elements of the gameplay.

The controls are bad/hard, and it’s a bit slow from the go, but the pace goes up. If you want a little challenge – try scoring over 100 points. It’s quite hard, but definitely doable

GOOOOOOO!!!  Pleeeeeease, rate and comment!)))

Tags: 2D, BUTERATOS, game, jam, Ludum Dare

Folks are asking us – what the hell is going on in our game. Well, it turns out that many of you haven’t read original story the game is based on.
So, let us tell you what it is all about.

The protagonist, young priest, is locked in the village chapel to save dead beauty’s soul from the evil spirits. But in the midnight all evil spirits are materializing, so protagonist have to fight ’em and save the beauty’s soul.

Checkout our entry here

Tags: gogol, one room, story

We are adding some balance right now so in few days will release post ludum dare build.

You can check it out here: entry

Kings Axolo wants to eradicate humanity, and he needs your help!

Control a giant-walking-grounded-submarine-robot and kill as many humans as you can!

But be careful, humans are not weak, and they’ll send you tanks and helicopters to stop you!

Check out Mechaxolotl Rampage right now!

Hi all! Once again, we started so hyped the LD and… again, we didn’t finish it like we would like. We always invest more time in technical aspects than improving the gameplay but we suppose that everybody has this problem right? Would you like to know what did we try?

The competition:

Ludum Dare is basically the only contact that my brother and me have had with game development. Because of that, each edition (5th for us) we try to focus on new things to learn. You can see different styles in our previous entries.

The Concept

One Room. Between all the different themes, this one wasn’t our favourite and we lost time thinking about the idea. Finally, we decided to do Open House, a puzzle game where you are a spirit that defends his house against buyers. In the room there are two types of traps: attracting traps and killing traps. The spirit can move the traps and activate them (using a turn system) to try to kill all the buyers “simultaneously”.

The Challenges

We have learnt a lot. We tried bone animation, new effects, changing ambient music… the gameplay was not as polished as we would liked and we had a lot more thing in mind that we didn’t included like new traps, punctuation system, better animations, screenshots of the situation (we planned to do a newspaper with the picture of the deaths after each stage with the results)… but as always, we enjoyed a lot all te process.

Now, we hope you also enjoy the game. We will try to play the maximum number of games to give feedback. For us, this is the best part of this learning process and about this community!

Play now!

Hi Darians! Here you have first part of me developing my game for latest LD (in Czech).

I will upload my whole progress. So if you want to see me code, draw or record music, watch the playlist changes for next days!

My game is called Garage Christmas, you can play it here!

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

Hey guys, thought I’d do a little blog post about my LD Jam game, Cozy Taxi!

I kinda wanted to make a Crazy Taxi Clone, and just do 3D  models this jam, I normally focus on code, so yeah i mainly made stuff out of cubes. I’ve been trying to develop my art style a bit recently, it’s a bit vaporwavey, a bit pastely, and defo Cozy. But yeah, I spent two days doing the level. A minimalist pastelly kids room.

So I had a few assets I did for the #3december hashtag for twitter, soooo I though I’d use em here, so your taxi is a toy truck and the clients are bunnies. You have to stop next to bunnies and take them where they got to go. I modified the Unity example car controller to get that working, and added a jump and a flip for when stuff went wrong.

The midi offspring tracks are found from the net, i actually had to convert them to Mp3’s haha. I feel they helped add a whimisical mood and flavor to the game. It was hard to create the different routes and paths in the game while still making it feel natural.

There’s lots of room for silliness and sick tricks, I’m quite proud of Cozy taxi, my silly little Crazy Taxi inspired game. I made a few physics bug fixes today and made it a tad easier, so give it a go! I’m planning on going through everyone’s games who plays mine too! So yeah thanks for your time!

Do you want to play Cozy taxi? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!

Even though we didn’t make any post mortem so far (but there will be a post about it, once we get a bit of pause from our real life jobs – so most likely over the weekend). I’d like to proudly present first video we have recorded and published now.

Also, in case you participated in LD – feel free to share a link in the comments on the video, and I will give it a try over the weekend.

Howdy folks! Im back with another mini let’s play review series for Ludum Dare 37! In this first installment we’ve got a bit of Tower Defense, some childhoom delight, and a Horror game that has a hidden mobile centric surprise.

Links to the Game Pages:

Defend One Room

Finding Home

Horror Rush

Got a game to Submit? Then use this handy dandy Google Form! It’s fancy!

Thanks for watching! =D

Tags: Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, Ludum Dare 37, review, Youtube Series

Hey, If you want to see the timelapse of Glitch Room. My first entry in the Ludum Dare:

And If you want to play it’s here : Glitch Room

Tags: #ld37 #37, Glitch Room, timelapse

Hello, we are streaming some games over at our twitch channel. Come and put your game in chat and we will play it!

https://www.twitch.tv/mighty_moosen

This was my first LD. Ive wanted to do one for the past 3 or 4 LD’s lol. I hate working a lone and grouped up with Picapiedras14 and fandicci for this project. Glad I was able to make time and finally got one LD down! These guys really did help out a lot as I am far from an artist and their music and art really brought the game to life. Looking forward to the next LD!

Check it out here

Come play as an intrepid space survivor trying to grow a tiny seed from his home planet. Experience a relationship between man, plant, and machine.

This game does something we’ve been meaning to do for a while: it incorporates procedurally generated content into the puzzles.

It was originally meant to have an FTL-like meta layer on top of it but we only had half our team to do this one (one of our coders came in after the fact for bug fixes and optimization but over the weekend it was just one programmer and one artist)

It’s a bit challenging but if you are clever and quick witted enough you should have no problem beating it.

If you like

-Narrative

-Puzzles

-Procedural Generation

-Sentient AI

…Square Roots might be up your alley.

Hello there, it’s me again.

The feedback has been so incredible that I decided to make some tests with art and gameplay. As you may know, Bruce has been captured in the yard by a kid. I realized that it would be cool to make a stage where our hero is there, before being caught. Just some tiles and we have the very beginning of the yard:

I decided to keep the art style black and white, but I still have a lot to work on it. This is just a test screen for what’s coming next for Bruce, the escaping ant.

Cheers!

We are extremely proud of the final result, it is a shooter where you go around Area 51 and destroy extra-terrestrial life forms, with 4 bosses and heaps of weapons.

PLAY IT HERE

So, we made a game, but I only just now got to writing a blog post about it.

Play it here if you don’t want it spoiled maybe?

The primary idea was that your life experiences transform your living space to the point where it could tell a lot about you, to the point where you could restore your own memory by interacting with objects around you. Kind of like you don’t fully remember that trip you’ve taken last year, but details spring to mind once you see some photos or souvenirs.

Initially we thought you’d be playing as an old man, trying to remember something. It wasn’t too exciting, so we thought it’d be more interesting if there was some life and death situation going on, even if there was no immediate risk involved. Currently in the game, you only keep two objects “in memory”, but we considered having the robbers beat you up in slow motion, knocking off memories with each strike.

We started with the story. Before we were sold on the idea, the outline was done in Twine. The graph looked something like this:

There had to be plenty dead ends so you couldn’t just get straight to the end, but everything had to interlink and guide towards the ending. The plot had to be changed on the fly in a few instances and not everything went according to plan, so it’s a bit nonsensical, but the main theme of most clues is Africa. We didn’t want dead-ends to be meaningless, however, so there’s a secret ending for those who visit all 7 important nodes.

Moving all the text and transitions into Unity was quite a tedious process, though. Some shitty javascript saved me time and I only had to copy keys rather than full text strings, but all the transitions still had to be assigned manually. In hindsight, instead of using Twine we should’ve just done a quick and dirty editor extension – would’ve saved a few hours spent fiddling with Twine’s scripting and a few more hours moving everything into Unity.

Visually, we wanted forgotten objects to be abstract and unreal. We experimented with vertex shaders, but we couldn’t get anything looking nice, probably due to lack of experience with geometry shaders and Unity in general. Luckily, Keijiro Takahashi came to rescue with this wobbly ball effect, slight modification of which let us use our own meshes as base.

Ultimately, lack of a dedicated 3d artist on the team and general inexperience with Unity led to delays, which in turn meant we only managed to produce the very base. Still, we think it’s interesting, so there’s that.