First Ludum Dare was a blast! After bouncing the idea around the whole first night and committing to an homage to I Like America and America Likes Me, I decided an isometric view was the only way to go. But after drawing the background image, I realized the floor was all irregular! Here are the translations I used to project the movement of Beuys and the Coyote, and a graphic explanation. Pretty simple stuff, but it was fun to make work.  Try to hug Coyote?

int transposeX(int x, int y){
int r = x+270+int((-.78+((float)x*.00045))*(float)y);
return r;
}
int transposeY(int x, int y){
int r = y+230;
return r;
}

**hint: the coyote likes to wake up to the triangle after a nice nap**

After some requirements about the packaging of the game, I have upload a .exe version. No more install the interpreter, just download and click to play.

Link to the entry: link

Hello darians,

I would like to share one neat trick with you from our game, Cure4Life.

Our artist didn’t have much experience in pixel art and in pixel art animation, unfortunately.

So we decided not to draw and animate player’s hands.
We thought that it would look OK as some pixel games look awesome without hands (Nuclear Throne, for example).

Well, we was wrong. This looks very bad in our art style:

So I tried to add some arms and it was way better:

As I’m a bit lazy to animate it frame-by-frame. It is also difficult as you can rotate weapons in any direction.
I tried to use Unity’s LineRenderer to create thick black lines as arms. And add two sprites as hands.
It took about 10 minutes to setup and voilà – nice convincing arms, that are animated with any weapon

P.S. If you’re interested in details about our game – feel free to ask in game comments 😉

Tags: postmortem, unity3d

Hello!

Just here to say that I’m beginning streaming now! Today will be my only stream till the third week, as at the weekend I’m leaving for Spain.

So! If you want your game added to the list (though, My GOD it’s huge list), feel free to submit here: https://goo.gl/forms/Xd9BMtm7VK6wQkUI3

Catch me here: click me

Also, wow! The competition is truly kicking off now, somebody has booted our artist out of first place on the leaderboard!

We’re running a competition so that anybody who is on the leaderboard (that’s top 10) at the end of judging gets a trophy like this:

With special ones for the Top 3!
Please get him off of the leaderboard entirely!

Thanks!

Before the Competition

I chose not to use Khan Academy for this Ludum Dare for obvious technical reasons. So, for the first time in my short LD history, I made my game using Love2D, Problem was, I had never coded in Lua before. I made a simple platformer the day before, but that was all my prep. So I knew it was going to be a little difficult.

When I saw the final themes, I knew that I would have like the theme to be Simplicity. It wouldn’t be very difficult for my first time using Love, and I had a great idea. The last theme I wanted? One Room. So small, and not abstract. So when the theme came out, I knew I wasn’t ready.

Oh boy.

The First Hour

I found a bunch of sticky notes, and I made it my goal to use as many of them as possible during the first hour. I had no idea what to do. I wrote down the words One and Room and defined each of them. Not really sure why. Then I wrote down questions, such as “Story?” and “Obstacles?”. I had no answers to these.

It took me a while to realize that:

1. I would need a big room and a small character to complete a game with any sort of character movement.

2. I should probably make something without lots of crazy movement.

I decided to make a game where the speedy user had to dodge the fast enemies and bullets. I was putting my head right up against the problem and taking it on. I thought that it would be cute to have a mouse as the main character, running away from cats and humans. That’s pretty original, right?

I spent the rest of my evening creating the mouse character. I had an idea of what it should look like, so I chose to sketch it out using MS Paint.

Not a good idea.

MS Paint is not good software for making arcs, and basically all of my artwork includes arcs. Even if it was going to be a placeholder, it still wasn’t smart. So I went to Khan Academy and drew out my character in code. I then removed the background in Word and pasted it in the program. I did the same thing with my background. It was time for me to sleep after an unproductive evening; I wasn’t going to stay up all night.

The Next Day

I wanted to get most of my entry completed this day, so when I woke up, I nearly ran for my computer. I spent the early morning adding player movements (how do I make if statements again?) and adding collisions (wait, which one’s the comment command?). After breakfast, I designed my cat graphic, which I was unsatisfied with, while watching my Cherries lose away at Burnley. By then it was time for an early lunch, which I coded the human character through.

After lunch, I added movements for the the cat and humans. I originally wanted the cats to slowly rotate towards the player when looking away, but I forgot to uncomment one line of code, and by the time I discovered it, I already implemented the easier movements for the cats.

I almost wanted the humans to look bad, just so the player could have something to laugh at. I think I did a good job. They’re not too smart, and when you get too close, the throwing movement messes up.

It was around the evening when I finally got the name Mouse House, which I thought would be original, but was not, because two other games share my name. 😛

During the night I added cheeses and their boosts.

Final Day and Submission

I didn’t have a lot of time to finish on the final day, so I woke up early and added dying mechanics and the win/lose screen. My background was simply a placeholder, so I worked on a new one when I could throughout the busy day. I spent the last hour refining the level and making sure that it wasn’t too easy or too hard.

When the contest finally ended I had to make my file an executable, which I had yet to do, and I had to post it on itch.io, which I had never used before. The Love2D instructions were unclear, and I had to watch and rewind a youtube video to show me how. By the time I had my program in an executable, there were 10 minutes left! I quickly downloaded my game onto itch.io (which is why I forgot to publish it) and I attached it to my Ludum Dare entry. I pressed submit one minute before time.

When I was in bed, I realized that I forgot to attach the source code! So I made a Khan Academy program and copy-pasted it into the program. It wasn’t pro, but it would work.

Ideas for Next Time

This LD was actually pretty fun. I wasn’t happy with the theme, but I still made a solid game. However, I need to use a new graphics program. I’m gonna try Paint.net, which should make things easier. If you have any other ideas just let me know by commenting on my game 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

Ok, so I’ve decided to post this here, because I know how supportive you guys are, and how all the gamedevs here are awesome. And since I don’t have much experience making games, so I think its a good time to just swallow my pride and be true to myself: the game me and my friends made have potential, but in the way it is now, its not fun.

I guess this happens to everyone in gamedev. I realized that the game wasn’t fun while I was implementing some wave stuff for it. After playing it a lot of times, I just realized it don’t have the core aspect we had in mind: Strategy and Good Coop. So yea, we made a game by ourselves in 3 days, and thats a REALLY GOOD THING for us, especially because it was our first finished game, but now that I set down with me and my code and thoughts, thinking on how I can implement those core ideas in the game we made, I just entered in a Blank Mind state.

I couldn’t figure out how to implement in terms of gameplay the aspects of Strategy, Good coop and Challenge inside the game as the way it is now.

So … I’m appealing to this beautyful community to help me on this. I don’t want a good idea, I just want to made the game enjoyable . So if any of you guys have a good idea of how to do this, I would be very grateful! Just drop a comment on the game itself, or here in this post, or on my twitter @jlcarruda

Thank you in advance :3

Overall I’m happy with how LD37 went! I made a virtual pet sim, What Have I Done? Here are some thoughts on the process.

What went well: Art

The graphics pipeline I used for LD37 was simple, outlined vector art in Inkscape, created in layers which are rasterized individually by a Python script and sent to Spine where they’re animated. I used a similar pipeline for my LD29 entry Hide-n-Stab, but this time there were a couple improvements: I made more (but judicious) use of gradients instead of all flat colors, and I utilized mesh deformation in Spine, which was added since LD29 and which I recently added support for in HaxePunk. This gave the animation a pseudo-3D quality that has received a lot of positive feedback. I think the main character being a small round blob really accented this effect.

Mixed bag: Scope

Throughout the whole thing I had in mind something that I could reasonably implement in two days (or in fact one day if I’d pushed myself more.) This was a benefit because I wasn’t rushing in new (probably buggy) features at the last minute as I was with LD29, and had no known bugs in the final version. I didn’t have to rush home from work Friday night (used that time to brainstorm), got plenty of sleep, ate good meals, and even fit in a trip to Ikea. I also wanted to keep the playtime to about 5 minutes or less and succeeded in that.

However, I probably erred on the side of being a bit too simple. One idea I had post-compo was a “play” button which launches a ball into the room for your pet to play with, fillings its happiness hearts. As it stands there is a bit of a sense of waiting between feedings.

Mixed bag: Planning

I started out with a specific plan in mind: art and graphics Friday night, gameplay Saturday, polish Sunday. In fact this was a terrible plan for a couple reasons. With 10 individual monster forms in the game, the graphics (and animation!) took up the bulk of my time, so knocking it out the first night would’ve been a fool’s errand. In fact, I came up with the idea for the spider-like animation on the last day and threw it in right before submitting. Beyond that, I found that my productivity was best when I allowed myself to flit between different topics: start to get a little burned out on graphics, put them down and start doing music instead. Get sick of that, put it away and start writing code. This seems like my optimal way to work, rather than trying to over-plan. So while the initial plan wasn’t good, the flexibility in scrapping it and doing what worked was.

What could’ve gone better: Clarity

I find that the gameplay is very clear if you’ve ever played with a Tamagotchi. Tamagotchi and its many knockoffs were a formative part of my own childhood, so this is where my own state of mind was. But if you’ve never seen a Tamagotchi, the connection between a yellow duck and flushing the toilet isn’t really obvious. Some tooltips for the buttons, and most of all (spoiler alert) a message when using the sword at the wrong time, would’ve helped more players see the point and make it through to the ending.

Conclusion

Compared to my LD27 entry there were mostly improvements:

• Graphics were improved, and more efficient to create
• Scope was better contained, resulting in many fewer bugs
• Gameplay may have been less clear for some, and there were fewer instructions

Hey Ludum Dare,

We didn’t post anything yet concerning our entry so let’s indroce you XENOPUNCH.

Play and rate XENOPUNCH

“Xenopunch is one of the most reknown underground arena in the galaxy. It’s not easy for a little human like you to compete against its most famous fighter during epic boss fights, Are you ready for the challenge ? Well, Probably not…”

View post on imgur.com

Defeat the Bountwins Hunters !

View post on imgur.com

Fight against Queen Krong and her summon spells !

View post on imgur.com

Unlock new Abilities (and kill the CHAMPION OF THE ROOM)

XENOPUNCH Title

We just released the bugfix update and uploading the game to itch.io,

We hope you’ll enjoy it as we loved working on it !

Can’t wait to play more games, so many great entry this time ! See you on LD38 😀

Play and rate XENOPUNCH

Pietro Ferrantelli – Game Design & Programmation @PietroFerrantel
Florent Juchniewicz – Game Design, Sound Design & Music @flojuch
Joe Rogers – Charater Design, Environment Art, Animations @jrrogersart

Hello there, it’s me again.

So I decided to write a few things about my first experience attending to Ludum Dare. I was thinking of not participating at all but thanks to some “pushing”, I ended up trying to do it.

The idea: As the theme was “one room” and I only have a small experience with platformers, my first thought was “how would be a platformer with only one room”. A man is too big, a rat is quite small, but still too fast so an ant (or another bug) would do the trick. Though it is a small space, I thought that it would be coll to have some variety to the scenario: Some jumping, some avoiding hazard and a mini-boss. As it still looks like it would be too easy, I thought it would be nice to force the player to do it as fast as he can, so the flooding. The whole thinking process took me about 5 min. 😛 Then I was off to the art.

The art: I recently bought myself a Wacom Intuos Draw® in order to be independent of artist, although I (thought I) couldn’t draw at all.

Someone who can’t do art trying to do art. LOL.

The way I went through first to last one was having a look at some “ant anatomy” on google. I did the same for the other characters and I was quite happy with the final result, as I was expecting to do nothing better than the left version of the ant.

The Music: I had no idea at all what I was doing. The only thing I knew was that I needed something mysterious to begin with and then an action tune. After a few tries, I was satisfied with what I have (well… I was running out of time anyways. The music was the last bit)

The gameplay: Controlling the jump in the air is bull*, said Newton. As a physicist myself, I insisted on the idea that you should not be able to control the direction after jumping. The result: everybody hated it 😛 Realistic physics in games are fine for simulations, but not for jumping ants inside a flooding box with spiders, flies and geckos, I guess. Another thing was “you hit a platform, you lose it”. Both was bad design decisions and now I understand why

WHAT!? I MADE IT YOU CHEAP BASTARD!

Still on the gameplay, there where some comments pointing the random nature of the gecko attack. It wasn’t supposed to be that way originally, but due to the lack of time, I left it the way I first developed

I really hope that this bastard doesn’t attack me, Pls!

Restarting and the story: When I developed the game, I wanted all to see the story about the ant. As the game ended up to be a bit too difficult to some, there where a lot of this:

Again….

and these:

OK, I GOT IT, I’M NOT SPECIAL! NOW CAN I PLEASE RESTART, PLEASE!?

so yes.. I realized that this wasn’t as clever as I thought.

Final thoughts, learning and the last cheap propaganda:

The feedback for the game was way greater than I could ever imagine, so thank you very much for all of you who spent some time playing and commenting! Here are my learnings:

• Let people control the jumping – This was unanimous. Some didn’t care but even so pointed out that it was weird that they could not control. Also, turn the friction of the walls off so that the player can jump against walls and reach the platform above
• Quick restart – Story is fine. Reading 100 times the same thing is not. Having a quick restart button doesn’t cost much and make the game more enjoyable. After making these two modifications I saw the huge difference (not available yet)
• Random attackers where OK on MSX era because they didn’t know better –  I remember one game, Awf wiedersehen monty, which had this smashing thing with a completely random pattern. It was annoying then and it is annoying now. Never again.

For this small and humble project, that is it.

If you haven’t played yet, check it out: Bruce, the escaping ant.

If you played and like it, maybe you will like this one too: Stick Nightmare.

Thank you so much for playing! Cheers!

Pedro Castro Menezes

Might as well do a proper announcement:

Check it out if you’d like to play as a panda or test your memory (or exploit the game to avoid memorizing anything, for that matter).

Some reflections:

So this is yet another single room hotel game. In retrospect, the idea might have been too obvious, but still, seeing how all the games sharing the hotel setting turned out to be completely different was very inspiring.

The development went relatively smooth, probably because it’s the 6th attempt I made with the same tooling, code-wise. The lessons that I took away from this entry mostly boil to a couple of points.

1. Don’t start implementing something just because it’s seems to be common sense. In the beginning I wasted quite a bit of time to support arbitrary room layouts with random table positions. In the end all that code turned out to be unnecessary, because the final fixed position of tables along the bottom does the job just as well.

2. I never fully realized before that vector art is a viable option for LD. After attempting to paint over the item sketches (and failing miserably at that), I remembered a bit of vectoring practice I was fortunate to have recently, and decided it would be a much safer bet. The graphics creation was split into two stages, first to put together the basic shapes, then when the game was done, remaining time was spent on making another pass adding the details.

That’s about it. Good luck in the rating, and hope to see everyone again for the next Ludum Dare!

I heard they are hiding in every room look behind you and check for yourself! They are very good at hiding as you “can’t see” they are invisible even in bright colored room when wearing black cloths.

On this ludumdare i have decided to base my game on worst move of all times “The room”. To follow the example set by this movie dont expect anything good from this game event better expect something bad.

If you want have any fun from this game check fake review section in game description on gamejolt.

Hey guys!

I’m Dan, one of the artists working on our third Ludum entry “Alien Barnage”; we wanted to make a fast-paced base defense game, and used the “one room” theme as a great opportunity to play with a wildcard mechanic to spice it up a bit!

We framed it as the player defending his farm from alien invaders, and having a tractor beam from the UFO jumbling up the base defenses and obstacles that the player builds.

Randomly generating the obstacles strewn around for the aliens to get stuck in was also important for making a replayable experience, especially as the initial difficulty of the game was steep.

Allowing the player to build his own turrets to fight off the enemy, as well as a repair mechanic, was a big help in making the difficulty manageable

Our last Ludum entry involved hunting down a randomly expanding shapeshifter truck boss, which changed in response to the player’s actions, so we wanted to keep the same element of replayability in this game.

I hope you guys can spare the time to play the game, preferably via the download, which includes higher visual settings that didn’t make it in the web build: Alien Barnage

I released a Windows and Mac version of Bat Cave to address some bugs that some people found.

• Shooting and jumping keys changed to something more standard.
• Fixed bullet hell power-up.
• More accurate collision detection.

This version, as well as the original submission, is available.

Hey folks, we have some news on our game. Now you can download the version 1.1 (we kept the old and official version as well).
There is a lot of stuff we wanna add, like screenshake and more visual effects. We need to apply some interface feedbacks, and make a better level design :'(

You can play the game here if you are interested

New features:
-Particle system
-New textures for the insectoids

Previous Posts:
Protagonist and Art
Interface
3D Models & Textures

Hey, Somebody help him! The priest need help to protect  the soul of young woman from demons.

Go to help! quickly, please.

Tags: 2d platform, gogol, oneroom

This time I can say this game’s post jam version was actually worth the time spent on! Actually, it’s kind of what I had planned for the jam but didn’t have enough to make it. It’s still far from what I plan to do, but worth the playing time I suppose.

I liked the result and I’m thinking of making a full little game of out this, before I continue another ambitious project, who knows.

You can play Super Bad Room here.

It’s the first game that I have made. It took me a lot of effort, since I had no knowledge in programming or design.

But after a lot of youtube tutorials, it’s finally done 😛

https://wanker-the-banker.itch.io/the-tales-of-jon

Hi all I just uploaded the first episode of my Ludum Dare 37 gameplays:

My PC sounds like a Jet in the background, and I failed to elaborate as much as I had intended on my thoughts of the game but in an attempt to keep the video to a watchable length, I think its ok for my first attempt. If you have any suggestions as to games I should play please feel free to email me at camblurban@gmail.com

Hopefully I can also show my genuine reactions to all the games in episode two and not have to re record my gameplay of any due to technical issues, however all the games I played in EP 1 still deserved the video.

Game entries I played:
One Room Hotel by TerraCottaFrog
Correct Color by gogo199432
Jim is Moving Out! by stadoblech

My Ludum Dare entry:
Royal Rise (Multiplayer) by thebrickanator

Thanks for watching