This post contains spoilers, if you would like to check out the game first before reading click here.

Loop Hell is a puzzle game where you are damned to loop in the same room over and over again for eternity. The game plays with gamer’s expectations I guess, as they expect some sort of a escape room type of game, where their actions would eventually allow them to get out of the room. Instead there is no way out, the character is truly in hell, the one where you end up after doing something wrong. The objective of the game is finding this out. There is only some sort of brief explanation why the character ended up in hell: the articles and the final dialog. But again, he is in hell so there is no time for small talk.

The game is therefore a bit annoying. It was intended this way althought I may have made it a bit too much for some people. I mean it’s really a pity people abandon the game halfway before discovering anything…
In other words, it needs to be annoying because otherwise the game doesn’t have sense but it should be somewhat less annoying so that people would not abandon… tricky question really.

Anyway this is my first Ludum Dare entry made in Unity. It worked well, I think I will be switching to this technology completely, even though it has a major drawback for game jams which is the long load time of WebGL versions.

 

The good points

graphics – I’m not a graphics artist so graphics take a lot of time, this time was no different, I have spent half of the time doing visuals but I’m quite happy with the result. I have beed practicing pixel art since last time and I feel I’ve progressed. I’m also really pleased with the animations. I used GIMP for static graphics and aseprite for animations and it worked well.

music – I like the tune I composed even though it could have been more elaborated but I guess in a loop game about hell it serves its purpose. I used LMMS which is very powerful for a free of charge tool!

time management – it is difficult to devote all 48H to Ludum Dare and usually real life can’t wait so it’s important to assess well the time available for game creation at the beginnig. The initial game idea served this purpose. I have made a list of priority stuff to implement and made things based on these priorities. I am happy because I managed to implement all the priority stuff.

Points to improve

testing – testing a loop game is hell. Literally. I have overseen that during planning. I’ve spent 6 hours just playtesting and debugging the game, and it was really time consumming. So it is an obvious point but still worth metionning: when brainstorming on game ideas think already about testing. The good side of this was that I have played the whole loop several times and still found that annoyingness was acceptable…

small details – I didn’t have time to implement any small details that should show the player that the room is changing, any superficial objects that could introduce error, or small changes to the puzzle.. the fact they didn’t make it into the game was that they had low priority. The question is whether the game would be really much better with them inside. Should I have gone for the jam? I decided it wasn’t worth it.

the puzzle itself – the puzzle itself is very simple and may be too simple. But I’m torn on this one, I know some people abandon the game because they don’t see the solution so maybe if it was more complex even more people would abandon?

Anyway I’ve received some fantatastic feedback so far, and thank you so much for that. This has been an intersting game experiment and I hope more people will play the game and tell me what they think. WebGL and downloadable versions are available.

Hooray, we reached 100 views on itch.io!

If you somehow missed this game – Play and Rate!

P.S. If you’re interested in postmortem – other posts about this game:

Running out of Hands
Swinging the Axe
Cure4Life Postmortem

Tags: LD37

Hello friends,

We decided to continue game development and target mobile platforms

Also, we need more feedback: what do you think should be removed from this version, what features should be implemented etc.
Any feedback is appreciated, bad feedback is better

If you want to help or just to play – Play and Comment!

P.S. If you’re interested in postmortem – other posts about this game:

Running out of Hands
Swinging the Axe
Cure4Life Postmortem

On the first part I wrote about how it was the birth of the idea. Today I want to talk about execution and learning, because if you remember correctly, the main idea was to learn Unreal Engine 4.

The starting point was to let the player find a number combination for a door. Every number will be in a copy of the same room, but every room will be lightly different.

We started thinking how to hide the numbers and we wanted to go beyond the easy way of hiding behind the furniture. We wanted the player to think out of the box, and our main fear was to make puzzles too hard to be guessed. With the time restrictions of a jam the harder part is to balance a game, and to balance something as subjective as a puzzle difficulty is only doable if you can make people play it, we hadn’t people.

The first thing we did was to draw a generic room layout with 4 doors, one on every wall but not in the center. Rooms in real life don’t usually have the door in the center, it wastes too much space and from a gameplay perspective, it will limit what you can place there and may compromise room walkability.

On the other hand I’ve started “coding”. For those who have not worked yet with Unreal Engine 4, it has a visual programming system called blueprints. In the editor you create logic by connection boxes; for example, you have the “branch” node, it receives a boolean expression and it has 2 outputs, one for true and the other one for false evaluation, the flow of the code will go from one output or another depending on the result of the expression, exactly like an if-else statement on traditional programming.

The first thing I coded was the num picker the player will use to put the numbers of the combination. The idea is simple, you will have a collision box to know when the player is next to the picker and everytime the player hits the mouse left button, we will increase the number up to 9, then, it will go to 0. Also, we will need various of these number pickers because the combination will have 5 numbers and every picker lets the player to select 1 number from 0 to 9. To be able to reuse this asset we will create a Blueprint Class, something like a object oriented class that groups code and other assets. In our number picker blueprint class we will have a box mesh, a UI text widget, the collision box and the code. We will be able to instantiate as many as we need and we will be able to access its public local variables to interact with them in the level blueprint.

Honestly, I’ve been coding for more tan 15 years and the mental switch you need to do to work with blueprints it’s remarkable. Not in terms of difficulty, in the end it’s logic flow and it does not matter if it’s a box or a code block, but more in terms of how do you have to do the flow. It’s hard to describe to me, because it’s not something specific. For example, for the num picker you need to increment an internal integer that stores the number on the picker, something that for me was a single line of code ( this.number = (this.number+1)%9 ) transforms in some nodes: a getter to get the value, next increase the number, then get the module and finally store it in the same variable. It can be done in less steps with a Math Expression Node, but it’s an example. What I’m trying to explain is that even when you know how to code the learning curve of the Engine, specially learning where do you have to go in the editor because it’s full of buttons and windows and tabs.

Back to puzzle design, we decided that we will need to teach the player that he needs to find numbers. That’s why we locked all the doors in the initial white room and put a first codelock there. Also this first puzzle is the easiest one, a giant black 35 in the ceiling, only partially hidden due to it’s like an humidity stain. Locking the player also gives us the moment of surprise when he opens the doors and finds the same room over and over again.

Once Carlos told me how the basics of blueprints and the event system I started to prepare the door unlock code. Meanwhile Carlos was working in the assets we will need, the furniture, doors, etcetera. We needed functional and easy to create assets and whats more generic, easy and reusable furniture in the world? Disclaimer, no brand or company funded the creation of our game. IKEA of course! :V

We relied in UE4 vertex painting tint every room, we used a material with a color parameter in some assets, giving us an incredible power to get all the rooms done with a minor impact in performance and a huge time saving. The only texture applied to the assets was a baked ambient occlusion to give them the correct shading.

Finally to create the puzzles we used different techniques. For the distance one is a simple material that changes the opacity depending on the distance from the camera. Something similar happened with the reflection, we have a copy of the same room below and the floor uses a material that changes the opacity in this case with a Fresnel function. We wanted that the details that changes in every room helps the player to find the clue. For example in the light one there is a second lamp, no other room has it, the green room is the only one where the statue is different.

And it’s all, we wanted to do more content, but I’m happy because we marked us a minimum product and we delivered it as we imagined it, but the process was good enough that if we had more time, more content would be done fast, spending again the major part of the time designing new puzzles.

Many thanks for reading, please play the game, rate us and please comment, we need your feedback!

Tags: [Almost] One Room, Carlos Coronado, LD #37 postmortem, postmortem, Theck, ue4, unreal engine, Xavier Borrut

> Link to game <

I finally got Unity’s WebGL exporter to not crash when the game starts up! Give it a try!

I have not participated in a Ludum Dare in quite some time. During those weekends of the events, I spent my time working on an entry I submitted for miniLD #58: Core Influence. I went back to my original brainstorming notes and tried to redesign the original game so that it fit the conceptual theme better in an abstract way: a game about positive and negative influences. My intent was only to do one game mode and release the game.

Well, that was not going to work for me, as like many of you I feed the feature creep. Added unlockables & acheivements (local & GPGS), rewarded video ads, cloud saving (GPGS), and 3 other unlockable game modes. Was just going to release for Android, but a lot of my family and friends have iPhones and iPads. So, that had to happen. Also, got my friend from Electric Ally Music involved, Ryan Looney, and he created the soundtrack and sfxs for the game. In the end, I am really happy with everything that I have accomplished with Core Influence and can’t wait to get started on the next game and participate in the next Ludum Dare! If you have time, please download Core Influence from your store of choice and give it a try! Thanks!

-BWS

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

I’ve judged 61 entries so far. Here are some of the ones I like the best. No rank order here, just seven good games.

Dethroned – simple but very fun. Took me a bit to realize I was meant to lose early on until leveling up. I spent 45 minutes on this one.

General Room – very creative and clever wargame. Great visual style.

Disk – tremendously visually impressive, as Jam games sometimes are. Gameplay is not that complex, but so beautiful.

Space Junk – The making-of video posted earlier shows how much work went into it.  Very fun and polished, with great lighting and model animation.

Fracture – I didn’t fully understand the story, but what I did was cool. Just a really neat visual experience. Not exactly one room.

Obelisk – trippy and weird, with limited but fun gameplay and a cool 8-bit art style

Death Dash – charming, gory, and fun, although I couldn’t complete it.

Don’t Stop Me – Simple but fun, visual style is great, SUPER hard, but I finally figured out a winning strategy. Very cool use of theme.

 

If you’d like to check my game out, please feel free – I’d love feedback:

Domain

 

 

What went well:

• Decided to go with Game Maker Studio 1.4 instead of 2 because of two reasons:
  • I never used 2 for more than a few minutes and I think LD is not the best time to try and study something completely new.
  • It doesn’t have HTML5 export and I really wanted my game to be as accessible as possible.
• I threw away stuff that wasn’t a ‘must’ for me. This probably saved me since I almost didn’t make it on time.
• Made the graphics simple yet effective. Most of the animations are done by code, the others are 2/3 frames. So yeah, no animations basically.
• Theme usage. I really liked the idea of making a game about making a game, and LD people are the perfect audience for that.
• Game length. The fact that the game is short and there’s no punishment for death made it more accessible to people to play until the end.
• Most important: didn’t completely freak out. Tried to stay as chill as possible. Obviously it didn’t work that well close to submission hour when I had to cut my leg off as a sacrifice for satan.

 

What went not-as-good:

• I made the entire audio in the last two hours or so. I’m pretty happy with the “music” but the sound effects were pretty bad and lacking. (Most of them were made with my mouth or with junk in my room that I threw on the table). Also the volumes are really not balanced.
• Totally forgot to animate the player. Somewhere along the way I thought I could get away with it by having the dev say “If you’re not going to behave you won’t get any animations!” or something like that, but I totally forgot about that too.
• “Beta” testing. I really should have sent friends demos since the platforming part is WAYYY too hard for most people. For me it was really easy and my brother also managed to finish it quite easily, so I thought it was fine. Boy was I wrong…
  

  View post on imgur.com

  (See? It’s easy!!!!!! Well for me at least)

• Having more debug shortcuts. Well, the game has different parts, and I didn’t break it to enough parts and didn’t make it easy enough to switch between parts. This led me to play the same parts over and over again, which is partly good due to testing, but mostly boring and making me want to kill myself.
• People expect to jump with space and not with up or W. I should’ve learned that lesson from the previous LD. Next time I’ll remember.
• I misspelled “procedurally”. And no, I did not misspell “mnoster”. That was on purpose.

 

More stuff that I want to say:

• So far I got lots of reviews and votes which is really encouraging. So I gotta thank you all for that.
• I got frontpaged on Newgrounds (again!) which blows my mind.
• I’m taking this whole experience as practice in making games, but also marketing the game. This LD made me open a Twitter (yeah yeah I live under a rock), but the thing that proved most effective is posting gifs here. So sorry-not-sorry for the spam.

 

Thanks for reading!

So I haven’t posted much this week… but I finally got around to updating Super Battle Cycle today– it’s not quite a post-compo version yet… that’s coming after results :3

One of the main problems for users were the controls, so I added the option to change the control style in the (new) pause menu. Many other tweaks were made too!

Now it’s time for me to start writing my postmortem… see you for that post~

You can play the entry here (works in browser)

Have some gifs

Thanks for reading!

Ultimate Showdown

Good:

Overall, I feel I did rather good for this compo. I came up with my game idea and expanded on it by using some of the themes that didn’t get chosen to improve it. I had very few bugs this time around that I actually had trouble solving so little stress there.

I even found myself planning features to add in updates once I was finished to make it more fun.

 

Bad:

Unfortunately, I think there was more bad than good this time around. I spent a lot of time adding that fine polish to try and cover most of the things people would normally complain about. By doing this I neglected to actually make the game fun in an engaging way. It’s basically just a simple arcade game.

I also didn’t have the time or the desire to make time to rate 200 games like I have been in the past. As such I am basically trading 1 vote for 1 vote. I managed to hit 20 but I doubt I’ll get any real review or love for my game.

I can see why people want to take away the rating system. It makes it so you have motivation to put in your best effort, but it also makes it sad when you don’t get any love. This also seems to make comments and rating very quick and cookie cutter.

Moon Maze has been updated, 3 Levels in total.

New features added.

Play at Here

DON’T FORGET TO CHECK OUT MY 10TH LD, STEREOJO. IF YOU HAVEN’T CHECKED IT OUT YET, PLEASE DO! AND FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE ALREADY PLAYED IT, THANKS! c:

If time machines were real, I would be able to travel back in time, visit the three dudes developing the game between December 9th and December 12th and tell them a thing or two.
For example the moment they said things like: “This will be easy.”, “We will be done way before the time”, “We will have so much time for polishing.”  I would respond:
“Seriously? Are you kidding me? You bring more than 30 years of experience to the table and yet you still say things like this. And even worse: you are not only saying this – you believe it!”
Because obviously in the end it wasn’t easy, nor were we done before time and there was zero time left for polishing. But the reasons for that weren’t anything that any of us had expected and really surprised us.

This is part one of two of a post mortem for our Ludum Dare game Hitler’s Cactus or Only you can stop Trump. If you haven’t played it yet, you can do that here

Keep reading

Whoo, Whoo, Whoo

 

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

Hey Devs! Merry Christmas!

Do you wanna help Santa this night?

 

Play it here and rate!

Hi!
This is my first post this LD, I really don’t know why I didn’t manage to find the motivation to post this time!
So yeah, I was in, for my 8th participation!
So here is my 8th game as well : The Library

Play it here !
I’m really proud of it, it’s the most “complete” game I ever made!

This time I worked with Pierre Vanier for the music and sound design, and Tori for all the graphics!
It was a marvellous experience, as always.

This jam is the only moments where I manage to be productive, so thank you to the LudumDare and to Mike.

Hi everyone,

This is my 6th LD jam. As a indie game maker, I take LD very seriously as a chance to explore creativity and skills.

So one day before the jam, I took some time and thought about every final theme and came up with some ideas.

And this is for “One Room” and several other themes. Player is trapped among giant boulders, and somehow he has the ability to move these boulder around. But due to the limited open space, it is still a difficult job to move around.

 

Klotski puzzle. in China, we call it Hua Rong Dao(华容道).

It is basically a twist of kind of puzzle called “Klotski”(sliding blocks around to move  a marked block to certain place.). My idea is about twisting this mechanic into a exploration game: the world is full of sliding blocks, big and small in various shapes; player must move through with some careful thoughts.

 

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The Jam Starts

But right after the jam starts, I started a brainstorm and had more ideas.

I was not very satisfied with the first idea. Reasons:

1.Not hitting the theme hard

Theme “One Room” is about physical space limitation. But this idea would end up a game world much larger than “One Room”.

One the other hand, it is not possible for the player to feel like in any room. As there is no way to add furniture.

2. How to balance the “puzzle” part?

This idea is definitely not about remaking the “Klotski” puzzle. I will not design the blocks so that player can pass with the right difficulty. Not to mention I want to add certain free play into the level design. So how do player deal with “impossible” situation?

I preferred idea No.2 “Use Room as resource” from the brain storm, yet I couldn’t came up with solid design.

Player has “One Room” and that’s all he got. He can take actions to counter the threat of death. But actions would be placing items on ground that cost “room (slots)”.

I still like this idea No.2 even after the jam. I can think of some great idea now. But I couldn’t come up with idea good enough under the pressure of jam.

Here was the idea I had after 4 hours after the jam starts (very funny, but no):

One day, the husband lost his job and he was very sad.

But he came up with a poster about a “Money Making Machine”.

He ordered one and he set it up in the living room.(Taking up a slot) The machine makes $1 every second. Player can also press the machine directly. The machine makes a “ka-ching”  sound for every dollar it makes, even in night, which drived the wife crazy.

Yet then, husband just buy more machines with money he made. And he has to sell his furniture to make room for the machine.

In the meantime, I made some breakthrough for the idea No.1:

• Player can CUT a block out of a larger block to make the “impossible” situation possible to handle. And there is a “battery-cost” to have the player not abusing it.

• Player can hold the moving button and then release to make the block “RUSH” forward, crashing monsters along the way!!!

The second breakthrough bring the element of “BATTLE” into the game, and then I feel the idea complicated enough. As for the theme, I aimed to continue the development after the jam and hoped to publish somewhere , and the idea is good on its own.

Idea No.1 won the bidding.

 

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Coding is Fun

How the three days spent

I happened to be in a time-zone of UTC+8:00. The jam starts at 10:00 am Saturday, end at 10:00 am Monday.(I aimed for compo when the jam start). I don’t have a job currently, good for the jam.

This is the decided concept art in AI

During the actual development, concept art was decided very quickly (I didn’t ask too much). I spent the first two days writing code. Here are certain jobs that cost me time:

• Move/rush a block: check how far it can go.
• Cutting: cut a piece out of  a block, results in 2 or 3 blocks.
• Render the blocks: trace the border line of a block and create mesh to render.
• Analyse the tile-map data and create blocks for tiles neighboring same color. (must fast enough)
• Light up the blocks that can be see but no further.(This is totally just eye-candy)

Before each level, tilemap data must be parsed and split into each block. And you have to do it quick.

A single cut might just cause a block split into 3 blocks. That’s what makes it complex.

---

Desperation

These coding carried me away. During the late night of the second day, I felt sleepy and realized that maybe I can not stay up. Desperation arise. Here are the reason I should felt desperate:

• I have not touched UI.
• I had no actual level design.
• There wasn’t any level structure (title, thank for playing, level select, etc).
• I haven’t thought about the game title yet.

I have spent too much time on the coding of core mechanic itself. I should have spent the time more wisely, in the order of importance, and submitted early and then update.

In the end,  I had to switch from compo to jam! I have another day to fight.

 

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The Final Redemption

The third day, I worked on UI, logo, the first and only level, sounds and some bugs. I stayed up through the night. I had underestimated the “extra” work.

The last screen of game if the last job of development.

Back before the jam started, I had wished that I could have more time creating levels and have player enjoy for a longer time.

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Post-Jam and Future

After the jam, I created another two levels, worked on a lot of other improvements. Currently I am working on a completed version of the game. Instead of a level-based game, I would like to experiment with random-map generation and rogue-like elements.

 

Thank you for reading.

[Play the Game Here]

 

 

Merry Christmas, everybody!

I don’t have a gift on me, but I guess a post-mortem will do.

I’m half of the Horse Stache creative duo. I’m mainly responsible for the aesthetic aspect of our games, while my friend is busy coding our dumb ideas into existence.

Our latest game DMG CTRL is the second game we’ve ever submitted to Ludum Dare, the first being It’s Cupid, Stupid (LD 34). Though it’s too early to say for sure, but at least in terms of responses, we’ve surpassed our previous game.

Which is not to say that it’s perfect. Far from it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first, we want to talk about…

What Went Right

Surprisingly, my music got decent feedback. Our previous game did not future any music or sfx, so I made it my mission to add sounds this time – however bad they were going to be.

Having no musical talent whatsoever, I only spent about half an hour fiddling with BeepBox, and I guess it turned out okay. Some people have, quite rightfully, pointed out that my music is repetitive, but we really lucked out with the type of game we were doing. Lesson learned – repetitive music goes along greatly with repetitive gameplay 😀

Art was another positive in people’s eyes. I was going for something colorful and cheery, and reviewers responded well to it. I am willing to experiment with my art, but it’s nice knowing that, at my most basic, I can create something people might enjoy looking at.

                    

For instance, Doom-like emperor’s portrait at the bottom was something we wanted to do from the get-go. Really glad that people liked it.

Still, it wasn’t without its issues.

What started as a leisurely-paced game making session became a race against the clock by the end, so some of the art you see in our game was actually done by my friend. Bolts of lightning, for example, are all on him.

But alright, that’s enough of tooting my own horn, let’s look at…

What Went Not-So-Right

Once again, we’ve faced the issue of “We have a vague idea, let’s not try to expand on it at all”. We were so busy building a completed game that we forgot to make it fun.

Sure, some people liked it, but the overwhelming verdict is that it lacked the elements of engrossing experience. It was monotone and kind of unengaging.

I could put some of the blame on the theme, but it’d sound petty. A lot of people made some really unique games, so we’re the only ones to blame for our downfall. (Still, the theme did not help us :D)

We only came up with good-ish ideas for abilities when it was time to put finishing touches. We found out that our time management skill is really our worst enemy.

So, with that in mind, let’s focus on…

What We’re Going to Do

For the next Ludum Dare, we already decided to use our time more wisely. The idea is to produce a playable prototype in 48 hours and then add visual flavor to it in the last 24 hours. It will be more hectic but at least the gameplay will (hopefully) be better.

We’ve addressed some of the more pressing concerns about DMG CTRL, and out post-Jam build features waves, growing difficulty, and some downtime to rebuild the lost buildings. It’s still not ideal, but at least it’s more in line with our original vision.

You can play it here.

Anyway, thank you for reading this wall of text. TL; DR: We’ve still got a lot to learn.

We’re really grateful to everybody who left their feedback to our game. You’re awesome, and you help us grow as developers.

Have a magical holiday season!