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 almost forgot to share my game post mortem. This time I wrote on Medium, you can read it here.

Also, I recorded my entire game dev process, but I have zero HD space to edit a video about it, maybe in January?

You can play and rate my LD entry here! Hope you like it and please leave a comment! 😀

Tags: LD37, post-mortem

When brainstorming my LD37 entry, I had scrapped two ideas that I’d felt were beyond my skills design-wise.

So far, I haven’t found any of these actually executed by other people, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody came up with the same idea and made a neat game out of it. Naturally I am very interested in playing someone else’s attempt of what could have been my game.

So, the first game I am looking for is…

A puzzle game with floor plan aesthetics, something like this image. Maybe built around the idea of rearranging furniture.

The second may be a little weird, so I wouldn’t bet on someone doing exactly this, but maybe someone did something remotely similar:

A Sim/Action game where you play an anthropomorphic house that catches and eats people who are then having a party in its living room.

Any help finding something along these lines would be greatly appreciated.

For anyone interested, this is what I made instead.

This was my second time doing LD and overall i’m very happy with the result. i think i did much better than last year, but there are still some things that fell short.

First of all was the view. i tried to make it dynamic by having it turn with the player. i liked it but a couple people found it disorientating. Believe it or not that view is about 120 degrees per second shorter than my initial turning speed. I should have added the player’s ability to modify this, but i forgot. second year i’ve wanted to add a feature but forgotten.

Second of all was the core mechanic: warping. some people liked this mechanic, and some never saw it. it makes gameplay much more strategic. i guess i should have either made the “HELP” menu l mandatory, or more visible.
Additionally, Upgrading was under utilized by players. some people didn’t use skill points, or understand them.

Third: BONUS LEVELS. every 3 levels there is a bonus level where you try to protect a baby unicorn. troll-ey music plays in the background as this is just my fun way of breaking up the intense game play. it is almost impossible to keep that baby alive, but if you do, you get an extra life. unfortunately, nobody commented on them, and i am certain nobody survived long enough to see these levels (probably due to the fact they didnt warp or upgrade.

Fourth: more enemies. I would have done this, but the game was originally meant to  be stealth, so halfway through, when my plan changed, i had to completely re-write my enemy AI. this took away the ability to add new enemies in, as i still had to polish up all the rest of the game, and only a half hour to do it.

If you haven’t played it yet, click here, and enjoy Yetis and Unicorns.

if you have, thank you for voting and your comments. they help a lot!
See you next year 😀

You should try our Ludum Dare 37 Entry, Area 51: CLICK HERE

Check out Maggie’s Grinning Soul soundtrack ! Here is the Intro > https://soundcloud.com/antoine-wert/intro-maggies-grinning-soul

You can find the game right here : Cyborg Ninja Training Program

Hi!

Second post here, just to let you know that the MacOS and Linux version of our little game are here!

It’s not tested, so let us know if there is a problem. (On the linux version there is a high chance of problem with the notes).

You can try the game by clicking here

And please comment if you have something to say, we still need feedbacks!

Thank you !

(Click to open Wall of Text version)

First LD. Jam: not themed game, not solo. Realistic hacker simulator.

Before LD: static HTML/CSS/JS sketch for login screen and desktop. Private Github repo.

Day 1: terminal prototype, simple “internet” and system pages. Player which uses YouTube API.

Day 2: set up LAMP stack in a VM and worked on backend systems – translation, search, networking and URL handling. Made IRC with button mashing and delayed messages. Friend helped with dialogs.

Day 3: added ssh, integrated dialogs into IRC, created first two tasks and in-game blog with hints. Polished that a little: playlists, translation, icons, renaming, etc. Created an entry.

Reception: surprisingly well – I was a bit nervous if the game’s too short or not interesting. There was not enough hints and no “game’s over” message, though. There is a record of TVGS playing the game:

And a link for you to play it yourself. If you do, please leave some feedback!

(Yet another link to the entry)

Tags: is-there-anyone-who-reads-the-tags?, LD37, post-mortem, postmortem, tl;dr, UNH4CK3D

Hello everyone!

We hope you’re having enjoyable holidays so far! It’s been quite busy for us (eating all that food and drinking alcohol) so we didn’t get to play any games from fellow devs, so if you’d like us to play and rate your game let us know!

You can also check out our game DISK below:

BOOM HEADSHOT! Click to play!

Cheers,
Kuality Games

Tags: DISK, doom, FPS, headshot, KualityGames, LD37, madewithunity, shooter

My first Ludum Dare was pretty fun! I started wanting to create something meaningful, maybe share some kind of important message with the player, but ended up creating a platformer about you wanting to go back to your room. I participated to gain some practice for the Global Game Jam 2017 and I more than achieved said goal.

Now, as an attempt to make the most of it and help anyone else doing something similar, I’ll analyze what went right, what went wrong, and conclude about what I must improve for my next project. Before I start, I suggest you play the game to understand better what I’ll be talking about.

Context

Back To Your Room is a short platformer developed solo for the Ludum Dare 37. It is comprised by a single playable level which is about two minutes long. It was developed with Unity, using Tiled for level creation and Tiled2Unity for import.

What went right

1. Art

Art seems to have worked, as most players have complimented it so far. I obtained all graphic assets from opengameart.org, and tried to use as few different artists as possible to keep the style consistent. However, good comments about the art usually are only about the art. This means that there are not a lot of positive comments about anything else, which I’ve taken into account when writing the rest of this post.

2. Sound

According to feedback, sound effects and background music were fitting in most cases.  At the main menu, at the credits and at the introduction. Even though, I received several comments suggesting this was not the case with the actual game level; they are probably right, as it was the last one I added and the one I spent the least amount of time searching for. This was a big mistake because it is probably the most important to get right.

To get the background music that did work, however, I searched for playlists full of royalty free music at the start of my working session and listened to them for the entirety of it. When I found one that caught my attention, I saved the link to check it out later and decide whether or not I was putting it in the game. The first song that I found this way was Wolf by Jeremy Lelis, Back To Your Room’s main menu theme. Check it out!

Further, all sound effects were created using bfxr. I added those I thought were the most important for the player’s feedback from the world: jumping, killing an enemy and obtaining a pickup.

3. Introduction to core mechanics

The actual game level that is played in the game was poorly designed, a result of most of it being created in the last few hours of the jam, which I’ll address later in this article. In spite of this, it seems the part of the level meant to teach the player core mechanics served its purpose well enough. By “core mechanics” I mean jumping and pushing dead enemies around, even though the latter is not used as extensively throughout the level.

First, I had to teach the player how to jump. To do so, I put a tall obstacle only surmountable by jumping. Until now, not a single player expressed confusion as to what they were supposed to do there. However, I think this is because I taught the player that jumping was a core mechanic of the game rather than how to jump. They had already acquired this knowledge thanks to other platformers.

The obstacle that teaches the player about jumping

Then, to teach the pushing dead enemies mechanic I did two things: put an enemy in such a way that the player would kill it whether they tried to jump over it or not, and force them into a narrow passage where the only way to advance was by pushing this dead enemy. I achieved the former by having the enemy be in the position where the player would fall over it if they just walked right, while making sure it was still easy to jump on it in case the player tried to do so.

Scenario that teaches the pushing dead enemies mechanic

For the latter, I made sure the space did not allow the player to move the now dead enemy out of the way and the decision to try to keep moving right happened naturally amongst all the players I’ve seen play and hopefully in the vast majority of those whom I haven’t. Also, by having the player avoid direct contact with another enemy at the same time, I also communicated one possible way to use this new mechanic.

Jupiter Hadley playing this part of the game for the first time

Finally, it’s worth noting that I tried to make sure the player was aware of the existence of the second enemy by having it not do anything unless the player had entered within a certain range at least once. Whether this worked or not is uncertain at the moment, because the player would still find out about this enemy in a safe environment soon enough.

What went wrong

1. Level Design

As stated before, level design was not very good, mainly because I didn’t put enough time into it. Everything in the level aside from the mechanics’ introduction was created in the last 5 hours of the jam. Throughout the level, I tried to encourage the player to dominate better the controls by introducing sections where you had to jump precisely to avoid falling in pits, something a lot of other platformers do.

Section that requires precision jumping

I also added collectibles that rewarded many points to appeal to the player’s completionism and tried to place them in a way that tested the player’s understanding of the game mechanics and encouraged them to explore the level. However, something curious happened with one of them. I meant this collectible to test the player’s understanding of the pushing dead enemies mechanic, so I placed it like this:

First collectible’s location as seen from the Editor. Lizard enemies rush towards the player. Beer enemy guards the collectible.

It might remind you of the scenario where the player learned about pushing dead enemies. This is intentional (but I’m not sure if it worked that way, so please tell me in the comments if it did for you!). I wanted players to use the dead lizard-like enemies in the vicinity to push the enemy away from the collectible and then defeat it safely. Despite my intentions, most players used an easier method I did not foresee. See what I mean with the GIFs below.

What I thought the player would do

What they usually do

This was probably a consequence of barely playtesting this part before turning it in, but there was no time left to playtest anway.

In the end, what little feedback I have on Back To Your Room’s level design is purely negative. This, together with the reactions I’ve observed from several players, has lead me to believe they feel there’s nothing noteworthy about the level. It does not excel at anything but it’s not that terrible at anything either, which makes them feel it lacks something but unable to point out what. This evidences my weak level design skills, whose improvement must be my number one priority in my next project.

2. Time management

Time management was absolutely terrible. Well, the lack of it. I simply designed and changed parts of the game in my head until they were good enough and then implemented them at full speed. Added to this, I spent too much time settling on an idea and took a few too many breaks. No tools for time management or control were used.

The results of this naive approach to time management were catastrophic: I ended up submitting my entry for the Jam instead of the Compo. It might have been a decent entry for the Compo, but for the Jam it’s just not good enough. This encouraged me to do some research on the subject of time maganement.

Summary of results from a Ludum Dare 22 Post-Mortem Survey. I cut out some results and left those related to time management.

After reading through quite a few articles exploring time management strategies both in general and in game jams, I realized a lot of other jammers experience similar issues. It appears to be kind of a rookie mistake, one that I must endeavor to avoid the next time. Luckily, I found an interesting post with a lot of time management tools to experiment with in the future. I suggest you check it out if you’re interested in this topic as well.

Conclusions

Participating in this Ludum Dare was a valuable experience. I learned a lot of things faster than I would have otherwise. Also, writing this post mortem helped me understand better my weaknesses. Specifically, what I conclude from this project is:

• My foremost priority for my next project should be to learn more about level design, both in theory and in practice.
• Time management is an important skill whose mastering I should focus on after level design

I hope this analysis was helpful to you. See you in the next Ludum Dare!

Sources

1. Jupiter Hadley. (2016, December 17). Jupi Plays Indie Games: ALL THE INDIE GAMES [Ludum Dare 37] [Part 5]. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiLAPTz00w0#t=333

2. McFunkypants. (2011, December 28). INFOGRAPHIC: Game Jam Survey. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from http://mcfunkypants.com/2011/game-jam-survey/

3. myfirstgamejam. (2016, July 8). Resources: Time Task Management – My First Game Jam: Summer Edition community. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2016/topic/29905/resources-time-task-management

Hope everyone is enjoying the final days of the year. If you have a spare moment, try your hand at my short puzzle entry, Callisto.

I’m now committed to expanding this to create a larger, but still relatively small game inspired by The Witness, The Room and Riven. Even at the small scale it’s quite an undertaking but I look forward to it. In the mean time, have a happy 2017 everyone and keep making great games!

Play Callisto (WebGL)

Hello everyone, 2017 is almost here, and so are results! Here’s my overdue post-mortem.

How the game looks now (1.0.9)

The Concept

Super Battle Cycle is a sort of driving top down shooter thing that I made for the compo. LD37 was always intended to be my first pixel art compo. I wanted a simple semi-monochrome or GameBoy-like art style… but with the theme of One Room I just couldn’t think of any original ideas that I would be able to execute quickly. A toy driving/fighting game sounded appealing, and I eventually decided to make a top down driving shooting physics game (how complex it sounds now). Soon enough I had created a prototype of the physics gameplay using a little motorcycle sprite I ended up sticking with.

My entry’s first GIF

Many players have commented that the game is unique in its grappling hook mechanic, utilizing physics as a weapon. I am very happy with this grappling gameplay because I feel that it’s fun (and juicy).

Boom. Objects are used to destroy enemies.

The game has about seven levels with three short help levels, all taking place in a room with rearranged levels for your toy cycle to shoot cars in.

The Bad

Alright, so most of all I need to put time aside for playtesting. This is what I never get around to in Ludum Dare because for some reason I put it off. Clearly it would have fixed the problems many players had with controls early on.

Something I wish I fixed before the initial deadline was pixelation! During development I had no method of rendering the correct GameBoy resolution in the exported game, and I had no time to find one (the first GIF seen above was taken in the editor, not the export). The initial version was just a 2D physics game with rotating sprites… something I am not proud of D:

Look closely at the cars and cycle… they aren’t pixels.

Even so, after this pixelation was fixed I couldn’t make the HUD render in GameBoy pixels without reworking it entirely. Maybe this will be fixed in the post-compo versions.

Finally, players have pointed out the the grappling mechanic should be more important than the other mechanics that are “unlocked” throughout the game’s levels. They couldn’t be more right, I see now that each feature should have built upon the grappling attack mechanic! This must be fixed in the post-compo version, huh?

The Good

Now onto the good… I have felt from the start that the grappling-driving gameplay is pretty fun and original compared to my other entries. Crossing my fingers to do well in innovation, if that’s my best chance!

I sorta made a few “tutorial levels” that introduce the base mechanics through help messages. It’s not the best way, but it’s something! This hopefully fixed the previous problems I’ve had with first levels.

Also, I’ve finally scratched the surface of pixel art with this game… hooray. It’s faster than 3D modelling and animating, so I might try it again in Ludum Dare. The sprites themselves were probably a bit mediocre, but maybe I can learn more. Speaking of art, the music was quite decent for how quickly I made it, and oh man, this time around I did many good things in juiciness 😀 Camera-shake explosions never hurt, right?

Final Thoughts

I also have a timplapse that will briefly show the process of my entry’s development:

So based off of feedback, the concept is the game’s strong point, but I made a lot of errors.

I won’t continue developing this one very much if it isn’t good enough (time is precious with school and all). I’m hoping to place top 100 in something, or even get top 100 overall for the first time (I doubt it). If my results are my best yet, I’ll try to develop the game and even sell it! Hoping for the best~

You can play the game here! Please do give feedback 😀

TL;DR – The game had lots of problems with execution but it was still fun for the most part. It also might be developed further if the results are reaaaally good, ha.

Thanks for reading, play link is just a few lines up there. See you next time!

-Power Spark

Tags: LD37, post-mortem, review

Ayup,

I made A lil’ Christmas Update for my game. (4 days late to say this)

Its really cute and gives the game a BIG BUTTLOAD OF NEW FEATURES!!!

Including: – A REALLY SUPER RAD SNOW EFFECT. – A REALLY RAD SUPER SANTA HAT;

OH MY JEE WIZ THATS ALOT OF STUFF!!! With all this content, you’ll be playing for hours! Why not check it out here!

sarcasm is best.. uh.. ism.

Tags: 2D, compo, game, gamemaker, GM:STUDIO, LD37, ldjam, Ludum Dare, music, progress, update, Windows

No, this is not my first time joining Ludum Dare Game Jam (held every 4 months). I have been joining different game jams and since then, a team was made called Green Soda. We’ve been growing ever since, started from 2 people, now we’re 5 – consisting of 1 programmer and 4 artists.

Few days before the jam…

What went right:

What went wrong:

Day 1

ONE ROOM.

What went wrong:

What went right:

Day 2

What went right:

What went wrong:

Day 3

Let’s keep this short… we all have games to play

Giiver’s Preview

Play Giiver’s Hop

Prejam

Before the jam started, I realized Ludum Dare fell on the same weekend as my friend’s birthday party. So the entire time before hand I kept thinking to myself “I need to make the shortest possible game I can”. That was the set up for my entire weekend. After the theme was announced I started sketching out various concepts of how the game could work. It was all up hill from there…

What went right

I got the entire game done! I knew I wasn’t going to have a full weekend to work, and I was going to have to do art, level design and programming all myself. I did my best to keep everything simple with the possibility to add more levels and characters later. Once the basic gameplay was set, it was all downhill from there.

What went wrong

I completely forgot about designing a good title and win screen. Before the jam started I spent a good amount of time doing various UI designs in Unity  just to get use to working with it. But, once the jam started I spent way too much time playing the game than actually working on it.

What will I do in the future?

Next Ludum Dare, I think I want to do something with a different way to interact where I can primarily focus on user experience. I might do something non-arcade and more experimental.

Now get out there and play some games.

Hey all.

Being a sucker for rhythm games, I wondered if there were any good entries from that genre.

I found The Library (very good!) and Rhythm Rink

Are there more anyone would recommend?

Better little late, than never!

Introduction

This was our first Ludum Dare competition ever and, to summarize the experience, it went really well! First we were a little confused on how everything works and during the second day we were really paranoid on our participation status on the whole event. But when the submissions opened up on the old site, we were relieved to see that we were doing everything right.

We already discussed about potential game ideas before the theme was announced. We’ve really liked playing this game called “Crawl” together and we thought, that we could do something inspired by it. We ended up with the idea of doing “reverse” Crawl, so that you’re the final boss and your job is to get rid of the heroes, that try to kill you.

When the theme was announced, it was really easy to decide how we should approach our idea. If you’ve ever played any RPGs or MMORPGs (I’m 99% sure you have!) I’m sure you have noticed that in 70 – 90% of those the boss fights happens in only one room.

What went right?

We chose to do the game using Unity, because that’s what we both were most familiar with. Both of our background is in programming, so our first problem to be solved, was which of us was going to do the art and music. At the end we chose that I’d do the art and we’d both work on programming and music. So the first thing that went right was the art. It was really minimalistic, but it did it’s job.

Programming-wise, I think we made a good job on eliminating potential bugs and the final game was quite polished. We dedicated the last day on just doing polishing and testing, so that there’d be no game-breaking bugs. We noticed for example that if you kill the wizard while he’s casting his spell, the wizard dies but the fireball still stays. We made it so the fireball explodes after certain amount of time, so it’d serve as a “landmine”, if the player got too close.

All-and-all, for our first Ludum Dare entry, I think everything went quite smoothly.

What went wrong?

Audio was something we didn’t dedicate much time. Although some of the music were really memorable, it didn’t always fit the tone of the game. We wanted the game to have a somewhat “humorous” feeling with dialogue and gameplay while the art and audio should have been a little more “serious”. I don’t think we achieved this. But still the game is fun play, which is more important.

I think what we should have also thought is how we were gonna build the game on different platforms. For example, when we were packing the games and uploading them for submissions, we saw that the WebGL build couldn’t load the main scene of the game. I think this had something to do with instantiating too many enemies on the start for the object pooling system. Also we didn’t have any time to test the Linux and Mac builds, so we had no idea if they’d work or not.

If there is something to say about the programming, it’d be one thing: Polymorphism. For many classes we did too much just copy-pasting other classes and modifying them, when we should have made more base classes to inherit from. I think we made 3 different classes for the monsters you can control and all of them were inheriting from MonoBehaviour, although there were many functionalities they had in common.

In Conclusion

Just as I wrote in “What went right?”, making of our game went smoothly from start to finish, with minor problems here and there. I think we have learned much from the whole event. We’ve never really published our own games anywhere, so this was really good opportunity for both of us. The whole Ludum Dare community has been really helpful and the feedback that we’ve gotten is really nice. It’s really nice to see that there are communities that like to rate your game fairly and all the trolling is nowhere to be seen.

Hope to see more awesome games in the next Ludum Dare! Definitely going to participate again! Thanks for the opportunity and good luck for everyone on their future games!

Boss Room Ludum Dare page

Hello again folks!

Only three days until judging ends and we’ve still got a lot of games to try!

We had a vicious bug the first days and probably this damaged your gameplay experience. If you have some time check out our entry with the bug solved.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=55109

Feedback will be greatly appreciated!