Tags: #desperate
I just want to thank everyone who played our game and left a valuable feedback. You guys are awesome!
I played a lot of interesting games during this LD. It was an epic journey. We got more than we expected. There is still some time left so let’s push this to the limits. You can try our game (find a link below). If you like it leave a comment so I can try your game too. Have Fun!
THANK YOU AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Click here to learn how HourGlass Collector was made.
Click here to play HourGlass Collector
Tags: game, jam, LD37, Ludum Dare, unity
Now that the jam is about to end, and we’ve played quite a bit of games, we wanted to point out some of our favorite games we played during Ludum Dare 37… and also our game. Play these things!
Walkie Talkie – Ingenious is the only word to describe this game. A working chat application that allows you to type in messages, but then each message gets transformed into a playable platformer level. I mean, common… what!? That’s crazy dope.
Face Man – Here at ShuddaHaddaLottaFun, we like games with style, and Face Man has that, in faces… and maybe butts… I dunno. A jump and gun shooter where your dead enemies faces become your new weapons. This is a game to come back to and play again and again.
Cancelled Refuge – One of us might have had a hissy-fit in this games comments section, but it was deserved… this game is TOO good. This game is practically ready to be flashed to a cartridge, sent back in time, and put on the shelf at your local Hollywood Video to rent and play on your Nintendo. It’s got a sound test for crying out load. Super fun to play, and look forward to seeing more of it in the future hopefully.
Karate Basketball – Let’s be honest, this game could have been awful and we still would have found it funny. It’s a good joke. NBA Jam, but starring Draymond Green kicking people. But this game is also really good and fun to play. I mean, it feels like NBA Jam, but with a kick button. It’s great.
ClapClap – Also known as “Real Life: The Simulation”, ClapClap is an awesomely awkward adventure in social clap expectations. You are at a concert, ready to bring forth applause from your sweaty hands, but need to clap at the right time when the song ends… and there are a lot of false endings. Clap too early, and you get some real mean-mugging from the folks around you.
and lastly… our game
Shadow Fencer Theatre – A 1-2 player fencing game set in the world of shadow puppets. We are super happy with how our game turned out this jam, and would love for you to check it out! It’s super silly fun when you have some friends to play with. Play it and tell us what you think!
Click the gif to play!!
Well as the post title suggests, seeing as tomorrow is New Year’s Eve (which means some of you will probably be off partying somewhere) and there’s only 3 days left until voting ends, this is the last weekend to play and rate my entry BreakAround (For those of you with a Google Cardboard VR headset do give the postjam version I made a go as well).
I still have my little Google Form set up for anyone who would like to play/rate their entries as I’ll most likely be at home during the weekend (otherwise I’ll probably go through them all on Monday) and I might try doing a small rating livestream but to sign off, here’s a few clips of people playing my game.
Clip from a Twitch livestream (Click here for the full video)
Have a happy new year peeps! 😀
Tags: Ludum Dare, unity, unity3d
Rummet is an escape room type of game with many keys to find…
…and many codes to figure out.
Find the four golden keys to unlock the exit door!
And try not to cause too big of a mess…
Game can be found HERE.
Rate and leave a comment and I’ll rate your game in return! 😀
Here is last update for Croquettes. Thank you all for playing and for your comments …and for all your super games!
Now, preparing the next jam!
Here is last update for Croquettes. Thank you all for playing and for your comments …and for all your super games!
Now, preparing the next jam!
Hello everyone !
I just released a polished version of my LD33 compo. You can play to the new version here.
I corrected some bugs, redraw assets, made better UI, improved little aspects. It’s far easier to get into the game now (it’s a little complicated).
Here is a before / after screenshot :
Before
After
So after a stale period in my game development activity, I finished the post-compo version of my game, The Pit! If you have already played my game, feel free to try it out!
If you haven’t played it yet, and intend on rating it, please don’t play the post-compo version until after you’ve played and rated the original version here on the LudumDare website
Basically, I had to make a post on r/webgames so get some real feedback, as I feel that everyone around here is too nice due to the fear of accidentally offending someone which could effect ratings on their game, which is understandable. I found myself doing that a bit also. Anyway basically everyone said the controls were confusing, so I tried to focus on that.
Changes:
Enjoy!
All of you guys’ games that I’ve played are great in their own way and you should all be very proud of yourself!!
First I started by making quick prototype using scripts I already had from my previous games.
After getting basic zombie AI and player script working I moved to drawing sprites.
Player needed to rotate around, so I had to use 12×26 sprites size insted of my usual 8×8.
I tried to use color combinations I learned from drawing manga.
I didn’t have any idea how to draw walk cycle from isometric perspective, so I sticked to simple animation.
For some reason I decided to use unity animation system.
Considering how much time I spend on turning off settings that break pixel art animations and setting up animator tree it wasn’t a good decision.
Then I added two additional enemy types: one that follow player and shoot him when he’s close enough and turret.
Score system was very easy to impement, I wish I spent a little more time on it and add some animations or effects.
After that I drew a simple enemy sprite.
I though that I will differentiate enemies by adding color variations, but it didn’t looked right so every one of them looks the same.
(Another thing I didn’t do for no reason and now I regret it.)
Remembering how sterile my previous games looked I added few things lying on the floor.
If I had some more time I would add script placing them randomly but the deadline was looming and the game still wasn’t fully functional
.
Next few hours I spent on setting up UI panels.
Thanks to TheNumberGuy I didn’t have to struggle with music, so I just generated a few sounds using bfxr.
I playtested game, tweaked few values quickly and uploaded it on itch.io and ludum dare.
I still had some time until deadline, but it was already past midnight and I was afraid I will do something stupid or just fall asleep on my keyboard.
What went well:
The game doesn’t have any horrible bugs, everything works and I really like the final look of it.
What went wrong:
Adding a few details would help the game a lot.
I wish I added some kind of shop, bonuses or weapon variation to keep players longer in game.
Also the game feels very ordinary, it is just a top down shooter.
Seeing all of the other ludum dare games I noticed that adding a little twist to game, makes it much more outstanding and interesting.
Conclusion:
I won’t probably continue developing this game but it was a nice opportunity to quickly test my skills, experiment a little and deploy game in small amount of time.
Excuse the self promotion but…
I have added a Post LD updated version of my game Arena 3000 onto my itch io page here. It includes most of the features that I ran out of time before I could add in, trap doors hazards, health pickups, a boss fight, an ending, controller support, balancing so its possible to survive more than 30s , more bug fixes etc. Give it a try and let me know what you think or play the original submission and rate it if you haven’t already, but be warned its kind of hard.
PostMortem
Wasted too much time on artwork, instead of adding in gameplay features that would have had more value for the amount of time it took. Next time will definitely try implement all the features first with placeholder art, I thought i would save some time by just dong the final version first and not having to spend time swapping them out because that seems a bit of a chore in unity. Probably a bad idea. Was a bit too lazy on the first day because it didn’t occur to me I needed to leave time at the end for play testing/balancing. Also wasted a couple of hours because of unity acting weirdly, I spend a couple of hours wondering why my prefab was not doing the appropriate things for its layers and in the end fixed it by just recreating the prefab from scratch. Thanks unity.
In case its helpful to anyone unity tip #2 my Post LD webGL build was failing mysteriously when trying to run it in a browser but fine in unity. It turns out this was fixed by converting my larger .wav files into mp3 before adding them to unity. From what I read unity is meant to convert them automatically when doing the web gl build, so it should make no difference, but it did for me. thanks again unity.
Anyway this was my first LD so I am pretty happy to have managed to submit a (sort of) playable game in the 48 hours.
As an unexpected bonus I also had a great time playing some of the other entries, a lot of the best I have played have already been mentioned here so i won’t repeat them.
Here is one I really enjoyed that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere Tomb of the Glitch King, a simple but cool 2d pixelly, puzzely thing. Give it a try
Happy New Year everyone – If you are out drinking tonight, keep an eye on where you are walking
ROOM BUILDER POSTMORTEM
This was my first time entering a game jam but I managed to make a quite complex entry. Let’s analize the mistakes I made and what I did right during the development of Room Builder.
WHAT WENT RIGHT:
THE IDEA: Avoiding the unknown
After seeign the theme I brainstormed some ideas. I thought about making a platformer with only one level where a new obsticle is added every time you complete it, a game about customizing and improving a hotel room, a point-and-click , a top down zombie shooter…
But some of these seemed too complicated for me to do, so I decided to stick to the genres I had experience in and made a top-down shooter about repairing your room’s walls, shooting at enemies and building turrets, which is what I made.
I surely had experience on top-down shooters (this one was my forth!) but I underestimated the building part! Even though making the building mechanics was quite a challenge the core mechanics were easy to make cause I had the experience.
SCOPE: Make something you can actually make
Maybe I aimed a little high but still the scope was very small and totally doable in 48 hours. If I had chosen to make the “deep-storied” top-down zombie shooter full of cutscenes and different endings that I imagined during the brainstorm, I would’ve ran into problems. Choosing something relatively small, with simple mechanics is ideal for 48 hour challenges.
STICKING TO THE IDEA
I’ve heard of many people that didn’t like their idea and changed it in the middle of the competition. So when I was thinking about what game to make I made sure I chose something that I was able to make and that I would enjoy working on so I wouldn’t want to change plans later.
TIME MANAGEMENT: Starting with a minimum viable product
Everyone knows developers are bad at predicting the time they need. For that reason I made a list of the minimum features I had to implement to make my game something “decent enough to upload on LD” and I didn’t add anything else until those features were done. This ensured that if I ran out of time I could still upload my game. Once I had those I started making the music, the shop, the UI, improving the sprites… but I knew I had something playable.
WHAT WENT WRONG:
LACK OF PREPARATION: Not knowing the tools
I had played around a bit with sfx tools and a music generator, but that wasn’t enough. During the game jam I had to learn how to make gifs to make screenshots of my game, learn how to use the music generator (abundant-music.com) properly, how to make a song loop with Audacity (which took a hole hour!) and how to upload a game on itch.io. All of these could’ve been avoided just with some more preparation, and would’ve saved me a lot of time.
NOT FOCUSING ENOUGH ON GAME DESIGN
The idea and the pitch were clear, but I didn’t think much about the details: what items the monsters would drop, how you would make the turrets, what would be needed to make turrets…
So all of these were answered basicly with “whatever is easier to implement”.
The consequence of that was that the difficulty curve was irregular and some choices that were meant to be meaningful (like choosing to build walls or build turrets) were not meaningful at all (building walls was a waste of resources, turrets were extremely better).
That could’ve been solved with some trial and error, but I wasted my time on little details and improving the art, instead of making the game as fun as possible.
CONCLUSION:
Even though I made some mistakes during the development, Room Builder turned out very well and I’m really happy with the result. The difficulty curve is a bit odd: the game starts very hard and seems impossible but then once you’ve died a couple times and know what’s most efficient, the game becomes really easy. Appart from that, Room Builder is amazing and very fun. You totally need to play it.
———-> PLAY ROOM BUILDER HERE <———-
THE FUTURE:
I haven’t stopped working on the game since its release on Ludum Dare. The bugs, difficulty problems and game design problems are fixed. I’m currently adding new features and improving the game. I plan to upload the final version in one month or so, and it will feel totally different. Follow me on Twitter to be updated on the development of Room Builder!
Last version of Room Builder (not available yet)
———-> PLAY ROOM BUILDER HERE <———-
Ludum Dare 37 was my third ludum dare so far, and the first time I tried to familiarize my self with the community. In my opinion out of the dares that I have done, I have enjoyed this one the most.
Day 1: When ludum dare started with the theme of “One Room”, I was a bit skeptic at first, but I was able to get the base mechanics done before I went to bed. like this ludum dare would be the best one I would have.
Day 2: Most of this day was adding the lose condition and how I would convey the instructions and story to the player. I decided to just give them a .pdf file that comes with the game to educate them on how the game would work. I ran into a lot of problems that day but I was able to make it so you had more buttons to press, telling them whats wrong by using flashing lights and text to move across the screen and I made a cutscene for the game when the timer ran out. At this point the game was done. I posted it later that day. The part about it was that I was shooting for the 72 hour version but I was able to make it to the 48 hrs. But I signed my game in as a jam game so if I wanted to update my game in the next 24 hrs. I was able to do so and if I messed up on the game to the point that it was irreversible I still had the 1st version that I had already posted. This gave me the ability to experiment with my game and do whatever I wanted with the game
.
Day 3: Since I had a finished product. i could begin to build on it. I ended up not having much time that day but I was able to add music and more situations for the player to go through.
What went right :
What went wrong :
It, was hard to find stuff that I personally found “wrong”, but I am sure there are some things that are defined as “wrong”, with my game that I can’t see but I would appreciate the criticism to help me improve my game.
Overall, I learned a lot about the community of the game industry and about the creation of games. More than any other ludum dare, I have participated in. I am planning on improving on this game in the near future. In fact I am working on an update for it right now. From this experience I have enjoyed it so much more than the previous dares. The last two dares I participated in were filled with stress and fear of not meeting the deadline without sacrificing a mechanic or something that would make the game really special. This one was different. I was able to get most of the stuff I wanted done, done without the fear of the deadline. This might be the only time I don’t have the fear of the deadline on my back. But, I will be back for the next ludum dare, for better or for worse.
See you next year!
My game : NPPTF
*May not be good but music is music.
For some, it is already 2017 😀 Have a great weekend everyone!
Shameless self-promotion alert
Hello everyone and happy new year!
We are two brothers from Moscow (Russia) who had almost no experience in game development 3 years ago. We’ve been participating in Ludum Dare for the hmmm… 10th time, I guess and thanks for LD we gained a lot of game development experience over these years. We started from shitty 2D pixel-art graphics on XNA engine ending with 3D multiplayer games with PBR materials. Here are our previous most successful and less successful entries.
And this time we made a first-person puzzle game.
Lighthouse Mystery. Ludum Dare #37
This LD’s theme was ‘One Room’ and this time we decided to make a first-person game so we end up with some sort of puzzle game. But one room literally wasn’t enough for us to make a great puzzle so we decided how to stick to the theme without forcing player to stay in one room actually. And then we got an idea of “one room, multiple exits”. After discussing the idea we end up with the door like in “Howl’s Moving Castle” animated film by Hayao Miyazaki. It had a special lever which changed the destination of the door.
First draft of our idea
So we made a similar one door. Now we had a concept of multiple external enviroments and one room which was a start and an exit point at the same time, perfect for a puzzle game. But player needed something to do in the ‘outside’ world so we modified our door a bit and created a concept of a key which is actually a cube charged with a specific color. Each color leads to a different world and is consumed by the door after changing door’s destination. So player now had a purpose in the outside worlds: to charge his key by the color of the next world. And we just needed to add some puzzle component into the worlds itself. We took some inspiration from Portal and Talos Principle games and decided to use quite simple laser mechanics with emitters, mirrors and receivers. Last one designed to charge player’s key. And also we added an impossible gravity, just because I had an extra time.
We really wanted to make something aesthetically clean, light and nice in the outside world. At least we tried We created floating islands with nice grass on it and added a huge accent in each level – a lighthouse, it is inspired by Bioshock Infinite time-line concept with lighthouses:
We also placed multiple lighthouses on each level :)
The game was developed by me and my younger brother in 72 hours, i was doing all of the programming and unity level design while he was modelling and drawing stuff. We already had an experience participating in ludum dare so our time management had no issues and let us to develop the game without hurrying. For my opinion, the key for it is prioritising all tasks and distincting details from core gameplay and doing most important things first. We didn’t hurry at all, cause we know that it could be worse.
Part of our prioritized checklist (on a real whiteboard)
You can checkout our timelapse videos:
The only problem of our game was the sound. We are not skilled in sound design and the only person who could help us with that was unreachable. But i still wanted to try create sound myself without downloading it from freesounds.org or whatever, so a took a mic and an and started making noises in front of it. It took about 6 hours for me for recording, postprocessing and putting results into the game. The result is not that bad, i think. Unfortunately we had not enough time for recording music but we are still working on it.
This is how we recorded sounds. At least we tried.
I think we succeeded this time. We’ve done what we’ve planned and pretty happy with the result. Probably we should continue to develop our game but it still requires a lot more work to be done.
What do you think about the game? Please write your opinion here or in comments to the game itself.
Btw, our source code is open and published on github.
We’re getting pretty close to the end of the voting period. So before everything is over next week, here are three more games to vote on before the winners are announced!
The Games:
Miss out on earlier episodes? Grab the complete playlist for Ludum Dare 37 and catch up!
Got a game to Submit? Then use this handy dandy Google Form! It’s fancy!
Thanks for watching! =D
Tags: Cervidae, Heaven Inc, Larry Does Ludum, Ludum Dare Showcase, VIdeo Series, Witching Morning
Starting Up
LD37 was my first game jam, and I was looking forward to entering for quite some time. At the last minute, I asked my little brother, Alan, if he wanted to join in, and he agreed! So we got the “One Room” theme and while brainstorming, Agoraphobia came up. Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder regarding unsafe environments, and people with agoraphobia will often shut themselves in and try to never leave their house. So in our game, our character would be someone who’s scared of facing the outside dangers, choosing to remain in their one room. The game play conflict would then come from the outside dangers coming inside, and if the player wins, overcoming their fear.
We decided to create a male and female character that would have some game play and story differences. We also added our third gender, the attack helicopter, because we couldn’t stop laughing about it. Luckily, the attack helicopter was a good testing bed and Alan knocked out the art for it and its related assets really quickly. The game was going to be a top down shooter, and I added the 5 hotzone objects to add a defense element. Our enemies were going to represent physical dangers as well as social and mental pressures, like, debt, “Why aren’t you married yet,” or “When are you going to have kids.”
Game Programming
I had some experience with Unity 2D so I went with that to make the game, although I hadn’t touched it for over a year. While I was brushing up on the engine for the couple weeks prior to the jam, there was a lot of things I forgot to do. I lost a lot of time fighting with the GUI and animations. I decided to try out Scriptable Objects in various parts of the project. They were great for defining both the individual waves and the series of 15 waves that made up a play through. They were an awful idea for defining the spawn points (should have used GameObjects) and probably overkill for the character data (prefabs for each character would have been better).
One of the main criticisms we’ve seen from our comments were that the controls were too slippery. On Unity’s rigidbody2D there is a linear drag setting, and it was zero. Oops! Maybe I should have used kinematic rigid bodies, anyway.
Another criticism that came up even more was lack of feedback of getting hit and doing damage to enemies. I think this was our biggest flaw as the side panel health GUI was the only way to know if you actually got hit and were in danger of dying. The helicopter’s anti-air wave could be especially difficult, and in general the female characters lower health could lead to dying almost instantly.
Content
We made 3 characters, and each character had their own projectile, stats, themed enemies, a series of 15 waves, and an ending paragraph. About 5 waves were unique to that character and featured its themed enemies, often in excess. We also had 10 generic waves that filled in the gaps, many of these were the hot zone defense waves. Each wave had a string to play when it started, ended, and if you lost on that wave. There were also 3 health pickups, and around 15 enemies. The enemies had 8 spawn-in spots and could chase the player, wander randomly, or move to a hot zone.
A few of our comments praised the amount of content, and a few expressed concern with neglecting the above criticisms to make it. I won’t disagree with the latter, but I will say, making prefabs for new enemies and pickups, tweaking their values was all pretty easy with the scripts I made and unity’s inspector. Alan was able to knock out art and the background music in parallel to my coding. What I definitely wasted too much time on was the GUI; I spent a bunch of time trying to get the speech bubbles and wave story text to appear and move around with the player character. I had to rush making a lot of the text in the last hour, so we didn’t get to tell the story we wanted to. And most unfortunately, we didn’t get to making our puppy bomb pickup, which was going to act as a wave clear for the player:
Post-Jam Build
I’ve already added in a 1.5 second invulnerability phase with a little red circle that fades in and out once you get hit. I’ve also created animations for 2 of the 3 player projectiles when they hit an enemy. The girl’s teddy bear breaks up in a pretty hilarious way, if I may say. I’ve tweaked the health levels to be a little less punishing. Nice buffs, right? Well, I’ve also nerfed the fire rate! I left the base fire rate value in the inspector set to 0, so all the characters had no delay in between shots. Oops, again! All in all, I think the post jam build will be a better experience and better balanced.
Summary
My brother and I had a lot of fun with LD37 and we’ll definitely be participating in future jams. I’ll upload the post-jam build after another review and after the voting period is finished. This was a great learning experience, both in game programming and project management. Special thanks to the Ludum Dare runners, and all those who commented on our game. Happy New Year!
FUCK YOU ALL!!!
just joking!, was trying to get your attention.
A real-time strategy game that I made for my christmas challenge to myself. Play it and rate it so that I know if I improved compared with my ludumdare 37 compo entry. Thanks for the time.
By the way, Try playing the different levels.
Play it here: https://doppelgunner.itch.io/zpeed-wrapping (html5)
Watch the game demo here:
Watch the process here:
Tags: 2D, 2d unity, christmas, pixel art, real-time, realtime, strategy, youtube
After several compos, I must say that this is the first time I like to play and replay my own game after the compo. It’s really fun!!! (if you like action shmup like old retro games)
Also has nice comments from gamers, so I decided to share this entry with everyone. If you have ten minutes of fun with it, will be enough reward for me.
Thanks!
