After an all day struggle, it’s finally done! Really interesting to see someone else react to the game. Feel free to tell me what you think about it!
You can play it on your browser. Look for the itch.io link in my entry.
Here’s my entry: Ludum Dare Entry
Hi all!!
Finish!! I completed my second Jam with a new game! Are you going to be ready to escape from the words of the best writers?
Hope you enjoy! Check it out! PLAY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Nd8mpQiyg&feature=youtu.be
Although my original ideas were a bit unrealistic, I managed to get something playable with a goal.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=112917
Bring on the next LD, had a great time and learnt alot.
Now that I’ve had a nice long sleep, it’s time for a little postmortem for my game, and the events that led up to its conception.
Surprisingly, this could be the most effort I have put into a game jam, despite my limitations at the time. I had Christmas-related responsibilities to take care of, and knew I would have as little as 12 hours to actually make a game if I wanted to go for the Compo, which I always did.
CIRCUMSTANCES
I arrived home at about 8 pm, with the deadline being 13 hours away. I had woken up at 9 am on Sunday morning as well, which meant 24 hours of no sleep. I had a sneaking suspicion I was just going to keel over and fall asleep halfway through. But, either through some misplaced pride or an act of defiance, I got started anyway.
During the theme-voting period, since I knew I was going to be busy, I purposely voted for all the themes that implied small and simple, like Small World, Only 5 Minutes, Simplicity, etc. Thankfully, One Room got chosen, so I had an excuse to scope the game down and make it more manageable.
When you’re not a programmer, you’re bound by some pretty weird limits when making a game. Since I use drag-and-drop code almost exclusively, a physics-based game was actually far easier to do than a turn- and grid-based one. At the time, feeling rather pessimistic about my chances of success, I decided to use this as a stepping stone. I’ve always wanted to make a dungeon dungeon crawler, especially for mobile. For someone at my skill level, that was a tall order, but I figured that even if I didn’t finish it, I still would have built a framework I could use in the future.
GAME DESIGN
There were a few reasons why I chose a dungeon-crawler, besides the fact that I had a fascination with them. One big factor was that I could skimp out on the art and sound, since they weren’t that important. I mean, I still needed some sprites, but having animation was something that was entirely optional. Sound was also not much of a factor, seeing as the encounters and stuff were going to be heavily text-based. Randomly generating the background music took me about an hour, which I could afford.
Most of my efforts went into the ‘programming’, so to speak, abusing the crap out of the engine’s drag-and-drop limitations to come up with fast solutions that worked. The grid-based movement and random generation were actually the easiest to do, especially the random map generation. Me and an old friend came up with this technique years ago, which I’m still using to this day due to how bloody simple it was. Below is an illustration.
Each wall spawner creates one wall right next to itself.
It’s not the most perfect system; sometimes it would generate squares that the player couldn’t access. And the pathways are all over the place. Still, if your objective is simply to get from one corner of the room to the next, it worked.
The meat of the programming was poured into the so-called turn-based system. Seeing as I didn’t know how to even begin something like that, I just… hardcoded every turn, and slowly carved out a framework along the way. If I found myself doing something over and over, I’d create a new variable to hold that data, or changed the code into something more efficient. What I came up with certainly would be difficult to be used and understood by outsiders, but at least I could make a dungeon crawler much faster by myself if I ever needed to.
The most important aspect, for me, was that it was mobile-friendly as well. After scratching my head over the sort of UI that would be used, I experimented a little and found a nice way to make a choose-your-own-adventure style encounter system with unobtrusive UI. From there, I could probably branch out in to an actual combat system, and maybe into an inventory system as well. Time will tell.
Even though I’m quite happy to have more or less leveled up in terms of ‘programming’ logic and systems design, the inner game designer in me feels that the game experience still fell short. The game is pretty easy once you figure out what to do against each encounter, and the randomization doesn’t add too much. Even though it’s a good thing I learnt a lot of new things, the fun factor of the game was compromised in the process. I really do want to improve on this, make a more robust system that has real choices that the player has to make. Right now, the whole thing feels like a tech demo of sorts. Works, but not necessarily the most engaging.
Conclusion
Honestly, at the end of the day, I’m very relieved to have been able to submit something for the compo, given the sort of time frame I had and the scope of the game I was attempting to do. What’s more, I have a (relatively) solid base to lean on if I wanted to make more mobile dungeon crawlers. I would love to continue working on this, but right now, the Stencyl Jam is going on, and I can’t resist going for it.
Still, that doesn’t mean I won’t spend some time playing all the amazing games submitted (or are going to be submitted) for the jam. If you do decide to try out The One Room Dungeon, make sure to leave a comment so I can give some love to your games as well!
So I’m nowhere near finishing my game, too much art to do. Fortunately it’s easy to program, that’s the one upside of a point & click game.
Forgot to post that I’d submitted yesterday. It was 2am and I was tired.
Anyway, here’s my game. Inspired by a mini-game from “Digimon world”.
You play a store clerk with no experience, in a barter heavy economy. Best of luck!
Room of Shadows! Compo Entry – This is my first game that has a beginning and an ending. All my other projects are just small 1 scene core feature examples.
I had tons of fun trying to crunch out game play with the 48 hour time frame looming over my head. I started late, so I lost about 8 hours and also slept >.<
Originally I was building for isometric 3D, but ended up swapping into top down orthographic because it looked better at the time. I ran out of time to do audio, and add in enemy models and animations (so you get to fight placeholder spheres for now). Had zero time to play test / adjust settings of the game for difficulty and performance. My computer is pretty good, so I never saw performance problems with the current settings. Attack range of the enemies could be increased a bit, sometimes they stop just out of range. Oh well, download it an tell me what you think!!
I’m kinda burnt out, but I may spend the rest of the day adding music / sound effects, wall destruction effects, enemy models and animations. If I can finish it all, I’ll post it for the jam event if that is allowed.
A retro platform survival game with amazing weaponized powerups, featuring swords, pistols, tanks, fish and many more.
are you rectangular enough to survive in the dark cold dungeon room before you die to loss of time?
Can you survive the chaos in the dungeon room…. or will you get rect?
Game was done in Unity and with a team of 5 you can download the game HERE
THE TEAM
Programmers:
Pihel Saatman
Egon Elbre
Sander Sats
Music:
Mati Kook
Art:
Silver Kontus
Hi there coders and players,
I hope all of you had a good weekend coding games with friends or solo. I had lots of fun, planing my game, thinking about to much features, discarding features… hunting bugs, eating good stuff, drinking too much Coffee… I was sleeping only a few hours… was watching quill18 on twitch.tv and finished my dev-session just in time.
Have a nice time while playing entires and rating games. Thank you!
So… our jam is over. It was a pretty crazy few days. We weren’t huge fans of the theme to begin with, we were hoping for Upgrade Yourself, Chain Reaction or Only 5 Minutes but alas. Fate wasn’t on our side. That all being said, after a few (six) hours of chatting about ideas, we began working on a 2.5D platformer.
The original idea was to write a maze generator, drop the player at the start of the maze and have them run, jump and dodge to the end. We would have generated traps and obstacles throughout the maze to add variety to each time it plays. However, while writing the movement code, we very quickly decided against a common platformer and attempt to achieve movement similar to Super Mario’s water levels. What we ended up with is pretty good (I think).
With this new idea in place, we began steering away from procedural generated levels and opted for a hand designed world, giving us the ability to design trap placement and collectable locations ahead of time, which gave us a further sense of the old school platformer in which we were targeting.
Things that went wrong:
Things that went right:
Have a look at our submission, Squiddy. Leave a comment, start a conversation and have fun! 
I look forward to the rest of the submission, happy jamming to the final people.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=83538
The end approaches. Here’s my latest commit.
Added Powerups. Added Guardian. Added 4 additional weapons with an upgrade system.
Also added basic ui. Fixed despawning to prevent lost entities. Some entities still get lost however. Need to track down that bug.
Just need a bit more polish before submission.
A Screenshot too.
All of my code is available on Github
Good luck everyone else!
TL;DR I made a game about abandoning a space ship with wonkey controls and I’ve love it if you played it: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=21100
I think it’s safe to say everyone ends a jam with a list of cut features bigger than the game itself. This was my first LD using unity, with a theme I wasn’t thrilled about, but I still think my idea was solid. You’re on a spaceship, there’s no gravity, the ship is about to explode, and there’s only one room that matters: the escape pod room.
The original plan was to construct a multi-level ship, generate a couple of routes through the ship (which could require going and getting other things) and adding a couple of random events. I knew some (or most) of this would never get done, ships ended up being a single level. I never got back to the ship generation algorithm, so ships are literally mazes. And rather poor mazes at that. I wanted to do something clever with the player hitbox, but after getting it to be “good enough” I moved on to other things. I wanted the ship to feel lived in, and even started work on some assets for other rooms (you can see the start of this with the ops room) but never finished that either. The whole game is an exercise in “is this good enough for me to move on to the next feature?”.
Whilst I’ve been playing with unity for a few months now, this is the first finished anything I’ve done with it. I had to learn how to do menus, use multiple scenes, fought stupid compiler bugs. (Can’t thank the good denizens of #unity3d on freenode for their last minute “it works on my pc” panic help) I learned a huge amount about how unity prefabs work, about the sketchup importer. I am going to be fucking ready for LD38 I tell you.
But, I finished a game (and finished it on time). I beat Ludum Dare. There are still some bugs, especially to do with the WebGL version, but it’s a game and it’s there! You can play it (if you can get around the control scheme, which a) was designed for more 3D environments and b) never quite finished, you’re supposed to be able to walk along surfaces and latch on when you jump).
I still think the idea is solid. I think I am going to try to make a version two, resurrect some of the ideas from the original concept, bigger better ships, more interactivity, an art style that isn’t “oh gods I’m running out of time”.
Hi all,
Just uploaded my video walkthrough with all five endings shown for Breach Lockdown. Enjoy!
All of your requests have been fixed! This includes the following :
1) Instadeaths are fixed!
2) Full controller support.
3) Added an indication to the blocks that are about to be destroyed.
4) Fixed gem counter.
5) Changed the pitch of the jump sound that made it sound like a glitch
6) Added gem counter in game.
7) Made more precise collision calculated for the player.
8) More gem drops (yay!)
9) Changed (a bit) the box spawning algorithm.
Thanks for playing!
Tags: 2D, gamemaker, GameMaker Studio, GML, hellblocks, ldjam, Ludum Dare, progress, screenshot, update
Hello !
I realize I did not make any post during the contest so I’m gonna make at least one now that it is finished.
It was my third participation, and probably the hardest one for me. The creation process was chaotic, the scenario was changing continuously, and I was really not sure that I would have a working game until the very last hour. My first complete project made with Unity too. But I am glad to say I did it !
This is a very strange game, focused on story and graphics. I’m very curious to see what comments I will get as I really don’t know what to think about it myself 😛
So, if you want to meet this cute little fox :
… then go see my game and enter the Mysterious Room of Dr. Ludum !
And good luck to the participants of the Jam for your last hours !
Hey all, we just managed to finish our Ludum Dare Jam game the Jumping Jeeves. For some of use this is our second LDJAM game, but majority of the people it is the first one. We chose to have a very weird mix of different styles of art styles due to people having different sets of skills and also wanting to try out new things. So we ended up having animated pixel art + voxels + some kind of vector art all meshed up in one game with 3D character.
Please go and try out our game Jumping Jeeves
Anyone up for some hectic hotel management??
Don’t lose all your stars!!!
Check it out here: Five Star Hotel
Android (Google Play), Web, Windows
Just an observation: the most popular LD posts on Twitter and Reddit are all gifs 😀
So maybe think about creating one for you game! (if it fits)
Here is a guide to get you started: https://itch.io/t/12612/creating-a-gif-for-your-game
So here i am , the next day after posting my first Ludum Dare game.What a experience , i must say i did a little underestimated the fun you can have doing this , it a thing to do at least one time if you are bit familiar with any development tool or programming language!
My entry for the compo is The training room , a fps with i think a simple gameplay but effective , at first i was thinking that the game would be to big for me to do in 48h but it seem i did quite good! The final product sure feel unpolish and a bit raw but i did see other people having fun with it and that is the most pleasant of feeling you can have after developping a game. I’m currrently in the process of “Trying” to start my own indie company with my dad (yup dad and son , sound super official a first glance 😉 !?)here at quebec and i must said that This Ludum Dare 37 just reinforce my will to make our first game a reality.
So that it for my post-Ludum Dare update , you will definitively see me for the next one!
Thanks you all for that experience , leaving you with a preview of my work !
Alright, so the hub works and I have my third boss on AI:
The game is almost complete.
Some crucial parts are still missing though:
– Music
– Sfx
– Start and Ending Screen
– Some major tuning
I’ll take my remaining 10 hours and try to squeeze as much as I can out of this.
Looking good!