I'm provisionally in for this. Not attempted Ludum Dare in ages but I'm not busy this weekend and would love to make something. Gonna try and keep it small and sweet though.

Hey folks, I'm trying to make a game that revolves around logic gates puzzles. Image below of progress so far however as I've not done input and outputs yet the image doesn't really mean much yet.

I want to get the basic logic puzzle mechanics working today because my real vision for this is to have the puzzles not just be an abstract mouse based puzzle game but have the puzzled actually spatialised in a 3D world manipulated by a character avatar.

I'm working on something similar for a much bigger project so figured I could use LD to play around with similar concepts on a smaller scale in a different direction.

Day 1 was mostly building the abstract logic gate puzzle system

Day 2 was mostly building the 3D avatar driven world

Tomorrow hoping to bring all the elements together, including creating a puzzle set

Feeling pretty good about how well this is coming together though I am expecting to need a bit more time after the Jam ends to feel compltely happy with the result, but I'm confident I will be submitting a playable game tomorrow.

Not taken part in Ludum Dare in a while and even longer since I actually finished during the event. Gonna really do my best this weekend to make something. Goal is to work on something for original Playstation 1 hardware. So I'm going to get a basic 3D framework working over the next few nights so I can hit the ground running with a real game on Saturday.

Normally I don't do any coding prior to the event, however since I'm working on native PS1 hardware and ancient SDKs if I don't do any prep I'm going to spend all weekend in SDK docs instead of making a game.

I know there's no rules for the jam but I'm still justifying it to myself as "not cheating" that all the stuff I'm doing would be available out of the box if I was going with old-faithful-Unity.

So I've now got a basic graphics framework with some features I may need including: - 3D tiled environment - 2D billboard sprites - Camera rotation - Repeating animated background (you can't really see it in the GIF)

I've got a few more features I want to get ready by tomorrow night, as well as testing it on real hardware and not just an emulator. So hopefully one more progress update before kickoff time.

Not long now until the theme reveal so it's time to wrap up my Playstation 1 framework prep. I didn't get all the features I wanted ready for the start of the jam but I got more than enough to cut out a lot of wasted time over the weekend. Even dealt with one showstopper bug already that I'm glad to have resolved ahead of the start time.

Last thing was to make sure it all runs on real Playstation hardware and as you can see from the GIF it's looking good. Shame I don't have a CRT in the house for a more authentic look.

Now to wait for the theme reveal to completely throw all my prep work to the wind but hey that's part of the fun.

"May the theme be ever in your favour!"

Theme seems fun. Not my preference but I think there's a lot of possibilties. Not going to start working on anything until tomorrow so going to use tonight to ponder on some ideas and see what leaps out at me.

Alright I think I've got idea, to be honest it was largely the direction I was thinking before the theme was announced. Usually I have an idea going in and the theme distrupts it completely, this time around the theme is more of detour to my original idea.

Came up with an idea last night then overslept through the morning. I say overslept but tbh I'm happy to have a nice Saturday lie-in as that's going to give me the energy for the long day ahead.

Absolutely blown away by all the progress images everyone's posted. While I slept some of you already got awesome games up and running. Got a lot of catching up to do today.

I'm about to get into coding properly now, but I already spent some time turning my idea into a design while I enjoyed a fairly standard pizza for dinner.

Time to kick off properly!

Goal today is get the core gameplay working as soon as possible, want to avoid hoping the game comes together at the end of day 2. So I'm avoiding polish right now and just focusing on raw tactical gameplay. First step, got character selection and movement working.

Still going to be working for a few more hours but I think it's time for a check in on how my Halloween PS1 tactics game is coming along.

A lot of the core mechanics are in place. You've got a team of characters you can move around, and enemies you can attack. The combat system itself was a lot of the day's work since it's the core mechanic. Though it needs a bit of visual polish (seeing the dice you're rolling, attack animations, etc..) but I'm focusing on gameplay not polish right now.

Core mechanics still missing: - Objectives, as I don't want the missions to come down to pure combat alone. - Enemy AI, they don't fight back yet. I've got a fairly simple rules based AI in mind. - UNSTABLE, the theme isn't in yet. That's going to be the decaying game boad as you play. - Special Abilities, I want each character to have a special ability beyond move and attack.

Going to keep working tonight to get 1 or 2 of those in. Once all four of them are done tomorrow I'm going to start looking at game presentation. Right now it's a bit drab and there's a lot I want to with the visuals and sound. However I've been burned in past jams doing visuals and audio too early. So I'm front loading mechanics this time.

I will say I was a bit worried working on such an old system might hinder me a lot in the jam. Not being able to fall back to all the power of Unity that I'm used to. However in practice, with the framework I setup ahead of the jam the Playstation hardware hasn't held me back at all today.

I'll admit I've not been pushing myself too hard this Ludum Dare. Been sleeping lots, taking breaks to relax and I even started today with a pretty nice meal to get myself going.

Despite the leisurely pace the game is going well. Main things I need to get done today is the objective based missions and enemy AI. Once they're in the game should be fully playable and the rest of my jamming time can be on polish.

Visuals and sound still need a lot of work but gameplay first, I've ended too many jams with good looking games you can't really play. Anyway enough procrastination, time to get on with it.

Playstation spooky tactics now has objective gameplay and enemy AI. It's still not much to look at visually but I'm near mechanically complete. I just need triggers for win and failure and I can move on to Polish.

Though there's obviously lots more I can (and hope to do) with the mechanics after the Jam. I really want to use the remaining time today and what time I have after work tomorrow to get it all looking and feeling nice.

Though it took longer than I wanted I'm super pleased to have the gameplay working so far ahead of the end of the jam. I'm guilty too often of building towards games that are only playable right at the end of game jams. I'm pushing myself to get into a better habit of critical pathing gameplay first.

Jam version of my Playstation 1 spooky tactics game is done and playable and out into the wild.

As is tradition I had to scale back my scope so a lot of features I wanted to include are still in the to-do column. So I'm going to spend more time on this over the coming week to try and get it to where I wanted it to be before I move on. The jam version is fully playable but not super interesting as a tactics game at the moment.

However I'm super pleased with getting this done. I'd gotten worse at game jams over the years as I got better at coding and therefore more ambitious. This is the first jam in a while where I've delivered some playable on time and has really helped me out of a bit a "failure to release" funk.

Also it's been really fun working on the Playstation 1 hardware with the old SDKs and pipelines. I definitely want to do a bunch more with the PS1.

20 years, Ludum Dare 50. How could I not get involved?

No plans for the weekend so theme permitting I think I might make a short point and click adventure. In a classic 9-verb adventure gaming mood at the moment.

Since quite a few people having posting tips and advice I thought I'd share my main advice from over 10 years of game jamming, and it's fairly simple:

Make a really small game, and finish it!

I know I'm not the only person peddling this classic which should prove how important it is. I would say this especially true for new jammers, but trurthfully as a more experienced jammer that's often led to ambition and hubris that has left me without a finished game at the end of a weekend.

If you target a game you can make in half a day, then I think realistically you're going to find it's going to take a lot longer. Then if you do finish in a day you'll have a whole extra of day to polish and make it really special.

Finding a way to get yourself to the finish line is much more important than the "learning experience" you get from another failed project. I've already got the learnings from countless unfinished good intentions. Every time I finish a small project these days there's a lot more satisfaction sharing that with everyone than there would be from a bigger game I couldn't finish.

Ideally by the end of day 1 you're playing your whole game through in some rough form. So if you find yourself at the end of day 1 with something that's a long way to go still, I would strongly encourage you to start cutting like crazy. Get the scope down as much as you can.

Now that's all said, as a disclaimer most advice is autobiographical. I'm preaching to myself and my own past mistakes more than your unique circumstances. If this doesn't fit you, do what you want, as long as you have fun then the whole weekend should be worthwhile no matter how it turns out.

tl;dr: I hope folklore wins, it's quite flexible and I'm already going in with baggage of the kind of game I want to make.

I think some of my most creative works from game jams have come from going in as a blank slate and designing entirely around the theme. However on the flip side I don't take part in a lot of game jams each year and usually my main motivator is I have some sort of game concept in my head I want to play about with. In those situations I end up trying to force the theme to fit and it may be less creatively pure but it benefits from a lot of pre-existing motivation and excitement.

My first game project I released publicly was "the white chamber" back in 2005 a point and click adventure game inspired by the LucasArts games I grew up with. Though stylistically it was a lot more inspired by anime, Silent Hill, Twin Peaks and a bit of Event Horizon. People seemed to like it.

I spent a lot of time after "the white chamber" trying to make games that were more creatively challenging for myself and more commercially viable than old school point and click adventure games. To... mixed success. Now 17 years later when I no longer worry about making things that can sell and reach an audience I find myself drawn back to the games I grew up on. I want to make adventure games again.

For Ludum Dare in particular I want to make a classic 9 verb pixel art old school game. I've got some ideas about a setting that I think I can pull off quickly and feel excited to work within. So now I just need a theme flexible enough to go ahead with that plan. So some of the more mechanical sounding themes like "Make Connections", "Single Resource" and "Combine" are certainly workable but not ideal for the corner I've already painted myself into.

So in short, I'm campaigning for your vote for FOLKLORE

Folklore 2022

the theme you can trust to get away with(tm)

With the jam kicking off in a few hours I wanted to spend a bit of time making sure my toolset is up and running with no major issues.

Since I'm planning to make a classic LucasArts style 9-verb point and click adventure game I'm using: - Unity - Adventure Creator (with 9-verb plugin) - Photoshop

So here's a sample scene I put together using some placeholder assets you might recognise:

It's pretty rough but it proves the core that the toolset works and shouldn't get in the way of making a game.

Not long now until kick off, I hope you're all ready for a great weekend!

The votes are in and it's time to say we on the Folklore campaign are forced to concede the victory. I want to say that I think the Folklore team ran a fair campaign with a good will effort toward the theme. We now accept that what the voters are looking for in this time is to "Delay the inevitable". So we humbly step down to support our new lawfully elected theme and will help them get on with the business of making games.

Okay I've not really got an idea yet, I'm still mulling it over. However while I do that, I knew one thing the game absolutely had to have was a big omnious ticking Nixie style clock. So I've made this first to inspire everything else to come.

You can hold out for now. You can even hold out for a while. But you can't hold out forever!

I already had a rough idea of the game I wanted to make. So although making an adventure game is typically very design first I wanted to stick with one of my traditions of getting the game playable as soon as possible. I don't feel like a game jam has really begun until I'm controlling my character walking around the screen.

So with a combination of an Art Deco asset pack and drawing over a template character, along with the countdown clock I built earlier I've got my first room up and running:

With that out of the way I needed to focus a bit on the structure and scope of the game. It needs to be simple enough to be buildable in a day (so I have another day for polish) but interesting enough for adventure game players to sink their teeth into. While I mulled that over I started my day with a very over indulgent lunch.

What I've settled on for game structure for now is a kind of escape room type setup. There's a vault door you need to open and there's three simple clues to open the door. However each of these clues is going to be obtained by solving a puzzle in another room. So that's four puzzles rooms and the inside of the vault to make.

Scope wise this is a little larger than I'm comfortable with, and depending how the day goes I may cut one of the puzzle rooms to keep this within a sensible LD scope. Let's see how the day goes.