Honestly; who can go wrong with a special healthbar?!

Meet Frabjous Studios' team for Ludum Dare 53! 🚀

Alex Mills is a naturally caffeinated math and computer science nerd who started leading his first videogame project at the tender age of seventeen. Since then, he's acquired more than ten years of software developer experience and a Ph.D. A proud corporate dropout since founding Frabjous Studios, he is perpetually five years behind on pop culture. He loved the ending to HBO's Game of Thrones.

Gregg Rossetti is a composer, producer, and teacher who specializes in creating both classical and commercial music, as well as occasionally performing. His musical accomplishments include performances across the U.S. and Canada, several commercially-released albums, and hours of music for video games, web-comics, and films.

David "Pixelgazer" Colditz is a budding musician and synth nerd who enjoys whichever esoteric genre of music you've never heard of. He is also an avid appreciator of bread and considers himself an internet connoisseur.

Carlos "Elekkay" Lazo is a freelance artist from Peru who is constantly drawing something -- yes, even as you read this. He loves pizza in any shape and every species of rodent.

Manifesting to this Earth-dimension through a slippage in the primordial Nexus, Jayecifer returns to us as a, hopefully, non-toxic sentient oil with a fondness for pixels and sub-catarrachtactenated-filobian culture.

PinkVirus is a young independent artist and developer 🎨👩‍💻. They love exploring and experimenting with different forms of art, from illustration to animation. 🧐 They enjoy the freedom their work provides and are always looking for new ways to improve their skills and express their creativity. 🚀

Leot Goose was a traveling acrobatic juggling magician by a French mime. When he isn't working in marketing for Fortune 4 companies, he moonlights as a creative game developer. He is an experienced game consultant, and has assisted with the development of several indie games, books, and published TTRPG modules. Call him Mr. Goose.

CaptianSkilly is a young creative working in all of the fields involving music, visual art, and writing. He is trying to make his focus in life the mental health and well being of others, to help to change the world into a more loving and accepting place. He also really really likes taco bell, even after he swore to go organic.

:wave: We're Frabjous Studios and we're excited to be participating! :rocket:

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FrabjousStudios

Check out our submission to meet the team!

WOW I am very impressed by the art that @jaycifer and @Elekkay have been able to come up with! Take a look!

This is PHENOMENAL work. I'm so glad I can be heads down in the code and make game logic.

Check out Twitter for a live video! This has all been done in the last 24 hours!

Hey LDJam! Time to check-in on our Game! Check out our demo reel on Twitter! IT HAS MUSIC! @FrabjousStudios

https://twitter.com/FrabjousStudios

We've got most of the art assets created except for the animations and a few of the backgrounds for some of the documents in the game. Even more character portraits are coming soon (it already feels like we have a lot!)

Next up comes a final few features to finish out the story and add in some complexity; and then we'll be in a spot where we can spend Monday polishing and fixing bugs.

As you can see from the Demo reel, we have more than a few bugs! This has been an absolutely exhilirating project and a joy to work on so far. I'm so stoked for what the next two days will bring!

Our immersive synthwave capitalism simulator is available now! Check it out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/untitled-frabjous-game

Meet your new boss! As a Bankwave employee you'll exercise the highest standards of service for our loyal customers.

We know you'll fit right in with the Bankwave family.

Check out the credits screen on our entry for a treat! We put together a parody of a Radiohead song especially for LDJam. We tried to have it capture the experience of participating. I (Alex) sang the lyrics and @gregg-rossetti ran them through a vocoder!

No Applause LDJam 53

Production’s crawlin' to a standstill / For a game that won’t fulfill you / For users that won’t deal / The art we acquired was crappy / [Bring down the government] / It looks, it looks bleak for us. / I’ll take a silent prize / A pancaked sprite that’s cockeyed

No applause and no reprises / No applause and no reprises / No applause and no reprises / Kindness, kindness

This is the final build / I hope it doesn’t break for

No applause and no reprises / No applause and no reprises / No reforms or compromises / Please

Find me a coffeehouse / A latte would be awesome

No applause and no reprises / No more flaws or compromises / No reward for sacrifices / Please

Singing three takes back-to-back late in the day on Day 2 was a welcome break from coding. It helped me keep going! What did the rest of you do to cope with the stress of the last three days? 🤔

I somehow found this really good title named Aspect Traveller but I lost it! It's not on Itch and I can't find the link! If anyone sees it around please leave a reply here! It deserves to be rateeeeedddd! 😭

Somebody really needs to put in the time to estimate the neonatal-sim to parcel-service ratio of this Game Jam... I'd really like to know just how many doctor simulators I'm missing out on. :T

We are all extremely grateful to Insert Coin for sharing his playthrough of our Jam entry! It's quite enlightening and we'll be making some changes as a result!

In thanks we're asking folks to check out his YouTube channel and consider liking and subscribing! He's a cool dude and totally worth your time!

https://youtu.be/u5GCvmNchxg

@100th-coin you da best! 🙏

We're only one vote away from being ranked on our immersive synthwave capitalism simulator BANKWAVE: Neon Networth! The game that puts you behind the customer service desk at a futuristic bank in the middle of a financial crisis! Will you deliver excellent customer service or show your loyalty to your boss? The only way to find out is to play!

We're releasing v0.4.2 of BANKWAVE: Neon Networth!

We've fixed several game breaking bugs and shortened the amount of time of each 'day' of play to better match the amount of content we've included in the game.

We also have a brief tutorial included on the game page to help players understand what to do -- since Bankwave management isn't very helpful. :T

Check out the updated version to experience the game how it was meant to be played!

Y'all, check out Crates by @karreg! It wasn't working properly yesterday but it's up now and holy cow it's good! If you like one-button games and physics games, you owe it to yourself to check this one out! It's definitely in my top ten so far! 😍

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/crates

We've posted even more bugfixes for our immersive synthwave capitalism simulator BANKWAVE: Neon Networth!

Basically concurrency is hard and shouldn't be attempted in less than 72-hours -- even by experts. :T

Check out the game at Itch.io or here at ldjam.com!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/untitled-frabjous-game

https://frabjous-studios.itch.io/bankwave

Hi Folks! We've just release v0.4.4 of BANKWAVE: Neon Networth. This fix corrects a bug that was getting in the way of the day/night cycle which we implemented, and also improves performance and stability on Windows.

Enjoy your new job!

I've played and rated quite a few games from LDJam53 at this point. Here's a link to my personal blog where I post about my top 8 favorites! Check it out and see if there's anything I've missed.

LDJam 53

Which are your personal favorites? Any I've missed?

We just CONFIRMED the major source of instability for our LDJam entry, BANKWAVE: Neon Networth has been resolved!

It turns out that not every library you find in the wild includes sane defaults. We missed setting up a cache for our text rendering library, resulting in massive performance penalties you can see in the graph below -- taken with pprof. As a result, 20% of our game's time was being spent on creating new images to render letters it had mostly already rendered.

Once we set things up properly and added a tiny 4 MiB cache, the bottleneck was resolved!

I would never have guessed something like this was responsible for a performance hit... definitely a mistake I won't be repeating. Super glad I'm working with Ebitengine and Go -- which comes with fantastic profiling tools (pprof) that created the graphs above and showed me exactly where the problem was.

This should be the very last update for the Jam version of our game! Stay tuned as we get rolling on a Kickstarter! Mailing list will be available soon!

We are officially announcing that we will soon in the future have an announcement to make!

We've decided to continue development on our LDJam53 entry, BANKWAVE: Neon Networth and take it forward into a full-fledged game! As part of that, we're planning to launch a Kickstarter to help fund the final phases of development and marketing.

If you played the game and want to be notified when our Kickstarter launches, join our waitlist here

Thanks to everyone for making Ludum Dare 53 a huge success! We all had a blast and we can't wait to participate again next year...

Our Jam entry: BANKWAVE: Neon Networth, is becoming a full title!

Thanks to everyone at Ludum Dare 53 who played and left encouraging feedback on our game! We're so grateful for your help and support. 🙏

In BANKWAVE you play a VatBorn™ working for Multiverse Mutual -- a megacorp bank headquartered at the heart of the multiverse. Will you be able to escape your dead-end job? The game features a cyberpunk universe, a synthwave soundtrack, and remastered graphics! Sign up for our Kickstarter Waitlist to keep in touch as we continue development!

Visit https://bankwave.frabjousstudios.com to join the wait-list!

Check out our entry here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/untitled-frabjous-game

We just released an EP with the music from our Jam entry: BANKWAVE: Neon Networth. Check out the album art!!

You can give the EP a listen here: https://greggrossetti.bandcamp.com/album/bankwave-jams.

We're planning big things for BANKWAVE. Join the Waitlist for our Kickstarter! https://bankwave.frabjousstudios.com