I thought this year's theme was very open-ended, so I made something I always wanted to make: a minesweeper variant!
In the future, I want to make an RPG-style minesweeper game where almost everything is hidden in tiles — weapons, items, enemies, even NPCs and special encounters.
Leave a comment if you're interested to see more!
Minesweeper the RPG. This is the second time I'm making a Minesweeper variant for LD. Hope I can still finish for Compo, already made almost all assets and sounds and even a bgm after all.
Anyone else like me who almost never read tutorials?
When I play games for fun, I just get into the gameplay and expect it to make total sense right away (good games do, but they are hard to make). And I lose patience in minutes if I don't get the game.
For my game (which is a little bit confusing), I added both an image tutorial and a in game dialogue tutorial. Hopefully keep throwing tutorials at players will help them learn easier. Which one do you like better?
Speaking as a player, the problem with AI, especially AI art, is that they are associated with low effort, and most times they are very low effort. Fun games require a lot of love and effort from the developer. If your game design is actually really good, using cheap (stressing cheap here) AI art is like putting a fancy dish inside a junk food box. People immediately associate it with trash even if the design is good. Programming/amature art is much better because there are a lot of great games made with them, and people associate them with "cool hidden gem made by a random guy", which is the spirit of indie games.
sharing some rules I made to myself before the jam started
(This is my own rules to help myself, not the atucal LD rules of course)
1. stick strickly to theme, the main mechanic or creativity should be directly related to the theme
2. no in game tutorial (keep the complexity down, everything should be intuitive)
Absolutely nice to have and as much as I want to do it, DONT do it in 48hr so I can get some sleep
1. no start menu
2. no save
3. use a screen shot for cover image
4. no extra art for itch/ld page
Try out my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/downtown-signal
Zombie Apocalypse in Downtown Manhattan.
Follow information on radio to survive.
I've always wanted to make a 60 seconds style survival game, and I felt this theme was a good chance to try it out.
- right now there are 3 endings (other than running out of food, water, and ammo).
- 2 of the endings are before day 20, could be missed.
Would add more if had more time:
- more endings
- more missions and storylines in the first 20 days (maybe more items to collect and put on desk, missions to help others, etc)
- super high reward locations, but only available on certain days, and the radio signals you the hint.
- let me know if you have fun ideas!
