It's been ages since I joined a LD! Planets have aligned and this weekend I might be able to join, so I'm quite excited. Tools I will be using:

• Pico8

That's it, it has everything one needs for a game jam. I've made four games and a few prototypes already with Pico8 and I love it!

I would love to know how you do it!

I usually begin by googling up the theme and watching pictures related to it. Yes, depending on the theme it can be hilarious or disturbing, but that's also inspiring. Google, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube... whatever. The more the merrier. Jot things down meanwhile.

Then I usually take a piece of paper and bein drawing a mindmap - you know, the theme written in a bubble in the middle, then nodes coming out from it with different ideas for stories, mechanics, feelings, whatever. I write anything that comes to my mind. IF I already have a genre in mind, perfect. But it I don't? Well, this step can take longer.

Finally I pick two or three promissing ideas and draw a mockup, see how they could look like, expand them a little bit, and 'roleplay' how it would play. The best one wins.

What about you? Do you use some proven method to come up with ideas you find interesting to work with?

I added my game as a Jam game thinking it was the 'I did it all myself in 48h' jam, but now I see that the JAM ENDS countdown keeps running... so I guess I messed up O:D

Does it matter a lot? Is it possible to change it somehow? (I uploaded it yesterday way before the deadline!)

For LD50 I was Home Alone, but didn't scream after shaving. Not too much at least. But this time my whole family is at home, meaning I have to cook and help my kids with some homework. Hope my wife lends me a hand so I can make something with...

Pico8

That's it! Enjoy your weekend!!

Ludum Dare is perfect for experimentation, weirdness and flexing design muscles! After a false start with an idea that was not too appealing I came up with the concept of a land that changed every 10 seconds. If you are not on the ground, you die (the floor is lava!)

I got it working in a few minutes by means of Simplex 3d (x,y,time), and it looked nice. For 5 seconds the ground shifts smoothly, then stays still for 5 more seconds.

Next I made a character that could run and fly around with a jetpack, but just for so long before it overheats and switches off. Just fooling around trying to stay alive was fun, so I went for it.

First system was working. What else? Well, it made sense to pick things up. I thought it could be some kind of miner on a planet where shifting tectonic plates pushed minerals up for you to pick up. Spawning diamonds on local maxima of the Simplex function worked well enough. Trying to reach them before they sunk into the lava was fun!

With that in place I thought it would be a nice touch to score only when dropping collected diamonds somewhere. I added a dropship that lands when the ground is still, then flies back into space. This made collecting diamonds much more interesting and challenging. I discarded collected diamonds slowing you down because of weight. It made the game way too difficult.

Well, on the first version the dropship was some kind of ugly purple bowl, but you get the idea...

Instead, I added some lava creatures that wander around, chasing you if you walk nearby. You can scare them by using your jetpack, which heats it up - so you have to be careful, maybe you won't be able to use it when you need it most! Ha! Dual purpose. That's always nice.

FX, particles, the lava effect, a few details here and there... polishing always takes between five and ten times it took you to make the core game. But I thing it was worth it, I like how the game looks.

All in all I invested 15h between Saturday and Sunday. Tecton Inc. feels solid enough, a fun little arcade to enjoy for a few minutes. I would have wasted quite a few coins on an arcade cabinet with this game back in the day!

Give it a go! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/tecton-inc Hope you like playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!

I'm in! Once again I'm going solo, using PICO8, which keeps ideas constrained by default. My last three entries were also made with Pico8 - I love using it in game jams, makes things easier. I'm really looking forward to a full weekend making a silly game!

See you there!

You are a frog, so life is simple: jump on waterlilies, eat flies and play pool the way frogs play pool. Some of them, at least.

Play here

Fresh air, tasty flies and huge lily pads to jump on. Ah, a frog's life is a happy life. Go, try it here! Just try not to swim for too long of koi will eat you!

POOL FROG! Once again, I ended up making a fast and simple arcade where the goal is simply getting the highest score, beating your best by mastering jumping. Which is usually my goal at game jams: small games that can be easy to pick up and play, trying to polish them to death.

I enjoy entering game jams with Pico8, a fantasy console with harsh limitations: 128x128 pixels, 16 colors, 4 sound channels and even a limit in the amount of tokens - code, that is. So I guess that just using Pico8 to make this game satisfied the game jam theme! Still, I made a one-screen arcade where space is limited by gameplay space (you can't leave the pond) and game mechanics - you can run out of safe spots to stand on.

TIME MANAGEMENT IN A GAME JAM

I usually distribute time in the same way during 48h game jams:

• Wait for the theme to be revealed, which may happen during Friday afternoon or Saturday midnight. If I'm awake, great. I used to wake up to find out, but these days I prefer to sleep a bit more.
• On Saturday, wake up at 8am. Brainstorm ideas until 9am. Have breakfast. Consider implications for the most promising. By 10am I must have chosen one.
• Before lunch (say 2pm), core gameplay must be working.
• Start again at 4pm. Before dinner, most of the game should be completed.
• Go to bed and have some sleep. This time I stopped at 8pm and even watched a move with my family.
• Wake up at 8am on Sunday. Add content (usually FX and music), menu, gameover, polish.
• Before lunch the game should be finished.
• After lunch, prepare itchio page and publish. There should be no coding at this point.

So... mental and physical health FIRST. I'm here to have fun, not to torture myself.

BRAINSTORMING

I tend to use a mix of methods: Look for synonyms, browse related images (google and pinterest, mainly), draw mindmaps, have a look at my ideas notebook... I may also chat a bit with ChatGPT. It may surprise you!

This time, and because of a recent conversation in Mastodon, I wanted to do something related to pool mechanics - which fit the theme! What I'm not quite sure is how I came up with a frog being the one launching billiard-ball/lily pads around...

• Player is a frog on a pond standing on lily pads.
• Jump would be something like golf games, or Worms: choose angle and jump power.
• When jumping, you launch the lily pad you are standing on in the opposite direction.
• Originally, there was a hole where you had to put waterlilies in. I even coded it, but it was not fun.
• Bumping lily pads with each other increases score.
• Falling into the water attracts koi, more the longer you stay in water. You have to swim back to safety.
• If koi are too close, they will end up eating you.

Those were the basics, but at some point I added waterlilies degrading the longer you stay on them, which ends up destroying them. Rembember the theme? Yep, so there's limited space.

Then I usually draw a mockup of characters of how the game may look.

DEVELOPMENT

Most of the time was spent on pool physics (which is basically a projection of ball velocities on the tangent vector of the two balls involved in the collision), tweaking how jumps felt (gravity is increased when falling) and... procedural koi. There was no need at all for that, but I spent a few hours making those koi with five circles. I'm quite proud of them :D

And then of course polishing, polishing, polishing. Because my game jam games are really small, I start polishing from the very beginning. Things like:

• The star you get when you nail a jump
• Water ripples (which are just circles drawn with a certain fill pattern)
• Particles
• Visual cues (like waterlilies blinking when colliding)
• Animations! There's limited sprite space, and 16x16 sprites eat a lot of space in Pico8.

Still, I'm missing a few things like score points floating up.

SO WHAT WENT GOOD?

Well, I was able to do all that within time limits. Yay! The game is more or less exactly what I came up with, and then some - like the fly and eating it, which was added on Sunday. If gives you a reason to jump around. And 25 points.

WHAT WENT BAD?

Difficulty stalls! So once you figure out jump timing and distances, it's difficult to lose. You may end up quitting. I mean, that's better than a game-over because the frog got eaten, right? At least for the frog. But not for a game?

FUTURE WORK

I'm planning a post-jam version where difficulty ramps up by making koi swim faster. Will probably make waterlilies degrade faster too.

Will add floating poings, so it's easier to undestand how to score (it's explained in the main menu... but yeah, better to always tell the player what is happening)

An finally... code is prepared for two players! I didn't add a second one during the game jam but most functions expect a player. It shouldn't be difficult creating a two-player version. Not sure if it makes sense, though, but I had it in mind from the very beginning. We'll see.

THAT'S IT!

All in all I had lots of fun making this one. I hope you enjoy playing it too! Would love to read your comments. See you in the next jam!

I had some time to kill while waiting for my kids, so I drew this as a cover art for Pool Frog. Hope you like it!

Play and rate here!

Drew this as a cover art for Unpacking Armageddon! Have you tried it? :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unpacking-armageddon

Don't you feel like pushing and pulling cardboard boxes to summon demons and contribute to the armageddon? OF COURSE YOU DO! GO FOR IT! :D

Maybe you would like to play (and rate!) before reading, so you have more context? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unpacking-armageddon

"Unpacking Armageddon" is my entry for Ludum Dare 55, themed "SUMMONER". Given the theme's specificity, it's no wonder that many entries gravitated towards pentagrams and summoning demons. However, I've noticed a significant decrease in platformers and a broader diversity in game genres in this edition?

DAY 1

For some reason I felt like making an arcade puzzle game. Fortunately, knowing I wouldn't have much spare time that weekend, I came up with an idea much more quickly than in previous editions: Sokoban for someone who doesn't really enjoy Sokoban puzzles, pushing and pulling boxes that are just in the way, so you are forced to constantly shuffle them around in a shrinking space. This allowed me to start working early on Saturday morning.

And thus, the story emerged from the mechanics and the theme: Armageddon has begun, you are a hell-designated summoner, but it caught you in the middle of moving into a new home. All your belongings are in cardboard boxes lying around the invocation basement! Demons are eager to enter our realm, but can't do it if something is on top of the pentagram that serves as a gateway. You have to clear pentagrams free by pushing and pulling boxes in order to let demons enter our real and fullfill your summoning quota.

After the Unity Fee mess last year I also started looking for alternative game engines, and found that Defold is pretty interesting for pure 2D games. Early this year I entered the Global Game Jam with Defold, making a 'full' game for the first time with this engine, and the experience was superb. So I have switched from Pico8 to Defold. I still miss Pico8, but Defold makes some things just easier. At some point I might try Picotron...

I enjoy, however, working with really low resolutions, so I stuck to Pico8's 128x128 pixels and 16x16 sprites. It gives games a nice blocky look that reminds me of NAMCO games, which I love.

By 13:30 I had some final art (main character, boxes and the background), and the character could move and detect boxes.

A friend was visiting, so I left home to have lunch and didn't come back until 19:00 - totally worth it, though. I still managed to work two more hours at night and finished the main mechanic: pushing boxes around to set pentagrams free. If not done quick enough, pentagrams explode- Otherwise they glow and disappeared, scoring.

Not much for the first day, but pretty good for roughly 5-7 hours of work, considering art was final already. I expected a hard second day.

DAY 2

Woke up early on Sunday and went for the next basic mechanic, pulling boxes! And once that was working the whole thing started to actually feel like a game. Added some FX for pentagrams - when they are cleared, they glow, some arcane text floats up, a demon appears and flies upwards and a new pentagram is created. If too much time passes and a pentagram is not cleared, it explodes and a new one appears. With each pentagram a new box appears too (don't know, maybe someone is throwing them to the basement for you to organize?)

By lunch time I came up with the last game mechanic: while you have to clear pentagrams from boxes, you have to place the Ritual Candle on them to complete the summoning. Game felt quite fun! So all that remained was adding sound, UI and good/bad endings.

Freesound.org is great for sound effects, but one of the last things I added to the game wa the summoners' chant when the Ritual Candle is placed on a pentagram. Shouting KLAATU BARADA NICTO! to the mic at 11pm while the family was already sleeping was too fun.

Extra points if you get the RIGHT movie reference!

WHAT WENT GOOD

Almost too much, to be honest! The game idea was fun to play even when the game was barebones. I don't speacially enjoy trial-and-error Sokoban puzzles, but as you can move boxes around freely the game doesn't feel so restricted. Sprites were easy to make, and programming was not too complex thanks to how Defold enforces certain behaviours, like message passing. Things are compartimentalized by design, but you can always resort to LUA modules to share critical information if needed.

WHAT WENT BAD

With not much time to work on Saturday I couldn't animate the main character nor demons. I like my game jam entries to have smooth character animations, they make the game feel much more polished. But I just did not have more time to draw them - yes, I could have lost sleep time, but... it's a game jam, no need to stress things out!

There are some silly bugs around, like boxes falling on the character (although you can walk out from them) or pentagrams reappearing right where they just vanished from. But the most important issue is that most players DON'T READ INSTRUCTIONS (no surprise here), so they have no idea they can both push boxes - which is natural, just bump into them - AND PULL BOXES - which needs the player to press Z while moving. I should have made it clear in the first tutorial level by placing the candle by a wall, with an on-screen message or something like that.

Will probably add all that in a post-jam version at some point.

LAST THOUGHTS

I'm specially happy with how this game plays and would love to revisit it at some point. I think I can add some new mechanics - maybe imps that run around pushing boxes and being a pest, rocks you can't move, maybe larger pentagrams and more candles? Not too much, just a few things to make it last a bit longer.

Already looking forward to the next game jam!

Meanwhile, TRY THE GAME YOURSELF and don't forget to rate! :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unpacking-armageddon

2 hours and a half before the deadline ':D I just can't work on it anymore. It's almost what I had in mind except for a few missing FX, but I fear that not everything that a good falling-blocks puzzle needs. Quite proud of it, anyway. ^-^

We came, we forgot who we were, we were enslaved.

Thins are going to CHANGE. But we have to save our friends first.

Hope you like it!! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/moos-from-the-depth-of-ppace

Sometimes after a game jam I like drawing a cover for the game I made. As usual, the illustration takes me MORE TIME than programming the game itself :D Hope you like it!

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/moos-from-the-depth-of-ppace