Fellow game dev beginner from germany here.
This is my first time at ludum dare and i’m really exited!
On the tool site i’ll be using:
I wish everyone a good time and may you meet the deadline!
Since everybody seems to post on their progress i thought i could at least offer a little screenshot. Progress is pretty slow but as i read through the last posts i realize i’m not alone with this “problem”. It’s also my first game jam ever so honestly problems were to be expected. I’m still not 100% sure where i want to go with my game but i’ll do my best to flesh out gameplay tomorrow.
The promised screenshot:
I finally have a clear vision for the core gameplay…
I hope it’s not to late (i don’t think it is). So actual gameplay programming starts now – this is a small teaser of what I got so far:
Today my sweet baby pet T-REX Harald learned how to throw garbage around – that sentence alone should be enough to mark this day as an successful one… But there is still alot to do and I really need to go nuts tomorrow to finish this. Good luck to all of you who also struggle with time 
If you know only vaguely what you’re doing: don’t try to write physics code. Insted of searching for bugs in my own developed “physics” world I should have just used Box2D.
(Also rethink this really unpolished event system I’ve written)
Hope you guys have / had alot of fun and didn’t ran into the same “reinventing the wheel” issues like me
And I’m proud of what I created. Like everyone else I also had to cut alot of stuff due to slow progress / inexperience but the result is still the best game I made so far. It’s a short game so please play and rate it in the comments – that means alot to me
And for my second Ludum Dare there are some quite heavy changes to my workflow. In fact I haven’t even used the engine that I’ll work with – but it sure will work out eventually… Right? Right? (*quiet sobbing*).
So again this time I’ll use another engine. I switch from the awesome LibGDX framework to the (hopefully) even more awesome Godot game engine. What’s the reason you might ask. Well see: developing with LibGDX feels really great to me. I like the programming centric development and I’m also pretty fluent in Java – so naturally this framework just works for me. At least that’s what I thought prior to my first Ludum Dare. Then I tried to create a scene which was not tile based (hint: you better not do that with LibGDX – at least at the moment). I tried a few solutions: Overlap2D (abandoned project…), VisEditor (also abandoned atm…), Tiled and R.U.B.E.. Just none of them really worked or felt good to use. So I stood up and I yelled at the sky: “Why! Oh god why do you hate me!”. I ended up pretty much hard coding the coordinates of all my sprites which luckily were not too many to handle it and I swore to me to go out and find a solution which just works. And ideally one which has all tools neatly organised in a single window. That’s how after a long journey of comparing different engines I ended up with Godot which seems to pack alot of awesome features for 2D! I will learn it while developing my game for this Ludum Dare so I expect alot of chaos but it will hopefully turn out well. I wish everyone and especially the first timers the best of luck and I pray that one day we will have a great level editor for LibGDX.
Have fun! Anudin out. – Anudin
Good morning everyone! My alarm rang at 05:30 AM here (look at what you do to me... you cruel monsters) in germany even though the official event start was at 03:00 AM - but a man got to sleep. So now I start! I went shopping yesterday and got some energy drinks, frozen pizza, cereal and chewing gum which means that I'm off to a fucking (is it allowed to swear on this platform?) fantastic weekend! Good luck everyone :) - Anudin
Good morning everyone! My alarm rang at 05:30 AM here (look at what you do to me… you cruel monsters) in germany even though the official event start was at 03:00 AM – but a man got to sleep. So now I start! I went shopping yesterday and got some energy drinks, frozen pizza, cereal and chewing gum which means that I’m off to a fucking (is it allowed to swear on this platform?) fantastic weekend! Good luck everyone – Anudin
After some quality brainstorming, planing and presenting my ideas to my family time I have a finished game idea. Spend the rest of the time drawing these few assets - but they might actually be enough...
http://imgur.com/a/QAqJW
Now it's time to fire up Godot and see what I can create!
Good luck y'all - Anudin.
I've finished some basic gameplay. Alot more work tomorrow!
Current state (small planets are place holder'ish): http://imgur.com/a/V99Je
Hope you're doing good! Anudin
I drank an energy drink nearly right before bed time yesterday... Well guess who doesn't feel well rested :| Seems like this will be a day with even more caffeine! Cheers.
Here we go! Day 2 starts now for me and I'm pretty exited :) Pretty sure I will make good progress today - wish you all the same.
Anudin off to codin'
Progress was a lot slower than expected (it's always like that - isn't it?). Had to do some stuff for uni and will need to work on that tomorrow too. The first thing I will do in the morning is sort what is still left to do by priority because I sure need to cut some things. Wish me luck - I'll need it. Hope you finish in time!
I need to admit that yesterday evening I was in quite a panic. But after the first few hours of todays development I'm getting optimistic that I might in fact finish the game - and hopefully even make it fun ;) I'll be coding some more features in the next 2-4 hours and dedicate the rest of the time to tuning all values.
Little sneak peak:
Anudin out.
Finished my second Ludum Dare. Switched from libGDX to the Godot game engine and was really satisfied with the workflow. Everything worked better than expected since this was actually my first time working with the engine... Anyways please play and comment - I would love some feedback. Linux builds might be available tomorrow if I figure out how to do them. [Post Ludum also coming tomorrow]
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$20171
Much love <3 - Anudin
Now that I have your attention: please do not. But I need constructive criticism on my entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-giant-called-frederick
I know that audio would be great so that's a no brainer. But how does the game feel to you? Is it fun? What would you personally change in order to make it more fun / more intuitive / more fluid... To make the game better? You can be as brutally honenst as you like - just don't get insulting.
Big thanks for everyone who follows this call! Anudin
squeeches No... Not again... Have mercy...
So recently I called out to a "roast" of my entry to get some constructive criticism. Sounds like a strange idea to you? Well hear me out. I noticed on my last ludum dare that many people rate games just to get ratings theirself - and in order to maximize the "profit" they write really short and not really meaningful comments. But a big problem arises here - because most of us are here to learn and improve. I just wanted to tell all of you that my plan worked and I encourage you to follow my example. Ask explicitly for constructive critisicm and you will propably get some! Now I'm off to improve my entry when I find some time - based on the data I collected through the little "roast".
Best of luck - Anudin
Hah - clickbait game is still strong. Have you ever heard about the (open source) Godot game engine? If not you should totally check out its features! (https://godotengine.org/features). I used it for the first time on LD38 instead of LibGDX which I used for LD36 and I'm pretty much blown away by it. Now to the reason I write here - today started a kickstarter campaign to fund a professional tutorial series on the upcoming version 3.0 of Godot which will be an awesome release by itself. I invite all of you to take a look at the engine and the kickstarter and decide for yourself if you want to pledge. The autor of the tutorial series is experienced with tutorials and has numerous free tutorial videos on youtube - also some on game art with the awesome open source painting program Krita (which you should also check out!). I do not know the autor personally nor do I get any benefit from his success but he seems like a great guy worth supporting. Here is the link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gdquest/make-professional-2d-games-godot-engine-online-cou
Thank you for taking the time and I hope you jump unto the Godot hype train with me :)
Edit: Please feel free to share those news with you friends and family or on your social media accounts!
baby... This will be my third time participating in Ludum Dare. A short summary over my last two entries: * First entry didn't suck. I learned alot but in the end was unhappy with the used engine (LibGDX) due to lacking visual tools. It's really a shame because LibGDX is totally awesome. I'd still recommend it for games using tiles or procedurally generated games. First entry - click me * Second entry didn't suck on the first glance. But as soon as you realised that the best tactic is to wait... This could've easily been avoided by proper prototyping - which I will do this time! I was alot happier with the used engine this time though which was Godot. I think you can easily see that on the increase in visual quality :smile: Second entry - click me
So third participation - second time with Godot. This time I'll prototype properly, stream the whole thing so I can find out where I loose time when the jam is over and use Git continously. Good luck to everyone, especially the first timers. Greetz Anudin
Edit: I wanted to add that in addition to changing engines I also switched the strategie for my second participation. I tried to find a simple but fun game mechanic. I actually failed on the fun part but my idea was simple which is a good thing for a jam. But something very strange happened: I lost so much time! I still don't know where all the weekend went but I produced very little content for such a long time frame. Much less than on my first entry actually. This is the reason I want to live stream this time - so I can review on where my time is lost.