My fellow countrymen may have foolishly voted us out of Europe, but I still love you guys over on the continent. So in an act of Brexit rebellion I have programmed support for the major European keyboards layouts, take that  The Government!

Support for QWERTY, AZERTY and QZERTY, with the Arrow Keys and ESDF thrown in for good measure (Although if you want my recommendation it plays much better with the 360 pad)

It’s the 15th anniversary of Ludum Dare, and our 15th Ludum Dare in a row… coincidence? Yes. (Already posted over on the old site, but wanted to test the new one so sorry about the double post)

Anyway we’re in for the jam! I’m away until Monday, so will be handing the programming over to @AdamD this time, and I will spend the last day writing music and making sound effects. As usual art will come from @Failedstarfish.

As we’ll have slightly reduced time over the weekend, the plan was to go for something simple. We’re going to do a game that involves small planets, which we know everyone else is doing too, we don’t mind too much this time around. We’re going to try and differentiate it a bit with our art style, and make it a more art/animation based focused on exploration.

You will travel between different colourful solar systems and each planet will have something like an animation/puzzle to play with and explore. The aim is to find a small world you can call your own, we’re going for a peaceful, colourful vibe like our previous entries From the Sea and Miyu.

Still posting on both sites, not sure which one people are using the most?  Hopefully that is not a super annoying thing to do.  Things are progressing fairly well, we now have a little alien who needs re-homing somewhere among the stars (he needs a small world to call his own).

Anyway here he is:

Be careful, he is easily shocked:

Things are progressing fairly well, we now have a little alien who needs re-homing somewhere among the stars (he needs a small world to call his own).

Anyway here he is:

Be careful, he is easily shocked:

We managed to keep our streak going, Star Traveller is our latest LD submission! It's a short audio/visual experience, it has some light puzzle elements but is designed to be very relaxed. It's Coming up to 4am UK time, so we're going to try and get some sleep.

You can play Star Traveller here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/star-traveller

Hi all, just wanted to point you in the direction of our Post-Mortem. We've done it a little differently this time, so a quick explanation on that first...

At the end of last year we decided to make a change to how we do post-mortems, as we found that we never did a proper one on-time. We think the main reason was our tendency to always write them as very long dry documents that everybody hated doing, so we decided we were going about it all wrong. We were trying to write something for other people, almost like an article, but in reality there are very few people who actually care :smile:

So we went back to basics... a post-mortem is designed to help us analyse what went right and wrong with the game, and although it could potentially be interesting to others, its primary purpose is to help us understand how we can get better. Our solution was to do it as an informal chat, through an instant messaging app, and just talk to each other honestly about the game. We've done this for the last 3 games and published the results on our blog. It has worked really well for us, it's easier and more enjoyable to do, and we get some good feedback from each other.

We did one for Star Traveller earlier in the week, so if you're interested you can check it out here:
http://www.seconddimension.co.uk/blog/2017/star-traveller-review.html

Game itself is here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/star-traveller

This scientist is supposed to be making advances in alternative energy, but for some reason he has grown more arms. I genuinely have no idea why this is happening. To be honest I'm considering leaving it in.

(Also, Hi! We are in!)

We're going for a physics-based game this time. The idea is you have to build energy efficient robots, and prove their efficiency by navigating various test courses with a limited power supply. So far it's going pretty well, you can add rockets, boosters and magnets. It's also possible to navigate through the level, although generally what happens is you leave a trail of destruction. Trying to decide whether to reward players for breaking stuff, or not breaking stuff... hmm

Another GIF from our game Modular Destruction Labs. Here we demonstrate the dangers of working in a laboratory environment without the correct protective clothing

You can build your own scientist-abusing robot on our game page here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/modular-destruction-labs

Hi everyone, we have completed a post mortem for our entry, Modular Destruction Labs. We like to do our post mortems in a chat client and keep them fairly relaxed, so we won't post the whole thing here. If you're interested in reading about the game, as well as my upcoming gin problems, you can read the whole chat on our website here:
https://www.seconddimension.co.uk/blog/2017/modular-destruction-review.html

If you want to give the game a go, you can do so on the competition page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/modular-destruction-labs

Thanks to everyone who has played and commented so far, we do really appreciate it

Hi all, we ended up restarting our game yesterday, after out initial idea wasn't inspiring us. We tried a herding game, and for whatever reason it just wasn't working. I'm not at my best due to currently recovering from pneumonia, so this jam was always going to be tricky.

So anyway, now doing an alternative game, which a sort of pipe-matching game but with rivers. I play these kinds of games quite a lot and am enjoying working on it (although the rest of the team might hate me). It's a bit simpler and happy we can get it finished for the jam deadline. In terms of the theme, I have created 6 difficulty level which increase the number of tiles each time, as with this kind of game the more tiles you have the worse the difficulty gets. Not the most inspiring intepretation of the theme, but it fits!

Going for a pixel look this time, and wanted to do a little environment rather than an abstract puzzle feel. The generator is a fountain, and the units you have to power are little dead trees that grow when connected. Here is a screenshot for you viewing pleasure:

(PS: the answer is yes, the harder difficulty level will almost fill the screen with river tiles!)

Found it tough going this time, but managed to get a little puzzle game finished. If you like rotating tiles until they join to other tiles, then this is the game for you!
Well done to everyone who got their game finished, looking foward to playing some when I've had some sleep.

You can play it here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/cherry-creek

Hi all, I feel a bit guilty about using the Ludum Dare page to promote another jam, but we ran Finally Finish Something last year and it was a good place for anyone who couldn't get their December LD game done in time.

The idea is that it's a New Year's Resolution jam, and you use January to finish a difficult or long running project. You can submit any LD game you didn't finish from any year, or in fact anything at all no matter how long you've been working on it. It really is just designed as some extra motivation for the new year.

I won't spam any more posts, but everyone is welcome, and feel free to share if you think it's a useful concept. Link to the jam on itch.io is here:
https://itch.io/jam/finally-finish-something-2018

Going for a combination of platforming and golf. You are the golf ball, and the only way you can jump is to indulge in some self golf. Got the basic mechanics working in the quickest time ever, just need to make the game around it.

(PS I am flying solo this time, so everyone will have to put up with my crappy developer art)

Self Golf is coming along, managed to get proper golf scoring going (with pars and everything). Need to design some levels and polish everything up, then spend tomorrow on audio.

This is my 18th Ludum Dare in a row, and this is first time in 5+ years that I have completed my game early. It is highly suspicious and I am worried that I've forgotten something super essential. It seems like it went OK though, but I did it solo this time so forgive the terrible graphics.

Anyway my game Self Golf is finished and submitted, it's a platforming golf game where you are the ball, and you can only jump by hitting yourself with your golf club. You can play it via the submission page HERE

Hi all, I realised yesterday that my entry had been hit with Google's dreaded HTML5 audio issue (recent Chrome update has upset a lot of people). Anyway I exported a new version to allow for this, so audio is working now.

I always enjoy writing music for LD, so I'd be a bit sad if anyone played the game without audio. This time I also recorded myself clapping for then end of each hole, so that makes me a sound designer now right?

Anyway if anybody happened to play without music, or just wants to give it a try, you can play/rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/self-golf

Hi all, this is a very late "I'm in", as I finally have something to share for this LD.
As it's been 30 degrees and sunny for a month here in the UK, I have really missed the rain. To counter this incessant cheery weather, I am making a game where it's always raining. As usual I have planned to implement around 500 features and a full story, so I will need to drastically cut back, but hoping to finish before tomorrow evening.
First screenshot below:

Very tired, but managed to fight through the server issues to get my game submitted. It's called Evercloud, and is an atmospheric exploration game. You need to fix an old ship to get off your planet, everything is flooding and you're running out of space on land. I even put a poem in it. Play it here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/evercloud

I just realised that at some point, I accidentally changed the link on my game page back to an unfinished backup from some point over the LD weekend. So a good number of the people who played my game were playing a broken unfinished version :cry: I'm an idiot and it was my own fault.

I have corrected it now (just the link, not done any more work on the game). So if anyone wants to help out an idiot, maybe give the correct version a try here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/evercloud