YEAH! From a theme we didn’t like much at first, we managed to find a concept we’d enjoy to make. We wrote things down and the incredible part is that we managed to stick to the plan and achieve our goals! Kind of a first time for me and Zhyr. We are very happy to show you the result of approximately 100h of insane work (we barely slept…!) We are also very eager to see what you guys have been up to, so, see you around.
So, here I am after my first Ludum Dare. For the occasion, Zhyr & I teamed up to save some time and have some fun instead of coding alone. Here are a few humble comments about the whole process.
I have to say that we both down voted the theme “Connected Worlds” because we thought it was too accurate to be really permissive and emergent in term of concept and game design. But once it was announced, we forgot about our own taste and decided : “What the hell, let’s make a game with a theme we hate!”
It came after 45 min of throwing random ideas : Zhyr proposed to simply create connections between planets to make them rotate around each other without colliding. We decided very quickly that game’s rules should be very simple and not involving complicated physics rules. I think we stuck to that pretty well.
Some examples of fake formulas we didn’t need to use in our game :
So around two hours after theme release, we started coding… I will spare you some details and give you a short sum up :
Universe by Zhyr
All along those steps we managed short pauses composed of : 3 hours sleep, Coffee, Tea, Nutela, Brainstorming, Bagels, Zap de Spion (french zapping) and random food to fuel the brain machine.
The game is here, as we planned! Amazing! Ideally we would have added a few more features (like destructible meteor and more levels) but we are really proud and happy to have actually finished something in time.
We worked approximately a total of 100 hours. I personally broke my but on a wooden chair while getting my right hand atrophied by thousand of stressful clicks. Zhyr started singing weird Canadian songs during night coding, probably due to the twelves cups of coffee he had that day.
But overall, we are incredibly happy about participating to this jam. It was pure fun, even during insane working sessions and now sharing our works with you feels really great. We reviewed 60 games so far, posting large comments, trying to bring some thoughts into them and we also enjoy reading each of your reviews guys, so thanks!
Try out our game if you haven’t yet : PLAY GALACTIC DUMP
This morning I woke up and found this :
I wondered what was that weird pink round next to overall. I right clicked on it, save it to my desktop and realized it was entitled “bronze.gif”…
We plan to work on a post jam version which would include 50 levels and more features, first for the web then on mobile. Anyway, thanks Ludum Dare for the inspiration and the fun, see you next time 😉
Hey Ludum Darian,
We mixed our teams a bit so here we go :
We’ll use Unity, C#, Photoshop and maybe a bit of Flash.
Have a nice jam guys, let’ make games !
We’re glad to present you our game made with 72h efforts, 29l of tea and not enough pizza:
We would ♥love♥ to have your feedback guys, tell us if we can improve things!
Despite a epic struggle with 2D physics, we’re glad we made it to the deadline with an empty TODO list 
This was my first Jam with Unity, huge thanks to @Tavrox_ and @resptyle for their performance and skills, I learned a lot, lot of fun working together!
Little survey for game designers :
That would involve : better controls, a full scenario and more variety/levels in survival (more replay value).
So feel free to share you thoughts! No matter if it’s harsh, we can take it 😀
good luck and keep it up on this project!Believe it or not but here are our estimations for our Overall rank :
Hey, here we are in Toulouse-France, with a custom team!
Let’s make some games!
P.S : If the theme is Day & Night, we all pledged to kill ourselves…
Just wanted to share a few words on our experience during the jam, working on DRUMSTER!
We were four people here in Toulouse-France:
I wrote 3 games ideas right after the theme was announced, and proposed them to the team. We picked the Crazy Drummer idea as it was the most fun and original for us. It was also a big challenge: non of us has ever worked on a musical game!
Concept was simple : You play drum, and the more you play the more you go crazy on the drum kit, building up your evilness from Jazz to Heavy Metal, to finally turn yourself into some kind of black demon!
As a drummer I wanted to be very accurate so each drum hit must be played by the player to be heard in the music. No buttons pressed? No drum sound! So player basically plays everything (well, try to…). That sounds simple but most rhythm game aren’t that accurate with the original instrument. I hoped that it would really help players feel like their inputs matter and mostly would help them feeling like they were playing drum Here’s an example, every notes played in the song are displayed on the screen for the correct part of the drum kit:
Basically, everyone went on his task and worked hard with around 5-6 hours of sleep each night (that was very comfortable compared to my previous Jam :D). Quickly we met with lots of difficulties and challenge in all areas:
Long story short, after 2 days of work we could barely play the first loop of the Jazz section… The animations were quite done, which were awesome and motivating, the UI was quite finished as well, but we missed a game… So the last night was a real rush and we finally managed to play the game entirely! Problem is we didn’t have time to balance level design (I couldn’t possibly rebuild all the songs)! So we added the more polish we could thanks to our cool artists, and that was it => we’re playing freakin’ drum on our screens \o/
“Thus stopped the teamwork and started the high score competition…”
We’re super proud of our little game. We had tons of fun playing it (some more than others^^) and hope you’ll feel the same. It’s a shame we didn’t have time to balance the difficulty (my bad). But in any case that was super cool, we’ll do it again.
As I have cool fun playing the prototype we build, I decided to go on with the project for mobile and web with the help of the artist animator. Hopefully, I’ll have the time to balance difficulties!
Thank you all for playing and commenting, I’ll continue to post feedback on as many games as I can, I’ve already seen some pretty neat work, but it takes me a while as I try to post constructive thoughts!
Anyway, see you for LD34!