First night of development went well. Several basic mechanics are in place but most assets are still placeholders... Except for this guy!! Meet the Eskimonster!

We all had a great time with the Jam and I am really enjoying playing everyone else's games. The fun doesn't stop just because the Jam is over! Thank you for all your feedback!

You can find our game here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/eskimonster-pingus-rising

Inspired by an earlier post by@eric-lathrop , I have released a web build for Eskimonster: Pingus Rising on itch.io. It was surprisingly easy for Unity so I encourage anyone to try posting a web build if you haven't already.

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/eskimonster-pingus-rising

W00t! 30-ish hours of dev time later and I think we are practically done! My friends and I made a Text-Based-Platformer, which works slightly better than I expected. I really enjoyed spending time on making challenging levels rather than spending all my time with basic implementation (Which is what happened the last two jams).

Enough exposition! Cue animated screenshot and link!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/colossal-cat-aventure-maze-of-the-elder-gods-lazer-turrets-revenge-part-2

Let us know if you find any bugs. I cant wait to play everyone's games. Good luck all!

Hey all, every time I do this I always learn a lot, and as I was reflecting today I thought of a few lessons learned that I'd like to share with you all. Most are probably no-brainers, but they still bear repeating. - When brainstorming (especially with a team) always write down every idea, especially the dumb ones. - Your initial vision for mechanics is never quite the same in practice, so be flexible as you develop.

These lessons were very much reflected in the development of my team's game this past weekend. Feel free to go check it out. Any feedback or bug reports are appreciated!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/colossal-cat-aventure-maze-of-the-elder-gods-lazer-turrets-revenge-part-2

Hey all. We just released our game! This time there were just 2 of us, but things went rather smoothly. We are both really happy how it turned out. There are a lot of things we would like to add still but since we don't have any time to work on it after tonight this will have to do for now.

Idea: Post-Jam Jam. A jam a few weeks after the jam where we all go back and use the feedback we got from our comments to improve and expand our games. Thoughts?

Aaaannd I'll just leave this here.... https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/gravity-well

Ludum Dare 42 was my 4th time participating in the jam, and each time it is a totally new and different experience. My teammate @SpicyRhino and I made the game Gravity Well, an action puzzler in which you must guide your spaceship to the end of each level by placing black holes to effect your trajectory. Here is a quick audit of our creative process and a post-mortem of what we learned this time around.

The Pre

In previous Jams I have competed with teams of 3-4 people, but this was the first time with just 2 of us, both with limited schedules. This personnel and scheduling crisis meant we had to curb our enthusiasm and let our constraints make some choices for us. We spent the first hour of the jam brainstorming, the results of which can be seen below.

We started by performing a brain dump. No bad ideas. Fill the page, make the font smaller, repeat.

We then picked 3 that we liked the best and fleshed them out a bit.

Finally we did a quick analysis of the feasibility of the idea as well as answering the all important question "Where is the fun?"

In the end we picked the Gravity Well concept and started work.

The Post

I am very happy with our game, but there are several things that I would change. Our process was solid, but our limited experience held us back a bit. The GUI drag-and-drop controls were not quite functional and not being able to re-position things in the game-field was an issue. (All of which were fixed post-jam). Some play-testers had issues finding the reverse-thrust button, so I would like to make that more obvious in any future releases. It sucked not to have 100% original assets for the game, but I will be replacing those shortly.

Overall I am very proud of the game we made, and have lots of ideas on how to improve it and to make it fully featured. It has good potential as a mobile game and so I eventually want to get it to the app store. Of all the games that I have made, this one is the one I will most likely keep working on.

Link to the page for Gravity Well

I look forwards to hearing from you all at the next Jam!