The Idea!

So I had the idea from playing a boardgame called Carcassonne where you lay down tiles to build a kingdom. I wanted to take this tile building concept and put it into a video game.

I am using game maker studio 2 and found a free extension that allows you to load rooms within rooms. It was designed for gms 1.4 so it was a bit of a hassle to work with but I got things working.

My first attempt with room dog

Lets work on grid movement for tile placement

Hand Crafting the rooms

This was a fun process b/c there are 32 rooms total. The first room is always the same but you the player get to lay down the remaining 31 rooms in a randomized order. Here are few of the ones I thought were pretty fun. Note all the enemies and rocks look the same in the photos but in game are randomized.

Using a low color palette

This was probably the most key thing for me since I'm not an artist. I used this awesome color palette https://lospec.com/palette-list/rustic-gb by Kerrie Lake.

So I was able to make enemies, rocks, and power ups pretty easily. It made life simple and it looked consistent. I was actually pretty happy with the look of the game.

Coming all together

Here you can see it all coming together at a glance

Play The game

I would love to hear your feedback and see if you enjoyed the game as much as I did. This was the first time I ever attempted to do anything with randomization and endlessly loop the game so it was a really fun process.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/99hearts

Just wanted to say that I am beyond stoked that so many people have downloaded the game, played it and gave feedback. I know some people might think this number isn't that big , but for me it's huge. I have never had that many people play anything I've made.

Thank you to everyone who played the game. Who knows maybe we can get past 100 downloads!!!

Here is the page for my game >>> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/99hearts

The game in action

I am thrilled beyond belief

I honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started this gamejam. I always had been afraid of larger gamejams and only had participated in 2 smaller gamejams prior to this. I was told ludum dare is one of the best game jams because of the amount of feedback you get.

Well that person wasn't lying b/c I have never gotten so much feedback and so much press. I really wasn't expecting people to go out of their way to talk about my game. It was an incredibly shocking feeling. I am so honored and thrilled that people would do that about something I made.

Places the Game was shared/shown

I asked 2 people on twitch to play the game, everyone else this was their own doing

Twitch Streamer #1 Z_Doctor

This was one of the few times I've ever watched anyone play a game I've made and it was an absolute delight

https://youtu.be/IEYaHDZijNM

Twitch Streamer #2 elysiagriffin

This one didn't go as smoothly but due to the controls and random nature I can understand why. It was still great to watch

https://youtu.be/C2TcRrY9cbo

Youtube Channel Randomise User (11:50 timestamp)

A friend of mine told me that my game was feature on this channel and I loved watching this video. His commentary was just great

https://youtu.be/_N-SbFtoqBE

The Demodisk Podcast

I was alerted by a friend actually the composer who did the music for the game, that our game was featured on a podcast. I listened and they even said they would like to see the game as a full game which really made me smile. Maybe I will do that one day

https://demodisk.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-24-ludum-dare-44-edition

Blog post for Top Ludum Dare 44 games

I was really pleased to see my game was listed under top games for innovation and they really liked the music as well

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/life-corp/test-1

Play The Game 99Hearts

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/99hearts

Would love to hear your feedback and hope you enjoy the game. Thank you so much. This Ludum Dare was my first time participating and it's been such a blast getting to see and play all the games and getting all the great feedback from the community.

I know it might not seem like much but I was super humbled and proud that people had fun and enjoyed the game. Being ranked 190th over all when there are so many other great games submitted has me feeling super honored over here. Thank you everyone

First off I want to thank everyone for all their valuable feedback. When we first started developing the game we had a very dark background so our cursor color was white and our bullets were yellow.

However when we changed backgrounds we never adjusted the colors of the bullets or cursor to be more visible. So one of the number one issues stated in the feedback was that it was hard to see the cursor.

We also changed the shop text from white to black to be more visible

So this update changes nothing in gameplay. The game plays exactly as it did before, it's just now more accessible with the new updated color changes

Play The Game Here

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/oak-defenders

The Issue - white cursor (Before)

The Solution - black cursor (After)

So I did a google search on our game Oak Defenders and funny enough I found it hosted on several sites we didn't upload it to.

• A hack website that added cheat codes to the game

  • http://www.arcadeprehacks.com/game/35125/oak-defenders.html

• A chinese website that added the game

  • http://www.17yy.com/f/play/242446.html

• A Brazilian website that added the game

  • https://baixefacil.com.br/download/oak-defender

The most interesting thing to me, was that the site that added the cheat codes currently has 3187 Plays which is way higher than our itch.io page amount.

Play the official version here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/oak-defenders

I have played some games through rating and wanted to share some of the games I really enjoyed

What The Firetruck

• NOTE: this one doesn't have 20 ratings yet

• Really fun twin stick shooter game where you are frantically trying to put out fires. The gameplay loop is really nice on this one and I found myself playing multiple playthroughs.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/what-the-firetruck

Remnants

• You keep the ship/crew alive in this fun card game. I love card games and what's funny is that I didn't even really realize how the game worked at first, but I was having fun still. I don't quite understand how they pulled off this magic haha. Like how do you have fun but at the same time have no idea what you're doing lol.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/remnants

Catastrophe: Wildfire Firefighters

• Ok so second game on the list about putting out fires, now this one is more strategy where the previous one was arcadey. I really liked the idea behind this one, you have to use real methods that actual firefighters use to control forrest fires. I am not the best at the game but I really thought it was executed well. I believe the devs want to continue working on the game

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/catastrophe-wildfire-firefighters

Keep It Powered

• A cute puzzle platformer where you need batteries to stay powered. Have you ever played a game where you kept failing but were also super motivated to keep pushing on and beat it. That's how I felt with this game. It's execution was very smooth and the puzzles were fun. I did make it all the way through but levels 13 and 14 wow those ones were very hard. You had to think about it and figure out how to manage your battery power, and these levels almost try and trick you into thinking which path is the way to victory but after many failed attempts I learned the proper way.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-it-powered

Leap Of Faith

• this one has you launching a fish around and keeping it alive by keeping it in the water. I didn't complete this game but I had a ton of fun playing it. I tried several times but just couldn't get past a certain part. It has lots of interesting things the fish can land in.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/leap-of-faith

Hey there everyone. I finally got around to posting on here after one heck of a weekend haha.

So my fiance has never done any gamedev or pixel art but I thought it would be really fun to try and make a game together. I had been playing a lot of dome keeper which is a game about mining. My fiance said she wanted to make a game with pretty colors and flowers so I thought we could do a farming game. That was probably b/c one of the themes was harvest but I thought of an idea for every 10 seconds that would fit.

The first day was a lot of learning. I was showing her different programs to make pixel art and explaining about pixel sizes and resolutions to help her know what size the sprites needed to be. We brainstormed together and came up with some ideas in a google doc and got to business.

I am so happy with our outcome even if the game has some bugs, we did it and it was a blast to be able to show her part of my gamedev world and passion. Maybe if I'm lucky we'll do another gamejam together.

I hope you have fun and try it out. I would love to try your games.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/garden-panic

So there were a few bugs found after the build was submitted. Thankfully I saw someone else post about a bugfix and read the rules that this was ok since it doesn't add any new features.

Hope you have fun and play the build. Here it is >>>> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/garden-panic

Come help us get there and we'd love to play and rate your games

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/garden-panic

So the gamemaker html5 build of our game was a slide show. The Opera GX version isn't as good as the windows executable but it's definitely playable and fun if you don't have windows

check it out here https://gx.games/games/2owf4i/garden-panic/