I'm back for my 3rd Jam and I'm bringin' along a first timer friend of mine, @Lycanious. We're very excited and think it's going to be a lot of fun. Some good themes have made it into the final round and personally, I'm excited to see which one wins out. My buddy and I did a fun brainstorming exercise last night where we went through all of the themes that made it into the final round and came up with 1 or 2 solid ideas for each of them.

It ended up being super fun and by the time we were done, our sides hurt from laughing so much at the ridiculous ideas we came up with. We're very eager to get started, and can't wait for that countdown to hit 0. We wish everyone the best of luck!

Tech Stack: - Unity - VS 2017 - C# - Blender - Photoshop - Audacity - and a little FL Studio

So spent most of last night working on getting some basic mechanics programmed. After I was happy with that I slept for a few hours and started bright and early this morning at 6am, and have spent most of the morning working on getting the first iteration of the atmosphere of our game sorted. Did some playing around with post processing, volumetric lighting and particle effects to get the kind of feel we're going for. This is only just the first pass on it though, many changes yet to come.

Right click > open in new tab for full size

This is only my 3rd LD, and for my buddy it was both his first time participating in LD and pushing out something for others to play. Unfortunately we ran out of time which ended up leading to some scrambling right at the end, which led to a little bit of slop. But you know, I'm ok with that.

We set out with one goal in mind and that was to submit a playable game, no matter what happened and that's what we did. My last LD riding solo, I dropped out. So what we submitted is good enough for me. It was a lot of fun, and I'm excited for the next one. For now, though, I'm glad it's over and I feel like I can breathe again haha.

I can't wait to play everyone else's game and I hope that at least ONE person that plays ours jumps in their seat just ONCE at something unexpected lol.

So when the Theme was announced I was on my way to work for a 6.5 hour shift. I've finally gotten home and an idea has been decided upon between my partner and I! I have to work another 6.5 hour shift tomorrow so unfortunately that is valuable time that I can literally not do anything about. It simply means We're gonna have to do something simple enough that losing 13 hours won't matter much.

Fingers crossed! Will provide updates.

Wow all these games and ideas are looking really good, hats off to you all.

Slowly making progress on our game. Due to work and other errands to be run during this jam, when all is said and done we will have lost around 13+ hours. Stupid IRL responsibilities lol.

Either way were going to submit whatever we have at the deadline and continue to polish it afterwards. We have our core gameplay pretty much working, it's just a matter of adding a couple more code related things to complete gameplay. Then its art music and polish.

About 18 hours to go, and I'm starting to feel the pressure. Having lost over 13 hours of development time, I'm pretty happy with where we're at. Now if only I can keep from adding more gameplay ideas to the list!! Core gameplay is done, now just adding some powerups to make the game not COMPLETELY impossible to stay alive for more than 3 minutes lol

Music is coming along really nicely and should make the simplistic nature of this game a little more bearable. Cracked open my first beer of the entire Jam and will be dedicating the rest of tonight, and tomorrow morning to finishing the mechanics and art. Can't wait to start playing the other submissions!!!!!!

So I've decided to publish what we have so far! It's 4am and I have to work today. So I've decided to submit what we have so I can get some sleep before work. I am going to try my best to find some time to finish up some art and update whatever else I can before the deadline, although I am thinking stuff like that will have to be patched after the deadline.

Oh I suppose that's a question actually. Am I allowed to update the art after the submission deadline, or is that too big of a change? If so, I'll focus mainly on bug fixes although I haven't run into any thus far that I haven't already fixed.

A cover photo will also get done at some point. For now I just need to sleep. I'm happy with what we have so far, despite the art not being finished. The rest of the core gameplay is done and that's what mattered most to us.

Here's a link if you want to check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/digestion-aggression

I've only completed two Ludum Dare events in the past but I've participated in I think 4 or 5? The last few times I tried to participate, my schedule ended up not allowing for me to present something suitable. Life, am I right?

After a game dev hiatus due to work, relationship, and as of August, wedding planning (she said yes!) I recently started noodling around again and am super excited to stretch the old game dev muscles!

Engine: Unity

Modeling/Art: Blender/Aseprite

SFX/Music: I have no idea, I'll figure it out (that is if I have time for SFX and music)

Every Ludum Dare I have particpated in seems to have had the worst themes haha. Oh well, time to get clever and make the best out of the hand we were dealt! (Curse all those who voted yes on stuck in a loop! (jk <3)). Good luck!

Well, as per usual, the business of life gets in the way. Oh well haha. I was able to at least get a prototype done and implemented the tools and codebase necessary to continue development of the game.

I want to polish it and release it as a full game so I am going to continue working on it. For now, though. I need some rest. I was in crunch mode to at least get SOMETHING done and have been up for over 24 hours. Need some rest.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/$218764

Go easy on me, it's nowhere near where I wanted it to be haha.

TL;DR - We ran out of time, decided we would still spend the rest of the week working on what we have because why not. Then we realized there is still the Extra format which re-lit the fire under our asses and got us excited! Looking forward to playing your games and sharing ours with you all in 3 weeks!

Rewind to 3 days ago, I didn't even know LD was taking place until I saw the theme announcement ping on Discord. I had just closed my work laptop and was about to go eat dinner, watch a movie with the wife and finish the night off with some DCS.

Instead, I feverishly recruited my buddy to start working with me on it. We came up with our idea almost instantly. The rest of the story is the same as everyone else's except we ran out of time due to some unforeseen commitments on my side. Even in a panic driven hyper-crunch we still just didn't have a viable entry for it to be worth submitting for rating (it was playable but just barely and hadn't had any QA done on it beyond 5 minutes here and there to test mechanics). Disappointing as it was, we decided to spend the rest of this week getting it ready for play-testing because we're excited about what we do have and think we can turn it into a polished release. Especially because the game we built has been an idea we've tossed back and forth for the last year or so. Simply modified it a bit to match up with the theme.

That's when we noticed the Extra format is back! (I didn't even know it was a thing before). We're super stoked! As someone without a lot of free time, getting an entire 3 weeks to work on the game and get it ready to share with people is very exciting!

We're looking forward to playing everyone's games and looking forward to sharing ours with you all in 3 weeks!

At the beginning of the week I was ready to do this jam. However, the last week at work was an internal Hackathon which was super fun but it's left me feeling way more exhausted than I thought it would haha so I think I am gonna be doing the Extra format instead so I can recover lol

TL;DR

Get Candy Crook Here

NOTE: On Windows 10/11 if given a "Windows protected your PC" dialog when attempting to run the game, click "More Info" followed by "Run Anyway"

Goal Reached!

After a several-years-long dry spell, I have finally been able to get something "shipped". I decided enough was enough and I would get SOMETHING turned in for this jam. It feels really good to release something again and I am looking forward to future projects and game jams.

I present to you, Candy Crook! An awfully simple game about collecting candy for as long as possible and trying to collect every piece before time runs out! Check it out here or here. (Sorry mac users, I couldn't be bothered to go through Apple's process in order to run software without issue just yet. So for now there's a Windows build and an untested Linux build)

Moving on

Due to my busy work/family life I was only able to put about 24 hours into the development of this game over the last two weeks. There are several ideas I have that could flesh this game out a little more, but I feel I acheived what I set out to do and rather than go beyond the scope of my original plans, I would like to move on to a couple other small-scale projects that have been cooking in the ol' thinker. I want to take advantage of the momentum I have gained and let it snowball.

Thank you in advance to anyone who checks out the game and I'll see you in the next one!