I like to make logos/banners for AAGH Games entries into Ludum Dare, and for the last two we've entered (Ludum Dare 39 and the upcoming one) I made the logo using our pictures of our entries to date in the words "Ludum Dare" plus the number. Here's the one I made for Ludum Dare 41, for example.

I like the way it turned out, and it works well because we've entered 10 Ludum dares prior to this, making this our 11th. That means it fits cleanly into the logo.

How I'm going to handle this as our logo for Ludum Dare 43 this winter, though, is anyone's guess. 😄

Almost 24 Hours in, I want to share a picture of two unlikely characters to be seen together - a gingerbread man and a bell pepper with personality. After some wheel spinning and a lot of tweaking and testing, our game's finally coming together and these two are the stars. Yes, that is an oven in the background. No, it doesn't make much sense. Hell, I'm working on the game and I honestly can't make sense of it yet. All I know is that it involves a whole lot of fire.

So, this gingerbread man is toasting a marshmallow on a fire that's roasting the pepper. I thought they were gonna be buddies, but apparently not.

Our game's about the pepper getting his payback, and it's mostly done from a mechanical standpoint. We have a few more audio bits to stick in, some balancing tests to do, and some in-game tutorials, but overall we're in good shape with just under 24 hours to go.

Peppy the bell pepper likes to get baked, but gingerbread man and his kin keep getting in the way. Dodge saws, knives and more while turning gingerbread men into toast in this quick shoot-'em up/cooking mashup.

Here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/get-baked

Here's a timelapse video of the creation of Get Baked, our Ludum Dare entry. We didn't capture any of the first 16 hours of the event (I forgot to start Chronolapse at first like a dunce) so we missed the early design/concept/testing part but it picks up at the modeling of our Gingerbread Man (or G-Man as we call him) and continues from there.

If you'd like to give Get Baked a try and a rating, here's the link. We would love the feedback!

https://youtu.be/13GG4_PwRZc

Thanks to everyone who's rated Get Baked so far! The feedback has been solid, and we've learned a few things we can improve on, too. For example:

1. We should have either better tested our mouse look controls or made an option for scaling their sensitivity, because they've been described as both too slow and too fast.

2. Most people like the gingerbread man voice overs, but they've not for everyone. A toggle for the voices would have been a nice touch of polish.

3. We made a mistake during the intro comic, making the continue button hidden until the player presses the escape key. It was supposed to appear on its own when the last panel appeared, but that obviously didn't happen. Again, the solution is just to press the escape key and it will appear.

4. We should have included a skip for the ride to the top before each level after the first try. Seeing the same exact sequence multiple times gets tedious after a while.

5. Burning the gingerbread men needs a bigger emphasis. It's supposed to be part of your revenge against the gingerbread men but it needs more in-game context.

One of my favorite touches are the pictures on the walls as of the levels, such as this one.

If you haven't gotten baked with Peppy yet, now's a great time. Give it a rating, and let us know what we can improve on!

As rating wraps up on another Ludum Dare, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who rated Get Baked, so I made a nice word cloud out of the comments we got (using Word Art).

Thank you for your feedback, and good luck to everyone tonight!

While we're still working on getting our next game ready for show (it's made a ton of progress but we're picky that way), we're taking this weekend off for another Ludum Dare. It'll be our 12th one dating back to Ludum Dare 30.

We'll be streaming our progress live - as usual - on our Twitch channel, twitch.tv/alphasim. We tend to get a bit goofy and sidetracked, but we've always come in on time so far. Good luck to everyone involved!

In Fruit Flinger, you protect your home from the mindless minions with fruit - and a catapult. Use careful aim to target the oncoming masses and take them all out before they reach you.

Why not give it a try?

With another Ludum Dare in the rear view mirror, I wanted to look back at working on our entry, Fruit Flinger.

Like most of our Ludum Dare entries, the graphics were not prioritized, and it shows. We wanted a game that was fun to play, solid with minimal bugs, and entertaining to listen to. The music came together smoothly (thanks to @floata-1), and the voice overs were fun to record (another in a long line of characters I've voiced in our games, from cows and squirrels, to a shady salesman, to a cranky foreman, among others).

I wish I'd taken more time to make the minions look better and animate with more detail, but the base mechanic they served - marching towards the player and dying upon impact with flying fruit - was still clear, so it worked out in the end.

The theme was one that took no time at all for us to come up with an idea for, even if that idea went through a few mutations along the way. From an initial idea of tossing people into a volcano to the Last (Fruit) Stand design we finished with, the base concept of using a catapult to hurl things was at the center of it all. The idea of throwing things across the map was just too appealing to pass up.

The controls were fairly easy to nail down, but we eventually went from only controlling the power of the launch to mid-air aftertouch control after finding it too hard to consistently hit our targets. We included a reset button (pressing the B key on the keyboard breaks the current fruit at any time, loading up a new one) to prevent downtime on a missed shot, but probably should have spelled that out better, given the number of people who didn't notice it.

If you haven't taken time to fend off flocks of freaky fellows with freshly flung fruit, now's as good time to do so as any.

:apple: Play and rate Fruit Flinger, and let fly the melons of war. :watermelon:

Heya! My team from AAGH Games and I had to skip a number of the past Ludum Dares while working on getting our first game out on Steam (which, btw, we did in August), so we're looking forward to taking a break to jam again.

We'll be livestreaming progress on our Twitch channel again, as we always do. Good luck to everyone, and have fun!

Just a progress pic:

We're live on Twitch, if you want to see more.

This morning our game looked like this:

Now, it looks like this:

We had some hangups and things that didn't go as we'd have liked, but we're happy with our progress across the first 24 hours. With a functional random dungeon generator, interchangeable weapons, and the controls clicking on all cylinders, it's on to getting the combat, scoring systems, and progression mechanics in, before adding the music/sound fx/voice overs.

We're finally done! It took us down to the wire, but Dumpy is ready for his endless quest for crap. Enjoy!

Play it here

Heya, everyone! I'm Budaniel and I'm here to tell you about Dumpy's Quest for Crap, our entry for Ludum Dare 45.

In DQ4C, you're Dumpy. Dumpy is a rotund little ball of fury, and his goal is to collect crap. He likes crap. Crap like money. And power. His only solution to getting the crap he wants – the only thing he knows how to do, really – is kill the zombies and skeletons in the ruin in which he lives. The ruin extends indefinitely – it is an endless ruin, y’know – so he has nothing better to do than take up his axe and go collect the crap he so badly wants.

The zombies (zombi?) are plentiful and provide a meager earning. Cut them down, take their gold, and use it to buy power. That is how it works, obviously – money buys power. Even Dumpy, as dense as he is, knows that. He’s pretty sure, anyway.

Sometimes one of the zombbombi will drop a little bottle of red goo. If Dumpy picks it up, he immediately swills it and recovers some of his health. We’re not sure what the bottle actually contains, but it apparently doesn’t taste very good because Dumpy won’t drink it if he doesn’t need any health back.

Occasionally Dumpy will run afoul of the local big bad, Pelvis. Pelvis Eversley is a skeleton and he carries a wicked blade that he likes to stick into Dumpy. He’s tougher than your average zombidibidabi and hits a lot harder, so he shouldn’t be taken lightly. Luckily, he can be a butter-fingers and occasionally drop his sweet sword after being killed, so besting his bony butt in combat can definitely be worth it.

One last thing – this isn’t the most well-made ruin (are any ruins well made? Would they still be ruins if they were?), and you’ll find gaps in the floor that Dumpy will have to jump over. He has a decent vert, but do be careful out there – we can’t help you if you fall through the cracks.

Oh well. That was fun, wasn’t it? Why don’t you give it another go?

Play and rate Dumpy's Quest for Crap

We've been hearing that our game, Dumpy's Quest for Crap, has some movement issues across the board, ranging from moving too slow, to accelerating too fast, to getting stuck in the air if you stop pressing buttons.

That's not ideal, but what's done is done... and after looking into solutions, the things we've learned are going to end up improving all of our work going forward, so it's a net positive.

If you're curious what Dumpy's quest was supposed to look (and play) like, here's a quick clip I put together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehAe9YalAYo

If you haven't played and rated DQ4C, why not do so now? Click here!

Heya, I'm Bud with AAGH Games and we're back yet again. This will be our 14th Ludum Dare since our first in LD30, six years ago. We've been working on our most recent PC game (Agtnan: Monster Shutdown Sequence, currently on Steam), plus another as-yet unannounced project, so this will be a great refresher/palette cleanser.

We will be live-streaming our progress on both YouTube and Twitch. Our Twitch channel is https://www.twitch.tv/aaghgames, and our YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/c/aaghgames.

Good luck to everyone taking part, and here's to another great jam!

Our game is nearly complete! Grab Your Nutz is an endless falling game about a squirrel trying to catch acorns before the birds catch him.

Just some testing/tweaking to do, see about some more graphical details, and we'll be done in plenty of time for the end of the jam. We were going for super-simple this time, and we're happy with the results so far.

Play it Now

Here's a quick guide to the birds in Grab Your Nutz. It won't make them easier to predict, but it may help you evade them better

If you haven't played it yet, why not give it a go? Grab Your Nutz today!