I've been wanting to enter ludum dare for quite some time now and I'm really happy with how mine and my team's game turned out. Thanks to everyone who has played and left some feedback.

If you want to play the game checkout the LD Page! :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs

This is a behind the scenes for the making of our Ludum Dare entry - 'bergs'.

You can checkout the LD page here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs

Ideas

The first couple of hours were spent brainstorming ideas. We came up with quite a few but eventually landed on the idea of making a 2D puzzle platformer where the player could summon a new character and use the previous character to help them complete the levels in some way. We expanded on this idea a little bit and decided that the characters should spawn with shape and size variations which would also effect how fast they could move and how high they could jump.

Implementation

As the person with the most GDScript (Godot's programming language) experience, I did the majority of the implementation and programming. I wanted to get all the main features added to the game in the first day so that my teammate could start creating levels as soon as possible. On the first day I spent around ~10 hours working on the project. Most of that time was spent creating the core features however some of it was spent on art and a bit polish. Over the next 2 days I spent around another ~6 hours fixing bugs, tweaking a couple of things, and adding polish and game juice (to distract from the lack of any type of graphics lol). There's probably more to say here but I'm writing this a week later so I've forgotten. (I also have no clue how to properly write these things lol).

Level Design

The level design was done by my teammate, CaineTinyArms. I think he did a great job in designing the levels in a way that teach the player the core mechanics of our game without directly telling them.

Here's what Caine had to say about it: I spent a couple hours brainstorming level ideas, many of the early ideas had to be scrapped because I didn't account for berg falling from the sky when they're summoned. The main issue encountered when developing levels was the player could cheese pretty much all of them by just berg-stacking, which is where the no-berg-zone came in. Overall, I think the levels turned out well, considering it's my first forte into level design. (also shout out toast for carrying the team <3)

Sound

The awesome music track was create by my friend, Iiro. I think he did a great job with it and props to him for always being up for creating tracks for my projects. He also did most of the sound effects for the game - including the "BERG" summon sound.

Art

I'm not an artist so I kept things super simple. The bergs are basically just squares with arms, the levels are made from a square only tileset, and the background is made up from spinning squares. This isn't relevant to the art but the game's resolution is also square (it's 160x160 if you're interested). If you couldn't already tell, I quite like squares. All things considered, I think the game turned out looking ok.

Other

The bergs were original called 'guys' (in the project file they still are) but we changed it to 'berg' once we released they kinda looked berg-y.

End

Thanks to everyone who has played the game and left feedback. We haven't replied to many comments as there's quite a few but we have read every single one and taken notes on the feedback everyone has given :).

If you haven't played bergs yet you can check it out here.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs

Our first Ludum Dare Entry, bergs, is almost at 100 ratings! If you haven't already, consider checking out our little puzzle game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs

Thank you to everyone who has already played the game and left feedback :)

Before watching the video I recommend you spend 5-10 minutes playing bergs and experience it for yourself first.

https://youtu.be/jDyqu_xiPzs

When watching people play bergs, I noticed many of them abuse bugs and glitches to cheese their way through the levels. I think that this is awesome, and fully encourage it, but some people were confused on the actual solution to the levels. So for those curious, I made a short gameplay video showing the intended solutions to each level.

If you haven't played our little puzzle game, bergs yet, you can do so here.

As it's coming to the end of the Jam I want to say thank you to everyone who has played, rated and left feedback on bergs.

This was mine and my teams first Ludum Dare and it's been such a positive experience for all of us. We plan to work on the game a bit after the jam and polish it up based on everyone's feedback.

If you haven't played it yet, there's still a little bit of time, you can check it out here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs

Also we'll be playing some more games tonight, so if you want us to play your game, please leave it in the comments! :)

See you in October!