Was sent across this video from a friend's boyfriend, and I'm frankly at a loss for words
https://streamable.com/oxass0?fbclid=IwAR0cAFydjDMcYIYAs5npbLlrlj1vIs8ImgegjadkH4vafcp3Z3BYTnrnHws
Think you can beat his time? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/bubbles-saves-grandma
(For reference, my best time is 1:26 and I physically cannot get it any lower)
Bubbles Saves Grandma has had some great reception, and through careful consideration of user feedback from both the Ludum Dare community and external players, I've been able to put together a list of the most commonly requested quality of life changes and the most complained about problems.
Today, I finally ofund the time in my schedule to put an hour in and tweaked the game a bit, and now it should be much more fun and a whole lot more playable!
Changes: - "R" key now resets the game immediately - highly requested by speedrunners - Bubbles will no longer hang desperately to edges only to later fall - he will be able to jump up! - The jump's consistency has been improved, and you should now always jump when you expect to - "Super jump" bug fixed - A voice clip has been added to the bathroom letting you know the sink is your destination, as some users found this room quite tricky to work out - Finally, the most requested feature of all: Bubbles has now decided it's ok to look back sometimes - Pressing S will now actually slow Bubbles down! I'm worried this might make the game too easy, but I'm excited to see feedback
Please let me know if there are any glaring issues or new bugs introduced with this version!
Thank you for joining Bubbles on this journey!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/bubbles-saves-grandma
https://caladrius.itch.io/bubbles-saves-grandma
OH LORD OH JEEZ OH NO OH DARN SHE'S TAKEN A TUMBLE GET TO THE PANIC BUTTON AT ALL COST MATERIAL POSSESSIONS MEAN NOTHING IN THE FACE OF MORTALITY
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/bubbles-saves-grandma
- A score of 400 was combining the 400/500 score title. This is now corrected
- Previously a score of 1000 was completely impossible due to the "Seconds to door" timer continuing to count during the endgame. Max score is now completely achievable!
- Some props were spawning inside chairs. This has been corrected.
- NPC chatter continued to play in the end screen. This was not intended behaviour and has been fixed
- A few object UVs were very messy and the correct Albedo/Metallic settings weren't set, so we had shiny bags and matte bottles. These have all been cleaned up and look much better now
I uploaded a set of bugfixes yesterday and forgot to upload a changelog so, here it is...
Thanks for playing!
- Player uphill slope limit adjusted to prevent getting stuck on terrain
- Keys now rotate on the correct axis and speed when picking up
- Night sky light now correctly displaying, outside was previously pitch black
- Torches no longer broken and flashing when player is close
- Fire particle now correctly scales by distance. No more giant flares!
- Goblin skeletons now have the correct material
- Major mouselook bugs fixed - should now run much cleaner in WebGL
- Easter egg notes were being regarded as gameplay-important so are now properly hidden
- Password notes have been moved to be more obvious as some players were struggling to find them
- One additional note hidden to support with onboarding an obscure puzzle element
- "Sotaroni" easter egg text replaced with something a bit less inside jokey. Didn't expect so many people to find it!
We're going to be considering this the definitive version now, as through watching multiple streamers playing the game and rigorously playtesting ourselves, we believe every major bug and positioning issue has now been fixed. Thank you to everybody who gave us such detailed feedback and bug reports; we hope you enjoy playing the definitive version of Burst Vein for the remainder of LD48!
Thank you so much to everybody who played and rated MIFFED. For the most part we at the Tamanegi Collective always try to make a funny and entertaining game since most of our team are amateurs not capable of highly polished professional work; we've been working towards top 10 humour for 2 years now so this has been an extremely pleasant surprise to wake up to!
A geriatric thank you from the MIFFED team!
Here's to top 5 funniest next time
As with any Ludum Dare project, the amount of bugs found after final upload eclipsed the euophoria of finally uploading our game. So now, after a day of rest and an evening of fixing bugs, I present to you our 1.1 changelog:
There are still a few bugs to go, bur we're all very satisfied with this as a 1.1 release. Godspeed!
Almost every single review of our game "Stone Sabbath" has praised the music, so our lead musician Erik Bria has dropped the soundtrack on YouTube along with download links!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5qws5a0SGg Download Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FvzdBpnqlgic7D9WvgYliw6CjEsQDNuE/view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd06jgZblAA Download Link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QlSVPBDMzwO3MOXJrf1l3aeIXl3Q3p5u/view
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/stone-sabbath
Thanks to everybody who played the game and gave us valuable feedback. Bugs have been fixed, and a couple of key issues have been ironed out to improve things across the board. Our team are now thankfully looking at an empty Trello board for the first time since this project started, and we can hopefully call this version finished!
Thank you for playing Stone Sabbath!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/stone-sabbath
One of the most common things I've had pointed out to me recently is the size of my Ludum Dare team. We started as a small team of 4 (An artist, UI designer, Muscian, and Programmer) and over the last two years we've expanded threefold as friends see what we're doing and want to get involved themselves, so I figured I'd drop some insights into how we run things that may help others out as their own teams expand just so you don't end up with a "Too many cooks" situation!
Our team structure is simple. We have three key directors; a creative director, an art director, and an audio director. These three directors take charge of key aspects of the project and manage several team members all at once. This ensures the people with the least experience all know who they can ask questions to and nobody is having to worry about work being done outside of their own sub-team.
Our skill levels vary wildly across the team. Some of us have several years of experience, while others did literally one day of Blender training the day before the jam started. We want this to be a fun 0 pressure learning environment for everybody involved, and it's a great way for people to get hands-on game development experience in fields they've wanted to experiment with.
We plan our next jams ahead the MOMENT one finishes. This ensures we can all book time off work and align with eachother to ensure everybody that wants to take part will definitely be taking part. I encourage a process of iteration and improvement, so we discuss where the pain points of the project were and make a plan of action to offset these in the future. This has so far taken the form of bringing new people into the team, shuffling the team roles around, changing elements of our workflow, and finding educational resources to help improve skills that caused a block in the project workflow previously.
Generally the next few months are quite quiet in the project Discord. A few posts here and there on our non-LDJam projects, but we try not to stress about the next jam.
This changes when the final month approaches. This is a month of steady planning and preparation where we decide which tools we'll be using, and doing a double check on the full team make-up to ensure we DEFINITELY have the full team aligned and we can mitigate if key players are missing. Calendar events are set, source control is set up, a OneDrive folder is shared to the team, a whiteboard template is created, a Trello board is prepared, an empty Unity project is templated with our usual tools (LeanTween, Peek, UModeler) and a scene for each Unity developer to build their components in isolation, and everybody ensures they're on the same version of Unity. Strong preparation means the moment you have your idea in placed, you can all get to work.
Finally, a wishlist is put together of all the things people would LIKE to end up making with the hopes we can align our final game idea to match. This very rarely pans out, but it's nice to know where everybody's passions or worries lie.
In my opinion this is absolutely the most important part of any game jam project, so getting a process down that encourages creativity and speaking up from every member of the team to lock in an idea as soon as possible is key. We all hop on Discord and Figma on the morning of the jam, nice and refreshed (This time the jam started at 2am, so we all got to work planning at 7am instead of staying up). We handle our ideation in several steps, and try to keep these steps within a time limit:
Here's a look at our Figma whiteboard from the LD50 session so you can get a look at how we landed on Stone Sabbath. I think we did a great job sticking to the pillars for the most part!
I'm pleased to say that development mostly goes off smoothly. People know who to talk to, problems are isolated and ironed out quickly, and communication remains a constant. There are often 5+ people in a discord channel working together at any given time, so emergent problems are quickly known to the whole team. We try to hop on for a 9am meeting on the next two days of the jam to discuss the day's plan and mitigate if problems are foreseen. Our plan is always to go:
Of course, things don't always turn out this way. With our previous games Burst Vein and MIFFED there was absolutely no time for polish, as getting those games across the finishing line took our all in the first place. I'm pleased to say that our process finally seems to be refined enough to get the polish day we've always wanted with Stone Sabbath, and I like to think that the final result really shows the fruits of that day.
Once the game is submitted we all take part in Play+Rate as a unit, sharing the coolest games we find with each other in the Discord and just having a really fun time with it. I encourage the team to drop a post-mortem report of:
This information all helps to smooth out the edges and makes sure we don't repeat the same mistakes. There's also an optional step where people will ask me for a personalised performance review, which helps them to isolate their own weak points they might not be aware of. The improvement from jam to jam is absolutely undeniable, and I'm extremely proud of every member of the team. With how well Stone Sabbath went I truly believe that the team is ready as ever to make a full-scale game outside of a jam environment.
A look at how many Discord channels we use for organisation
When managing a team for a game jam, no matter how professionally you attempt to run it, it's absolutely imperative that things stay fun for your team. Remove pressure wherever you can, design the project around people's strengths, and don't force people aggressively outside their comfort zones. Don’t encourage all-nighters, make sure people are well rested and getting sleep, breaks, and support when they need them, and overall just be nice to be around. If you're the main organiser of a full team of people it can be very easy to let things get on top of you, but you need to maintain perspective and remember that this should be fun for YOU as well. If you're not having a good time with your friends you're just making a dry professional portfolio piece, and there's no joy in that whatsoever.
Thanks for reading. Maybe go check out our game Stone Sabbath! Also let me know in the comments your own experiences with doing a jam in a big team, would love to know if there are any unique challenges you've come across that we have yet to learn of
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/stone-sabbath
Next post will be a selection of concept art from Stone Sabbath
Loor's initial concept designs were put to a vote by the team, and elements of the most popular picks were combined to create the final design
While some liberties had to be taken with the chunkiness of the scythe to match the in-game aesthetic, the core of the "Moonlight Scythe" was retained in the final version.
While we initially had some scaling issues, the final result ended up being very close to the original plan. It worked out great even after rebalancing for a better gameplay experience.
It's not every day I can say something I've worked on has been given life by such a talented artist (let alone a game jam project!), but it's a thing I truly cherish when it does happen.
This beautiful piece by the incomparable @ Scribble_Knight- drop a follow!
So normally we at the Tamanegi Collective prioritise WebGL builds as our first build, but with new technical implementations come new discoveries. Discoveries such as: WebGL does not like "WaitForCompletion()" when working with addressables! Who knew?
So fast forward today, where I've spent the last 7 hours reworking my scene manager to finally accept it, and we're FINALLY there with a WebGL build! With a catch.... A huge load time on the first playthrough. It really pours when it rains huh. Don't get me started on having to bake lighting in nearly every single scene because the WebGL builds looked like the construct in the Matrix
Along with this WebGL build, I dropped in a few key bugfixes that were causing issues for players:
It should be said that the WebGL build is by no means the optimal way to play the game. I just like to give it as an option for people that don't like to flood their folders with random games as well as giving access to other platforms. If you're on Windows, enjoy the game, and want to give endless mode a try to go for a high score, I highly recommend the Windows build!
Take part in the DecaDare show!
Thanks to everybody who left us such detailed feedback. We've actioned everything that seemed consistent, agreeable, and not out of scope to amend on a Ludum Dare entry without significantly altering our intention.