This’ll be my first Ludum Dare ever, going to be in the LD31 jam! Excited to join!
Tools I plan to use:
I’m making a Donkey Kong style game, where instead of Donkey Kong throwing barrels at you, it’s snowballs rolling down at you. To honor the “snowman” theme me and my teammate crux_f were expecting. Snowball physics works, being hit/dying works, going to the next level works, and there’s even some nice sounds and fancy snowfall particles.
Things I’ve noticed so far: Sounds help. Big time. Even if it is you blowing into your mic or making a derpy “HURK” noise for the death sound.
I’m doing this in 2.5d, meaning it’s a 3d world with platformer controls. Feelin’ good, will be continuing work throughout the night!
Dev picture of my game, looking good so far!
Did not get enough sleep last night, meaning I’ve been LudumDare-ing as a part-zombie, but that’s fine… 😛
Anyway, while working on your game make sure to consider how balanced it is. If the game feels really easy to you, don’t go “bah it’s too easy, time to buff the difficulty” without having some playtests from people who have NOT played the game. If you’re getting to the point of “AARGH I HATE THIS GAME” because you keep failing, like I do, then I think the difficulty may need some tuning down. 😛
Still going strong, nearing a grand total of 20 levels in my game, the last of which are REALLY HARD and make me feel like I made the next rage game. Picture time, then I’m going to go balance the hardest levels!
I did a derp of some sort and then a bunch of snowballs piled up. Ooops…
Ball of fiery doom hurtling towards me (the bean)
I finally finished Hazard Hills! You can play/rate it here!
Things I’ve discovered from working on it: Work on the annoying stuff early, don’t put it off. Otherwise it’s likely never going to get finished.
Upload the sourcecode EARLY. The source folder was around 250 megs, which is a real pain to upload on my internet.
Ambient sounds really help make the game nicer.
Don’t set your aim TOO high.
You can watch my preview video here:
I’ll be in the 3-day category, working with one other team-mate and using Unity.
Hooray!
You may remember me from LD #31 when I made Hazard Hills. This is my second jam 😀
Don’t mind the guy under the cactus…
Weaponry, stats, and…randomly generated items and names?
Huh.
Pretty happy with how it came out!
It’s a sort of Roguelike game where you are a cactus with 4 legs and 2 arms and a face. Don’t forget your sombrero!
This game’s unconventional weapon is at first, you. When’s the last time you tried hugging a cactus?
Later on you find loot chests containing randomly made weapons with absurd names and types (Derpy Broomstick of Oolong Cows, anyone?) that can give you stats buffs or debuffs in addition to looking cool.
You can also use RMB to shoot a spine at mobs, but it uses SP (1 SP to be specific), or Special Power (probably, that’s what I call it). Space gives you a health buff (health restored equal to your current level).
I won’t spoil the “ending”, but I will say you can keep playing afterward and keep descending deeper into the dungeon of Cactusman.
Play it and vote for it here!
Barring any horrible disasters, I *should* be participating in the next Jam. Very likely I’ll be working alone, using Unity for the engine, with Blender for modeling, Gimp and Inkscape for texturing, as well as Audacity and Caustic 3 for sound and music design.
The aforementioned “Horrible Disasters” would include my computer exploding, being stuck in a car for most of the duration of the Jam, etc.
Despite going without my buddy crux_f (the Idea Guy and Orange Wizard, who’s pulled a good few jams out of the dustbin), I feel like I’ve made some pretty good progress so far.
The core gameplay mechanics I wanted to implement are there, it’s just a matter of content now. Content, in this case, means music, audio, and perhaps most importantly: puzzles to solve.
The game is a puzzle game, akin to Portal or perhaps Antichamber. The use of “Shapeshift” in this, would be two things. Each ‘test chamber’, to use Portal terminology, takes place in a number of dimensions that can be swapped between by walking through a wormhole of sorts. The wormholes and level exit are in fixed locations in each dimension, but the contents of the dimensions can change.
Have a picture of a button, with a box on it, in the first puzzle!
A button with a box on it, and some stairs to the exit
Very little progress was made. There’s a fourth puzzle now, and some new music made in Caustic 3, however there’s still a 5th test chamber/puzzle to build, and music is needed for the third and fifth chambers. There’s also no name for the game yet, and not MUCH in the way of shapeshifting.
Now, for the part where sleep is obtained, so that tomorrow, maybe the new songs for the soundtrack WON’T sound like they’re made of pieces of other game soundtracks, mashed together and assimilated by the Borg.
Goodnight, jammers in the EST timezone!
I have yet to actually submit it, because I’m sitting around waiting for ‘git push’ to finish and the Windows binaries to upload. I refuse to submit it until there’s actual proof my game exists!
However, I feel decently happy with what I did. It’s a simple-ish physics puzzler with some multi-dimensional madness and shape-shifting boxes. I would’ve liked to have had at least five test chambers in it, however, due to time constraints and lack of creative energy, I had to settle with four test chambers. However, to make up for that, I did spend some time polishing the game and making the different dimensions feel mildly more unique and themed, as well as putting in some nice quality-of-life features, like little mini musical stingers for buttons being pressed.
Code will be up at github once my internet complies, but hopefully a Windows binary will be up before then.
A vine-filled room in Shift’s green dimension, in the 4th chamber.
A bit later than most of the other jam entries, but it seems like a good time to write this anyway.
Not super happy with Shift. Kinda feels like it’s mediocre in comparison to my previous entries, and it wasn’t fun designing it, certainly in comparison to the previous entry I was the lead coder of, The Adventures of Cactusman.
Things done right:
Things done wrong:
All in all, not super enthusiastic about the product available for the moment, and ready for some more R&R. At some point, I’ll probably return to rate games, maybe starting tomorrow, but right now, sleep is mandatory. Have a good week, Ludum Dare-goers!
Party at the Knight Club, by Elisee & co: Somewhat short, but fun and puzzley, and certainly a valid use of the shapeshifting theme. If you haven’t played it yet, stop reading my post and go do it.
Wood for the Trees, by ratking: Also short, but bloody amazing. It’s not quite a puzzle, more of a riddle. It’s also beautiful looking. After you’ve beaten Party at the Knight Club, go play this and savor the experience.
The Creatures of Pflaumotopia, by Yazara: It’s a bit bare-bones in terms of gameplay and the likes, but still worth mentioning. Not your usual MMO. It’s more like a weird Spore-but-not thing – and it’s bloody awesome. Keep an eye out for the Dorians, my species in it.
h3ss, by wboqm: It’ll bend your brain and leave you confused as heck, but it IS pretty dang cool. I’m too rooted in standard X/Y/Z/ 3d-space, so I wasn’t even able to beat the first level. Protip: Don’t be me.
And finally, some sameful self-promotion, don’t forget to play Shift, the entry I submitted. If it reaches 25 votes, I can walk away happy this LD, though I would like to see it do better than my previous entries.
Party at the Knight Club, by Elisee & co: Somewhat short, but fun and puzzley, and certainly a valid use of the shapeshifting theme. If you haven’t played it yet, stop reading my post and go do it.
Wood for the Trees, by ratking: Also short, but bloody amazing. It’s not quite a puzzle, more of a riddle. It’s also beautiful looking. After you’ve beaten Party at the Knight Club, go play this and savor the experience.
The Creatures of Pflaumotopia, by Yazara: It’s a bit bare-bones in terms of gameplay and the likes, but still worth mentioning. Not your usual MMO. It’s more like a weird Spore-but-not thing – and it’s bloody awesome. Keep an eye out for the Dorians, my species in it.
h3ss, by wboqm: It’ll bend your brain and leave you confused as heck, but it IS pretty dang cool. I’m too rooted in standard X/Y/Z/ 3d-space, so I wasn’t even able to beat the first level. Protip: Don’t be me.
And finally, some sameful self-promotion, don’t forget to play Shift, the entry I submitted. If it reaches 25 votes, I can walk away happy this LD, though I would like to see it do better than my previous entries.
…you spend 30 minutes yelling “JUST ONE MORE VOTE! JUST! ONE!” at your monitor while repeatedly refreshing the main Ludum Dare page.
Getting to a measly 25 votes for Shift is becoming an obsession, even though 25 is, like, basically nothing in Ludum Dare terms.
Halp.
Once again, after much back and forth, it has been decided: The 006 Cooperative shall participate in the mind-melting crunch once more!
As per usual, Unity for the engine, Blender for modelling, The GIMP and Inkscape for any textures, and a mix of tools for music and audio. I might shake things up this time, using some Ableton Live alongside Caustic 3 for music.
If “A different kind of combat” or “Don’t kill anything” win the final rounds, I’m liable to grumble a lot, and make something really sarcastic; expect to see me making fun of Undertale and the likes.
Now with working on-screen text, and two utterly useless commands!
I still don’t know where I’m going with these, to be entirely honest; I want to make some hacking and fun stuff built around these computers, but I’m not sure what to put on them TO hack. I haven’t even started on doing stealth gameplay mechanics yet!
One thing I’m thinking about is maybe taking a leaf out of Gunpoint’s book, and making various hackable objects (like lights), that you can control from these computers. Next floor swarming with guards? Turn off their lights! Want to dig up dirt on the CEO? Look through his search history!
The problem with this, of course, being that I need to program a faux OS to hack, give computers separate instanced filesystems and things they can modify (e.g; lights), etc. Furthermore, I need some kinda model for guards, workers, etc. A low-poly or abstract human is the obvious thing to jump to, given the nature of the rest of the game’s graphics, but whenever I model a human, it always comes out ridiculously uncanny.
A security guard bean with a revolver. I don’t think I’ll be de-beaning them in time for the jam.
Actual gameplay other than console-puzzling is happening! There’s now basic stealth mechanics (centered around light, primarily), and a goal: Get all the data in each level. You’ll win the level if you get all the Core Data, but there’s bonus data you can acquire too. Data is gathered in the form of papers; you can print them out from a computer, or find it on tables, etc. There should be one playable level by the end of the day, and a second playable level alongside maybe a tutorial should be happening soon. Then, music. I really want to make some good music for this.
I’ve hit the hay earlier than usual; rather than going until the last minute, I’ve gone ahead and put the game up. You can view it’s LD page here, or go straight to it’s download page on Itch.io here. If you use the fancy-shmancy Itch.io desktop client to grab it, it’ll auto-extract, install, and I presume even auto-update, akin to Steam!
Have a celebratory bean.