I’m surprised. Night all.

Even though I joined late (I forgot…) I managed to pull out a game from somewhere! I literally made the first second game that came to mind and just ran with it, even though I wasn’t feeling it much at first.

My game is called RGB and is a little like Geometry Wars & Super Hexagon (apparently), so pretty much an arcade shooting game, with a twist?! It’s quite a challenge, it is beat-able too! I managed it eventually (:

Better get playing some games! You can find mine here

Windows only tho ):

So I wasn’t 100% in to begin with, but I liked the theme, so I went with it.

IDEA
When I woke, for some reason, all I could think was “Fire Extinguisher” and so I made a game from that. Initial concept was quite simple, you have to put out fires in this station situated on another planet, however it has been breached by some alien monsters, all you have for protection is a fire extinguisher and your manager doesn’t see that as an excuse to not work.

GOOD
I’m liking the visual style I managed to set up in the time available, more meshes would have been good, but I was running out of time and needed to build the level still.

BAD
The manager was going to contact you over radio during the game, but I ran out of time and didn’t manage to do any audio ): Rushed so much towards the end, I was way too slow on the first day.

At the end of the day, had a fantastic time! Now back to my assignments I put off for this o.o

Check my entry out here

If you don’t have windows, I made a video!

Well, I had a pretty good time last weekend despite not being enthused by the theme, I ended up making a game based around the idiom “A Wolf in Sheep’s clothing” and it turned out all right!

Design

My basic concept was you eat sheep, the more you eat, the more wool you wear and so the sheep are less scared of you, but you move slower. I had a few ideas of how the wool would be removed, like  other wolves thinking you’re a sheep, taking damage (wire fences, angry farmers, charging rams) and maybe I’ll add a shearing sequence if I had time (I didn’t!)

Visuals

I wanted it to look cute and simple but I wasn’t sure I could make it work, so I broke my one rule and made graphics before any sort of code. This wasn’t so bad as the simple style worked and was quite quick to make, plus the cute art really contrasted against the brutal sheep murder that the game is.  yay.

Conclusion

I worked almost non stop on the Sunday, but looking back, it would’ve been a good idea to have done a lot more on Saturday, maybe next time I’ll skip sleeping, I always feel at the end I’m always 2 hours short of time ): Due to this I never managed to test it properly and realise how necessary the shearing event was, I’ve since uploaded a post-compo version with it in and it really adds to the challenge of the game. Overall, I’m really pleased with the game, much more than my previous entry, going to definitely stick to 2D games  when going solo, 3D is just too painful.

I’ve had some great feedback so far, thanks to all who’ve played it, and for those who haven’t….

Play it here 😉 

Game got finished, there is a surprising lack of features and I can only say that…

Most of the mechanics are done, but it's still looking a bit bare and has no fail/win conditions, here's to a massive crunch tomorrow!

Woo! It's an actual game and stuff, would've been nice to get a bit more time on the visuals and sound, but it's passable! Looking forward to seeing what everyone has made. Time for sleep, lots of it.

https://cojowe.itch.io/planet-heist

:earthamericas::pandaface:A turn based puzzle game... I think...

This is a little late, but luckily for me as the judging started my pc died (While playing some LD games, funnily enough. Woo!) and I could only really play & rate games at work during lunch (if I got a chance :disappointed:)

...Anyway, as you can see, I shoe-horned in the theme a little, I did this to stop myself making the same mistake I made last LD where I got game-makers block by obsessing over the theme. The theme is great and I'd love to do something original with it, but sometimes the theme doesn't agree with me and I'd rather have fun making a game I want to make then a game I'm not invested in. Perhaps something to consider if you've ever felt the same way during Ludum Dare :stuckouttongue:

My favourite thing with these game jams is making something I've not made before and a turn based puzzle game is certainly something I've not tried. I honestly had lots of fun making the game but really wasn't sure it would work or be enjoyable, but by the time I was assembling the levels and creating the puzzles I was enjoying the challenge, which was an absolutely fantastic feeling :grin:

:chartwithupwards_trend:DESIGN

I tried to keep the games features as small as possible and still managed to cut a few. Perhaps a few more enemy types would've been cool, but making the levels took a lot of testing to assure they were actually possible, so this went as well as could have really... Also a few features I had planned would've maybe removed a lot of the challenge.

:flowerplayingcards:ART

I was very pushed for time in the last few hours and had to make due with a lot of the art I had deemed temporary to actually be the final version. I also never managed to add turn transitions, instead everything snaps to the next space each turn (... but, I guess it would've been odd if they did transition, as you'd be passing right through an enemies vision). More animations and ambient movement would've gone a long way into making it feel a little more alive.

🗒️ CODE

I always fall into a habit of putting art and sound before actually making the game, this usually tends to end with a lot of un-used assets and a very lacking game :stuckouttongue:, I managed to keep on track this time around and prioritise making the game.

:musical_note:SOUND

Music turned out great but I hadn't time to add as many SFX as I'd have liked, they would've been mostly BFXR audio clips anyway, so not the end of the world. Ummm... maybe a time ticking sound to build tension would've been a good idea, now I think about it...

🕹️OVERALL

I managed my time better than usual, spending most of my time committed to making sure the game is play-able and polished instead of fretting over art & sound. I would've liked to have had more time to polish art and sound, but it was passable.

I still need ~8 more votes, if anyone plays my game and leaves a comment I'll be sure to give your game a go too :grin:

PLAY THE GAME HERE

Windows only, sorry :disappointed:, it wouldn't export to html5 for some reason...

...Instead of compo, unfortunately I agreed to go to a wedding yesterday (Cause, y'know, when is Ludum Dare in July?) and I didn't exactly get enough done in 1 day to call it a game.

There's some core mechanics down and an easy art style, looking forward to doing a lot more tomorrow!

Perhaps a blog post at this time wasn't a good decision... Good luck everyone with their final hours :grin:

The name was my biggest mistake, I really couldn't think of a good one :sweat_smile:

:bulb: IDEA

Every Jam I like to try something different, make a style of game I've never tried to make or perhaps don't really play much and at least attempt at adding something new (that last bit is usually hit & miss :stuckouttongue:). This time I went with Tower Defence games, I've seen a lot made for LD jams (I assume as they don't require a lot of input for there to be a lot of content) but most play like the Tower Defence games you see everywhere, spamming down as many towers as possible usually yields a win, how can I change that up?

I wasn't very convinced from the start that removing the power to place your own towers and instead managing their "power" was going to work but I had literally nothing else and I'd already lost a day from being busy, so I just went with it.

:scroll: DESIGN

I've always believed jam games are better when you can control a moving character and this worked well with my change to the format (I think, I don't really play Tower Defence games...) as I wanted there to be a time cost between turning different towers on and transporting the energy to them. I came up with 3 or 4 varied towers (which I'm going to call traps from now on) and a bunch of enemy designs, they'll just have varied stats, like movement and health, if there's time I can add some bosses.

Got 1 boss in, they heal minions around them.

:pencil: CODE

Usual thing, I'm never good at getting any mechanics down before I've got some form of art style down, which is a pain... But I guess it's just how I work. Managed to get most of the main pieces done, the basic traps and the parents for all the enemies, probably should've worked a little quicker as the last few hours were the crunchiest of crunches. Never really got a proper win/lose condition in ):

:flowerplayingcards: ART

I feel my games look way better the less colours I use, I limited myself to 5 colours this time around, perhaps one day my game will be just a single colour and instead of "playing" the game like some uncultured rabble, you experience it instead. Joking aside, I liked the colour palette I created, rather cute and keeping to an 8x8 and 16x16 sprite size (mostly) I managed to make a rather consistent style, perhaps my best so far.

Still need to look into utilising shaders better, although this I assume would prevent me from packaging to HTML5, which might be an issue as I can't package to Mac.

:musical_note: SOUND

Didn't spend too long working on sound, wish I could've added a bit more length to my music track (it gets quite repetitive) and perhaps a handful more sound FX would've really helped. All in all, need to start leaving more time for this and perhaps testing sounds with multiple types of speakers as one of my sounds is rather painful on the ears (oops :sweat_smile:)

:joystick: OVERALL

Took a bit too long this time to come up with an idea (the entirety of Saturday, I was at a wedding, so I couldn't do anything, but still...) and found it rather difficult to get motivated. I guess I need to start investing in whatever I start making even if I'm not sure it'll work.

Give my game a play and leave a comment and I'll be sure to return the favour :grinning: Cheers!

Game page

Itch page For HTML version.

Was a little late to the voting :flushed:, looks like I've only half the votes needed to enter, if anyone can spare a minute (it's really short) and play my game that would be greatly appreciated! Leave a comment if you're still under 20 and I'll give yours a play in return, don't force feedback if you don't wanna, just leave a :red_car: emoji or something random.

Technically I didn't finish my gameplay, but I'd still like feedback on graphics and mood as I spent (perhaps to my own detriment) a lot of time on them, here's an image of the game.

I was trying to fuse tower defence with a card game and... programming a card game is perhaps too much for my rather slow programming abilities :stuckouttongue:. Not an issue though, LD is always a learning experience and now I know if I it's too complicated to explain in less than 30 seconds on day 1, it's too complicated to make in 2 days, haha.

Looking forward to play some of the winners, certainly think I've already played a few.

See you all at LD42 :grin:

EDIT: A game link would've been a good idea...

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/wasted-warlocks

Might turn out alright! The theme is one I would've preferred, however my idea might be a tad difficult to pull off... But there's plenty of space (ha) to cut systems if needed.

Already my PC has turned against me... Admittedly it has been a few days since I last turned it off :confounded:

Hopefully it packs that behaviour in as I need to now make my mock-up a reality!

...And love leaving things to the last minute :stuckouttongue:

I made a game about opening packages this time around and hopefully that sounds appealing! Many mechanics were cut as it was a little too much to do in a weekend, but once the results are in and I've got some feedback, I'm interested in adding in the missed features and polishing the GFX.

If you play my game and leave a comment (leave a random emoji like a :red_car: or something if you don't feel like leaving feedback) I'll be sure to give your game a whirl too! Until then, I guess I'll browse around...

You can play my game here, there's a web version which is better as it doesn't crash, unlike the windows version which is quite broken.

In an attempt to figure where I keep going wrong over the weekends of Ludum Dare, I decided to analyse all of my entries to date - all 4 years of them.

The main reason I started participating in LD was to improve as a developer and to have fun while doing so. From the graph it shows I've got better in some regards, but I do repeat the same mistakes over and over and I believe it's because of my poor time management. Other issues show up too, theme-block is a big one and relying too heavily on my strongest skill, coughgraphicscough.

LD30: Courier

I started fairly decently, relying on my stronger skills to make an 'experience' rather than a game as I spent most of my time creating graphics and audio while keeping the game itself to a pretty simple platformer with scripted triggers. Still my best MOOD rating and rank I've achieved to date.

LD31: RGB :star::star:

This I regard as my greatest game to date. I started late (forgot it was on until around 5pm on Saturday) and decided to only enter if I could make a skeleton of a game in 2 hours. I did this and decided to embrace the gameplay and theme and spent less than an hour on graphics. Getting back into the top 25 distracted me for many events until I remembered why I participate. While the prestige of getting a high ranking is great, I think improving on previous entries is far more important if I want to succeed. This was my best attempt at FUN, which is a little disappointing as I believe that is the most important category.

LD32: Extinguished

Something I've lived by from the start is a refusal of repeating myself, sometimes to my own detriment. This time I figured I'd give UE4 a whirl and make a 3D game instead of the usual pixel art focused 2D game. Unfortunately the gameplay took a dive and the art took so long to make I didn't have time for audio, something I go onto repeat in future jams.

LD33: Eat Sheep & Die :star::star::star::star::star:

Keep it simple, stupid! For once I listened and managed to make one of my strongest submissions yet. The tiny retro pixel graphics were quick and easy to pump out and I even had time to spread myself very evenly, which the results certainly show as all categories scored higher than 3.5. This has stayed my best attempt at THEME, which makes sense as the theme was fairly loose.

LD34: Super Christmas Tree Tycoon

This I always felt went pretty poorly, but the scores are fairly decent so I suppose I wasn't expecting my future attempts would make this look good :stuckouttongue:. It's my best attempt at HUMOUR, but also the only time I've tried to make something humorous. Graphics were done in photoshop this time around and I avoided making pixel art. I don't know why.

LD35: Porknight :star:

A decent submission but I mistakenly thought I'd done a good job with theme this time around but had that turned out to be completely wrong. The cute graphics and simple gameplay held this one up more than anything but overall the ratings were far lower than the comments let on. I guess people lie.

LD36: Mik & Odi

This was the event with no rating system. You can imagine my despair as it will reflect poorly on my consistent participation and leave an ugly space on my OCD stat keeping, but it's not the end of the world. Going back and having a play I see it was a solid submission with only minor balancing and buggy control issues. Graphics and audio were great and I decided to live by a new rule of limiting my colour-palette which worked wonders.

LD37: Abominable :x:

Aaaand this is where I officially go down hill. Theme-block is a horrible affliction as it totally demoralised me having me re-start what I was making multiple times over the weekend. The fact it got ratings above 2 stars will always astonish me and you may wonder why I even submitted it. Well, although I knew the glaring issues with the game (for instance, you could fish, cut trees and make fires with an axe...) but I was still curious how it would be rated.

LD38: Planet Heist :star::star::star::star:

Theme-block strikes again, but I had a plan this time. Fuck it and make the best game from the list of final theme ideas, which I did to great success. This entry holds my strongest attempts at OVERALL and INNOVATION and aside from theme, it's a solid game with challenge and multiple levels meaning it will require a good 10 minutes to complete. This is quite key to making a game, it seems. Innovation has always been my weakest category so this claiming the top spot isn't much to shout about.

LD39: Zest & Goop

This was a strong entry but suffered as I had a wedding to go to that weekend! This meant I essentially made a compo game but submitted it to jam causing it to have far better games to compete against and higher expectations. It remains my strongest GRAPHICS score while losing out on ranking to LD35. This further proves the effectiveness of a simple colour-palette. Also, if you have walls, making the character a ghost isn't enough to disregard collision checks :stuckouttongue:. Also, the audio was seen as annoying which is something to learn from.

LD40: Tail :star::star::star:

The main issue with this submission was the level... It was absolutely massive which meant the load time was around 15 seconds. The movement/controls were highly praised and overall it was a great entry aside from its lack of depth. Humour is very low in comparison to other categories but this is to be expected as not every could and should be funny. It claims the top spot for AUDIO which is great as this generally gets the least amount of time spent on it and my previous attempt was quite unsuccessful.

LD41: Wasted Warlocks :x:

Oof, talk about over-scoping. This will be the last time I allow friends to be around me during the initial design process. They had great ideas but very little knowledge of how to accomplish such things. I've only myself to blame though, I should know better after 11 LD participations. Too much time on GFX... the usual problem that caused me to not finish the gameplay.

LD42: Obey

These results are obviously not yet in but I'm certain this will be a poor entry. The main gameplay focused around a system that I implemented poorly causing Sunday to be mostly bug fixing and very little polish :cry:. Audio fell by the way-side and the game, while playable, lacks challenge and a core goal.

CONCLUSION

I need to sit down and practise my system design and programming practises before the next event, that much I'm sure of! I have felt this way for a year or so though, let's pray I actually do it this time. I'm also considering to limit myself to focusing on humour and innovation as these are my least explored categories (probably as they're the hardest :stuckouttongue: ) and hopefully that will bring something new out of me. Or maybe I'll fail even harder than before... Only time will tell!

If you've read this far... Thanks! This is an incredibly self-serving post but perhaps others could gain some loose learning points from it. I'd be interested in seeing others take a deep dive into their own ratings over the years, it's a great way to see which skills could do with some improvement.

I've yet to rate 20 games, so if you need more ratings to compete just drop a comment and I'll try and play it today! First come first serve and time permitting, of course.

Good luck to everyone for results day :grinning:

Not sure if playing as a Minotaur murdering childre- I mean sacrifices... Is a good idea but it's apparently where my day has lead me. Now sleep time.

Defend your GOLD from intruders.

Chase down the pesky SACRIFICES.

Beware of the HEROES. Don't worry, they bleed.

PLAY IT HERE

Leave a comment and I'll be sure to give your game a whirl when I get the time :grinning:

... charge through piles of gold... apparently?

PLAY ASTERION

Leave a comment and I'll be sure to play your game :grinning:

Don't forget to own the libs!

:heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird: :heart: :bird:

Added a post-jam variant (windows only) with a polished UI and an extra mechanic I failed to get in during the time-frame.

PLAY HERE

Leave a comment and I'll check out your game :wink:

PLAY IN BROWSER