I’m thirsty of making games.

I decided that 3 games per year wasn’t enough, so I seriously thought of making my own games alone.

But with my new job, my free time considerably dropped, and every game I started never stand more than two months, mainly because of a lack of motivation.

So, when I saw the #1GAM jam, I first just thought that I can’t do 12 games a year, I’m not even able to make one a year !

After several weeks, it came to me that this jam was not about forcing you to make games quickly, but more about how can you make games quickly. And when I say how, I talk about organization.

That was the key of all my failures, and that’s why #1GAM was made for.

So if you want to make your own games alone, and you’re a totally mess about making games done, it’s a really good place to start.

The #1GAM uses the gamification to encourage you to focus on time constraint, and with less time, you must make smaller games, and smaller games means less gameplay. And that’s here where it become interesting. You choose what’s important, what’s essential, what’s impossible to make within time and what’s not worth to make.

You work alone, but there’s thousands of people making the jam for the same reasons. If you’re bad at writing or designing, some people may look for coders like you, and if you’re a good writer but have bad dev skills, there’s even more people looking for you.

It’s a unique experience I strongly recommend, you can only get out with even more experience in game development, and all organization aspects that comes with.

Tags: OneGameAMonth

Here is some concept art of my game.

I know you guys like this kind of stuff behind the scenes, so I post it here for you.

Basically, you are a three-legged eyeball that tries to escape from growing swarms of liquid spikes. The idea came… as is, I cannot explain.  I liked the idea of a man with an eye as a head, like if he was always alert.

The spyx (say spikes) are just enemies that can spout up from the ground and that looks harmful just by looking at them.

There is some elements that I had not enouth time to incorporate, like snowmen that spawn randomly just to block passively your path, others kind of spyx and a sticky ground that slows you down.

The first drawing is the brainstorm. the second is some character research.

All graphics, animations and sound effects are made by me during the compo48.

Drawings are made with Black Ink, an amazing software that is still in development, and with my Cintiq 13HD.

I made all sound effects with Sunvox. I consider it like the ultimate tracker software, like you can create your instruments with deep customization, combine everything and create great and unique sound effects (it’s good for this, but not the main point).

Have fun,

Play LArse

I come for another Ludum Dare, but this time I don’t come on my own, I’m planning to make it with some coworkers, at work.

It’s a great opportunity to make more game content, and have more polished gameplay, since I will mainly focus on code.

There’s two graphic/video/3D designers on my side, so we’ll try to make that game even more beautiful than the previous I made.

May Ludum Dare 33 be the funniest for everyone.

I think I was really close to having a game and not just a simulator. I lost my time the first day when I switched from 2D to 3D. It looks absurd but, yeah, 3D was easier. Dealing with a 3D engine for a 2D game can become a headache.

But the overall look is way better than I expected (thanks to 3D?).

Anyway even if there’s no point to my game, it’s still pleasant to play it (at least for a few minutes).

Sky Road

I’ll make a kind of “Papers please”. That wasn’t the initial idea but it turns out that it’s almost the same gameplay.

Basically you would open left door when someone comes at, and decide if you let it through the right door. I don’t know how to put more challenge or fun in the gameplay, but at least I’ll try to make it look nice.

I’m making it with LÖVE, because everybody needs a bit of love

Have fun

Some work in progress.

Everything’s okay.

View post on imgur.com

I made some progression in the gameplay. Now it’s tactile friendly.

View post on imgur.com

Now it’s time to make it actually a game (with score and endings).

View post on imgur.com

previous WIP:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/2016/12/10/590770/

http://ludumdare.com/compo/2016/12/10/double-check/

It’s 3 years I’m jaming, and no timelapse until now. That’s my very first one, it shows how slow I am for coding, and how I made all the graphics in the last 4 hours… but I’m pretty proud of how my game looks.

You can play “Go find a job!” here

Someone mentionned making a character that represents the contest on a blog post so we can include a reference to the event (like an easter egg).

I liked the idea, so I made my own rendition. Meet the Dare Girl. Feel free to use, reuse, modify or derivate from the image as you need. If you do, could you tell me so I can play your game :blush:

It's been three hours I get up and I still don't know what kind of game I want to make. I'm struggling with the theme. Seriously. That theme doesn't help at all.

I found the ultimate solution for not running out of power anymore.

So far it's getting sharper. Gameplay is set, now I mostly have to add items and tweak values to balance the game.

It differs from a classic cookie clicker because there's two levels of upgrades. Cats are expensive and rare but permanent, rusks are cheap and abundant but consumes itself.

Tomorrow I must do all the assets (remove the placeholders), sounds, intro, and why not some tracks. Time is running out so quick! :grimacing:

My Compo game was done in time. I submited just before the submission hour, it's way more convenient when you have work the next day (Europe submission hour is at 3AM).

I'm pretty proud of it since I managed to make a game you can play and is quite fair. But I found some points I could improve for the next jam.

It's recommended to play it before you continue reading.
You can play "Cats Can Do That" here.

What I've done:

• I made the game pretty much like how I thought of it in terms of gameplay. It's blazingly fast to prototype, add features and tweak values on the fly with Unity.
• I made the game balanced and fair, for my first management game I found a workaround for making the balance easy (pro tip incoming!).
• I made all the graphics needed and minimum sounds. In terms of time management I rocked!
• I eat healthful food and sleep well. I drank coffee only for the submission hour.
• The overall game is quite finished. There is all the elements to start the game without asking for how to play or looking in the comments to find clues.

What I've missed:

• Even if my schedule was respected, I spend a lot of time just thinking about how to implement a feature. It's mainly to measure pros and cons, but I think I literally did nothing in front of my PC during 4 to 5 hours because I wasn't able to decide how to code something.
• The art style isn't consistent. 2D flat illustrations doesn't fit well with 3D objects, lights and reflections. I should have made it all flat lights (nolit).
• I spend the first quarter of the weekend to find a game idea. But I guess it was worth it. I lost so much time in a lot of aspects.
• Unity is good but way oversized for a game that doesn't need 3D at all. Build size are big, uploads are slow, but at least I can embed it for you to play online.

Items in my game must have costs equally distributed, so a cat that is twice more expensive produces twice more energy. But this becomes a bit boring. What if I want it three times, or what about 1.8 times.
A simple way to add more control is to use second degree equations (ax² + bx + c) to calculate every property of your item and made them controlled by a single value.

Basically, a cat costs 200 times the control value so a cat of 1 costs $200 and a cat of 8.5 costs $1 700. I did the same for every property so the power represents 2.5 times the value, toast efficiency is 0.8 times the value and so on.

(ax² + bx + c)

The rule can be summarized like this: what's in a tends to grow faster that the control value, what's in b is strictly proportional, and what's in c fades with higher values.

That's it! Play, rate a lot of games and have fun!

You've made my game the 3rd funniest of the compo games!

Humor: 3rd (4.526 average from 21 ratings)

I can't thank you enough for being so kind. I've never been this high in the ranking. Also thanks to all of the players to help me reach the crutial 20 ratings, I was in vacation for 3 weeks and I nearly missed to be ranked.

If you want to create energy with cats and toasts, you can play my game here.

It's a clicker game made with Unity. I'm pretty proud of how it feels but it certainly lacks of ergonomy and visual assets as well as some balancing.
I'm actually thinking about making it with a 2D engine and making it available for mobile devices.

You can follow me on twitter @crazyrems if you want to stay tunned.

I own a virtual reality headset for nearly two years. I'm really into this thing (no pun intended) and would like to make a LD entry using VR. It has so much of potential and opens a lot of possibilities, but there's many concerns about it:

I'm not ready for VR game dev

Even if I'm used to Unity's tools and workflow, there's a lot of things to set up and make it feel "right". You can't just throw a regular 3D game into your headset and pretend it to be VR. Locomotion, hand controllers placements and motion sickness are concepts you can't ignore and I can't spend two days to solve these problems.

I need 3D content

Making a game is cool but without content to show it will feel empty. The fact that I won't be able to put some identity in it is very limiting. Modeling and animations are very time consuming.
The good thing is that there's quite a few nice (and free!!) modeling/sculpting softwares for VR like Blocks (https://vr.google.com/blocks/) and Medium (https://www.oculus.com/medium/). But there's still the technical issue that I don't know how to properly exploit those models.

Nobody will play my game

Mostly the biggest downside : Rating.
Ludum Dare is all about making games together, supporting each other and giving and taking advice from others. VR will limit my audience to very few people which means no feedback. And that's not funny for you either.

However I think Ludum Dare is a place of experiments and exposure, so not taking this opportunity would be kind of a waste.

As a way for you to "play" the game I think of showing more of my advancements while making it and posting a video of gameplay when released.

What do you think of this, should I try to make it VR?

I made a post about why I shouldn't make it in VR. But I changed my mind and now I've got an idea to realize. The problem is that I have to set up a completely different tool set than planned.

I'm gonna make web dev… It's gonna be tough!

bash G:\> npm -v 5.5.1 G:\> node -v 8.9.1 G:\> a-frame -v 0.7.0

Wish me luck and have fun everyone.

click to watch the video on YouTube

Currently in progress, I made this with A-FRAME, a WebVR technology. So everyone will be able to play it with some downgrades if you don't own a Rift or Vire, or a GearVR, or a Cardboard, or not even a smartphone!

Live inspector of my scene right in the browser using A-FRAME

See the page of my game.

What a challenge!

I made a web based game that supports VR and has fallbacks to smartphones 📱 and PCs 💻.

You don't have any excuse to not play this VR game 😈

It wasn't so obvious about how to implement things since I was mostly used to Unity and its C#.

Try to play it at least from you phone instead of your PC, it really changes the game.

Have fun!