http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Danielpotter/3299625

This is my first Ludum Dare competition entry that i created on Scratch. I tried to make the game with an interesting interpretation of minimalism, so i used the definition of minimalist (a person who favors a moderate approach to the achievement of a set of goals) as a basis for my game. You play as the Minimalist in a seemingly normal platformer with very difficult or impossible levels. You must think of simple ways of beating the level with the least amount of work involved. You may attempt at beating the levels like a normal platformer but to win you must think outside of the box!

So i got a lot of comments saying that my game was really hard and it IS meant to be that way because the point of the game is to find an easy, minimalistic, way of beating difficult levels. I understand now that it might be hard to grasp the concept, so i thought about making a walk-through but if i did that, the levels would actually be TOO easy. Therefore i decided to make this post with a hint for each level to make it easier to beat.

1. The green circle isn’t the only green thing in the level.

2. The game is programmed so that the character falls until ANY part of him touches gray.

3. Sometimes left is right.

4. For a minimalist, one is enough.

5. Sometimes you’re just too tired to save your own life.

Here is the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22050

This is our first Ludum Dare as a group and all 3 of us are in High School. So far, we have mainly focused on the graphics and design and have yet to start our actual game play and scripting… but our graphics and design are coming along pretty well. This game is about the fictional inner world of our Earth. The protagonist is a geologist that travels to Paris in order to examine exquisite gems, only to stumble upon the source of these gems: the secret world beneath the surface.

Here’s a screenshot of our game

Our game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=22050

What Went Wrong:
– We started with 3 people and good ideas, but the ideas proved to ambitious and 1 person quit, so we only really started after about half the time had already passed.

– A lot of people thought our game was too hard. We can both beat it easily, along with a few other people, but most people struggled with it.

– The game is pretty short, which is partly why we wanted to make it so challenging. We didn’t end up with enough time to make the entire game that we had planned, so we had to settle for limiting the game to one area, instead of implementing a whole story with multiple areas.

– We didn’t have time to make custom audio. The sound effects actually turned out pretty well (we didn’t make them ourselves), but there was no music. For our game from the last competition we had time to make an entire custom soundtrack with multiple tracks. Here is our last game if you’re interested:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=22050

What Went Well:

– The game is pretty well polished. Despite not being able to complete our entire idea, when we realized that we wouldn’t have time to add much more, we dedicated the last few hours to polishing what we already had.

– The mood turned out very well. We added flickering lights and eerie sound effects that really contributed to the creepy mood of the game. People have said our game is scary, and we’re glad to have been able to achieve that with simple looking enemies (shadows) and without adding any gore.

– Despite many people thinking it was too hard, we think the game mechanics themselves were actually pretty innovative. Many people did games with the idea of pressing a button to go into another world, but our game has a bar that shows how far into the other world you are and if it fills up you lose. This, along with the flashlight mechanic that drives the shadows away, makes for very interesting and unique game-play.

– There is a Nick Cage Easter egg somewhere in the game.

The Future

We had a good idea for this game and it turned well, but we would like to release a post-compo version sometime in the future. This would include many more areas and possibly some of the story that we didn’t add. The difficulty level would also be changed. Many people thought that the flashlight didn’t do much to stop the shadows even though it actually slows them down considerably. Therefore, we’ll try to make it FEEL as if the flashlight does more and possibly make it actually do a little more. With a bigger game we could also have more progressive difficulty, so that people would get used to using the flashlight in easy areas before it got to difficult. We’re also planning to add many other features like lit-up areas that would act as safe-zones and a lantern with limited uses that would drive away shadows if you are surrounded.

Praise the Sun!

Tags: LD30, post mortem postmortem, post-mortem

The Tale of Earl is a hardcore alien parasite simulator where your goal is to infiltrate a spaceship and inhabit the captain. We are proud of what we have created so far, and we have plans to release a full version of the game on Steam!

Our Plans: - Improved game balance and polish - Expanded level design and interactions - Procedural generation for creating large space stations with varied environments (The current version of the game already uses procedural generation for the spaceship but we only used one set seed) - More inhabitable enemy types - A full original soundtrack - Multiplayer support - ...and more!

If you haven't yet, you can play our entry here in your browser, and please leave feedback and ideas for improvement! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/the-tale-of-earl

If you want to follow us and receive a free Steam key for the full game when we release it, check out our website and subscribe to receive email updates about our progress.
https://www.taleofearl.com/

If you haven't tried our game Line of Attack yet, you can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/line-of-attack. We are working on making a post-jam version of the game, so we'd appreciate all the feedback we can get!

We have just released a post-jam version of our game Prophet Kingdom! We attempted a rather ambitious concept, so we took some extra time to polish the gameplay and UI/UX based off of the feedback we got. You can check it out here:

https://dans17.itch.io/prophet-kingdom

This jam was my first attempt at making chiptune/8-bit music, and I'm very happy with how it turned out! I spent a good amount of time before the jam doing research and getting things setup to prepare for it, so I thought I'd make this guide if anyone else is curious about the process. This guide is meant for people who already have experience playing piano and/or working with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) - if you don't, there are easier options for making chiptune like BeepBox or Bosca Ceoil.

You can checkout the soundtrack I wrote here, or you can play our game Super Plantoid.

Setup

The main tool I used was Nintendo VST, which is best free tool for replicating chiptune sounds that I've found, and I was able to use it to create all the sounds I needed. Of course, if you're willing to spend money, there are much better VSTs available that I haven't tried myself. I prefer using this to dedicated software for creating chiptune because you can record all the parts using a digital piano, rather than having to enter each note in individually using a mouse.

The biggest downside with this tool (along with most of the other free chiptune VSTs I've found) is that it only comes in a 32-bit version. Depending on the DAW you are using, this might not be an issue. Reaper is one example of a DAW that supports 32-bit VSTs. However, I use Studio One, which does not support them, and requires a bit of an annoying process to get it working. I used a tool called NetVST to run 32-bit plugins and then stream them into my DAW. Here's a useful tutorial for learning how to use this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNKG9ho4dBE&ab_channel=ShaneDunne Once you have this set up, just open multiple instances of NetVSTHost for each track you need and increment the port numbers in both your NetVSTHost and NetVST track in your DAW so that you have a separate port number for each host/track.

Presets

One other downside of using a free tool is that there aren't really any presets available for it. I'm not an expert with making presets for chiptunes sounds, but here are some basic settings I used to create some interesting sounds.

You can use a slight modulation in pitch to create a vibrato effect.

You can use a wave of volume to create a pulsing, dynamic sound.

You can use variation in the duty cycle to create sci-fi-like sound.

You can save preset files in the Nintendo VST, but your DAW won't save the settings for the track if you're running it through NetVST. Therefore, I'd recommend naming your tracks in your DAW to match the preset you are using for it so that you remember what it was when you come back to it.

Musical Techniques

The NES only had 3 had melodic channels (two square waves and one triangle wave, along with white noise and DPCM channels for percussion), meaning only 3 notes could be played at once, which is a huge harmonic limitation. One technique that composers would use that allow them to work within these constraints is called polyphony - a musical texture consisting of multiple melodies being played at once that harmonize with eachother, rather than having a single melody play over chords (homophony) like the majority of western music. Of course, nowadays there aren't any hardware limitations on making chiptune music, and you can even disregard authenticity completely and combine chiptune sounds with modern instruments. However, polyphony is a really interesting musical technique, and using it will not only make it sound more like authentic 8-bit music, but it will also lead to writing more interesting music that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I used a polyphonic structure in the Surface Theme of the soundtrack I wrote because I thought it worked really well, but I also didn't limit myself and decided to use unauthentic homophonic textures for the rest of the soundtrack.

Another technique that is very specific to chiptune is including sounds that resemble video game sound effects within the music. Playing things like a fast, isolated arpeggio can sound like a coin pick-up or something similar, adding a unique quality to the music. Just be careful not to make these sounds too similar to the actual sound effects in your game so as not to cause any confusion. You can hear an example of how I used glissandos (slides) to create interesting video game sounds starting around 1:15 of the Fossil Theme in my soundtrack. One other unique sound effect I made in this soundtrack is using a single note square wave to make a series of beeps that resemble Morse code. I think it fits the "stranded on an alien planet" vibe that the game has, and I may have used it to encode a hidden message into the music :wink: I'm curious if anyone will actually be able to figure out what it means - no one has yet.

Final Thoughts

I could keep going on with this topic, but this post has gotten kind of long. If anyone has any questions about writing chiptune or music in general, let me know. Also, if anyone else here is a chiptune composer, let me know what your process is! I'm curious if anyone has better approaches to using a free chiptune VST in a DAW without doing some of the annoying steps I had to do.