*I finally had some time to port my game to the Web! *

And I wanted to take the time to share with you all my Ludum Dare experiences so far, here it goes:

This is my third Ludum Dare, but actually this is the first time I managed to "finish" a game. Well, actually it's not finished, not by a mile, I totally run out of time, but at least its playable!

My first try at Ludum Dare was LD36 and the theme was Ancient Technology, and I had to come face to face with fact that I can't draw. My idea was some kind of sideways Egyptian themed space invaders but I was so bad at drawing, I spent a whole day trying to draw a sphinx and I still failed. I can do this now: Still not very good and it took me 2h, but back in August the only thing I could draw was a pyramid △

So after my failure at LD36 I decided to learn Pixel Art, because the Internet said its easy :smile: (Spoilers: its not!) I started drawing tilesets, 2d characters, I mostly copied real pixel artists, how they draw eyes, how they do the shading. I have no talent to draw, but as with everything practice makes you better.

When LD37 came in December, I felt like, I'm ready to create some simple 2D platformer or something similar. And since the theme was One Room, I wanted to do a Super Crate Box style 2D action game. Unfortunately the character I drew, was not as simplistic as the one in Super Crate Box, and animating was really time consuming and hard. I tried to do a running animation which is something I never managed to do before. It took too much time, and at the end of day 3 all I have was broken prototype full of bugs, where all you could do was run and jump and walk on bullets. (totally not a bug its a feature!)

In the end I did not publish it because I was disappointed with myself and what I have created.

So when LD38 came, I took no chances and gone with the most simplistic idea I had. A small 2D planet where you transport goods from one landing pad to an other. Still managed to run out of time, but since I prioritized which feature I work on first, the core gameplay(flying/landing/damage/score) was working at the end of day 3.

I'm not satisfied with this game as it is, but the fact that I finally managed to publish something really makes me happy.

What's got cut: - Sounds - Music - A better scoring system (dependent how fast you are) - A game over screen (now its just restarts) - Visual Indications of the packages you are transporting. - Shadows for sprites. - ... and a lot of other things

I think next few days I will work on a post jam edition, because if I ever want to complete a game in time then I will need to know what it takes to do that.

Try my game

This is my 4th time trying to actually finish something. As always I will aim for the Compo and probably end up in Jam. :sweat_smile: Last time I run out of time before I could make any music, so my plan for LD39 is to maybe make music first and than try to make a game that matches the mood. I looked at the final themes and honestly I don't have any good unique idea so this will also let me figure out what kind of game I want to make while I'm working on the music.

Tools: - Unity
- PyxelEdit or MagicaVoxel or Krita - sfxr - and probably www.beepbox.co to make music or maybe lmms

Unfortunately I failed to finish my game. It's not even playable, and only the first level has been properly designed, (I planned like 10). I wasted too much time to experimenting, and got stuck in the details of the pixel art. :cold_sweat: But I will probably finish this game, I liked the direction things were heading (not the speed though). It might be just a bunch of sprites right now but these are a bunch of good looking sprites.

And I also managed to finish a little jingle for background music!

Yes I know half a day has already passed but, I finally have an idea I'm willing to work on.

Not even the dreaded man-flu will stop me from participating! (it will probably stop me from finishing a game but hey its not like my idea is viable for a 3 day jam anyway!)

If you still don't have a good idea for LD40 I want to give you my number 2 and 3, feel free to use them if you like them:

Top-Down beat'em up, Hotline Miami style, but most of the patrons are neutral just enjoying their drinks, you start fighting, bump into patrons, they drop their drinks get angry join the fight, hence the theme: the more enemies have you got the worse it is. Maybe add the ability to hurl furniture at each other, and friendly fighters if the enemy bumps into an neutral patron. I could do this but I don't really like beat'em ups.

Game screen is an apartment, your character adopts a cat at a fixed pace, you need to care for the cats or they will get frustrated and more dangerous, and maybe die, (like food, drink, pick up poop, play). If your cats are frustrated it's more likely they will do something stupid, like knock a standing lamp over and set the couch on fire, eventually they will burn down your apartment or destroy it some other way, the objective is to see how much cat you can own before they destroy your house, like with leader-boards or something. Bonus points: make the game anime style call it Neko Musume or something like that. The problem is you will have to make a lot of animation of cats, sou you need to be a capable artist to do this in time, I couldn't do this in time.

The man-flu won. What's nice is that this time I failed to finish not one but two games!

Half of the Jam time I spent chasing an impossible dream of mine, creating a space rts in LD, but after one and a half day when I only had a couple of planets and a design idea that had some serious black holes in it, I had to give up on this, maybe next time ...

I will definitely revisit this idea later, but I need to figure out a lot of things before I can design and draw a game like this.

After I realized that I had no chance with this is game, I decided to try my luck with something smaller, and fail with that too. The Idea was a Battle City alike game, where you had to destroy wave after wave of enemy tanks while picking up Power-Ups that while would make your Tank stronger, they would also weaken it someway. (hence the theme)

But I messed up the Art, it looks ok, but its too complicated, too Hi-Rez, thats why it took too much time to create this much, I really need to learn how to create simpler art, and more importantly faster art. Or maybe get some help from an artist. I have no doubt in my mind that if I would have started with this idea from the beginning I would been able to finish it, maybe even in compo time. But the compo was already over when I started working on this.

Well, bummer. From tomorrow I will try to make games instead of excuses. If you guys still working on your game, than good luck! You still got two an a half hours, and then some to port, build, upload, so get back at it!

Late as usual, but I really like the theme this time around and I'm free for the rest of the weekend, so why not?! Let's see what can I do in 31 hours!

Its been a while since I last tried something like this, so I might be rusty, but since I'm free this weekend I think I will give it a go. I'm going to have to focus on creating something playable instead of worrying about the looks since I always ran out of time in previus jams when I tried to create something that at least looked ok. So yeah, one ugly ass game incoming XD