First time Ludum Dare.

I'll be using JS + three.js probably. GIMP + Blender for art.

My oh my, the game is done! I was starting to worry there for a bit with only 6 hours left with the game half-finished!

ldjam page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/grindatron-tv

itch.io page: https://donitz.itch.io/grindatronio

The game was developed using native ES6, so it won't work on older browsers until I transpile the code.

Yes, he is indeed! You can play his story over at itch.io following the link below:

Play the game: https://donitz.itch.io/sven

Submission link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sven

This was my second Ludum Dare ever, and once again I had a blast! Nothing's like feeling extremely productive for a few days!

Courtesy of Sven

Sven was my submission for the second Ludum Dare event I've participated in. At this point I really regret not trying out this event years ago, as I find it highly enjoyable. The rush from being productive is exhilarating. Might as well give this port-mortem thing a shot too.

Idea

I spent the first 3 or 4 hours of the jam trying to come up with a good idea for a game, and I was getting desperate. I finally doodled a series of storyboard panels in MS Paint for a 2D platformer based on sacrificing people to open up demonic portals, and then fighting the demons that spawn. I thought the MS Paint style looked rather good, so I considered how I could incorporate it into the game itself. Since I was going with a simplified artstyle, it was a great opportunity to try out some fancy animating as well. The rest of the game grew organically from that concept.

Development

For the next 5 or 6 hours of the development process there was nothing but code to look at as I wrote the game engine. I had a few classes I've written for earlier games like an audio and input component, but most of the code had to be written from scratch.

After the rudimentary game engine was created I was ready to populate it with living sprites, so it was time to get animating. As it turns out, MS Paint and GIMP aren't really that good for animating things, so I went searching for a dedicated pixel art animation program with support for onion skins and animation frames. I decided to go with Piskel. While it doesn't have all the fancy features I would have liked (like multiple animations per file) it would suffice. By the way if you have a suggestion for an even better open source sprite animation program, please tell me!

I spent a couple of hours drawing up all the protagonist animations and... they weren't half-bad! Maybe this could actually work.

Shout out to TexturePacker, for which without I would never have been able to handle all the sprites in a sane way.

Fast forward to day 2 of the jam and it quickly became apparent that there was no way I would have been able to submit the game as a compo entry without skipping the music entirely and rushing the ending. Ok, no. No point in half-assing the ending. This time I'm doing it right. I then spent two nights and Monday (after work) working on the game non-stop.

Ah, sweet release... 1.0 that is.

What went wrong?

• The end of the music loops weren't trimmed to seamlessly restart. Sloppy sloppy.
• Did not fix all of the panel clipping issues. Due to the size of some animations, the sprites are overlapping the edges of the panels.
• Theme felt a bit tacked on. I intended the game to be much shorter and focused on the sacrifical theme, but as I kept adding more content it became less of the central point of the game.

What went right?

• The camera zoom and pan to different panels worked really well.
• The particle effects in general added a lot to the game's aesthetic.
• While the individual sprite frames aren't so pretty, the animations turned out better than I expected them to.
• The release version is relatively bug free, despite being rushed in the last few hours of the jam.

Conclusion

I'm happy with how the game turned out, and I had a great time making it. Will join the next LD!

Play the game here.

Oh boy, three days of straight out coding, but it's finally done!

I proudly present the entirely vector-rendered strategy game TRIWAR! Steal the life from your enemies and build yourself an army!

Play the game here: https://donitz.itch.io/triwar

LD entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/triwar

Some players mentioned getting stuck at the Spawning pools level in TRIWAR. Here is my favorite strategy for winning the level by spamming melee units.

Hi-res: https://gfycat.com/frightenedcookedjaeger

The game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/triwar

Whew, after three days of modelling and coding, I made it with minutes to spare. Feederz is a first-person survival horror game for HTML5. It was written in vanilla Javascript + three.js.

Rate and play the game!

The caffeine is running dry. Goodnight everybody!

The process of turning an image into an actual game:

This was the most difficult hazard to implement.

I'm happy that people still find mouse mazes fun.