Hello World!

We had the holiday on this weekend – an Independence Day of Ukraine (hence blue and yellow colors were used the most). Nevertheless we both decided to “waste” our possible free time with family and to take part in Ludum Dare 30 contest instead.

The game mechanics is to cover all sharp edges on the terrain to make it smooth. Three block types are available: a ramp up, a cube and a ramp down.

Track created for the game:

So our Ludum Holiday weekend looked like this:

Day 1 – Concept and prototyping
Day 2 – Coding and art,
Day 3 – Coding, art, sound, debugging and polishing

WHAT WENT RIGHT:

1. We’re quite happy with game concept
2. Time management

WHAT WENT WRONG:

1. We chose bad controls which led to people being frustrated while playing.
2. Levels are too difficult straight away. Seems like hardly anybody can go past the second level.

TAKE AWAYS:

1. Always playtest your game on somebody who is not taking part in development! Without that it’s very hard to adequately set difficulty.
2. The easier controls are the better.
3. No hardcore needed, though it is very hard to reach the balance between too hard and interesting.
4. It was fun, and it values the most.

Happy world connecting!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=33150

Our LD Entry Page

Hi, we’re Dustyroom, a two brother studio and this is our Xth Ludum Dare. Before the jam, we planned to make an action-packed juicy pixel platformer. In the end, we made a calm abstract puzzle game. Beauty of LD!

Every idea we had for a platformer wasn’t very interesting, so we started thinking about making game about logistics as our entry. Inspired by the great Factorio and Mini Metro, we tried to extract production belts and manufacturing into a simple innovative puzzle.

This resulted in Supernode, a game where you make a flow of energy by combining nodes to produce the right output from multiple sources.

In short, here’s how it went.

Day 1. (Idea, concept, prototyping)

We decided to go minimalist in every way (apart from programming side) and make an emphasis on the gameplay and polish. As with our most games, we made up an idea and then experimented, having only a vague idea about how it would play. The whole first day was spent on brainstorming and prototyping of basic gameplay. Although nothing was really playable at the end of the day, we kept believing.

Day2. (Graphics, code developing)

A day full of challenges for the idea development. Some features we designed on paper just didn’t work out in reality. Or rather not how we’d like them to work. Previous LD experience taught us to take flexible maneuvers against the pitfalls. We changed the game to be score-based infinite level and settled on free adding and removal of user-generated nodes. Also, most of visual elements were ready.

Day3. (Graphics, sound, code, polishing)

Making the simple 2d assets spared some time to for go sound more. We made a simple track of chords and intervals of the pentatonic scale, without a pre-defined melody. The melodies are produced randomly, again, in the pentatonic scale. Various events trigger a note, each time different one. By noon, the final gameplay was ready and we spent about 12 hours on polish, menus and tuning. Looking back, it would be great if we tested more since the jam version of the game has some nasty bugs.

There are plenty of things to improve. Anyway, we are happy how the game turned out.

P.S.

After receiving some useful bits of feedback we made (and still make) some major and minor improvements and placed the post-compo version of the game on itch.io. The jam WebGL version stays untouched on our website.

Have fun!

Our LD Entry Page

itch.io game with fixes

Soundmarine came out as the short (actually, very short) music-driven game-experience. We decided to try to make a game in a distinct visual style reminiscent of the works of Jean Giraud aka Moebius.

THE IDEA ON PAPER. The player starts steering the submarine on a barely filled screen (the objects are in outlines only), in complete silence and collects sound-emitting objects resulting in a semi-random musical piece. The sounds are fading and you have to keep picking them to stay afloat. The world around gradually becomes more dense. Then there is a board with all the sounds in the end menu that you can switch on/off.

THE PROCESS. The biggest chunk of process was the work on shaders, particularly outlines. Also the controls and camera movement took a lot of time too. Models had to be created with this shading in mind as lots of outlines depended on vertex colors and normals of the meshes. The sound layers and sfx were done in the last day in under three hours.

THE RESULTS.

The visual look came out mostly nice. The outlines were unfinished, however. We wanted to make them a bit more 'chewed', as in art of Moebius. The rendering of outlines was not equal on different platforms. In fact, we tested the game on Windows only two days later, just to discover that there is no lines at all! We managed to fix that now.

Performance was lagging a bit. It was due to literally millions of vertices on the scene. Luckily there are such things as dynamic occlusion and LOD (Level of Details) in Unity, which saved us a few FPS.

The music layers are ~40 sec long stems synced at the start. Each buoy unmutes a new layer. There are 15 of them, created to sound OK together and in isolation. Looking back, stacking some of the random layers came out too subtle.

The gameplay in a jam version is a bit bare. There were bugs when the submarine floats away from the view. The pick-up buoys were manually distributed in a random fashion in the last hours of the jam. We are working on a post-compo version (WebGL version too) with more obstacles, which should liven up the game a bit.

Check out the game or watch a video (which is basically a whole gameplay in less than 3 min).

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/soundmarine https://dustyroom.itch.io/soundmarine

https://youtu.be/om80uA44I5o

Thank you for your attention!

By the way, check out an amazing game Palely by anstabo, also crafted in Moebius style. https://anstabo.itch.io/palely

https://youtu.be/usIMhdKetg4

As many others, we've tied the 'Stuck in the loop' theme to rails and trains. In SPÅRVAGN the trams tracks overlap, which makes trams collide. You avoid crashes by stopping/launching the trams.

Here is roughly how the jam went on for us:

DAY 1. Working on a completely another idea was unsuccessful and took a whole first day of the jam. Two more days to go.

DAY 2. Trying next idea (the final one). Making models. Like, many models. Working on the shading system in Unity, specifically outline generation. Going out in the street to record traffic ambience and anything useful (bike rings) for sfx.

DAY 3. Models, shading, levels, UI. The last few hours - for sound. Working haphazardly, as it should be on the last day.

The models were built with the further shading in mind, like, suitable for outline rendering.

We've learned a bit about Blender freestyle, which was an amazing solution for generating this style of UI.

There are only four levels at the moment. There was simply no time left to make more. At least, they are working:)

Please check out and rate SPÅRVAGN here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/sparvagn

Hi! We'd like to tell a bit about our entry for LD48.

IDEA
Below the Tide is a game-experience where a vessel of an unknown origin explores the underwater world. The mechanics lie in moving through the suspended islands without hitting them in a search for safe landing spots. The goal is to go as deep as you can before the battery runs out. The hook of the game is in maneuvering between the obstacles while preserving as much energy as possible at the same time.

DEVELOPMENT
The gameplay development was all in Unity. Probably, the biggest chunk of the programming was in making the terrain for the never-ending underwater environment. The islands are generated in a procedural way by running the marching cubes algorithm on a signed distance field produced by 3D perlin noise. The mesh topology is generated on the fly and expands as you reach the level bounds, while the rest is being occluded for performance reasons. Using such noise as an input for level generation gives an almost unlimited freedom for controlling the shapes, density, roundness, fuzziness, blobiness etc of the islands. But it was (and is in post-mortem development) a challenge to get it work and look nice.

Below is the screenshot of the early work-in-progress, looking for a nice terrain variant.

One of the early decisions was to implement meshing to run on GPU using compute shaders, which worked out well in terms of performance (no loading screens), but unfortunately is not supported on WebGL at the moment. This resulted in the game only being available for the desktop platforms.

The shading was done using a custom-made set of shaders. The biggest problem was in making the terrain look as intended, basically, generating smooth-shaded normals on the procedural mesh. Because we had no time to polish the look of the generated islands — it would be easier to do if they were hand-made in Blender — we had to do some shading tricks to mask the imperfections of the terrain. Particularly, the psychedelic silky-smooth look of ‘charger’ islands didn’t work well with the marching cubes’ sharp normals.

WHAT WENT RIGHT
We finished the game that is playable and generally looks nice! Even though by the end of the jam the game was holding on sticks and a bubble-gum, we consider this an achievement.

WHAT WENT WRONG
There’s not much of the gameplay in Below the Tide in the Jam version. We have ideas on how to make the controls more interesting, but not sure if it’s worth pursuing.

What do you think? All feedback is very welcome!

https://youtu.be/I5-K_o1N6Is

Play + Rate:
itch.io
LD Jam entry

Detour is a turn-based tetris + survival + card game. It is soothing, relaxing and easy to play.

The Cube moves to a flag on its defined path. You have to block its way using tetris-like shapes. They can be placed strictly on the path.

Hopefully we’ll have time to improve Detour and fix some bugs.

Thank you for playing + rating.

P.S. :flag_ua: We are a studio based in Kyiv, Ukraine. So, if you liked the game, we encourage you to donate a few cents. All the donations will be sent to our army, which is currently fighting for our existence in an absurdly cruel war that russia brought to our country.