Hey there! I just submitted my game, “Silence”, to the compo.

Had a hell lot of fun this time, as usual, and I’m really satisfied with the outcome.

Check it out if this screenshot catches your interest or check it out anyway.

Hello, I am a link to game!

I made a timelapse for my LD game “Silence”. The timelapse itself is not silent, but has music by the amazing Super Guitar Bros. Check it out right here:

Also, the awesome Rialgar (check his game here) made the first let’s play of any of my games ever (that I know of). It feels great to watch someone play and like your game.

If you like what you see you might consider trying the game yourself.

PS: Yes, I need to feel like a wizard sometimes.

jk I’m in.

Tools: Unity, Krita, Blender, FL Studio, bfxr

Have a great time everyone!

Is it allowed to use the Unity standard assets effects package for the compo?

Let’s start this post off with a video showing me constantly hitting myself in the face while trying to create something (music for the video by the amazing Dan Terminus):

I had always wanted to write a postmortem after a LD, but never got around to actually doing it, so instead of writing nothing again I decided to just write a tiny postmortem this time.
So, this was my 7th Ludum Dare. It was, as always, a whole lot of fun, I learned a lot and it was pretty exhausting. Business as usual.
What was different for me this time, is that it was also kind of frustrating. I had a lot of problems that took too much time solving. The main cause for this is probably that I went 3D this time and that I had not really prepared for that.
I had huge problems with the workflow between Blender and Unity. An example for that: 5 hours before the end of the compo I decided to rework the model for my turrets, just a tiny little bit so it looks better. Unity did not overwrite the model on the turret prefab, so I thought: Okay, I’ll just place it on the prefab and see if it works and after that I can still revert this. Well, there was some kind of warning that I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was a little unclear stating what would happen, so I continued. The end result was that all of my turrets (and I have quite a lot of them) didn’t work anymore and I had to place them all anew, which took quite a bit of time that was then missing for polishing and balancing.
Due to my unpreparedness I had to watch tutorials on how to animate a model in Blender while the competition was running, which is something that should really be done in advance. Had I already known how everything worked I would’ve saved a couple of hours.
Well, thanks to all these time consuming things, I feel like I have not put enough effort into what really matters and am thus not completely satisfied with how the game turned out. The narrative could’ve used some more work, the balancing is suboptimal to say the least, the game does not look good and the music is just one chord progression and one melody, which I am most sad about since I love working on the music, but there was just not enough time.
All in all though, the game is not that bad and I guess I learned even more than in previous LDs due to trying something new. So as a result I am already looking forward to the next one and I hope I’ll remember to be better prepared than this time around.

 
Here, have a screenshot and a link to the game and thanks for your attention!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=24534

8th time in a row. Minimalist post ’cause really short on time.

Tools: Unity, Krita/Gimp, FL Studio, bfxr, Audacity

Really excited.

Fun.

More like, y’know, in.

Help these lovely Cyblobs get to 20 ratings: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/blobville

• think it's like the 14th time or something
• trying to not do too much coding and more art and audio and such delightful things
• built up a tiny library this time, feel free to use it: https://github.com/Erkberg/UnityLibrary
• using Unity, FL Studio and GIMP and/or Blender
• jamming together with friends, which has always been a blast and certainly will be again
• really looking forward to a weekend full of 🎮, 😄 and 🍕

But for now... off to sleep, see you all tomorrow!

https://erkberg.bandcamp.com
These are all the songs I wrote for the games I created in the last 5 years, mostly during game jams (and mostly during Ludum Dare).

Yes, it's more of a collection than an actual album.
Yes, it's barely 30 minutes long.
Yes, it's poorly mixed and mastered (and sometimes written...).

Still, it feels incredible!
I hope I can find more time for music in the future and get better at it, because I just love it!

I'll be returning from a 4-days metal festival on sunday evening (Brutal Assault, anyone of you there too?), so I'll pretty much only have a hungover Monday to create a game. :)
Still, I'm super excited and it's gonna be a valuable lesson in scoping (all the way down ^^).
I'll be using Unity, GIMP, FL Studio and probably my own little Unity Library, that doesn't contain much yet, but has a few helpful classes and stuff: https://github.com/Erkberg/UnityLibrary (feel free to also use it and / or leave feedback what I could add / improve)
Looking forward to jammin', let's do this!

I've been doing LD for quite a few years now, but one game per jam was always more than enough. This time though, I really wanted to push myself. The last couple of LDs have been quite relaxed and laid back, so I decided to jam to the max this time around. I jammed at the Kokolores Collective in Ludwigsburg, Germany, together with my friends Kathrin and Kasi, and it was beyond amazing to work with you two! (I live in Berlin, but they had their housewarming party the Thursday before LD and so I went there for the whole week)

We first brainstormed around an hour on the theme and came up with a few interpretations we liked. We chose a mechanics-driven approach for our team game and worked from there (the story is thus a little abstract), but in the back of my mind I always had this narrative idea about cows and meat that I wanted to pursue. If there's time, I said to myself, not really believing it could be possible. So, most of Saturday, we worked together on our game, I did some code and story writing, as well as music and testing on Sunday, and we progressed quite well.

After having watched High School Musical (which was way more entertaining than I had expected ^^) to end this intense day, the other two left, we had a game that was pretty playable already and I started working on my own little entry. It was a very pleasant way of working, since due to the very little time I had for this game, everything was "good enough" pretty fast, so I made some decent progress that night.

After 5 hours of sleep. I spent Sunday working almost exclusively on that little game, which wasn't really planned, but came very naturally, since our team game seemed to also be progressing well without me (like mentioned above, I only did the music and some testing that day). We managed to finish the team game in the evening and it was in more than good enough shape, the other two left and I continued working. Three hours before the deadline (midnight in this part of the world) I was almost finished and doing some polish on the game, but that polish came in a very sad fashion (recording panicked cow sounds, doing sad music, reading facts about animal slaughter) and it really, really got to me. I was so sad that night and almost started crying, being all alone in a big, dimly lit office, deprived of sleep and feeling the weight of so many animals dying everyday to feed humanity. I couldn't go on anymore, but it was okay. I uploaded the final builds and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up, replenished, not terribly sad anymore, more melancholic, but above all proud and satisfied. It was a great weekend.

So, these are our games:
First up, limbostore.heaven, our team effort, that is quite polished, also has a bit of playtime, and that I am super proud of. We are still missing a few ratings to get to the magical 20 on this one, so I'd be forever grateful if you left us some feedback:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/limbostore-heaven

And secondly, my own little compo entry, My precious life, that is very short and not very interactive, but has grown close to my heart:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/my-precious-life

Making two games in 48 hours was intense and exhausting, but totally worth it. We had a lot of fun, learned a few new things and I'm very proud of what we created. Thanks for reading, cheers!
~ Erkberg ~

In for my 19th LD! (shit I'm gettin' old :D)
Will be jammin' together with my buddy @guckstift at his place, though not sure yet if we go as a team again or each on their own, compo-style.
My plan is to try my hands at a 3D game again, although my modelling skills have not developed at all over the years :)
Will be using Unity with Visual Studio 2019, Blender and GIMP as well as FL Studio (probably with plugins from DSK and Spitfire) and Audacity.
The themes are actually looking pretty good this time and I'm really looking forward to jam to the max this weekend!
And to end this post with something nice to look at and listen to, here's a collage of most of my previous jam games and a link to the album containing all their soundtracks:
https://erkberg.bandcamp.com/album/jams

EDIT: And I'll be using my little UnityLibrary which mostly contains some helpful extension methods, feel free to use it in your own games too: https://github.com/Erkberg/UnityLibrary

The game is fully playable, has music and sound, only some graphics / animations / polish missing, which is pretty nice.
BUT there is one huge problem at the moment: I want to confine the cursor to the WebGL window and can't get it to work. Using Unity, and I already tried checking in Update for mouse down and then called Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.Confined;. I also tried setting up an invisible button that covers the whole screen and calling the code from its click event. Nothing has helped and build times are too damn long on my laptop to really continue trying...
Does anyone know how to do this properly?

I already participated in LD many times, yet I'm always eagerly longing for the next one to happen, and I'm still super-excited each time. Nr. 46 is no different and so I shall once again be in!
I'll be using Unity with Visual Studio, FL Studio and Audacity, Blender and Gimp as my tools. Also I'll probably be using my little UnityLibrary, which still doesn't include a lot of stuff but at least some useful extensions. Feel free to use it in your projects too: https://github.com/Erkberg/UnityLibrary
To get extra hyped I created a little spotify playlist containing music that I deem quite fit for gamedev and staying in that sweet, sweet zone: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4lNy3f6OXszuObMDC3MOtp?si=46ZeI_W0SRyHXCd5urclCg
And for preparation purposes I tried my hands at some simple sculpting and animation today and had a lot of fun! This is the result:

So yeah, I'll probably try to make a 3D game with some animations in it :)

Here's to all of us having a great time this weekend, cheers!

Really looking forward to the jam! But I will be taking things rather relaxed this time around, as regular work is stressful enough at the moment with a big deadline coming up next week... So I will try to adhere to the following, which might be helpful for others too: - make the smallest game possible, with just one core mechanic, and polish it - in the past, this led to the best game experiences, and polish is the most fun part anyway :) - sleep 7+ hours each night - starting each day fully recuperated is just great and very important - go for a long walk each day - this also helps with thinking about what I'm actually doing and get a little distanced look at things - eat healthy - I always forgot the frozen pizza in the oven anyway... - mix things up a bit - my last few games were all quite atmospheric, adventure-y games, so maybe it's time to go into a different direction (but staying inside that comfy comfort zone is also nice, we'll see :))

As for tools, I'll be using Unity, Blender and GIMP, FL Studio and Audacity.
For some handy extension methods and codebase, I'll use my little UnityLibrary (feel free to use it too!): https://github.com/Erkberg/UnityLibrary.
For listening pleasure, I got this GameDev spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4lNy3f6OXszuObMDC3MOtp?si=d91c6fa89db14bd9.
And the project will be up on GitHub: https://github.com/Erkberg/LudumDare48

Lots of text in this post, so let's end it with a little (clickable) picture of my last entry and cheers to all of you, let's have an awesome jam!

That was an intense day 1! I had a concept I believed in quite early, which was great! A game called Sea of Lies, that could best be described as a deep sea conspiracy theory bullet hell(y).

Managed to get almost all of the coding stuff done today (a little over 1.000 lines of code and I also invested some time to write pretty clean code (at least in terms of game jam code ^^)).

So tomorrow will be mainly for art, audio, balancing and polish. If I'm brave enough I might just add another mechanic or two (and if I'm fast enough with the other things). But let's not overscope too much in advance :D

Anyway, time to go to sleep now. Here's a gif of the current (quite ugly) state of the game.
Good night and see you tomorrow!

If I counted correctly, this will be my 23rd Ludum Dare, whoa!
LD has always been an amazing experience all these years and has accompanied me through my whole career in gamedev from humble beginnings through a job at an awesome indie studio to my upcoming adventure as a solo indie dev and I'm beyond grateful for that! <3
Really looking forward to jam together with my buddy @guckstift again this time around! (though we might each make a game of our own, we'll see)
See you all this weekend and on the other side, it's gonna be a awesome!

Hi there!
So you made an awesome game for Ludum Dare 49 and would like to see a video of a fellow developer play and comment on it? Well you're in luck, cause that's exactly what I'm gonna do!
Just fill out this survey and your game will get added to the list: https://forms.gle/VGUSh587QewRfjbv5
Depending on the amount of games entered and how much time I'll have available, it is possible that your game might not make it into a video, but I'll do my best to cover as many as humanly possible!
The videos will kick off my brand new gamedev Youtube channel, which you can find here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR0okiWDbwLgyLb-AoZUunw
See you there! <3

I just uploaded the first video for my little let's play series, which is also the very first video on my channel. I had a ton of fun and I'm super excited to hear your feedback! And if you want a chance to be in one of the next videos in this series, just fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/eZRQUAMhGydThkhD6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK4L_VinlSY
@neowhoru, @wuppos, @icedjam, @blackquiltro: Your games made it into the video :)