Greetings to all fellow Gladiators!

I've been creating and tinkering on games since I was a teenager and it got me into programming. My first game ever was a risk board game adaption I shared with friends - in Turbo Pascal on MS-DOS. Then I wanted to create a Game Engine, because if you didnt write everything yourself, you didnt really achieved it, right? lol. Well, I never finished the engine and learned I shouldn't try too.

Now after 25 years working in the industry professionally (but almost entirely not in the games industry, because it eats souls) and working in a VR team for my media company using Unreal 4 and later Unity I finally settled on Godot for my private tinkering.

So its time to finally use my many years old Ludum Dare account! Yes!

I'll try not to sweat it, aiming low in scope and reach some finished result. I'll be working with my non-dev partner and have a fun weekend together.

Our stack will be: Godot 4.6 (OpenGL) Blender (For Low Poly assets if needed) FL Studio (Music) Audacity (Recording Effects) Aseprite (Sprites & Textures)

Export to HTML5 and Windows, deploy on itch.io

Good luck and a lot of fun to everyone!

Night Sky and Basic Lighting Done

Our first fully playable version is done! Everything seems fine for now, so we can fix bugs and polish things tomorrow (no comp).

The player is lost in the woods, with nothing but a phone with dwindling battery, trying to get a signal. But there is something else in these parts of the forest...

Here are some screenshots:

My little trip through the woods went terribly wrong.

I know I was being followed, but I didn't get caught. And although I found the cell phone tower, I couldn't call for help. I might still be out there, waiting.

All because my battery died at the worst possible moment.

How did your trip go? Check out our game

Another trip on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfZxYVSk330

Hello fellow jammers!

Now the Jam is over it's time to play all of the many games!

Here's a list of games we tested and liked very much so far and you should check them out too:

1100 Fish by @mortith, @blublu and @reo-silmetal The game has cute artwork and is about managing your fisher boat fleet to get the fish and avoid obstacles. Since you need to switch between the boats it can get quiet challenging. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/1100-fish

Beacon of Hope by @milestone-games, @javve, @nevyn, @ocwal, @voxar, @pierre-reimertz, @barbapapa and @mascoll It seems a whole game studio tackled this one and it shows! It feels so polished for a 72 hour game jam! You're on a sunny deserted island and can walk around paper mario style to find items and solve puzzles. Get a fire going at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/beacon-of-hope

Return//Null by @shadyshade It's a fully fleshed space game with insane aesthetics. The rendering of the black hole is so visually pleasing. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/returnnull

Lighthouse's Vigil by @tanjou and @sasori It's a game that reminded me of Dome Keeper and Dredge somehow, but it has its own soul. The player uses a light beam to drive away monster and descent orbs. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/lighthouses-vigil

And in case you haven't seen it yet, this is our game: ...And The Worst Part: I Had No Signal! In our game you're lost in the woods with a creature hunting you and you need to find a cell phone tower, activate it and call your significant other to pick you up. To get there you need to overcome the forest, your phone is both your eyes and flashlight. We're happy for any feedback! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/i-had-no-signal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfZxYVSk330

Hi fellow LDers!

We are participating the first time and already had our good round of players trying our game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/i-had-no-signal) and we couldn't be much more excited!

Now we need advice from more experienced Jammers!

That's because we had some feedback and naturally we asked ourselves the question whether we can act on some of these feedbacks.

The 2017 Rules (https://ludumdare.com/resources/archive/rules-2017/) state:

"Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission (a short change log). You probably wont get a 2nd chance with some players, but at least it wont be a problem for future players."

There is a link on the submit page to the current rules, but its down: https://ludumdare.com/rules/

So, what we would like to fix is: - Monster spawn bug: encounter now works every round as intended (sometimes the monster was stuck and never encountered) - Restored missing trees (an area had trees intended to block paths, but somehow got missing) - Added brightness slider (game was unplayably dark on some monitors)

Now we really don't know. To fix the monster we also needed to move it to a different spawn position, the trees are essentially minor but not just a single variable fix and the brightness slider could be considered a whole new feature.

What is the accepted guideline there to judge this?

For now we have concluded we don't touch the Jam version at all and live with the problems, until the voting is over. Is this the right approach?

Thank you very much!

We spontaneously decided to do our first Ludum Dare (finally) and we achieved way more than we thought we would! Let alone having other people to actually play our game too and giving valuable feedback. You have no idea how much fun we had creating our game (there were also brief breakdowns, lol) and interacting with this positive community!

Now we hope we can participate in many more Ludum Dare iterations and of course we believe in a solution beyond 2028.

Just some random screenshots we did when creating the game:

Saturday, the phone works (pink ball for scale)

Monday, the scary sign, so the player knows whats up

Saturday, figuring out the brushes, since we need a textured landscape

Monday, the forest seems to be done now

Sunday, Rigging is harder than we thought