Hopefully, I'll be able to finish something this time.

Finished uploading screenshots for my game.I was unable to do so yesterday because of my home wifi acting up.

As for the game itself,it's based on Vagrant Storiy's battle system. You gain risk by attacking enemies. The higher your risk the more damage you'll take/deal. It's a pretty simple implementation of the theme. It's not at a level where I can show it off to other people but I'm proud of it. I learned a lot on the way and I'll definitely enter LD41. I also plan on doing a post-mortem on r/Gamedev soon.

link:https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/riskbreakers

I seriously thought I wasn't going to make it. This Ludum dare has been a total disaster for me. My artist decided to leave midway, my University decided to hold classes on the last day of ludum dare for no reason, and I had to cut almost every feature I had in mind. BUT I have a game on my hand now. So it was worth it. Probably. Link here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$153873

I'll add some screenshots once I get some sleep. To anyone who hasn't submitted yet. Good luck. If I can do it after hours of procrastination playing sekiro, you can do it too.

A huge thank you to everyone for reviewing my game. This ludum dare was a wild ride from start to finish. For the first time I stayed up all night to finish the game. I ended up submitting it with less than a hour remaining. Now that I've had some time to distance myself from the game (and got some sleep), I think I'm finally ready to write down my thoughts that went into creating the game. I'll be posting a postmortem soon here and on r/gamedev.

After that, I'll get back to reviewing your games.

Ludum dare has just ended and wow, as a second time participant, things went nowhere near as smoothly as I hoped. Here's what I've learned by going through that grueling journey:

1. Sh*t happens. If I had to describe this year's ludum dare in a nutshell, that's how I would describe it. The artist I was working with had to leave on the same day due to RL issues. That left me with with a very small amount of usable assets and not enough time to look for premade ones. I had to somehow work with that. Then My university decided to randomly hold classes on the last day of ludum dare. Then, as if that wasn't enough, They announced that my yearly result would come out on the day before. I spent the second day frantically refreshing the results page to get some peace of mind so that I could work on the game. Naturally, progress came to a halt. Which brings me to my second point.

2. Don't give up before the end. I almost did. My motivation was already running low with all the issues I was having outside of the game. 12 hours before the submission I realized that I might not make it even if I crunched all night. I closed unity and basically gave up. I procrastinated for two hours playing Sekiro. Weirdly, beating one of the bosses I was stuck on for a while gave me the motivation to retry. Then, I somehow submitted the game less than an hour remaining.

3. Cut your scope again and again. Don't bother with extra features that you don't have time for. In my experience, UI falls in this category. I spent the majority of the second day implementing the UI for an upgrade menu before deciding to replace it with a more simple one. I didn't even bother with a title menu since the game is not very replayable. I think the game is better for it. But this will vary from game to game.

4. Don't be overly worried about clean code. One of the reasons the upgrade menu was taking too long was because I was trying to code everything the clean way. I threw away all of it for a more simplified upgrade system that directly modified the variables in the code. And I just copypasted the same code for all the powerups. It took me just a couple of hours and I never had to look at that piece of code again. Plus, when you do something the wrong way, you have a better understanding about what the better approach might be.

5. Making an actual playable build is important because you'll probably mess up your first time. I said this last year as well. This time I decided to do a webgl build. I didn't know that itch.io requires you to upload a ZIP file, not a rar. It's a simple mistake but I was stuck on it for an hour. I don't think I'll ever repeat it now. So fail fast and make those mistakes early.

6. Do not be complacent with your progress early on. The first day went really fast for me and I had a lot of things done. But that's only because I was doing the simple things then But progress was slow afterwards and I almost ended up missing the deadline.

7. Know your toolset. I lost a lot of time integrating an external pathfinding library. I also wasted a lot of time writing a save manager (which didn't even make it in the game). Pathfinding and serialization is one most common things you need in games. Learn them before hand so that you don't have to waste time.

8. The theme will always suck. Don't avoid participating on the jam because you didn't like the theme or some other external reasons. I skipped ludum dare for a year making various other excuses. What matters is not the theme but how you approach and design based on it. I don't think my take on the theme was particularly unique, but it is still MY interpretation and all the weirdness that it entails.

9. Accept that you'll never be able to do justice to your ideas. There were a lot of things I wanted to implement but I didn't have the time for.

10. Polish your game- I was going say this but I should really practice what I preach. Unlike last time, I didn't have time to polish the game and it really shows. The main thing I realized from playing other people's games was that theirs was much more polished. In a sea of games, polish is what will separate your game from the rest. Obligatory link to THAT video

11. And last but not least, don't beat yourself up by comparing to others. There will always be people who have accomplished much more impressive things in three days compared to you. But know that they still had to reach that point by trying and failing again and again. Your first game jam is unlikely to be that great but over time you will learn and improve. But I'll admit that I still don't understand how people can make such amazing games on the 48h compo.

Overall, this ludum dare has been an enlightening experience for me. I hope you guys enjoyed these past few days as much as I did.

This'll be my third LD. Somehow I always end up doing 1 LD every year. I'm not entirely satisfied about how my older entries turned out. I hope to make something cohesive this time around and improve my level design skills.

My games: https://b-deshidev.itch.io/

If you're an artist looking for a programner, I'd be happy to work with you.

Best of luck to all participants. I know that you're all feeling anxious due to the current situation but don't lose hope!

Hi, I'm a unity programmer looking for artist/animators. Both 2D and 3D is fine.

My Discord ID is: Wagnerok#3261

BTW, the guy in the GIF is from my newly released puzzle game, Control : Override It was originally made for GMTK gamejam 2020!

Here's hoping for another fun game jam!

I made a puzzle game where you literally compress space to cheat your way through puzzles:

It was heavily inspired by this moment from Jujutsu Kaisen

I hope to develop this mechanic further. I'd really appreciate it if you played the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/compressspace

P.S: There are some funny references hidden in the credits.

I'm really happy with the reception for compress(space) so far. I'm happy to confirm that I'll be expanding the game in a proper post-jam version.

For now, I've added requested QOL features like a tile indicator and it now shows if you can fold from a tile.

For post-jam updates, you can follow me on itch.io or twitter

If you haven't played it yet, here's a juicy gif showing the space compression mechanic:

You can play it here

I don't know why but I often tweak the level outline to turn it into a monkey face. Compress(space) has one: The jam version of my previous puzzle game, Control:Override also had one. Back then it wasn't quite blatant: It was more of a skull shaped level. And yeah it was pretty ugly.

I redid the entire artstyle for the steam version of Control:Override. And somehow I turned it into a monkey face. That was the start: I don't know what exactly compelled me to do it initially but now I try to put one in any game I make. If I were to make a guess, it was probably PTSD from learning blender shortcuts pre 3.0. Suzanne still haunts my dreams: For monkey shaped levels and other things, you can play compress(space) here

For LD54, I solo developed Compress(space), a puzzle game where you literally compress space to cheat your way through puzzles. The gif below shows how it works.

Originally, I was making a different game. But after ~~procrastinating~~ watching Jujutsu Kaisen, I had an epiphany about how the space compression mechanic could work in a game. I immediately threw away all of the first day's work and started working on compress(space). In the remaining 48 hours, I somehow managed to finish the game.

Here's what I learned:

Acknowledge your limitations. Cut scope as needed:

At first I wanted to no limitation on the compression ability, allowing vertical as well as horizontal folding, multiple folds etc. But the reality was that I didn't have time to code all of it. If I only allowed folding in one direction, the calculations would be much simpler. So I cut all of that extra scope and made a simpler but much more achievable game where you can only fold space left.

Embrace your restrictions:

Restrictions can also be a creative tool. The game doesn't allow you to fold space over a prop(say, laser turret). If I allowed it, then I'd have to write extra code to handle it. It's not complicated but would likely take some time to handle the edge cases it would cause. Instead, I simply prevented the player from folding over props and designed puzzles around that. This simplified coding and provided me with another avenue for puzzle design.

Plan out how much "game" you want to/can actually make. Work based on that:

After the basic compression mechanic was implemented, I brainstormed various ways to utilize it. I then chose the ones that I could finish implementing within time and designed 12 levels on paper. I decided that 8 levels would be enough for the jam while being. So I picked 8 levels from there and coded only what was needed for those levels.

Leave some time to implement/adjust your initial plan:

When I sat down to actually implement the levels I designed on paper, I had to change and adjust them a lot. In fact, I had to redesign the entire final level several times before I could get it to work. Your initial plan will never survive reality. So be flexible.

Save some time for polish:

I had 12 hours left after I implemented the final level. After that, I didn't code any new mechanics. I just focused on polishing the game. I played around with post-processing settings, added particles etc.

Post-processing can elevate even shitty art:

The game has a really simple artstyle. It looks good only because of post-processing. The CRT effect, chromatic aberration, bloom etc. all of it was from Unity's built-in post-processing stuff. Even programmer art can be made good if you put in effort.

If your game is complicated, make proper tutorials in the game:

This is especially true for puzzle games. Very few players are going to read the huge paragraph in your description. From the very start, I had to think about how I would teach the mechanics. Even in the first 12 draft levels, I included tutorial levels. I designed a lot of small levels to gradually teach the player the mechanics. I thought I did a good job. But even then, players had trouble learning the rules. It is never enough. But you still have to try.

That's all. I hope this was useful to you. I plan on developing the game further. If you found this helpful, your feedback would help a lot.

You can play Compress(space) here

For the last few months, I've been working on expanding Compress(space). I now have a ~1hr demo with 62 levels on itch! Vertical folding was a common request in the jam page and it's here: Folding is also freeform and you can fold as many times as you want.

There are a lot of new mechanics. My favorite is this switch that can be activated by the ceiling:

Compress(space) was 10th(innovation) and 71st overall in LD54. I was floored by the reception here. Your feedback was really helpful last time and I'd really appreciate your thoughts on the expanded version.

You can play the demo here