Well, so that was my first entry ever at Ludum Dare.
This weekend has become short! I could not work on the game on saturday, but I’m happy with the result .
I had participed at the last Ludum Dare Jam with the friends of Indiesquish with a great sensation. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10871
I have participated on other events such as Global Game Jam, that I hope to join again next year, but Ludum Dare will be a must from now on.
Great fun!
This time in LD I will be using the GooEngine down at goocreate.com
I have been trying it for a while now and I want how far can one get with it.
I have already been playing arround a bit:
https://goote.ch/7ed1875eb7e749f1a957cf012526c3c0.project/
GL HF!
Tags: webgl
I have been working on Trust Music this weekend, everything on the web, some sprites and sounds, but I did everything on a browser through a browser 
First time using GooCreate to make a game. I had been trying it out for a while now.
I have used their engine the most though, not their editor, but you basically you get a nice editor where you can do the same. And host your project for free!
Didn’t manage to do all I wanted, ended up being more of a concept demo than a game, but that’s what a jam is all about
I’ll probably try to add some more levels and add the mechanics I didn’t have time to implement after the compo, If I have the time 😛
Most of the people that played my game this ludum dare 31 have started playing before reading the description.
It makes such a difference in my game’s case 😛 Most of them have realized what was happening while playing, but some players have been strugling to find the reason why they get sent back to the title screen after what they think is beating a minigame hehe.
If the game doesn’t seem to work as you would expect read the description people! 😉
Hi!
This LD we tried to do make a music game, and we ended up with Pianobots. You could say it's a music puzzle game.
We spent quite a lot of time at the beginning of the jam trying to figure out how we could make these compositions. What does each of the bots play in order for each piece to only sound *correct* in the right combination, and how can we make sure there are not too many possible combinations for the bots to play at the same time?
I ended up making some tools to help us design/compose each level, but overall really enjoyed working in this small game.
Since pieces resulted to be challenging even for us who made the game, I decided to not force players to beat each level in order to reach the next. In Pianobots, the whole game is accessible from the beginning and if you get stuck on a piece, you can always try another one.
Even if you don't know much about music, please give it a play!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pianobots
This Ludum Dare @notke and I made Jamsterdam, a game about trying to survive being a jazz singer in Amsterdam.
The game features an endless procedural jazz sountrack that was possible with the musical help from YenTing (@tinglo2233)
In this post, I'm going to go into the musical details that made this possible, forgive me if I'm too technical but I hope you can enjoy the explanation too! I'm no professional musician but I have the required musical knowledge to communicate with YenTing and make this happen. We made everything inside Unity, using multiple AudioSources and messing with the pitch to change the frequency (the note) of our audio clips.
Disclaimer: Some of the details refer only to the post-jam version of the game.
We aimed to create a jazz rhythm section that play a nice-sounding accompaintment for the player (the singer) as you improvise your scatting solo. For this purpose, we needed to compose a song, a base for you to improvise on, and already on the conception of the idea we decided to go procedural
We wanted a song that sounded like jazz, so after discussing with YenTing we went for one of the most characteristic jazz progressions: Two-Five-One progression
We stuck to a major tonality for simplicity and lack of time, but basically that means that the whole sountrack keeps repeating the chords 2, 5 and 1 (for 2 bars) over and over, with some modulation in between, which I'm going to explain. After some testing, we were satisfied with the simplicity and how effective it was. We then only have these 3 chords: * IIm7 Second minor seven * V7 Fifth dominant seven * Imaj7 First major seven
This means, if the song is in C major key, the chords played are going to be:
Dm7 :arrowright: G7 :arrowright: Cmaj7
Then after a two-five-one has been played we need to decide the next tonality to modulate to. In Jazz, your modulations are not really limited, you can change the key to any other, and the song can still make sense and sound good, but there are still some common transitions. For the sake of time, in our case we only defined 3 different transitions and assigned them different probabilities:
A new key is then chosen and its corresponding two-five-one are queued in the chord progression
For the singer we are using just a 10 audio samples of YenTing singing a C4 using different syllables. In our case we have: Ba Be Bi Bo Bu Ta Te Ti To Tu. We randomly choose a syllable whenever the player presses the mouse, and we could easily increase the vocabulary of the singer by increasing the number of samples.
The sample is then pitched to a note in the scale of the current key. This scale is constant during the duration of a 2-5-1, and it's always a major scale.
To find the right amount of pitch distortion to apply to a clip (using Unity's AudioSource.pitch) to hit the right note you can use the formula:
n0 = note of the recorded clip
n = note you want the clip to sound
deltaSemitones = n - n0 // number of semitones appart
pitchN = 2 ^ (deltaSemitones/12) // pitch value to apply to the AudioSource
If you want to learn more check the physics of music by Bryan H. Suits
In the game, we define a singing range and map the vertical position of the mouse on screen to the a note in the range of the singer. We always make sure the mapped note is on the scale of the song on that moment.
(Please pretend the cymbal is a hi-hat)
We knew from the very beginning we needed at least a double bass and some kind of drums. We went for a very minimalistic (and simplistic) representation of the drummer: Hi-Hat only jazz swing). It doesn't do fair to all the ways a drummer can play but please, if you are a drummer, forgive our lack of time :sweat_smile:
For the double bass we tried to imitate a walking-bass. At the begining of each bar, if we just changed chord, the bass plays the tonic of that chord, and in the subsequent beats, the bass plays notes in the chord of the song of that moment. For example:
In a Fm7 Chord: * Play F in the first beat * Play randomly F, Ab, C or Eb on the other beats
Again, I want to emphasize, this is a very simplistic imitation of a real player :grin:
Originally we tried to stick with only bass and drums, but we very soon realized we lacked more support on the harmony of the chord in order for the vocal solos to sound good, so we decided to go for a simple piano comper.
They keyboard player plays each new chord on its first beat, plus on the Imaj7 chords (which are 2 bars long) it plays on 5-and and 6-and (that means on the last third of both the 5th and the 6th beat).
We managed to add 2 different voicings for the keyboard. * Basic voicing We just play the chord notes from lower to higher. In a G7 chord, the piano will play G B D F, the G being the lowest note and the F the highest. * Tonic-less voicing Since the doublebass is already playing the base note of each chord, the keyboard can avoid it. YenTing wrote down for us a common 2-5-1 voicing for jazz piano players. From lower to higher note, for each chord of the 2-5-1 progression:
II :arrow_right: 7 3 5 9
V :arrow_right: 3 7 9 13
I :arrow_right: 7 3 5 9
On each key change, the keyboard player chooses a voicing to perform.
There are plenty things we wanted to do with the music but didn't have time for in the end: Adding other chord progressions, modulating to minor modes, improving the sound and variety of the instruments.. But we are very happy with the overall result of both the visual landscape and the soundscape of the music.
We wanted to make the player feel like they are jazz singers singing in the canals of Amsterdam, to make players feel like they are improvising with a live jazz-band, and I feel we got quite close to that feeling :slight_smile:
Give Jamsterdam a try and check the post-jam version on itch.io:
https://nothke.itch.io/jamsterdam (If you press X 3 times you can enable the Chill-mode where you can just enjoy the scenery and sing freely without the worring about paying the bills)
Big shoutout to @notke's amazing visual adaptation of Amsterdam :art: :cityscape: Check his work on twitter Nothke
Follow @tinglo2233 for amazing music :microphone: :musical_score:
Follow me for more games that make music :videogame: :musicalnote:
This ludumdare @nothke and I decided to try to make an online-multiplayer game about cats sailing catamarans in the sea while trying not to capsize the boat!
We didn't get to finish many of the things we hoped but we got the boat physics and the online open-sea up and running. You can choose to join an existing boat or to launch your own!
We are working on a web version with some tweaks and added features that we will post on our itch, but for now, you can still join the boats play at our ld game page:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/catamaran-cats
You can also follow Nothke or fonserbc on itch for upcoming updates!