Hi all, this is my first compo, and I don't really know my way around too well, so please bear with me. :) I've been programming for years, but I've never done an official jam before. For LD38, I had family stuff going on during that weekend, but I went ahead and did a little jam of my own, following the same rules as the compo.

Unfortunately, it was a complete failure. I was trying to do a text-based adventure / dungeon crawler game, neither of which genre I had really tried before. But I'm terrible at art creation, so a text-based adventure game should be the best choice, right?

No. I spent the entire first day coding the back end, and I hand only gotten the first test rooms made by the end of the second, and there were all kinds of bugs, and worst of all, it wasn't fun. Uggh.

This time, I had something going Saturday morning, but I decided to participate anyway, so I got started at about two o'clock. I wanted the game to be different right off the bat, so I decided to have a different movement style. And I wanted it to be funny, so I came up with a granny riding a pogo stick. To fit the theme, I decided that her pogo stick was an electric bounce assist pogo stick, and she had to go around collecting batteries to keep it from running out of power.

Probably the biggest thing I learned from the unofficial jam I did before was that I just could not create the entire back end in time. I had to rely on someone else's back end code. That seems to be the paradox of Ludum Dare; you have to make the entire game yourself, but in order to survive, you really need some help. :P

Pogostick Granny runs almost entirely on unity's physics engine, so the amount of coding I had to do was very minimal. Still, it took me over four hours to get the bouncing feel somewhat close to right. That mechanic was going to be way better, and more important, but I just didn't have the time, and had to scrap a bunch of ideas. By Sunday at 10 o'clock, I was still in prototype mode, and still needed a city, all the art for a city, including cars, buildings, and other stuff. I also needed all the music and sound effects.

Now, I'm pretty terrible at art any way you look at it, but I do two things fairly well; hand-drawing terrible art, and making cartoony-feeling copies of other stuff in paint.net by tracing the outlines and filling in open spaces with solid colors. Having access to a scanner, I decided to take those and get the best of both worlds: Crappy cartoony-feeling copies of hand-drawn art! Yay! But at least it was fairly quick...

By about 6, I had a town with a few of buildings, and batteries scattered around, and cars going by that you had to avoid. It was playable, and kind of fun, and the bouncy movement was a novelty, so I called quits and made a sound track. I had a riff that I had recorded a while back, so I made a song out of that in LMMS, and a quick sound manager in the game. Finally, it was 7:30 or so, and I went to the Ludum Dare website... Sheer madness. Every page took five to ten minutes to load, but thanks to the super submission hour, I made it.

I got a build up on GameJolt, and had my younger siblings try it out. They had some friends over, and it turned into a huge deal, each of them taking turns trying to keep granny alive the longest, and they were all shouting and laughing. Lol, I love it when people find so much joy in something I created, especially when I don't think it's all that great.

Anyway, I had a great first compo, and look forward to jamming again! See you round the Universe!

Finally!! The Jam is finally over! I actually managed to submit my game just barely in time! I can sleep again! I've been participating in Ludum Dare since 37 or 38, but I'd only gotten two playable in time.

This time, I was able to push out a build that was able to make it through from beginning to end, and a tiny bit of middle too. I admit that I did go about ten minutes over time, doing last minute bug fixes before I got that build I mentioned. - Submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/dissuasion - Game site: https://gamejolt.com/games/dissuasion/411417

This Ludum Dare was a new experience for me, as I did the Jam instead of the Compo, and had my Dad and a couple of siblings helping out. @royallion composed the music, and made it sound great! This wouldn't have had music otherwise, and this without music is kind of a drag.

So, I've been thinking that everyone in Ludum Dare should explain (in more depth than just what engine they used) about where exactly they started the jam from. The thing is, everyone is starting with a different set of tools, and it's a bit difficult, just looking at their game, to tell how far they actually came in the little time they had.

For example, let's say @andrew is using RPG Maker this time. He makes some sprites, and some simple gameplay, and ends up with a pretty good game. Now, @sarah is a pretty talented web programmer, and she decides to make an rpg from scratch; just gimp and a text editor. She ends up with an okay game, just several monsters and items behind @andrew, and scores quite a bit lower than him because the player gets stuck on corners.

Now obviously, with no real objective to Ludum Dare other than to have fun, it's not really a big deal, but it would be cool if everyone knew where @sarah and @andrew had started from. Perhaps they would have rated a bit more fairly?

Okay, enough of that. My hands are getting tired from programming all day, so I'll just wait until tomorrow to finish this.

Alright, I'm back.

So, I'll start with what I had Friday at the time the theme was announced.

• Unity 2018.3
  • Visual Studio 2019
  • some old audio manager code that I didn't actually use
• Paint.net
• Inkscape
• some daw that our audio technician used and I don't know the name of
• a great idea for a music-generated teraforming hillclimbracing-esque platformer that got totally shattered when the theme was announced

Whatever the theme may have been, I wasn't expecting Your Life Is Currency, and we had a difficult time coming up with ideas. We basically just decided on "a scifi game where you're up against a tyrannical government that just sees its subjects as tools, and their lives as currency," and then said "okay, see-ya-tamara" and went to bed.

I woke up bright and early, and had more brainstorming, and decided that you play as a secret agent infiltrating the offices of the Organizations that manage the Sectors that the world is divided into.

I was going to try to make three levels at least, with interesting monologues in-between each, and differing network speeds, timer durations, and personel susceptibility, depending on the office, and how you did on previous levels. If I had another day, I could have done this much at least, but that's what a game jam is all about; getting as much as you can out of not enough time.

Well, I didn't have the time to build a good music manager, so I just threw the songs @royallion made into an audiosource on the main camera of each scene, and put them on loop. The best song was meant for the credits and title screen, but I didn't have the time to make those, and it now lives on the Gamejolt page. Be sure to give it a listen, I played viola on it (please don't laugh! =P) and my sister played the melodica.

Anyway, I just barely managed to get the game done, and I submitted the game with one build, and around five minutes to spare.

Aand to wrap it up, I asked the three members of our team if they would want to jam again, and got three answers. - No. I could do the art, but I don't like the computer stuff. - Well, I really enjoyed working on the music, but I didn't like having to commit to the full weekend. - Probably not, managing the team was pretty difficult, and I felt like, as the only experienced game maker in the group, that I was the only one actually making the game.

That said, if I can find a talented programmer and level designer, I'd love to participate in another Jam!

So... Yeah. I guess that's about it. Now it's time to buckle down and play every ld44 game I can fit into my free time for the next 20 days!

Well, it looks as if I am going to be jamming with a team again, despite my previous almost-decision not to do so... The thing is, I'm working on a different project with some folks, and on mentioning Ludum Dare, a couple of them said that they'd help out a bit with graphics and sound and such, so great! I just hope we can pull something fun out of the magical hat called coffee and frustration and nightmarish fun! [insert-some-relevant-gif-here]

I don't like this six months period! I'm really hyped for the next Ludum Dare!

While I'm waiting, I'm thinking of theme suggestions, and am open to change if someone has constructive criticism. - Game Inside Of A Game - Our Childhood Heroes - You Are Only A Dream

I'm also doing idea jams to practice coming up with good ideas on command.

I've got a list of past Ludum Dare themes as well as themes from other game jams. With a pad of paper, a pencil, and a timer, I randomly pull a theme, and begin writing as many single-sentence ideas as I can in ten minutes. The ideas don't need to be fleshed out at all, even just names or main mechanics work.

After that, I pick the two or three most interesting ideas that I think could fit the scope, and take ten minutes each to add details like story, main mechanics, art style, etc..

With this, after just thirty to forty minutes, I have a couple of great ideas that I can begin prototyping!

Hey all, I'm considering learning Ionic React for LD 46, but I have no web development experience. I've mainly used C#, but lately I've been working in Swift as well.

Does anyone know how easy it is to get into Ionic React? Can I learn it in a week or so?

Rescue Mission

LD46 was one of my favorite LudumDares. I had the house to myself, and outside of food preparation and a couple of hours of sleep, I just made a game. I scoped small, and cut a bunch of stuff out of that, and ended up with a game that had a start and an ending, and some gameplay in the middle.

One of the biggest problems I've run into in past jams is coming up with ideas when the theme is announced. I generally like to come to the jam without any preparation, but when the theme is announced I end up completely blank for a long time.

This time, I held idea jams every day during the week or two leading up to the theme announcement. What I did was to pick a random theme, give myself ten minutes to spam as many ideas as possible, and then pick the three best ideas and spend ten minutes each expounding on them. After 40 minutes, I'd have three great ideas with basic plot, core mechanics, and art style/genre already figured out, and could then pick one to move forward on.

It worked really well for the actual theme announcement, and even though one of my least favorite themes was picked, I was able to immediately begin brainstorming, and ended up with several plausible game ideas in less than an hour.

During a pre-jam mechanic testing session, another thing I had never done before, I came up with a physics-based rocket engine that worked really well, and I ended up using the same idea as the core movement mechanic for Rescue Mission.

I spent much more time on art than I have been able to in past jams, which was pretty great. I had borrowed a drawing tablet from a friend, and it worked out well, even though I did decide to crunch the size down drastically since I'm not much of an artist.

For this Ludum Dare, I did interpret the term 'base code' more generously than I have in previous jams, and took the rocket engine code, some pieces of an enemy spawner script, and a tiny music manager script from some of my other projects. While this did cut down the coding time some, it was almost more of a pain trying to get everything to work together than if I had written it all from scratch, so I'll probably refrain from doing this too much in the future.

Audacity and my headset mic were giving me timing issues, and I couldn't get two tracks to sync up even with a click track, so I ended up just recording the different music tracks in single takes. I'll need to get a proper mic and a better DAW next time I do live music.

Anyway, the compo itself was a great time and very enjoyable, but on Tuesday, I came down with a bad cold, and was out for two weeks, so I wasn't able to participate in the play and rate portion of LD46 as much as I'd like, and only barely managed to squeak through with 21 ratings on the last day.

But in the end I made a game in 48 hours, had a lot of fun, and ended up surviving, all thanks to Providence and maybe 30 cups of Mate.

I haven't been following the LD news, but I see that there are only two Ludum Dare events scheduled for this year.. I was disappointed when they went down to three, but now two only? Does anyone know the reason for this, and what the plans are for the future of Ludum Dare?

This has been one of the main constants in my life, and I'd really hate to see it changed too drastically.

First time using godot, git issues, and a fairly art heavy game, and we decided to try going for vibes more than fun... We're probably going to make it, but it might suck, lol!

edit: yeah we didn't make it. one more day and we'd have been able to put all of the pieces together, but right now we just barely managed to get it running, the game play is only half-done, some of the levels have broken/missing geometry, and our music/story elements weren't fully implemented.

Just went and played several of my previous submissions again, and I'm getting pretty excited for this! The odds are pretty good that I'll end up aiming way too high again, so I'm not going to predict anything except that I'll have a great weekend jamming with all of you.

Funny how that works. I'll be jamming solo again, but because there's a bunch of us doing the same thing by ourselves at the same time, it feels like we're doing something amazing together! I have taken a weekend here or there to try to get something built out, but I am always disappointed in how little I can do when I'm truly working alone.

It doesn't really matter who fails and who comes out with a once in a lifetime gem of a game. By the end of the day on Sunday, we'll have built something great together, and by Tuesday it will be colossal.

We're going to make some great games, y'all! Get excited!