The first day is coming to an end and I am fairly happy with the result so far. The gameplay is nearly done, tomorrow is fine tuning and dressing the game to make it look nicer.

What a ride. I doubted myself so I was planning on entering the JAM, just to get a day extra, but somewhere around the 24 hour mark i realized that this can be done and I decided to go for the COMPO. This morning I played my game and realized that no one have seen a space-floating-racer but almoast everyone have seen or heard of the swampboats, so I redesigned. Since I don´t know how to model I made all the games assets from cubes within Unity, yea I know, not the best thing for performance, and when I populated the swamp with trees the framerate died. So, another designchange and the scene is now framed by blocky mountains. Well, anyway, I would be super glad if someone would like to try and rate my game.

Thanks for this wonderfull weekend, on to the ratings =)

The reviews are in, the handling is hard, but give yourself time to aclimate to the controllers in this fast pased redneck boatracing game and you might be able to beat Flopo´s time 25,32. The game is available as WEBGL or windows donwload. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/redneck-raceway

This is my first Ludum Dare and I am so happy that so many of you are playing my game. Now, over 250 laps have been compleated in my game Redneck Raceway. Why don´t you give it a try yourself?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/redneck-raceway

The leaderboard is filled with Dalon´s time. He is good but I belive that you can beat it.

I would love to find more WebGL-games to play, please add your game in a comment and I promise to play and rate it. If you want to you can play my game, Redneck Raceway, and give me feedback. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/redneck-raceway

This is my first Ludum Dare and going in, my thought where to just finish somthing and it turned out in another, more unexpected way. Let´s start from the begining. I code for pleasure and fun, I am not very good and I can´t use blender or any other cool software. My initial thought going in where to make a physics based game without any fancy animations with other peoples models. I was aiming for the JAM, even though I am a solo-dev, just to get an extra day of work and so that I could use other peoples assets.

The theme was announced and I was planning on what to do with it. My initial thought was a kind of top dow/third person-space-vehicle racer. I started with making a cube that I stretched out to the shape of a yellow space-thingie (still just a cube). To make it more graphical before I added a model later I smacked on two blue blocks tilted to represent the cockpit glass. I added two point´s, one in the front and one in the back. I then just added forces for the horizontal and vertical axis. If you press forward, the mainEngineForce is applied straight from behind in the aft point, if you turn, forces are applied to the forward and rear points vid forces from the side. Now the physics was created and is pretty mouch the one that is shipped in final version.

My camera-follow-script was a bitt laggy, especially in the web version so I replaced that with a static camera that looked at the player and changed the FOV depending on the vehicles distance to the camera and I got that to a nice state. So on to the next part.

To have a place to drive the vehicle I made a small track made out of plane´s rotaded in 15 degrees intervals and then added railings, the first thing since the vehicle to have colliders and placed them around the track. I now was a short nights sleep and 12 hours into the JAM and my friends started to wake up, I pestered them to beta-test my game, a huge thanks to you guy´s for helping out with feedback, and one thing was given to me across the board. Your car is way to slippery. hmmm It is not a car it´s a space race-vehicle. Well, I tweaked the camera and vehicle-performance to handle better and I started to add an UI and a menu. At this point, still quite early on saturday I was fairly finished with the main gameloop and I decided to try to aim for the compo instead of the JAM. That meant I could not add nice assets and that I had to do my own.

This was the game state when I went to bed on saturday evning and when I woke up on sunday it was clear to me what I had to do. If everybody thought it was a car, I had to make it into somthing people understood. But what had these kind of physics. I came to the conclusion that a hoovercraft could be possible and after a couple of iterations I landed on using a swampboat.

A quick redesign, just using unity cube´s offcourse, and I hade made the reneck swampmobile. This design sparked my imagination and the story of a redneck, stuck in a loop, unable to get home, started to form in my head. Then It was the dreaded sound design. For my space craft I had made a swooping engine-sound by recording a compressor and beating and looping the sound in Audacity until it was atleast a bit SCI-FIy, well that did not fit the swampboat. So a new sound was needed and I took a walk around my home looking for things with a more corresponding sound. I found my snowblower in one of the outhouses and recorded it on a couple of starts and a continous running sound. Back to audacity, and It did not turn out perfect but acceptable.

And now, it was a simple downstretch in just populating the swamp with trees, And did I do that, you have no idea. I made a couple of base-prefabs and dupicated the heck out of them. The scenery looked amazing, I exported it and started the game. It was unplayable. Totaly unplayable. Apperently webGL-version don´t like lika a million threes made out of 10 cubes, very strange. So I had to start with the optimizing process. Tree´s was removed and mountain-cubes and hills was added instead.

The last thing I had to do before submitting the game was finalizing the online highscore system. Since I already have a webserver for hosting the game, I threw togheter a snappy little PHP-script and a MySQL-database. Unity is now able to ask for the top ten times and to store a new laptime, as of just now over 400 laps have been compleaded and logged to the database.

The startscreen got the finishing touches and I was wondering how to avoid the dreaded wall of text to explain the backstory and I turned on the mic, moved it away and just yelled it out. Smack, good enough. I exported the project again and playtested yet again. Well, everything looked like expected and I realized I was finished, with four hours to deadline. So I started to upload and make my game-page. It was at this exact time my Internet decided it needed a break. With whooping speeds of up to 0.5 MBIT/s it took me three hours to upload all the needed files and this turned out to be the most frustrating thing the entire weekend.

The game was published and a feeling of emptyness and meeningless started to spread, well, now what. Maybe sleep before work tomorrow and remember, it´s just 6 months to the next jam.

So, to finalice this very very long post. Thanks for emverybody that are leaving me feedback and rating my game, it is far from perfect but I have learned alot during the weekend and will do better next time, maybe I even will start to look into that blender thingie.

If you havent tried it out yet, It would make me a happy little coder if you did. The game can be found at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/redneck-raceway

Aftermany day´s of Dalon in the lead on the highscore he has been dethroned. Come try my game redneck racing, https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/redneck-raceway and see if you can be the highscore.

This will be my second LD. My first was 47 where I did the Compo, this time Im in it for the Jam with my buddies. Can´t wait for it to begin.

My theme suggestions are: * Insane velocity * What the frick is this * It seems impossible at first

Someone really wants the theme to be Echoes. It is available in all three Theme votings.

OK, At this point we are happy to release our game Colony Defender but man, did we overscoop, as per usual. We cut down on features early on and managed to get a deacent game out. It would make us super happy if you would play and rate it.

To make it easy to test the game we focused on a weg-GL version that runs smooth in your browser.

Rate and play game on our Ludum Dare page

I am looking for games to rate and would love to play yours. I will give you feedback, if you like it and want to thank me, just play and rate our game: Colony Defender.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/colony-defender

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/colony-defender

Ok,I can´t join this LD beacuse my wife works and I am home with the kids, but then somthing weird happened. Somthing so un heard of. I LIKE the theme. More then like, I love it. And instantly an idea poped out in my head. So after a serious discussion with myself, I decided that hey, your wife may work, and you have the kids but do you know what? Thera are nights to.

So I will be enetering with my game idea Satellite (placeholder name for somthing great). I will be entering the Compo this time and my goal is to get a finished game, nothing more.

Best of luck to you all, may the code be ever in your favor.

I only have a couple of hours per evning to work on my LDJAM-game but with half time remaining my core gameloop is in place and all that is left is more apealing graphics and fine tuning.

The game is a crazy Satellite-simulator where you are trying to keep your satellite on perfect distance to earth to send data, while at the same time trying to avoid all the other spacejunk. The only problem is that with Elon Musk´s schedule, a new satellite is launced every 10 second.

This weekend has been a wild ride. First off, I had decided to skip the event all together due to lack of time but then decided that I want to give it a try. It is what it is. So come sunday evning I am rushing to get a stable build up and running and when It is time to submit I have problem with packing the sourcecode. I realise that I am two seconds late when I press publish, only to realise there is a submission hour. I had totaly forgot about that.

I have pestered friends and family to see if they can get hang of the controlls but It would be awsome to here your judgement of it, is it to hard, or easy. What grade and score do you get?

I will play all of your games in return if you rate mine.

//Henrik

After a short night it is time to begin playing all of your games. This is a part almost as good as coding, or getting reviews. I am so impressed with all the games here, in my eyes, all of us are winners.

If you would like me to play your game, leave a coment. If you would like som physics chaos feel free to play my game Satellite Commander. I would be thrilled if you could give me a rating as well.

Do your game have WebGL-support? Add a comment and I will play and rate your game.

I need to get better at reminding myself how much you playtest your game during development. This time, I set the rating score way too high. I just witnessed a player reach B- and that seems to be a great score. There is a secret score above A+ that you can get, but I don´t think everyone ever will =) Play for yourself to find out on https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/satellite-commander

The rules specify that AI is not allowed but wouldn't it be fun to see how far we can take it? A JAM-category where AI-tools is allowed could be fun. JAMing for me is to experiment that would be a new way to experiment and to see what can be done by a small team during a weekend where all assets need to be made during the JAM, even if it is by an AI.