I'm in again! Going solo again after collaborating with a pal for the last one.

I suspect that I will be using the following:

• Game Engine: Unity
• Modelling: Blender
• 2D art: GIMP and Aseprite
• Music: I think I might shake things up and use my SP404 and Novation Circuit (hardly ever use them)
• Sound Effects: BFXR
• IDE: Visual Studio

But, maybe I'll change my mind and try to make something for the web using Phaser or something.

A two day game jam is the perfect time to learn something new, right?! ... right?

I decided to plot the results for the last 3 games I made for the LD Jam and see if there are any trends. Spoiler! There is a trend!

Turns out I'm an innovative guy with very little creative talent :laughing:

Anyway, my intention is to try and focus on art/music assets a bit more this time around (I usually leave that until the very end to avoid getting disheartened). Also, I'm going to try and add some simple game juice where I can.

We'll see if it pays off.

So... here a a few ideas for each of the final themes that I literally thought of while typing them out.

Are they stupid? Probably.
Are they helpful? Unlikely.
Do they immediately eliminate one ridiculous option you probably wouldn't have thought of yourself? Almost certainly!

Decay - Players prevent members of their household from cutting slices of your beautiful chocolate cake until it is completely decayed. Why? Because you're spiteful!

Layers - Commercial hen house simulator. Manage all those egg layers!

ontrol the world, not the player - Bullet hell shooter where you can only press control to reload if your crosshair is on the world sprite, not the player sprite.

Nomad - Play as a seven year old Scottish child trying to convince everyone that they aren't angry but all you can say is "I'm no' mad!"

Connections - 1950s switchboard operator and McCarthyism surveillance simulator. Lowkey good idea actually. Don't steal it.

Stuck in a loop - The letters S, T, U, C, K in a washing machine. Control the rotation and water level to manipulate them into spelling STUCK.

Feeding the monster - Cooking simulator where you dress and cook a horrible creature and serve it for dinner.

Delay the inevitable - Don't do anything for the first 47 hours and 55 minutes of the jam, then make a post saying "Sorry, folks. I didn't manage to make a game this time!"

Contain it - Play in real time as an IT department intern who desperately needs to fart but is only 30 minutes into a 2 hour meeting about risk management.

Day and night - Point and click adventure staring Kath Day and Kel Knight from the hit Australian comedy series, Kath and Kim.

Shipwrecked - Play as a jealous friend and plant incriminating evidence around your friend's apartment in an attempt to wreck their relationship. Bonus points if this is a live action, fly-on-the-wall gameplay experience with Twitch integration.

Clockwork - You want to clock off work on Friday but the boss has something for you that "should only take 5 minutes". Can you avoid them long enough to get to the pub?

You can't save them all - Disaster event bystander simulator. I mean, YOU can't save them all but you can sure as hell watch some one else do it.

Death is not the end - Reverse game of hangman. How does that work? I don't know. I'm just the ideas guy.

Summoning - A quick maths game. Addition only.

The world changes when you are not looking - An illegal piece of malware that deletes all of a users desktop icons and changes their background whenever they open the "game". For the love of all things meaningful, don't do this. Please.

Good luck everyone!

So anyway I started blasting...

I just remembered (after 4 hours of work) to create a git repo and push my progress to it. So, I figured that I'd put a reminder on here for anyone else who is a big dummy like me and forgot to do it.

No matter what method you use: BACK UP YOUR WORK

Otherwise, in an hour's time when your PC invariably BSODs, you will cry.

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a great LD Jam 47! I've seen some awesome games so far!

Anyway, I uploaded the two songs that I made for my game "ME! vs the unrelenting alien invasion" to SoundCloud.

They're kind of funky, so why not, aye?!

Main Gameplay Music

Menu Theme Music

Enjoy!

Now, back to playing and rating games!

P.S It'd be nice to be able to embed the Soundcloud player in these posts.

Hi folks!

I usually try to do a Windows, Linux and Mac build for my LD games but I ran out of time for it this time around. So, to make sure people can't accuse me of being a Microsoft shill, I've updated my game page to include a WebGL build.

It was a little funky to get working properly (of course, I'd use the version of Unity that has a mouse inversion bug for web builds!!!) but it's there now. Aside from the weird WebGL input issue, all of the original bugs are alive and well! :laughing:

On another note, I've played some amazing games so far!! You people are awesome!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/me-vs-the-unrelenting-alien-invasion <-- Web build is linked here!

Hi everyone!

Congratulations on another successful LDJam!

Even if the results weren't what you hoped for, just remember that you made a game in next to no time and that's something to be super proud of doing!

Before this jam, I made a post looking at my previous three jam results. Off the back of that post, I decided that my focus for this jam would be trying to improve on my graphics, sound and humour in the hope of boosting my overall rating. I wanted to add a bit more animation and some juice to the graphics and input. So I ended up implemented a couple of things like easing for projectile firing and impact shake for explosions etc.

I'm glad to say that I seem to have achieved what I set out to achieve!

The improved ratings didn't translate to much of a shift in my category rankings (apart from humour) although it blew my last game jam entry out of the water. That was to be expected, though. My LD46 entry was a hot mess.

It's worth nothing that my improved results in the areas I focused on are counterbalanced by reduced performance in other areas. I suppose that's to be expected when you have limited time. However, I guess my focus for the next Ludum Dare is to make a well-rounded game and manage my time best towards that end.

So, I guess I'll see you all for the next one!

I feel like I made a bit of progress last time so here's hoping I have similar success this time!

Tech stack:

Engine: Unity

Modelling: Blender

2D: Photoshop (last time I used GIMP... never again)

Sound: Bfxr

Music: Logic X and a few hardware synths

Database (if needed.. probably not): SQL

Although, I have had a desire to make something with web tech so if I go in that direction it'll be .NET Core.

And one final thing... if you're making something in Unity try binding Esc to quit the application.

Day One is in the bag. Got a fair bit done behind the scenes but also managed to get some of the basics on the screen! Of course, I also sunk a bunch of time into stuff that I'm 100% going to scrap tomorrow... c'est la vie.

ANYWAY... :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat: :sailboat:

Also... here's a friendly reminder:

MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR WORK

(or use source control... y'know).

Have fun!!!

First of all, congratulations to everyone who participated. I hope you had a great time. I did!

I feel like this jam was my most successful one though the scores don't necessarily reflect that.

Background

I worked in a team for this one and we all contributed meaningfully to the game. Initially, I had intended to do the jam alone but two of my friends were free-ish for the weekend so they jumped on board at the last second. That was great because they are much more capable artists than I am and it meant I could focus on programming while they churned out art assets and music.

Issues

We did run into a few troubles which sucked up a bit of time. Merge issues using Git meant that we couldn't simply and easily work on the project simultaneously. As it turns out, solving those issues was fairly straight forward but I didn't look into the solution until after the jam because I didn't want to sink a tonne of time into it. At least now I know the solution for next jam.

Feedback

As is always the case, player feedback and criticisms focused on exactly the issues that you knew were problems. Mainly, the controls confused people (controls operated in world space rather than object space... which made sense for me but no one else apparently). Collisions were a bit janky (I didn't leave enough time to develop an elegant solution). The game was a bit unbalanced (that's what happens when you spend exactly zero minutes balancing).

Overall

Overall, I think the scope of the game was a bit too big which meant that there wasn't enough time left after development to do proper playtesting. This seems to be a recurring theme across a lot of my jams. I should probably look into that.

Anyway, onto the graphs. The jams marked with an asterisk* are jams where I worked in a group.

Conclusion

I am a bit disappointed with the results but only because I feel like this game is a significant improvement over my previous jam entries. It looks better. It's more fully fleshed out. People (that I know IRL) played it for longer and seemed to enjoy it more. Yet, it scored worse than my last entry which I wasn't super-happy with...

... who knows?!

This has been my TED Talk, thanks for listening.

:wink: :wink:

In the lead up to a LD Jam, I often visit the site and look at the various "I'm in" and "These are my themes..." etc posts. Whenever I find a post or comment on a post that I think is interesting, I follow the person that made it and then I check out their game after the jam.

Does anyone else do the same thing? Or do you pretty much not use the Follow functionality at all and rely purely on the smart ratings to present you with games to play?

Having lurched through another theme slaughter, I think there are two changes that could be made so that it isn't such an onerous task.

• Only let people submit one theme each. We clearly get enough suggestions. Even if we got one-third as many, that would still be around 1000 theme suggestions.
• Show the themes in batches of 10 rather than 1 at a time. Each theme should automatically be a "NO" and you could just click on the ones you like to make them a "YES". Button or SPACE to go to the next batch.

Good luck with the slaughter!

Here's how I went...

This will be my fifth LD in a row!

It's probably my 10th overall, as I did a few on an old account back in the day. Usually, I use Unity but I've decided to use Phaser this time.

I've been teaching myself the basics of Phaser over the past week and I'm confident that I can get a small, fairly simple game across the line for this LD but I'll still very much be learning as I go... so that should be fun!

Engine: Phaser

Art: Aseprite

Sounds: BFXR

Music: Logic X

Other tools: Tiled, TexturePacker, Trello, Git

Super excited for this one! :smiley: :smiley: :videogame: :videogame: :smiley: :smiley:

Now that we have a list of our final choices, I always think it's fun to spend a few minutes coming up with ridiculous (and almost certainly idiotic) game ideas for them. Here's my ideas for this LD.

Unstable - A game about horses masterminding a jailbreak from their stables.

Making connections - An awkward physics based game about soldering audio connectors to wires.

One tool, many uses - A game where you only have one tool and it needs to fulfil many uses. But it doesn't fulfil any of them and you just score people on how long they attempt to play the game before they quit.

Decay - A donkey kong clone (D.K/Decay... get it? hur hur hur) <-- this is truly awful and I'm sorry

On / Off - A rogue-like where, when you die, you actually have to turn your computer off and on again IRL.

Delay the inevitable - A tedious, obsessive game where a slider slowly moves from across the screen and you have to periodically drag it back to the start before it reaches the end or you lose.

Keep your distance - A text-based chat game where everyone has to name a distance and if your distance is unique, it gets added to your score.

Delivery - A medieval stealth game where knights sneak into the opposing army's camp before a battle and steal their livery.

The environment changes you - A fashion-centred casual game where you have to select cute outfits that are offered to you by various trees in a local forest.

Leave something behind - A hangman style game where a leaf obscures your view and you have to guess what's behind it.

Everything changes at night - A fashion-centred casual game where you have to find cute outfits to dress every item in your house each evening.

3 rules - A measurement-based puzzle platformer where the main characters are a long, medium and short ruler.

Replication - A cooking sim but you play as a replicator on Star Trek.

Strength in numbers - A survival-crafting game where you have to research and craft numbing agents (numbers) to inject into yourself so you can survive increasingly brutal MMA fights.

Summoning - A mathematics-based combat game where you have to sum numbers of ever increasing difficulty to execute fight moves.

It follows you - A walking simulator where Pennywise the Clown is always one step behind you.

So, there you go. A whole bunch of ideas to completely avoid.

Except the horse one... that's great!

I had intended to user Phaser 3 for this jam and have been working in it for the past 5 hours or so. As I've not really worked in it for anything substantial, I knew that progress would be slow. However, the progress is far too slow and I can see that I need to be more familiar with it before I can use it in a jam. I've just spent 30 minutes arm wrestling Phaser over collision body shapes (and losing)...

So, I'm changing to Unity as I'm more familiar with it.

It's not really wasted time (well, it kind of is) because it has helped me to flesh out my game concept and develop a few placeholder assets which I can bring across to Unity.

Anyway... that's how my day is going. How about you?

I had to do an engine swap (to Unity from Phaser... just not familiar enough with Phaser to "get stuff done quickly") but at least I have something to show for my time now. Time for a quick lunch here in the antipodes... then back to it!

For now, look at this dude gettin' flippy wit it!

It wasn't the most fruitful day, to be honest. I got bogged down in controls/feel. I haven't quite got it right yet, either, so there'll be more of that tomorrow after I finish building out the world and set up more the game loop.

Anyway, I'm tired now.

At a certain point, a making a hardcore platformer just becomes an excuse to punish random people for no good reason. And I have to say... I don't mind that at all!

I still have to make some music and a few sounds. Then playtest and (quite a lot of) polish!!