Obviously the first step to any gamejam is to make a derpy giraffe:

Usually I think of myself as a programmer first, but for this gamejam I decided to do the art first. The plan was if I couldn't find a good artistic style I'd abandon the idea fast, but I'm having a lot of fun making the art so I think I'm going to stick with it!

The lion looks kinda like a dog so I'm just going to give it a line of dialogue "Rawr, I'm a lion". And people say games have bad writing!

I'm really having fun making these. Do I even need to make a game?

It's nearly 2 am here and I should maybe be heading to sleep soon, but I haven't even coded anything yet! I've just been having fun with the art. Things are going well though; I like how this jam is going so far! :)

Done with day 1! Mostly I've just made a few different animal art things, but for me art is the tricky part! The gameplay I'm imagining isn't too complicated, so tomorrow I want to get the gameplay + a few levels working.Maybe a little more art. It's fun to be working on a project that actually has something fun to look at and post!

Now for 7-ish hours of sleep and a full day tomorrow!

Today I'm working on getting some gameplay going before I create any more animals. Is this game going to be fun? Maybe!

Today the gameplay systems came together. Despite being a really basic idea, it's actually more fun than I expected! There's something weirdly satisfying about putting things together that fit nicely. Placing objects together seems to be more satisfying than something abstract like blocks. Which is good, because with how simple the gamemplay is here it needs everything it can get!

For this game I decided to layout some structure that will help me create levels quickly, so now I can create a bunch of levels! The plan is to target about 4-5 minutes of playtime. Although it would be possible to make the game longer, when people are trying out gamejam games they're not going to want to play for a super long time so it's best to offer a good experience within a short amount of time.

What I want to do next is create the levels and then define an ending. (Basically just a screen that says "You did it!"). Then I'd like to polish things up more by adding in more animations, better colors, sound effects, and a few silly things. I have no idea what to do for music, but I've been listening to the Animal Crossing soundtrack on loop hoping that somehow I can figure out a way to create something similar. I'm doubtful I'll even have time for music!

For now I should probably sleep soon!

Things are coming in pretty hot. Right now I don't have many levels and no audio yet. Nor is there an "end", which would be nice to make the game feel more complete.

Something will have to be cut!

Noah's Help! A derpy title for a derpy game. The world is flooding, save the animals!

PLAY IT IN YOUR WEB BROWSER HERE: https://kettlecorn.itch.io/noahs-help AND THEN RATE IT HERE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/noahs-help-1

I really enjoyed working on this game, when things cool down I'll write a postmortem about what went right (the animals are cute!) and what went wrong (my sleep schedule).

I wanted to use a Unity WebGL build so that my game is easy to play, but after watching a few people play my game they ran into an issue where the mouse gets stuck like the above picture and becomes unusable.

(Yes, I took a picture of the screen, I didn't have handy a screenshot tool that included the mouse).

I found a fix from this Unity thread:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/web-gl-mouse-input-glitch-on-chrome.468362/

Copy-paste this line of code into the CSS file generated with your Unity WebGL build:

.webgl-content * {border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0; -webkit-user-select: none; -khtml-user-select: none; -moz-user-select: none; -o-user-select: none; user-select: none; }

It fixes the issue and your mouse-based games should now work fine in the browser!

CLICK HERE FOR THE ENTRY PAGE

What went well?

The Art

Immediately upon starting there was a core question: Could I make a style for animals on a grid ?.

The answer was yes, but it wasn't obvious to me when I chose the idea. Typically I'm a programmer, but I do have design knowledge. I just wasn't sure I could pull off the animals in a way that looked good.

I designed the giraffe first:

Giraffes have distinct snouts, so squashing the giraffes face down into a square felt wrong and I was worried I had removed what made it "giraffey".

I posted on twitter and here to get a sense for what people thought of the style, and people really liked it! I decided that maybe there's merit in the art style so I tried a few more animals. In the end the art was a big success, and I've come around to really liking how all the creatures look.

The Tools

I used Unity, which many of you are very familiar with. I tend to not use anything crazy noteworthy in Unity, but two of the things I felt were really useful this time around were the built in Unity buttons and the Animation curves.

It turns out there's a setting to make buttons change color on hover state and press states, so I made two button images for the two buttons in the game, and then I just set the colors for hover / press. Total it took a few minutes and helped a lot to escape that default-Unity-button feel.

The other thing I really liked was using animation curves to edit the title screen. It made it easy to make them bouncy without spending a lot of time on it, and it drastically increased the impression that this was a polished game, but only took a few minutes!

Figma

I'm most experienced with Illustrator, but I don't have a license right now and I didn't want to get one for this gamejam. So I used Figma!

Figma (https://www.figma.com) worked amazingly well. It was easy to create assets quickly.

I laid out a grid to create the animals on so I could quickly test them next to each other and ensure they fit within their bounds.

With Figma I was able to set up exports so with one click I could export all the animals for download and import them into the game. I would do color tests in Figma rather than Unity to quickly get a sense for what backgrounds and colors worked with the animal shapes. Then when I felt the colors were good I'd bring them over into Unity.

Figma definitely helped me crank out art at the rate needed.

Designing levels

I created a system for making levels pretty early, which was great as it allowed me to iterate quickly on level design!

I would lay out the available animals on the left, and the solution on the right. A system would then take the solution layout and turn it into tiles. This meant I could rather quickly create levels and play with their designs, which helped me quickly iterate on difficulty.

I learned a few things about designing levels pretty quickly:

The more square the solution, the harder it is! Giraffes make for hard puzzles. Penguins (take up a single tile) can make people feel like they have more choice with how to approach a level, but can be used to mask difficulty as well.

When I made the levels I would playtest them myself after. I was so sleepy that I would usually forget the solution and struggle with the level myself. I developed an informal sense of how difficult levels were.

At one point I had someone playtest the game and I realized that the levels were actually harder than I realized! I moved the third level to be the final level and in general adjusted the difficulty curve of the game. For a gamejam super difficult games aren't a great idea, so I tried to aim for slightly harder than the average Ludum Dare entry to make the game feel more substantial but not like a waste of time.

Pacing and Difficulty

I wanted to pace the game slightly differently than the straightforward "easy to hard" pacing.

The idea was that if the game had really short "fun" levels periodically you'd feel more of a sense of casual progress. It would make you feel good at the game and like you're on more of an adventure. However some difficulty is necessary to make the entire game not feel meaningless. I think this progression wasn't perfect, but it worked better than I expected! Watching some people play it was clear they weren't really into the game initially, but because of the progression of difficulty and the pacing they found themselves enjoying it in the end.

Nintendo is really good at this style of progression, and I was inspired by the game they published "Pushmo". Periodically in Pushmo there are levels that look like a character or object, and I tried to do something similar with levels like this one:

What went poorly?

Music

I don't know how to make music, and music could immensely help a game like this!

Narrative arc

This game doesn't have a sense of progress in that you can't tell where you are in the game. There's no goal you're working towards, or an ending that you can sense approaching. There isn't an ending to speak of.

When the player finishes the game they aren't left with any feeling beyond "well, it's over". In the future subtle little progression indicators could go a long ways. Even a Level 10 / 16 displayed in the upper right would have helped people feel more of a sense of progress. Level names could have helped establish a loose narrative and been an opportunity to introduce more personality to the game.

The Name

"Noah's Help" is a lame, very bad name. It isn't punchy, clever, or memorable. I knew this immediately upon naming it, but I didn't change it! The reason for the name is because I created the animated sequence where the animals are on top of the ever shrinking island and they yell "Help!". I realized I didn't have time for a title screen, so I had to make that animation the title screen. I also wanted to somewhere introduce the idea that this was a game about Noah's Ark. So given time constraints and what I had available, I just put the word "Noah's" above the animals cry for help, and that became the title.

In the future I should try to avoid boxing myself into a situation where I give the game a poor title, because titles matter a lot!

Humor

I chose this concept because I thought I could make it humorous, but in the end I didn't have time for any of the humor I had hoped for! This is in part a failure of planning, but also I could have identified simple ways to make the game more humorous that would have taken little time.

Silly sound effects or physics could have gone a long way!

What did I learn?

I think in the future I would like to think about how I want the player to feel when they finish the game. Even if they're just playing a gamejam gam for a few minutes, if I had a sense of the emotions I wanted the player to feel when they're done I could tweak the game design to better encourage those feelings.

I should learn how to make some basic music and better sound effects!

When I'm planning an idea I would like to create a breakdown of a few core categories of gamedesign and how I can make them work well within the time alloted. For this game I think I cognitvely blocked thinking too much about the weak parts of the game because I liked other parts, but having a more formal process for considering all aspects of the design might help me create a stronger design overall.

All this said, I'm very happy with the end result! I've learned a lot making this, and many people seem rather pleased with the game. Thanks for reading, and if you haven't played the game give it a shot!

I might not have the right priorities, but things are sort of working!

I may sleep soon and madly scramble to create levels tomorrow.

P.S. Can anyone recommend a good gif recording tool for Mac? I can't seem to find one that works well.

So uhh... What?! #1 in fun is crazy! I am very grateful to those who rated my game. Thank you!

So what went well? I think making physics driven games is really a good direction for gamejams. Physics have depth and a ton of fun built in, and turning on physics is just a toggle in most game engines.

Why was it fun?

I think a willingness to break my "vision" helped a lot. Making the game was basically a series of design failures:

Failure #1:

Originally the game was inspired by "Lemmings" as you can see in this gif I tweeted after around 4 hours of coding:

https://twitter.com/kettlecorn/status/1068762210535534593

The idea was you would build stairs and things out of the blueberry people so the other blueberry people could navigate teh environment. Unfortunately I realized that getting their movement to feel fair and fun would just take too long to get right. So I thought about it for an hour or so (precious time!) thinking about how I could simplify it. I realized that blueberries are round, I didn't need to give them legs, I could just make them bounce around. Then I realized I could draw from pinball.

Failure #2:

My new idea was to have the player build a own pinball table with bouncy bumpers. Then once they had the solution they would hold spacebar and fire hundreds of blueberries through the level to the exit. Unfortunately due to the dimensions and mechanics of the platforms I just couldn't get it to feel quite right. Adjusting the platforms never felt fair. The realistic physics wouldn't bounce how you wanted, and the unrealistic physics felt too constrained. I never solved this problem.

Success

So at this point I was frustrated because my core mechanic didn't work well (in my opinion) but I had spent a ton of time. So I just decided to ignore the "core" of my game, reduce the difficulty, and make the game more playful. I reduced the number of blueberries you needed to save on each level from 100 to 5, removing the "core" challenge of my game. By making this change I allowed players to "cheat" instead of finding an actual reliable solution to each level.

I removed a bug fix that prevented blueberries from colliding with platforms while you were moving the platform. It felt like you were breaking the game doing it (and you were!) but it was fun, and the game really needed fun.

At this point I designed the levels to feel more like playful physics sandboxes rather than the tricky physics puzzles I envisioned. The game was a lot easier and more about just playing around. This meant I had to be careful to not make any level too challenging. Each level had to have some slightly unique premise, and they had to be really easy so that people would experience enough of them before they got bored.

Conclusion

I am very happy with the results, but there's definitely a lot I'd like to improve for future jams. I really screwed up audio this time around and my "clever" level loading system completely failed in the final half hour when I tried to make a web build.

But I'm very glad people found the game so fun! After all of my design failures I was really unsure about if the game was fun at all, but it appears it is a lot more fun than I realized!

See you all the next jam!

Try Blueberry Bounce here: https://kettlecorn.itch.io/blueberrybounce

I'm in!

I wanted to share whatever ideas pop into my head for today's themes. Ideas aren't precious, so hopefully these help inspire other people!

When I'm thinking of ideas I tend to try to think of obvious ideas and ideas that subvert the theme.

Ridiculously overpowered

The best way to feel overpowered is to fight huge swarms of enemies at once. Make a game with tons of enemies!

A game about finding ways to stack abilities to combine abilities to become overpowered.

A game about gamers complaining something is "OP".

* You're the final boss *

Defeating waves of super smug hero types.

What other sorts of "final bosses" are there? A final exam? Maybe you play as the exam trying to mess someone up?

* Everything is a weapon *

Taking this to the extreme, what if the user interface is a weapon?

* You are a side character *

What if you played as someone like Kazooie from Banjo and Kazooie? You'd have to trigger abilities at the right time to help the main character.

Games where you run an RPG style shop are also pretty fun. The world ending might be big business!

Or you could be some other profession like a dungeon janitor.

* Shelter *

Shelter implies sheltering from something. The cold, wind, rain, negative emotions?

You can build shelter, or seek it out. Shelter often feels important when it's for you and someone else. Maybe you're a family of animals? Maybe you create shelter for others?

* The more you die, the more the world dies *

Each time you die, part of the level goes away? Maybe you play as parts of the level, so you are the world?

Could you use the word "dye" instead and make things change colors?

* You can't save them all *

Escorting lots of small creatures Lemmings-style comes to mind.

What about "saving for later" style saving?

Or what about a game about the Trolley problem?

* You are the quest giver *

A "quest" is a search for something. What if you are a librarian of lost objects, and you ask adventurers to find lost objects?

What if you're just giving "quests" to your dog to go find a ball?

Maybe you run a quest giving business as an inkeeper, and you are paid to give quests to adventurers?

* Contagious *

Make a game about the Dancing Plague of 1518.

* You control the enemies *

Obvious: You play as an enemy stopping a hero. Like a Goomba instead of Mario.

Less obvious line of thinking, if something is an "enemy" to you and yet you still control it what does that mean? Maybe you can control the enemies but they still cause damage? Think moving a bunch of monsters around a city at once as you press the arrow keys, but because they all move at once some will bump into buildings while some run into range of your weapons.

Maybe it's a game about herding zombies?

* Alchemy *

What "matter" can you transform? The level itself? The rules of the game (like Baba is You)? Can you perform Alchemy on yourself to change yourself?

* Break the cycle *

You could be a malicious railroad designer, optimizing for maximum congestion (parody New York's MTA to get New Yorkers playing your game).

Perhaps some sort of automatic system tends to reform cycles and breaking them might be tricky?

* Underground *

Rabbits, moles, worms, and other animals live underground. What is their life like? How might they move and what struggles might they overcome?

Skeletons are underground, what if you're playing as a skeleton in the afterlife under a graveyard?

* Nontraditional boss battles *

There were old flash games about beating up your boss at work, but that seems unusually violent.

What if you have to talk things through with the boss. What if you were a negotiator sent to reason with the dragon?

Maybe the boss challenges you to a dance off?

Is it the boss that's non-traditional, or the battle?

* Two characters, one player *

There are lots of good platformers where you swap between characters to solve puzzles.

There are also good mechanics to be had by controlling characters at the same time and figuring out how to complete the level with both of them at once.

The theme doesn't specify you have to "control" the characters. It could be that you're one of "two characters" in this world. Is there some way you could disguise which player the character controls? So the player has to figure out which one they control?

* Tiny town *

How can you make a small space meet certain goals? (this Ludum Dare game was a brilliant implementation of this idea: Tiny Towns)

If a town were on the surface of a small object, like a cube, or a marble, what would that mean and how might that impact gameplay?

What if it's a game about "small town" rumors spreading. Maybe you try to spread rumors to get more popular, but other people are trying to spread rumors about you as well.

I'm making a solitaire card game about life. Watch my development on Twitch!

I'll be spending the next few hours building out the core Unity gameplay framework.

https://www.twitch.tv/kettlecorn

Play 'Wonder' here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/wonder

This is my first post about my game. Better late than never, right?

Wonder is basically a chill game kinda like Line Rider focused on evoking positive feelings. It doesn't take long to play, there are ~10-ish levels. Even if you don't have time to rate I really appreciate any plays of the game! :)

For Ludum Dare 46 I set out to make a game with no engine, just raw WebGL and web APIs using Rust compiled to WebAssembly.

Finally I've written down the chaotic technical and creative process of making the game for LD46. Read about it here: https://ianjk.com/rust-gamejam/

Decay * Fix a tower crumbling tile by tile * Radioactive decay * Play as a mushroom? * A sped-up gardening game about creating dirt * A word puzzle game where letters 'rot' into other letters

Layers * Move overlapping paper to make shapes * Shift the tectonic layers of the planet * Cake building game * Play as a rolling circle, gain layer of stuff. (Katamari?) * Play as a brick layer * Mystery game sorting through piles of photos and papers

Control the world, not the player * Control the weather * Click and drag to move the world around a character. * Astronaut goes unconcious. Save them by moving the space station around them to get them to safety. * Terrain is springy. Drag it and release to launch the player or objects. * Marble rolling game

Nomad * A game about bus / train hopping. Manage budget to reach goal. * Play as a migratory animal of some sort. * Travel through a procedural world trying to stay out of the rain. * Find a home. * Try to overcome anger.

Connections * Something about social network friends * Thought-piece about 'Connections' in the time of Covid * Connect cities via transit * Manage electrical wires between buildings * Guide a character to make friends

Stuck in a loop * Escape a 'time-loop jail' * Figure out how to break some sort of cyclical system * A racing rogue-like where you move onto the next level if you win the lap. * Try to construct inescapable loops for an AI * Find and correct infinite loops in code.

Feeding the monster * Minigolf on top of a monster's face. Aim for the mouth! * A factory to feed a creature. * Manage a society that requires constant sacrifices to a monster. * Struggle to break a bad habit. * Prevent your teammates from 'feeding' the monster and making it stronger.

Delay the inevitable * Water is flooding. But try to block it. * Fight old age with: a time machine, weird remedies, etc. * Manage a bankrupt company so your employees don't get laid off. * Add support beams to an increasinly overburdened building. * Try to resist eating the last donut

Contain it * Zombie outbreak management * Horror tower defense trying to contain an unknown creature ('it') in the dark. * Play as mother nature trying to use disasters to set back humanity. * A game about moving homes and packing memories into containers. * Play as a vampire trying to live a regular life without giving in.

Day and night * What if day and night were roommates? * Create a garden that works both during day and night. * 'Day' and their protector 'Knight' * Schedule a worker's day and night shifts when they have increasing costs. * Flip between day and night with a button press

Shipwrecked * Tower defense trying to setup traps for ships * Play as a siren trying to lure sailing ships * Jump between floating pieces of a wrecked boat. * 'Shipwreck' in space. Boost between chunks of spacecraft to reach escape pod. * Combine with the "stuck in a loop" theme and figure out how to prevent or survive the wreck.

Clockwork * Adjust clocks that control how fast different elements of a level move. * Play as a clock-person looking for gears needed to control time. * Platform through a giant tower to wind the clocks. * Use gears and levers to build machines to complete a level. * A game about a Casio watch.

You can't save them all * Increasingly absurd trolley problems. * Twitch reaction trolley problems * Try to save some candy for later without the kids stealing it * Earth is Dying. Repeatedly choose groups of people to try to start space colonies. * Your computer is about to force update but you have tons of programs open. Don't lose your work!

Death is not the end * Play as multiple generations of a family * Defeat death to return to life * Reflect on memories of a loved one * Each life lasts 15 seconds, but the body solidifies in place creating new routes. * Escape your terrible accounting firm job that somehow also has a branch in Hell.

Summoning * Hackers have found demonic energy in the deep internet. Harness Cyber Necromancy! * You are the least appreciated of the grand witches. You can only summon marshmallows. * You are a demon that's repeatedly summoned to rapidly accomplish menial tasks. * Draw arcane runes to summon things. * Try to fix a possessed alarm clock that summons demons. This is NOT what you signed up for!

The world changes when you are not looking * Encourage people to take a break from their computers * Time only progresses where you're not looking * Manage security cameras. Only a few can be on at once, but stuff happens on the ones that are off. * A spot the difference game about visiting your childhood home. * Try to balance spending time with family while working a job to provide for them.

So I probably should have posted earlier about my game, but better late than never right? :)

Last of The Sky Folk is a 3D-platformer where you use a grappling hook to climb a tower and evade an enormous purple worm.

Give it a play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/last-of-the-sky-folk

The game was built with an extremely from-scratch Rust-based game-engine I've been working on for a while. This is the first time I've used the engine in a game jam!

Let me know what you think!