Wow. This time the feed and comment are really hurting. Is it the time to star asking people to point out buses and other stuff?

• Engine: none. Some GPU driver thing I guess.
• Art: none. I can't blend, but I'll try to put out some colored triangles.
• Sound: none. Hear your coolers spin up? That would be me.
• Music: none. Aren't you streaming something already?

I'm ready! 😅

Orbiter controls, some camera movement, texturing.

Next up - lots of UI and scoring.

noengine

PS: Sorry for another orbital thing.

Thoughtful of previous jam comments took some time to add tiny bit of sound effects.

The planet shader got the clouds and the game got scoring. Yep, that's a Snake game.

I don't think I'll be adding resource limits - it is quite difficult as it is. Unless you can play Hohmann transfers by ear. Which is exactly the skill it meant to train.

I've broken the loop of "access violation" errors and managed to pack up Windows (x64) build.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/orboros

Activate Engines :smile:

With a week to spare I've got the ratings. Thanks everyone who got involved!

What started as a pre-jam coding exercise ended up being a pretty viable thing. Thanks everyone who +1'd theme :smile: (I voted against it precisely on grounds of having some code ready)

Now, how it went?

First things first. Was it fun? Yes, it was! A new game was born, more serious than the previous installments in my personal series of space stuff.

In the week before the jam I started to assemble a more refined Vulkan rendering library. After the jam I extracted some common parts back to the library. Next game would be even easier to start.

I wanted to stay 2D and use fancy shaders instead. That didn't fly. Drawing lines went good enough, but faking spheres with math got me only so much. And then there was problems with lines occluded by a square "sprite".

Reluctant to use model files I generated an icosphere and, after fixing all the usual problems with camera, depth and face orientation...

Next came the dread of amateur developers, the glorious quaternions.

Adding glitch to corruption, orbital elements calculation library used different coordinate basis and different math library (I made one myself to work specifically with vulkan coordinate system without jumping through OpenGL hoops).

Orienting things for linear motion is trivial(-ish), rotating frames require a few more tricks. Which I botched and, given the time constraints, decided to skip. That's why you see nice ambiguous spheres instead of nice pointy spaceships :sweat:

On the other hand, adding planet and background textures from cube maps was fairly straightforward. I even didn't have to assemble texture arrays myself, thanks to Vulkan API and KTX format.

Adding simple directional lighting was no sweat either. I considered adding a specular reflection to the planet surface, but then had to skip over it in favor of getting controls right.

The last jam day was appropriately stressful.

I spent first half on it making a proper Linux build that could work outside my own machine. Second half went to my day job. And then third half :sweat_smile: left to iron out remaining OS and hardware compatibility issues. Few close friends were recruited for build testing.

6 hours remained to take a walk and add font rendering capability. I went with simple font atlas, but due to problems with transparency in compressed textures I switched to SDF and slap-dashed a decent renderer.

It isn't a compo game, but the source is out there nevertheless. Go check it out, unless you wholeheartedly believe Haskell is limited to academia.

Or, you can take it for another spin: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/orboros

Wow, what a nice bunch of themes this time!

I was traumatized by the pre-voting round (really, I've felt sick from all the violence and repetition) and expected similar gorefest in the end. But no, everything went better than expected. I've only -1'd one and +1'd all the rest.

Kudos to fellow theme butchers.

Or so I hope :fingers_crossed:

One more time with (almost) no engine again. I spent a few months to chill after LD47 and another few on rewriting my engine/framework from scratch and lots of copypasta.

Less anxious now, but the code is a raging spaghetti fire. Every refactoring and major feature is on hold until I get 20 rates on this jam.

Lots of nice games this time 💛

Started as a silly one-shot jam entry, the game yielded itself well to being a lab case for a new engine.

Somewhere after the Ludum Dare 48 I took a commitment to refine and maintain an engine derived from a previous playground (4) project.

The game itself is basically a complete rewrite, moving from an engine derived from another playground (3).

Instead of messing with cubemap textures for everything and painted clouds it is now a procedurally generated barren world with glass-bottomed rifts, lit by scattered colonies.

There are some improvements like orbit information and extended camera controls, but the core gameplay remains intact. It’s still a Snake-type game, where you collect stuff and grow.

And now I can see how a few more touches can make it into something you wanna play once in a while and not just for Jam review score.

https://icrbow.itch.io/orboros

Since that would be the same no-engine, I'd be grateful if you take it for a spin and leave me a note if it crashes or something like that 🙏

PS: I've got a new personal record!

It is playable. And there's even global scoreboard, powered by cool @owca service!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/$261726/free-online-highscore-service-for-jamers

This was a surprisingly chill run. First things first, I've re-read a postmortem for the previous jam. It basically said "time is short, don't get distracted, have a plan".

This is the first jam for my fourth(!) engine. I've been practicing, but things are different for actually jamming with it. I tried to get my tile framework ready and stop hanging spheres in a vacuum, but alas.

I considered (briefly) doing a game on floating point numerical instability, had a sensible chuckle, then discarded the idea.

Next up on my list was unimplemented n-body racing mode for my old game, with items and stuff. With a few strokes I've unloaded everything there was to begin.

Before I had a chance at getting to that I've found I don't quite have a starter project for the engine, oops. So the next 7 hours went into frankenmerging engine demos and examples into one relatively clean project.

By the end of day one I've found myself in violation of the postmortem commandments. At least I was working on the code that would remain in the game, not just thrown out.

Day 2 greeted me with the memory corruption bugs... which were solved promptly by consulting out git history for the previous project which had similar symptoms.

The simulation core is ready, but the game feel is a bit off. The planned thing ought to be somewhat more thoughtful and tactical, but I had suspected I wouldn't be able to implement all the details in time. And the game could be dull without them.

• Collectible items were crossed out.
• Small amount of checkpoints swapped for a wild ride across hundreds of bodies.
• Ship controls tuned to be more powerful, at the same time the bodies became more heavy.

A few more engine fixes, open source library fixes, game fixes and the game is playable.

With a few hours remaining for the day (and the compo), I've plugged in the scoreboards library I've prepared a few days before.

Taking a day off was the great idea. I had to sit through only a single work call, duh.

A final day went into boosting the experience.

I remembered how sound does improves a game and went trawling https://freesound.org/.

An already powerful ship got even more powerful with addition of rechargeable boosters. And so did the bodies. A rather sedate ride turned into a trick play with multiple styles.

But there was one little thing in the original n-body flying game - particle effects - and just one hour remaining before the submission deadline.

Without getting too fancy I just shoveled them sparkles into the same wireframe rendering collection and the engine got picked them right away :triumph:

First play day was rough, but I fixed almost everything we've found during the second one.

Fly safe: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/swerve

I doubt there would be much post-jam activity, but the project looks like I can have some compute pipeline practice on it :thinking:

Bonus content: n-body gravity force visualization with color-coded directions

Normalno budet, inevitably.