So many nice games around!

Meanwhile, we have some protein upgrades:

And full gameplay footage with a kinda atmospheric soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vutLQAzZNo4

Game is almost finished, so see you soon guys :smile:

SUBMISSION PAGE

WEB https://graal.itch.io/protolife

Remember, this is not a tower defense game... this is something more.

Will be glad to hear your feedback and see you on Friday (Judgment Day :smile:).

Game jams is not a best place to show your OOP patterns knowledge. And well, code written on LD has no chance to win «Best Architecture Ever» award. Just look at this God-object class of our Protolife game:

Class with ~1K lines and 26 dependencies? I would have a serious talk with myself about this code.

But good practices still make life easier even if they take longer. This is how we decided to define our micro-buildings. Here is a simple turret:

More powerful turret:

«d» means «blue block», «e» means «yellow block», capitalized letter means «anchor point», e.g. turret muzzle.

Yeah, hardcoding all the coords would be much simpler, but this pattern system allowed us to quickly add new buildings - as fast as we invented them. This part would be first candidate for DRYing - so we DRYed it.

Do you guys use the best practices in your code? SOLID? GRASP? Unit tests?

Not so much time left until Judging Friday, hope you have all your bugs fixed.

Ludum Dare compo is not a place where you can spend some spare hours on additional features like Easter Eggs in your game, especially when this feature brings nothing to a gameplay. While Jam teams could afford this more often, in my oppinion.

Thus we have John Conway's Game of Life in our game. So you can play a game while you play an actual game :smile:

Green blocks are in-game resources, so player can use a knowledge of Game of Life mechanics to produce more. Which means this Easter Egg actually relates with a gameplay. But at the same time it's totally optional.

So I hope your game also have Easter Eggs, it is always fun to find some.

Play on Web

Submission Page

Judging Day HYPE つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

Because, you know, our itch.io stats are very sad:

That's why Feedback Friends are the best. You rate a game - someone rates you back. Do not hesitate to use it. :thumbsup:

Hey! It's now possible to set up a cover image for your game.

A lot of games still have a blank image.

You can update it under /edit page of your game:

Usually, exploits in games is a bad thing, even considered a cheat and big issue for online games.

However, sometimes it can be fun and useful:

(default slow pew-pew on the left side and very extremely rapid pew-pew-pew on the right side)

Our game tries to match all valid structures almost every game tick, so when player removes a single block from a turret and places it back -- it resets the attack cooldown since the game creates a new turret structure on the same place over and over.

We decided to leave it as is. Although it's a bit messy in some cases :smile::

Does your LD game have some exploits?

50 done, 2933 remain. :smiley:

I see some people have 200+ comments given and these are my personal heroes. But for me to rate and comment 50 games was some sort of a challenge; since 1 review takes 10-30 mins (don't know why, just playing games).

And now I'd like to present my TOP-3 charts:

TOP-3 THE-GAME-IS-NOT-WHAT-YOU-THINK-IT-IS:

• GardenGarden by @matlab
• Bullet Wrap by @chao
• It's a Small World by @aviv871

Games above will just blow your mind (but not at once) especially if you ignore the description and comments before playing.

TOP-3 TEH-ATMOSPHERE:

• eiland by @rubna
• Water Bear World by @aviland
• Haven - The Small World by @iluvatar

You think you can into atmosphere, huh?

TOP-3 OH-MY-GAMEPLAY:

• Global Disaster by @jamesy012 and @vince
• Space Snake by @hunter-loftis
• Echoes by @ghostbomb

These three will raise some questions about your gamedesign skills.

Can you highligh some entries too?

What happens when a programmer draws a concept:

What happens when an artist draws a concept:

Can you see the difference? Me neither :smile: That's why our game was made without artist.

But I'm so happy he is back <3

Do you remember our LD38 game -- Protolife? It was cute and small:

We decided to complete it. Thanks for all comments and feedback -- the best motivation.

And now it is almost a full-featured game:

LD39 setup:

• Phaser JS
• Audiotool

Volcanic Giraffe Team:

• https://ldjam.com/users/a333 :art: deviantart
• https://ldjam.com/users/graal :musical_score: audiotool
• https://ldjam.com/users/icxon - that's me.

So... what shoud I say? We are in! :robot:

It's always a very ticklish process when three persons should make one solid decision.

Like it is an RPG but in real life, right?

Top-down view:

Side view:

I think it's quite important to give a visual game-to-player feedback, especially when something breaks, explodes or just disappears. And it looks hot!

It's fine.

Actually, these are not particles but some animations.

Name: Galvanica Genre: Adventure, Lots of texts and meaningful choices Crew: 1 Captain, 1 Robot Janitor Status: Running out of Power

Please proceed to the Submission Page or Play on Web.

Play on Web

Submission Page

Just imagine:

• You can sit on it
• You can use it as effective spaceship fuel
• You can kill aliens by throwing it!

Play on Web

Submission Page

LD game code usually is not something you're proud of, it could contain a lot of bugs and exploits. Some of these bugs are not that critical and even able to provide more interesting options for the gameplay.

For instance:

• You can use fire to fix a hull breach in the same way you can use any item on the ship for this purpose. It is not really safe, but you can try.

• Since the fire object is just a regular game object, you can use fire as a power source... why not? :smile: Pure energy for your spaceship.

• Aliens! You can grab and throw them, so try to beat an alien lifeform with another alien lifeform. It's Super Effective! But not that effective as a chair.

Play on Web

Submission Page

We have purpose

Hi again! Love the site improvements and themes so far. I hope "Only three colors" will win this time. :smiley:

LD40 setup:

• Phaser JS
• Tiled (maybe?)
• Audiotool

Volcanic Giraffe Team:

• https://ldjam.com/users/a333 :art: deviantart
• https://ldjam.com/users/graal :musical_score: audiotool
• https://ldjam.com/users/icxon - that's me.

So... We are in! And good luck everyone. :stars:

Sketching is the best thing you can do to share your vision with the team. Although it is just a static picture, you can feel the mood and get some inspiration for gameplay ideas from it.

So we decided to make a platformer this time. Pretty popular genre for LD games, but we still didn't have one. :joystick:

Actually, it's just a slightly modified A-star, but it looks cool.

I barely can see the main character here

Congrats to all COMPOs who finished their games, great job guys! Last day for us, JAMmers.