Or even got to a playable state... this is gonna be fun. Good luck to everyone, here is my first cryptic screenshot.

Don't mind me..just starting to add music and pretty colours, while I don't have any actual gameplay yet.. Also, all the ideas I'm having don't fit the theme too well, but imma keep trying.

I finally have a way to move the 'character'. Still unsure about the objective of the game. Maybe something like Golf, or Snake. I'll hardly have time to code tomorrow, but I'll keep going. Happy coding to everyone.

https://youtu.be/eUELMMBjDEk

EDIT: The basic mechanic is: Send out some probes on your behalf. If you like the position of a certain probe, you dial in its colour and fly to the same spot!

I'm in a bit of a pickle time-wise, so I'll be submitting to the jam. Still have music-loop, menu, credits, tutorial and other stuff to do.

Now it's too late... Anyway, still happy with the result. Tomorrow evening is crunch time, where I will be finishing the game. Added 10 songs, a little help-screen and cleaned the code just a tad - it's still a mess though.

Tomorrow is for collectibles, level progression and a mysterious SECRET - and then it's done. Still debating, if I want to make 'real' graphics. I kinda like the look as it is.

Core Mechanics:

Gravity Simulation

Lock in a direction and begin flying for a fixed amount of time. If you are not sure where that direction would take you, you can buy some rainbowcoloured spaceprobes and send them out on your behalf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmjZNkGr2jA

Mind the sound glitches, might be pretty loud for some of you, but it's just a recording issue.

Also some of my testsubjects experienced trouble getting the game to run on windows... not sure what that's all about.

Now I just have to get hosting to work.

Time was short, bugs were plentiful, but it's finally here - YAY!

I know the name isn't very exciting..

Anyway

If you're in the mood for a relaxing puzzle game, give it a try :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$143210

Don't really know what I'm making yet, but I've started getting some basics up and running. Still using Processing like the first time I joined :)

I hope that I'll see some improvement in my skills. So far I've just resolved some old audio issues, built a SceneManager and got some pixelart images on the screen.

I hope everyone has a good jam. Don't overwork yourselves!

I lose motivation pretty quickly, so I'm adding some non-critical but pretty stuff early on :)

First try at making a menu for this one

EDIT: I'm going to need a content warning for flashing lights for this jam probably...

Got a late start, due to timezone and sleeping in, but it's coming along nicely. The bare game-loop is almost done (it's only missing a lose-state). Still lots of mechanics missing, that'll make it an actual game, but I'm quite pleased.

The last few jams have all been failures for me due to poor mental health, so it feels really good to be able to do some coding again! :)

Collision is kinda done, but requires all enemies to have the same hitbox at the moment due to performance (might not actually be an issue, will test this tomorrow)

Knock-back was a lot of fun to implement, as was giving bullets some of your own momentum when firing.

There is so much more to do tomorrow, but it should all be fun stuff, like upgrades to your character and other cool things. (Oh, and the things that make the name actually make sense...)

Have not thought about music or sfx yet. Hopefully I can whip up something chip-tuney... I've never made music for a game before and have very little experience with music making in general - thinking of using BeepBox and bfxr.

I hope everyone else is having a blast and not overdoing it. Take it easy :)

~Laura

Finally in a position where I can implement some more features! piercing + splitting bullets seems OP tho..

Hope everyone is having fun crunching :3

Slow day, but got a lot done in the end :)

Happy last minute crunch to the compo people! :3

HeadSpace Limited is out!

Play it now : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/headspace-limited

(or after you had some rest)

quick teaser :3

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

I really dropped the ball on my first jam 4 years ago. I was so burned out that I didn't rate anything and slept for what felt like a week and didn't come back to the gamepage ever.

This year I made up for it by rating mostly games with 0 or very few ratings and giving as much feedback as I can. It's hard to get everyone's game up to 20 ratings and I'm not even there myself. In case you wanna help me out, here's my entry again:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/headspace-limited

Also, since people seemed to enjoy it, I thought I'd upload the soundtrack to youtube, although I'm sure that when it is disconnected from the game, that listening to it doesn't feel as exciting. It was my first time creating music for a gamejam and kinda my first time trying to create full songs, so I'm super super happy people seemed to enjoy it!

Anyways, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXrVpSqg5Fo

I hope everyone else is recovering from crunchtime burnout and having fun rating and playing games :)

Also anyone struggling to get many ratings, feel free to drop a link and I'll try to play your game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/results

get em

I think most people would agree that this would be a bad theme:

"Defeat a witch by burning the book that gives her power - also the book is hidden in a chest in the third room on the right"

Of course this theme would still produce a variety of games - one can easily imagine 2D platformers, 3D shooters, puzzle games, etc... being made from this theme. Maybe the only way to burn the book is by drifting so hard into it that your tires go up in flames in the racing game you made. If we ignore the lengthiness for a moment, we can still agree: No theme should completely give away the objective or content of every game you could make from it.

"Sulfur hexafluoride"

This is also a bad, or at least very weak theme. While it is more concise and less specific than our wizard theme, it still does not allow for any room in what the theme actually means. Maybe you can make a game about stealing sulfur hexaflouride, or a game about manufacturing sulfur hexaflouride, or a game about drifting so hard that your tires go up in flames in order to...

It's all about sulfur hexaflouride, because that word can only mean one thing.

So, I propose that a theme should be concise, nonspecific and have many homographs.

Homograph: One of two or more words that have the same spelling but differ in origin, meaning, and sometimes pronunciation.

An example of a homograph would be the word "tear", describing both "a drop of clear salty liquid secreted from glands in a person's eye", "a split in something caused by it having been pulled apart forcefully" and a few others. With this perfect definition of what a good theme is, I present to you the objectively best themes possible:

1. Run
2. Set
3. Go
4. Take
5. Stand

Ok, maybe this definition is not perfect after all - it seems we went too far with it. Too many interpretations are now possible: apparently the word "Run" has 645 different definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. The subcategories get so deep the numbering system for them starts with capital roman numerals, then to lowercase roman numerals, on to arabic numerals, latin letters and back to lowercase roman numerals, so you get fun headings such as

II.i.44.f.ii.

This rambling has, in a way, just lead us back to what everyone already knows: a theme should be open to interpretation, yet specific enough so you can't just make anything.

I think that there is something to learn from this though, which is: If you come up with a single-word theme, make sure that it has many homographs. If you can't name five (or let some ~~de~~generative AI come up with 20) it's probably a bad theme. What also seems to work nicely are words that are nouns and verbs at the same time.

"The theme always sucks" some might say and while that is true, I'm mostly writing this because I don't feel like voting on over 2000 themes again. (ok, to be truthful, I'm mostly writing this because I'm bored) I think it's alright to be a little elitist about what makes a good theme; I think it's alright to shame people a little who submit "You don't play as the main character" for the tenth time; I think it's alright to try and quantify the unquantifiable.

So what did I - in my oh-so-great-wisdom - come up with for themes this time around? 1. Cycle 2. Pass

I know they are maybe too generic and boring for most - and they certainly aren't perfect - but I appreciate boring themes. It's us who are supposed to give it life and make it interesting. So I advocate for less "Find a way to die", "Alien contact" and "Pyrotechnics" and more "Power", "Nest", "Order", "Break" or even "Cycle" or "Pass"

I spent the entire first day trying to get the movement of these lil ants smooth and finally figured out that it wasn't working properly because of multi-threading.

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

Then once I tried actually implementing gameplay, I sorta got hit hard with demotivation, so imma sit this one out :) I wish everyone competeing good luck on their last day!

Don't crunch too hard :3