Making a small puzzle game about flying around in a small spaceship and landing on small planets and solving small conflicts in a small starsystem.

http://static.impbox.net/ld38/1.gif

You can follow along on https://twitter.com/impbox/

Just had a sleep and continuing working on Smalltrek, a puzzle game about solving small conflicts on small planets.

Next up music!

Follow development on https://twitter.com/impbox

~2 hours left and it's done, uploaded.

Pretty happy with how it went.

Please let me know how it goes for you.

https://impbox.itch.io/smalltrek

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/smalltrek

This was my 2nd LD I've submitted a game for and 4th I've attempted. I chose to use Nim again and the same basecode I used for LD37.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/smalltrek

https://impbox.itch.io/smalltrek

You can see a history of development gifs on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23LDJAM%20from%3Aimpbox&src=typd&lang=en

I was thinking about the boardgame "Small World" and the idea of many races fighting over a small piece of land and resources and thinking small little planets, then thought of Star Trek and how each episode is very similar where they discover a planet and meet the locals and they're fighting over something and they have to sort things out for them, so I made a game about that! I also wanted to make a non-violent game about spreading peace. I had also planned that you would visit a planet and then after solving the level you would gain an ambassador of one of the races on the planet to add to your ship (which would also be a puzzle on how to fit everyone in, and be its own little small world) I ended up not using this idea as I couldn't figure out how to make it into a fun game.

After writing up some notes, I began mocking up the artwork in Aseprite. I decided not to use the Pico-8 palette this time and tried out some other 16 colour palettes, and settled on the Arne16 preset from Aseprite which had some nice greens and blues and warm tones for contrasting alien skins against brown planets.

A bunch of different types of aliens on a grid that you can slide around like a puzzle game, I reused this mechanic from my previous LD game "Moving-in" a game about moving furniture around a 1 room apartment which I thought worked quite well. But I was worried about it being too similar, so I needed to make the aliens more interesting than furniture.

The first alien types were very basic, simply requiring to be adjacent to a fixed resource. I then added the blue aliens which connect in a chain to their resource. I had planned that some races would not like other races, but it seemed very racist and didn't fit the kind of game I wanted to make, so I scrapped that and tried to think of something else to make the puzzles more interesting, which led me to the alien type that craves diversity.

Then I was trying to think of some other star trek references and I remembered the Tribbles! Once that occurred to me everything fell into place. The story, and the main mechanic, I was excited! I added the cute little fluff balls that multiplied like crazy and filled up any empty space they could get to, then made it so the blue aliens hated them which made things a lot more interesting.

I added a few more aliens to fill up the roster, one for each main colour in the palette and 8 to fit nicely along the spritesheet size.

Once I had things mostly working I wanted to do something I didn't do last time, which was ADD SOME JUICE! Lots of tweening, dust particles, heart particles. It made such a big difference to how the game felt to play.

Added a scanner mode to look at objects/aliens to see info about them. I felt this was one of the things I did poorly.

I had decided for some reason to make 32 levels, I started making a bunch and they were flowing nicely, made the ship fly in and out between levels.

END OF DAY 1. My plan was to have a quick nap and then make some music.

Longer than planned nap happened, but I was feeling ok about my progress as I had all the mechanics and art done, just needed to do Music and Level Design.

I kept putting off level design. Tried making music on LSDJ but it wasn't happening for me, figured I'd come back to it later.

I decided to make an intro screen with a logo and starfield. ... Then I added a little ship you could fly around. Fly between quadrants. Then added planets which would be each level. Went way over the top with the level select. I still hadn't figured out the later levels. I felt I needed one more mechanic.

Then I added the last alien type which had something I didn't want to add to the game. I hated to do it, but I think it worked as a mechanic, it totally changed the gameplay though. So there's a big shift in the later levels.

I wish I had had time to make a great finale level though. But generally pretty happy with the outcome.

I think some levels should be reordered.

Hi, please link me your game so I can play it and review it!

Web or Linux only please! Small Windows games might be ok (under 10MB), I'll try run it under wine.

If you like, try my game too! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/smalltrek (it's a small star trek themed puzzle game)

You can play the web version here!

Just ported by base code to use the Nim Javascript compiler target so now It runs natively in javascript with canvas. Let me know if you have any issues running it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/smalltrek

Thanks so much for playing my game SmallTrek and all the votes! \o/ Totally blown away by all the positive responses, feels like a great sign since I just quit my day job to become a full time indie game developer. Hopefully I can keep making fun games forever.

1 Overall and Fun in Compo

2 in Graphics (all done in Aseprite)

6 in Mood

12 in Theme

13 in Audio (music made in LSDJ on gameboy, sfx made in PICO-8)

I programmed it all in a lovely new language Nim using my open-source basecode which I used for LD37 and my other game projects called Nico based on PICO-8 API, which I extended to support compiling to Javascript post-jam so I could have a web port.

Looking forward to next LD! =)

This will be my 5th attempt at LDJAM (but only two completed submissions)!

I want to make something quite different this time, I felt my previous two entries were quite similar mechanically although I was happy with my improvements to the formula.

I've been in a bit of a slump lately, so I hope LDJAM will help get me out of it!

But a SmallTrek for Android should be coming out very soon, it's working just needs a bit more polish before I'm happy with it!

Been working on some chiptunes on LSDJ to get in the groove. https://soundcloud.com/impbox/only-cat

Tools i'll be using:

• Nico game framework https://github.com/ftsf/nico
• Pico8 for sfx
• LSDJ for music
• aseprite for gfx
• tiled for map editing if applicable

Please remember to be excellent to each other!

Each door requires a certain waveform to open it, you must connect various modules together to generate the required wave. You can see and hear the waves as you manipulate them and compare them to the required wave.

Set in a dystopian future where all music is created in a giant music AI facility which now only has one hour left on it's backup generator. As the lone maintenance employee, you must venture through the security systems and reawaken music for the world.

Particle effects including dust when walking/jumping and opening doors, and sparks when connecting cables. Background ambience Walking, jumping animations (3 frames all up but it makes a big difference).

Levels now connect up, but I still need a nice scene transition. Still need to make all the levels! Why do I always leave that so late?

Available now for Windows and Linux. MacOS I'll look at tomorrow after I've slept.

Unfortunately I didn't have time or energy to polish it as much as I'd have liked. Look forward to any feedback!

https://impbox.itch.io/minisyn

Due to request you can now adjust the volume in game.

Please play and review!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/ministry-of-synthesis

https://impbox.itch.io/minisyn

I'll be participating in LD40 Compo!

I'm currently polishing up my game framework NICO with some nicer audio functionality which should make it easier to quickly make SFX during the compo.

I'll be working with: * NICO my game framework https://github.com/ftsf/nico (used for the past few LDs and some other projects) * aseprite my favourite sprite editor * tiled tile map editor if necessary * GIMP maybe * LSDJ for music * PICO-8 for SFX if my own thing doesn't turn out

Hope I can make something new and fun =)

Making a Wikipedia game using a modified browser in Electron.

You start at a random featured page and must explore to a minimum depth before finding your way back to the original article, without retracing your path on the way back.

I guess technically this breaks the rules of the compo since the game's content comes from Wikipedia and is not all created by me.

Added "Keys" to find along the way to give you a bit more direction and get you away from your original page before you can come back.

Feels more like a game now.

Might add a way to draw more keys to find to push your luck or something to keep with the "deeper and deeper" theme.

Compo entry submitted after some annoying electron packaging issues, but I think it works now.

Dive into a Wiki Vortex and get lost, complete your quests then find your way back before you run out of steps.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/wiki-vortex

Now for bed time! Looking forward to playing some games!