My First Lurum Dare. I will be participating in the Jam.

Have fun everyone!

Hi!

I am @jeroenpx and this was my first time participating in the Compo. I enjoyed it a lot. Since I consider myself more of a programmer than an artist I was not sure whether I would not be able to do all the art, but it actually went a lot better than I expected.

While I still have a whole list of things I wanted to put in the game, I am actually quite pleased with how it turned out.

The idea is to control Golems as they discover the world. Some sacrifices will be needed to get to the end. You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/icy-golems

Where would he be going?

Find out now... :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/icy-golems

"Icy Golems" is a puzzle game where you control some golems!

How many will you sacrifice to get to the end?

You can find out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/icy-golems (WebGL)

Hello everyone!

I am Jeroen and this was the first time I participated in the compo. It was lots of fun!! :smile:

Writing on a software product is my job and I really love it, but I definitely also love making games... which is why I am here!

So...

Some people have been asking how I did everything for the game in 48 hours. Well, this is how it went...

This time I made a puzzle game... Fun fact: I forgot to include this level. I made the level during the compo and then forgot to add it to the level list... :dizzy_face:

A game I want to make...

What kind of games do I like to make?

Hmmm... I like to create games that feel "innocent" with preferably very little UI. I also like "atmospheric" games...

"sacrifices must be made" + "innocent" + "no UI" + "atmospheric" = I don't know?

I actually found it quite a challenge to think of a game I would find interesting that fits the theme. I did decide at some point that it would be interesting to have to sacrifice some kind of living things though (but how to keep that innocent? :smile:). After racking my brain for a while I thought: "Well, if I have to make a game where you sacrifice someone, I want to at least make it sometimes feel more like "Oh oops! no! no! no! don't do that! well... that just happened" or maybe not even feel like a sacrifice at all even though it is actually a living thing." Hmmm... :thinking:

Anyway, I feel the game I made ticks all the boxes "atmospheric", "innocent", "sacrifices must be made" so I am quite happy about it.

But you don't have to take my word for it, decide for yourself here: Icy Golems. :wink:

The making of Icy Golems

So, after I had some idea of where I wanted to go I started with the main character. I looked up multiple references on the internet, opened up Blender and quickly modeled some character. The character did not have to be very detailed since you would probably see it from a distance (I was not sure yet at the time). Unwrapped it and created a texture. I started from some flat color and after that I added some dirt by using multiple texture brushes. After day 1 the main character looked like the one below...

If you are thinking, Huh? That is not how it looks in the game... You are right, it does not... :smile: (see second day)

More assets...

I needed a lot more assets, I had a list. For the puzzle game I wanted to limit the tiles people could put instructions on and I wanted to make this clear in some way. I also wanted to indicate the grid so I needed a texture for that. Next to that I needed some puzzle elements, some arrows, a bubble...

Fun fact: The tile where users would be able to place the instructions ended up being used for something completely different... A compo has limited time so whatever works... :smile:

For the grid I made some very simple texture in Krita + Gimp. The bubble is completely made in Gimp.

Day 1

6 hours of work...

Since I was still sleeping the 5 first hours of the compo :sleeping: at this moment actually 11 of the 48 hours had passed...

11 hours of work...

Five hours later it started looking more like the final result...

Nothing was moving yet though... :smiley:

Day 2

At the start of day 2 you could click a tile and move the camera but that was it. Fun fact: I had actually already rewritten the camera controls twice at this time. :slight_smile:

While I knew I should really start programming some gameplay, instead I changed the grid a bit to have it a bit more "wavy" since it was bothering me. :sweat_smile:

Fun fact: the "wavy" grid is actually happening in code. I wrote some code to apply some random displacement to the vertices in the grid (so, I am actually modifying the mesh).

Tiled!

I could easily change the ground mesh because I actually generated the whole level in Unity with code. The walls are just some prefab I spawn all over the place, the ground is a mesh generated by some code.

For the Level Editor I use Tiled.

Below you can see the last level in Tiled and Unity (recorded after the compo).

Xml for Levels, a good decision.

I think making the levels this way was a very good decision. That way the code that generated the meshes actually also had a complete representation of the level. The code reads all the walls and other things from the xml and puts them in some arrays... This allowed me to handle all the moving logic in one place with just some simple for loops. That code really had a concept of grid and knew how high each tile was.

Golems need to stop before cliffs? No problem! If two golems try to go to the same grid position stop them? No problem!

Yes, I had to write the code to read the level xml and generate the level (spawing some prefabs + making the ground mesh), but I just googled how to read xml in C# and had this code quite quickly.

Next to having a complete representation of the level in a single class the approach had even more advantages... For example, I never had to move walls in Unity by hand. They just appeared when I reran the level reading code. That saved me quite some time...

Making levels in Tiled also allowed me to focus on making interesting puzzles without any distractions. :sunglasses:

Rigging and Animations!

On the second day I also did a second iteration of the main character. I changed the proportions after I got some feedback on the first day that it looked weird (it does, doesn't it?). Anyway, I always planned to do a second iteration to do the rigging and animation. The only effect of changing the character this late still was that the texture got messed up a bit (hard line where the "dirty part" ends) but you cannot really see the texture in the game anyway. :smile:

As part of the second iteration I also redrew the emit texture (the orange spots).

15 hours before the deadline... let's start programming some actual gameplay...

I still had lots of things to do with only 15 hours left. If I remember correctly at that time still nothing was moving yet but I knew I had most of it in place... Animations were ready, I had the complete representation of the level in memory, ... So: coding, testing, fixing, repeat... :smile:

More features

After I got the basics working, I wanted to add some more puzzle elements and some more polish...

Buttons, doors, exits, hills to change level, wait instructions, the ice cube (textures, model and code), "snowflake" instruction, "magic circle" (textures and particle systems), exit effect, idle animations for the golem, icy pose for the golem, restart button, next level button, around eight actual playable levels, choosing a font, end screen, exporting to WebGL, making screenshots, replaying all the levels a couple of times, fixing some last minute bugs, breaking another level... Aaaaaargh!!, not enough time...

Because of some strange Unity behavior around static batching and post processing volume I still adapted the level reading code to work in the Unity editor instead of only when the game starts and ended up having to actually rewrite some of it. Apparently Unity does not serialize 2D arrays, who knew? But since the in memory representation of the level uses those it is definitely a problem if they get lost if you exit edit mode...

Block of Ice

I actually really like how the block of ice turned out. The block of ice is made by combining a model with a transparent darkish blue color and adding an emit texture with details (see below) on top. That is it...

Finished!

While I still had a lot of things to do in the last 15 hours, it somehow worked out in the end... :open_mouth:

The game was uploaded half an hour before the deadline and I am super happy with the end result!

Links...

In case you want to take a peek at the source code, you can find it here.

You can play the game here: Icy Golems.

This was the first time I participated in the compo. I joined some jams before with a team but somehow this was a completely different experience! By joining the compo I interacted a lot more with the community. I loved it. Thanks everyone! I got some good feedback and I loved reading the post-mortems!

I learned a lot in past jams and games I worked on. This one was no different. At the beginning of this compo I was not even sure if I would be able to even finish the game in 48 hours but once it started I went all in! It went really well and I managed to polish the game quite a bit. It seems all the polishing paid off and I am really happy with the scores! These are really great!

22nd overall, 14th on graphics, 40th on fun. Even the innovation, mood and theme scores are really good. I should probably have opted out of "Humor" though, meh... Thanks everyone for voting!

Some great games out there...

Looking at the ranking, the games above me and also the ones that ended up below me in the ranking are really really really good and I think I will try and play some of those still. :thumbsup: It is always good to get some inspiration. :smiley:

Next time...

Beating these scores next time will be a serious challenge, but I am up for it! Happy New Year everyone and see you next Ludum Dare! :smile:

Looking forward to the next Ludum Dare!

I had quite some fun coming up with suggestions... Here are mine:

Food, Fighting: It the food alive and fighting? Or maybe there is global fighting over a shortage of food? Or fighting with food? (food bazooka!) Or maybe you just need food to continue fighting? Who will say... :smiley:

The Dragon Egg Effect: So yes, what is the dragon's egg effect? Is it tasty or super heavy? Does it have time-bending powers? Maybe it emits light or something? Maybe finding a rare dragon egg causes a political power struggle? Or maybe the actual effect does not even matter?

A Changing Separation: Could be a chemical separation, borders, dimensional separation or changing groups even ...

I am finished! Going to bed now... :sleeping:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/squishies

Everyone loves a good platformer!

Squishies too!

I submitted a couple of small post-compo fixes (like a rare infinite loop in the code), but I couldn't resist and I added a small platforming area in the sandbox as well... :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:

Tip: you can even make them do this forever by telling them they need to be somewhere in the middle of the slide back down... Then just keep watching them sliding down and going the long way around to go back up. :grin:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/squishies

Squishies contains quite some things I never tried before! It was an interesting compo for me so I decided to document the process.

The theme and brainstorming!

For me the theme was announced at 3 AM. I woke up at 7 AM, full of energy to start!

"Your life is currency". Hmmm... what to make with that? Like last Ludum Dare, I found the theme quite hard. I don't mind though, it forces me to think of completely new game concepts. I don't want to make just any type of game though... As usual, next to the theme, I had some restrictions of my own:

• I wanted to make the main characters really cute. I never made a game with cute characters before and it sounded like a fun challenge.
• I didn't want to work with Health Points (HP) or any other kind of number. It might feel like a strange restriction, but I didn't want the player to constantly have to look at the HP bar to play the game. I wanted him to look at the actual gameplay, levels and graphics, whatever those would become. In general I simply like to avoid UI in games whenever possible.

Cute characters is still ok as a restriction. Not having any kind of life points is a lot harder with a theme like "your life is currency". Uh...

I started brainstorming.

One of the first ideas that came to minds was: "You are a bunch of cute characters with abilities". Cute, check. Each character could only use the ability once and "died" after that? Theme, check. No HP bar, check. You just need enough cute characters for the player to use, really. :smiley:

But what would the gameplay be? The above idea did not really limit gameplay options. It could still become almost anything. It could be some kind of "war game" where you have two camps? On the paper I used for brainstorming I had "Tower Defense", "protection mechanisms" but also "shape-shifting eggs" :smile: written down. I was thinking of some kind of civilization of "blobs" where the player would be a god. I thought of "infinite runner" with a whole bunch of cute characters. Anyway, as crazy as it sounds I actually liked the idea with the "shape-shifting eggs". Maybe they could transform into a gaint fluffy block which you can use to continue in the level? With those blocks, the game could become a nice "puzzle platformer game".

I decided to go with that idea.

Having a puzzle platformer with a lot of cute characters would be hard though. How to control them? You cannot control all of them with the keyboard. Maybe I could just select a bunch and point them where to go? That would mean they would need platformer pathfinding and some AI which could jump those platforms... I don't think I have ever seen something like that before. It could be something fun to try though.

Below some quick scribbles during brainstorming... In the beginning the squishies had feet! Also, in the image below the shape-shifting "eggs" became square! :smiley: There is also the word "hopping" as an idea for movement and a big "Squishy".

I was also thinking of making it physics based. It could be fun to see the characters tumble over each other. That would make the AI part even harder though...

Time to upgrade Unity?

It is 8:30 AM now and I just started my computer. I wasn't very well prepared for this Ludum Dare. I had been thinking of streaming the development but I did not prepare that. Instead I downloaded some simple screen recording software "Chronolapse" which I had seen somewhere on this site. I also wanted to try out the new Shader Graph in Unity so I started downloading the new version.

Downloading the new version of Unity during the jam was not a very smart decision. It also did not help that my hard drive was full. I ended up not being able to use it at all because it gave some strange error message when starting up. Luckily, I still had Unity 2018.3 installed so I used that one, but I definitely lost some valuable time. Hmmm...

Art!

While Unity was still downloading I wanted to start with the art (9 AM now). First, I spent around 40 minutes looking for references (work of other artists) on the internet and deciding on a color palette. I am using a tool to keep those reference images on the screen called Kuadro Beta (0.8.5) and to draw I am using a wacom bamboo mte-450a pen tablet (so an old model, but it still works).

After that I opened Krita (2.8) and starting painting. The whole process you see below took a bit more than an hour.

New Unity Project & Time to upgrade Krita?

Still using the older version of Unity, I started importing the "blob" into Unity (11 AM). I wanted to import all layer groups from Krita separately so I had more control. However, apparently my version of Krita was too old and it did not support exporting all layer groups separately. I could export all layers manually, but if I wanted to draw other things I would have to do that for those as well. So, of course I started upgrading Krita... :slightsmile: I don't learn, do I? :sweatsmile: This upgrade ended up going well though...

I wanted to make the blobs a bit ... err ... squishy. I thought it could be fun to have them stretch and get squished together on impact.

To be continued...

Since this post is already getting long and I didn't even start with the squishiness, hair simulation, path finding and AI, I will split up the "origin story of Squishies" in a couple of posts. Stay tuned for more!

In case you are interested, you can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/squishies

This is a continuation of the "origin of Squishies" post. Part 1 can be found here: Part 1 - Brainstorming & Art.

11 AM on Day 1

Since I still had time (it was 11 AM of day 1), I wanted to see if I could make the blobs a bit "squishy". I thought it could be fun to have them stretch and get squished together on impact. Maybe not the most important thing to work on but oh well I still had time and it sounded like a fun challenge. :smile:

Squishiness

For the squishiness I wanted to try using the Physics in Unity. Using real physics would give the most natural feeling when a Squishy would be thrown against a wall. Invisible springs inside the blob would make sure the blob would be compressed when it would hit the wall and those springs would push the corners back and bounce it off the wall. Squishiness! :grin:

The idea I had was simple. Instead of one object, the blob would be made of five objects: a center object and four corner objects which were connected with invisible springs. In the images below, the red, orange, light green and green squares are the corner objects, the center object is quite small and not really shown.

Squishiness Experimentation

I attached some springs and started with drop tests, dropping five blobs from different heights. Some examples below:

While the idea sounds simple (5 objects and a bunch of springs), getting it right ended up being really difficult. It took A LOT of experimentation.

If I put some spring joints/connections too hard, the frequency of the springs would go up and the whole thing would start vibrating. If I attached the joints in the wrong position the blob would become unstable and it would start bouncing around on its own. On the other hand, when the diagonal connections (connecting opposite corners) were not strong enough, the blob would just tilt to the right or left (see 5 above) and if I did not give the springs enough strength in general they could not even counteract gravity and the Squishy became flat. Aaaah...

New inspiration...

At one point I even gave up. (I mean, what kind of weird thing am I spending my time on anyway?) After taking a break, showing it to someone and getting some new inspiration on how to attach the springs, I got motivated again. With new inspiration it suddenly started behaving more like I wanted. Finally, after a total of four hours of experimentation, I got something I liked!

Below is a screenshot of the final game. (I will talk about the hair later.) All the jumping and moving you see is just physics! How cool is that!? The only thing the code does in the image below is call AddForce in the center of the blob twice. Once in the beginning to jump to the right and once to jump the platform.

At the start of the animation below looks like the Squishy pushes itself forward with one of his feet, but that is just the springs doing that somehow. Same for when it rolls a bit further or when it rotates in mid air. The squishy physics looks even cooler than I imagined... :astonished: (How does squishiness even cause such side effects?)

Final configuration

The final configuration had 16 spring joints/connections for a single Squishy. Every corner object had 2 joints connecting to the opposite side and the center. I called these the "diagonal" connections. Every corner object also had 2 joints connecting to the next corner object. I called these the "clockwise" connections for the lack of a better name. The experimentation learned me that the diagonal joints have to be a lot stronger ("frequency" 30) than the "clockwise" ones ("frequency" 10), but you definitely need both types. Next to the configuration of the spring connections, I also learned that the mass distribution is essential for getting the best squishy behavior. The corner objects have mass 0.1 while the center object has mass 1.

I you want to know, more, have a look at the code... Squishies is open source!

Together this makes the Squishies Squishy! :smiley:

Hairy Squishies!

So, the Squishiness Physics were finally done. Phew... (Was it worth it?)

One thing that still bothered me however was how the hair I painted was completely static. I used a single image for the Squishy and simply deformed that image. But the hair was painted on the Squishy image and that simply did not look right. It did not move naturally. I wanted to see the wind and acceleration in the hairs!

But that is something for another time as this post is already becoming a bit long...

To be continued...

This was part 2 of "the Origin of Squishies". I hope you enjoyed the read!
Future posts will look into the hair animation, platformer path finding and the AI... Stay tuned for more!

If you want to see the Squishies "alive", you can find them here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/squishies.

Hello everyone!

I am @jeroenpx and I am looking to team up for LDJAM46!

The last two game jams I worked solo and that went very well, but I would like to team up for this one to get to know some more people! :smiley:

So, who am I?

28 year old, male, living in Belgium, doing game development purely as a hobby. My skills range from: Programming (C# (Unity), Java, JavaScript, React), shaders & compute shaders, ... I also know something about: 3D modeling, rigging, texturing, animating, ... & 2D art (trying to improve) but I would even like try sound effects... No skills there, my previous games had no audio...

Because images say more than words... some previous prototypes I worked on: Cat - Unreleased prototype to improve my animation skills... (solo project)

Fruitapolis - Made in a game jam in one day (solo project)

Go with the flow - (game jam team project - LDJAM38 - did the programming only)
Programmed the fluid simulation & water particles

Icy golems - puzzle game (solo project - LDJAM43 compo)

Penguins - Made during a game jam (team project, but all graphics, animation & (shader) programming visible in this gif was made by me)

Echo Cave (team project - did the gameplay programming & echolocation shader only)

Real-time Water Simulation - Unreleased prototype to experiment with compute shaders... (solo project)

Interested? Contact me on Twitter, Discord jeroenpx#2243 or Instagram.

Looking forward to work with some of you!

Phew, game finished!

We might have cut it close to the deadline, but we are really happy with the result!

If you are interesting in starting some fires, this might be something for you: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/fire-keeper-4

Playable with keyboard or controller for Windows, MacOS & Linux. (WebGL coming soon hopefully)

This Ludum Dare we made "Enigma Cubes"!

We are pretty happy with the puzzles in the game and how it looks! From the feedback we got, it seems the difficulty of the puzzles is just right. Perfect! :smiley:

If you are interested in puzzle games, you can play it here.

How is it made?

Day 1

The team consisted of 4 people: 2 artists, a sound designer and me, the programmer. So, how did we make the game? We actually started of with a rather vague idea. After the brainstorming of day 1, we just had:

Cubes would move in loops and the player would have a kind of energy gun to stop them or push/pull them.

If you played they game you know the gun didn't happen, but the core idea is still there: cubes still move in loops and you can still push/pull them.

After the brainstorming, I started with the level editor. "Wait, why start with a level editor?" you ask? The idea was that this would allow us to quickly iterate on puzzles without having to place all assets again. Additionally, I needed a grid representation of the level in code anyway for handling the puzzle logic.

Levels are built in a program called "Tiled" and I am just reading the xml and spawning the prefabs. It is not the first time I took this approach. This is the view in the level editor for Level 4 in the final game (can be solved in 2 moves). It is the level which is also shown in the first screenshot of this post (in case you want to compare)...

Day 2

It is only on the second day while programming that the idea became less vague in my head. I really started to see what kind of puzzles we could do with this. I threw out the player and the gun because I realized the puzzles would work better without one and we didn't start modeling the player yet anyway. I moved the camera top-down instead of third person and started implementing a drag and drop mechanic instead of a gun.

Drag & drop had its own complications. I realized that I needed to stop time while you were dragging the cube, but how do you indicate that time is stopped? Shader magic! The time stop effect (while dragging) is a shader which is applied to all objects. I am affecting the shader on all objects with some global shader variables.

A is the part for the "time stop effect", with the top part of the graph being the edge wave effect, the section below the "activate time stop" and the part below the "de-activate time stop". Part B of the shader is unrelated, it is used for the cube mouse hover effect, and C is some other things for glow. I am pretty happy with how all the effects look. Next to the time stop effect, I am also really stopping time with the useful Time.timeScale.

Meanwhile the artists in the team were building assets non-stop. Plants, crystals, ... However, I would need to place all of these. To get variation I would need to rotate them, scale them, and move them to a correct place. I would need to repeat this a huge amount of times for grass and plants. I started wondering whether there was a better way to do it. In the end, I wrote a button to do parameterized random rotation and scale and spreads them randomly through the level (position). The random rotation script gets as only input the maximum angle that the asset can be titled. The code for random rotation looks like this: In case your wondering, it took me 2 tries to get the Quaternions correct. The "random" rotation has a limited tilt means they are never placed up-side down. I limit the angle. Spreading assets through the level (position) was simple as I was already placing all the floors from code anyway, I knew where everything was. Just needed to spawn some additional assets per tile.

Placing things like mushrooms is now simply clicking the button, locking all other layers in Unity and then using box selection to quickly delete all the ones I didn't like. Deleting is a lot faster than placing things, especially if you can just drag a box and delete! :smile: Because all mushrooms sit on their own Unity layer and I locked the other layers, I couldn't accidentally delete anything else. It was actually pretty fun to mass delete mushrooms, grass, plants, crystals, ... Screenshot: right after clicking the button (on level 4).

I also put in some of the cube animations on day 2.

Day 3

Finally, on day 3, I took time to design the levels I had in my head (8 of them). Before this we didn't have any levels yet. I imported them, but still needed to implement some pending mechanics. By 6 PM CET on day 3 the mechanics got implemented and we could play the game for the first time. :sweat_smile:

I guess that is still on time? We still had 6 hours?

Even with the scripts I created on day 2, I still spent 2 of those hours actually placing all the mushrooms, plants and crystals though, ouch...

So, like the previous time, we didn't have a game yet on the start of day 3. I don't think that is necessary a problem though and I think in general, it went very well.

A different angle on level 3. It's a magical place!

That's it!

Interested in some nice puzzles?

Play & rate it here.

I thought I'd post an in progress screenshot here of the game I am working on (solo, it's just me). :book:

I consider myself mostly a programmer, but my goal this game jam was to reaaaly challenge myself on art and I think that is going quite well. I am pretty happy with how the art is turning out. (Too much stuff to draw though, ugh)

I originally planned to go the compo though but that obviously didn't happen. Way too much scope and no easy place to cut... :face_palm:

Oh well, at least we have the jam. Hopefully I make it on time. :sweat_smile:

And it even has a WebGL build... (+ Windows as well)

You can play it here.

You can now visit the potion shop on Windows, Mac and WebGL. Play it here.

Im in! This will be my 9th Ludum Dare and my 15th game jam overall!

Also, below a work in progress screenshot on the start of day 2!

Still aiming for the Compo. Let's see how it goes. Lot's and lot's of stuff still to do.

Managed to get it finished for the Compo! :sparkles:

Browser version is now also online :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/snowy-snatch

Harold, the Hamster... :hamster:

So, I am in! It took me a really long time to come up with an idea I wanted to do this time. At first I was even thinking of skipping this one, but I finally got an idea I like 14 hours after the Ludum Dare started. :smiley:

I was also planning to use Godot, but ended up still using Unity. I really like Godot, but when I started, I realized I haven't used 3D Physics, Raycasting, Decals, Animation Blend Trees, Gradient Noise Shaders, Web Exports, ... in Godot... A bit too much risk in one go.