(First of all, I was originally concerned about not having enough votes when I started this post, but I’m all good now. That said, you should still play my game because it’s cool, but perhaps consider playing other games too, there’s still time!)

Tamamystery is a cutesy virtual pet game with nothing mysterious or nefarious involved at all. Nope. Why would you suggest that? Also it’s in Flash, so there’s no download or anything, which means you should totes play it!

[Click to play!]

You should totes play this game

Now that that’s out of the way, lets get to what this post is about: How I came to using papercraft for my Ludum Dare game!

The first thing you’ll notice is my freakish hands holding some type of paper-craft device. But it wasn’t always going to be this way…

Once I knew I was going to do something Tamagotchi related, I started off by doing the classic Google image search to get ideas.

So many Tamagotchis…

I also watched some Youtube videos to get an idea of how the Tamagotchi gameplay typically works. I also came across this Tamagotchi device with the little cake on the top, which I liked, and is why I added a bow on the top of my toy.

Apparently if you’re into Tamagotchi videos then you also want to know how to make a Crochet Mini Coin Pouch

So I started creating the graphics of the game. I knew I wanted the game to look like a real device, and so it had to be fairly realistic looking. So I started in GIMP, first by taking photo of an actual Tamagotchi and adjusting the colours a bit. Using that as a basis, I was going to try to essentially redraw it in GIMP, but soon realised that it looked pretty bad, and was going to take a while to do.

(I’m not very good at this way of doing art)

So I ditched that idea. Then I remembered “Hey, I’ve done nice vector stuff in the past, right? I’ll do it in flash!”. I quickly realised that THAT was going nowhere too.

I was hoping the grid would help me make things even, but I couldn’t even get the curves to look right

So I drew this little place holder graphics and moved on. Also, here you can see I had the idea of having a background that’s permanently etched in the game, like some Tamagotchis and small toys do.

The “figuring out graphics is a problem for Future Jez” graphic

Then I tried to figure out what it would look like on paper, and an idea hit me: If I can make it look good on paper, why not just use that as the graphics as is! I have a whole bunch of cardboard in my room (I often use it for craft things for kids), I had everything I needed really.

Even though I wasn’t trying to make it look good, I felt like this sketch was better than my my actual graphics attempts

The actual process of making the toy wasn’t too hard, all I did was draw each piece lightly on the cardboard in pencil and then cut out the outline. I made sure to measure out a piece of cardboard with the same dimensions as the screen so that they lined up.

To put the pieces together, I used Blu-Tack, which is good for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s not permanent so you can move things around. Secondly, it makes the pieces stick out a bit, so you don’t just end up with a flat piece of cardboard, but instead have something with a bit of depth in it. Depending on how much Blu-Tack you use, you can adjust the height of each piece a little bit.

From side on, you can see the layers… kinda. That screen is coming of a little.

To get it into the game, I just took a photo on my phone, put it on the computer, and then skewed it a little bit to compensate for the slight angle I took it at. Then I scaled it to make sure the screen was a nice multiple of the game window size, in pixels, because otherwise you get awkward half-sized pixels or blurry edges due to anti-aliasing, and nobody wants that.

This one is nice in the way that you can clearly see that it’s made of paper, it’s not as obvious in the actual one.

It looked pretty good at this point, but I felt like it needed colour to look more like an actual device. So I added in the colour in GIMP by using layers with the “Multiply” blending mode. If you just transparently overlay a colour, you lose some of the contrast as all your shadows become lighter, whereas with multiplying, you preserve all the blacks as black, and keep the subtle paper texture better. That’s a little tip for ya.

Whee! Timelapses! (click to see the unsquished version)

And to add in the hands, I just took a photo of me holding it with one hand in the different positions, and photoshop’d that in with GIMP (am I allowed to say that?). It would’ve been nice to set up a tripod and take photos of me holding it in the different positions to get the shadows right, but that also would’ve taken a bit longer and would’ve meant I had to skew, scale and colour 4 photos instead of 1.

Whee timelapses again!

And that’s it! I had a lot of fun with using papercraft, I might try to make an all-papercraft game next time. I’ll probably need some better equipment though.

Thanks for reading! See ya later!

Tags: how to, papercraft, timelapse, tools

I’m thinking I’ll be using flash stuff for this, but who knows what ideas may come up.

Thanks guys!

I’m fairly surprised! I was coming off two very late nights (working on the Ludum Dare site actually!) and then during the competition I spent a surprisingly large time napping and procrastinating with Splatoon. I guess the game was fun enough for people to like it! And also, I probably got a lucky fraction of votes :stuckouttongue:

Some more specific thanks: - @jasonp, who made a game called microgue. It uses a similar turn-based mechanic where you move onto squares to defeat enemies. You can check out that game on the app store or Google play. - @managore, who made the font I used in the game. And by not entering this time, you left a gap for me to fill :stuckouttongue: - The folks hanging around the IRC who playtested my game during the compo! I... didn't jot down your names so I can't give specific shoutouts :grimacing: but you know who you are :) - All Ludum Darers! Ludum Dare isn’t about winning imo, it’s about learning and improving on your game making skills, and making really cool stuff! Congrats on making something (even if you didn’t finish) :raisedhands: and be sure to check out the other top scoring games!

If you haven't played it, you can play VUEL here!

Here’s a quick tutorial-like explanation of some parts of the game as a thank you back to the Ludum Dare community!

Animation

All the animations are three frames. It’s a simple ‘bounce’ style animation. One ‘rest’ frame, then a squished frame, which is anticipation for the next frame, which is the popping up frame. Then back to the rest frame. Quick way to make animations when you don’t have much time (or skill haha).

Level Generation

The game is played on an infinite 2D grid. The way I programmed this was to have a 2D array that grows when you get near the edge. To stop it from getting huge I split it into pieces of 10x10 tiles. Whenever you get close enough to part of the grid you haven’t seen, it adds a new piece, and if needs be increases the 2D array. This way you can have really big maps, where you only generate stuff as you need to. Otherwise the game would face some serious memory issues.

The random level generation is dead simple. Each tile has a 15% chance of being a gap. Then all the squares that aren’t gaps have 5% chance of having an enemy on them, although that percentage chance gets higher the further away you are.

To pick what enemy appears, there’s a few lists that it picks an enemy from. To start off, it’s just simple enemies and batteries, and later on, trickier enemies become more likely. A quick way to balance the probabilities is to repeat things in the list, which makes them more likely compared to the others.

AI

The AI for the enemies is really simple. They each have an set of moves they can make (an array of [x, y] pairs). Each enemy looks at all the moves they can make (loops through that array), and then calculates the distance to the player, and picks the move that puts them the closest. There’s no way I was programming a proper pathfinding algorithm in a game jam :stuckouttongue:. The real important thing is that they’re predictable, which is useful for planning your moves ahead. Also, having the array of moves meant it was very easy to add new enemies, and program unlockable movesets just as the compo was ending.

All the code is on Github if you want to check it out :smiley: Or you can just play it too.

See you next LD!

P.S. My twitter is @jezzamonn :wink:

If you have any Ludum Dare tips, comment them below and we can create a thread of Ludum Dare resources :)

Of course, the meta tip is that all advice is autobiographical - this is stuff people have done and it's worked for them, but feel free to take what you want & leave the rest. Make Ludum Dare your own!

I have other stuff to do but WHATEVER

Hopefully I do better than last time :wink:

Hey friends! I updated my game and now it's even ~~worse~~ better!

Check out Shovelware Knight

Personally I find it harder to pick between 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5 and 5

Just having 1 2 3 4 5 is easier to think about -- I think of them like real bad, not great, average, good, amazing

I guess I can just rate games with whole stars but I feel like having more options actually reduces the quality of my ratings

Hi I'm in! No idea what platform I'll be using. Possibly raw Javascript/HTML5 stuff, or maybe Unity. Depends what the game calls for I guess! Wheeee

Hi friends! I made a fun Ludum Dare game that needs some more votes:

ULTRA BAE!

They say that when a bae becomes so powerful, they surpass the ranks of regular baes to become something greater...

To become ULTRA BAE, you'll obviously need to do two things:

• Find your own hot baes on Baedar
• Enter the demon's lair and slay and many demons as you can

To play this game, you run ULTRA BAE on a computer, and Baedar on a phone (or a browser window on a computer if you want) at the same time. On Baedar you match with different people that change your weapons and stats 😜

I'm still working on some more tweaks for a post-compo version too, if you're interested in seeing it become a more complete game

This time I'm teaming up with @mrthee! I'll be making SOMEthing silly

So I made a little 'MMO' for this Ludum Dare. It's simple, but pretty fun? I showed it to some people at work and noticed there were some pretty high people in the high-score tables. "Troy Harper" and "Polly Boyd" had managed to become... multi-trillionaires?? That's a lot higher than I thought anyone would get!

We decided to work together and dethrone them...

I believe the term is multi-quadrillionaire :stuckouttonguewinkingeye: I'm Madge Grant, and the other top 3 players are my friends.

If you feel like trying to usurp me, go for it!

And I'll reveal the secret trick to making so much money: When you win a battle, you get half someone's money, but they don't lose any money. If you're working with a friend that's a powerful combination if you keep battling each other :P

This will be my 21st Ludum Dare! Wow

My plan is to try to build a networked game that works remotely, given the current situation!

So I'll probably stick to JavaScript and make a HTML5 game and slightly hate myself for having to do everything from scratch again :sweat_smile: I think I'll try package some of the Aseprite JavaScript code I made for LD44 so I don't have to do that again. :)

See you then!

Hi all! I am in this time for Ludum Dare!

Current plan is to stick to HTML5/JavaScript, but we'll see what way the theme leads me :)

I think it'd be interesting to see how many people were actually able to complete a game before leaving a rating. I don't think we should require it to leave a rating, but rather have it as an extra piece of feedback for games.

A lot of games end up being too hard, or too long for people to complete. Or they don't have a strong enough hook, people play them for a bit and then give up. And of course, a lot of the people rating games aren't that invested in spending a lot of time, and move on quickly. It's sad as gamedev to see that, but also its a reality which we have to design around! So I think having a checkbox would be helpful to figure out whether a game should try to be shorter, or have a better hook, or what.

It'd probably have a slight effect to encourage people to make the effort to play longer, although I'm thinking the main advantage would be the feedback.

Thoughts?

wowowo!

I'm super chuffed to have placed first in innovation! The innovation category has been my favourite category for a while, ever since the "Tiny World" theme and the game that took place in the page's favicon. So it's been the main category I've been focusing on when I've been entering Ludum Dare.

I was hoping I'd do well there, but had no idea I'd rank as highly overall too! And very surprised that I also came first for audio, given how many talented musicians there are here.

Here's a little recreation of what I did when I saw the results:

https://youtu.be/w4U2ALaRa0s

The idea for making this game came from going through the process of calling the DMV to renew an expired registration for my car. I remember exploring this phone system and trying to figure out if it was possible to resolve my problem without getting put on hold, and the experience was both ridiculous but also surprisingly entertaining. It just felt perfect for parody.

So I had that potential idea on hold, and then when I saw the theme announcement I realised this would be perfect! So I dropped all my other plans and started figuring out how to make an automated call system. And here we are!

So thanks to everyone who rated it! If you haven't tried it yet, you should jump on soon because there's a limited amount of credit in the account that's running the game, and when that expires the game is going to go down :P

This will be my 23rd time doing Ludum Dare! Wowo

Last time I did super well! 2nd overall! This time we'll see. I will quite possibly come up with a silly idea that I won't have enough time to implement. Hopefully I'll be able to get something out at least!

Tools: I have no idea what tools I will use. Depends on the theme!

Instead of adding new features to GA GAME ME, I've just been tweaking the animations to make player more squishy. I love it :)

For reference, this is the old jump animation

I also felt like the player needed a proper death animation, and it is maybe the best animation I have ever created:

You can't play that version yet -- I figured I'd wait until the rating period ends before updating it, seeing as that will happen so soon!

Results come out in less than a day, so good luck to everyone! :grin:

The results aren't out fully yet, BUT if you look at the game list, you can sort by the different categories and see how people went!

So, congrats to the compo winner ROOTS and the jam winner Fallumns

Hello! I am going to make a game, probably a web game from scratch with TypeScript but who knows where the theme will take me.

My last game came 2nd for theme, which is going to be hard to beat! This time, I'm going to try to make something as fleshed out as possible, which is a little hard without a game engine, but we'll see. Likely I'll come up with a theme idea that is too ambitious for the time and have to rush things as usual :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:

I came 6th overall! Nice!

It's pretty good, especially as I didn't get to everything I wanted to, and didn't even have the game loop done until near the end of the last day haha.

Interestingly, "overall" was my best category, and there wasn't any outstanding results in the other categories. Seems fair, I don't think I strongly excelled in any specific one, but often a game also needs to do well in one specific category to get a high overall score.

I'm going to keep tweaking the game (I'm currently adding touch controls for mobile), so if you want to stay tuned, follow me on twitter: @jezzamonn or itch.io: jezzamon.itch.io!