Hi all,

I thought it would be worth sharing a few games that I've come across that I've particularly enjoyed! I'll probably do a few of these before the rating period is over depending on how busy / tired I end up being in the next week or so. So, without any further ado:

Orion

This game immediately stood out to me with its gorgeous pixel art background and excellent use of a limited colour palette. There's fun to be had in piecing together how to get the most out of your summons, and a compelling sense of "ok, how far can I get with this?"

Luna's Ritual

I've been playing quite a bit of Risk of Rain 2 and Vampire Survivors lately - sources of inspiration that Luna's Ritual really wears on its sleeves. The game does a really solid rendition of piecing together the best character build you can and trading off that accumulation of power against the gradually ramping up of the enemy's own toughness. And - like Orion - some truly beautiful pixel art!

The Ultimate Cup of Coffee

Coffee has always been a very important part of game jams for me, so I'm always up for a game about it! My first go at this, I didn't really get what was going on, but after some of the comments prodded me in the right direction I found a satisfying deductive reasoning puzzle.

Deep

On Friday night, I felt I'd just about had my fill of playing / rating / reviewing jam games for the time being. "Just one more then I'll call it a night" I thought. Deep was that one more game, and it kept me hooked for way longer than I expected. There's an interesting map to explore and the build up of upgrades allowing you to venture further and further felt really well paced to me.

There are already more games that I want to mention, but I think better to keep the recommendations in manageable chunks! Although I will afford myself one more spot for my own game - Hellevator

Sminer

Sminer's got a lot going on in quite a small amount of screen. It's a really cool take on combining different ingredients to summon different types of monsters to defend your tower. It does this by focusing on how you're gathering your ingredients by mining down for different resources. The presentation of it is really lovely as well, it's great pixel art and so well done on so few colours!

Eulerian Demons

I really love a bit of graph theory, and Elerian Demons really appeals to that part of my brain. There's a really cool puzzle in "how do I combine these different shapes without taking my pen off the paper" and this game presents that puzzle well.

Centibleed

Centibleed's got a really cool de-rezzed look to it and some great music. There's a good ramping up of your conflict with the opposing magical centipede, and there's just a great vibe to the whole thing. Some pretty liberal use of screenshake as well...

Matthew, Emissary of Balance

This game's got a really straightforward 2 resource economy that has a really satisfying loop to it. I really enjoy a good horde-mode-defend-a-thing gameplay and this pulls it off really well with a good variety of cool stuff to summon.

And of course... my own game - Hellevator

The Good

Generally, I'm really happy with how Hellevator turned out. Feels like one of my more well rounded jam entries personally. But some personal highlights would be having spent the last day resigned to the fact I probably wouldn't get time to do music and then in a moment of madness banging together a decent amount of tracks that I actually felt quite proud of. I also had a lot of fun recording and adding in the voice clips - which partly ended up being a bit of a patch job for the fact I wasn't sure anyone else would associate elevators with "being summoned", so an "Elevator Summoned" voice line seemed like quite a good way to work that in.

Also very pleased with my main character (particularly the wings and wing animations), I mean, look at this little guy:

The Bad

Communicating game mechanics has long been one of my weaker points. Before the jam I had vague intentions of trying to make a game where there was no text explaining anything and I'd just put everything across via in game action. This went out of the window immediately. A lot of the reviews have mentioned that the controls aren't always intuitive and I get the impression a lot of people don't realise you can fly. It also seems a bit unclear at what point opening elevator doors actually lets passengers in and out.

The Ugly

I made a major miscalculation with some of my naming of things and ended up with "Floors" being a concept that was used in 2 different ways. Where you've got the sort of floors in relation to how high up you are, like this:

Those ended up being "FloorLayers" in the code, where as each individual platform was also a "Floor":

Having 2 floors on the same layer was something that didn't really get added until part way through the process, and I think the levels would have had a bit less to them if I restricted myself to only having floors at different heights. But having those 2 concepts and not feeling I had the time to refactor the original "Floors" into "Platforms" or something lead to some deeply confusing code. Particularly around souls trying to pathfind their way to their next workstation on the more complex levels where you'd have to take 2 different lifts to get from one platform to another specific platform. This wasn't helped by me trying to do Dijkstra's algorithm from memory for the pathfinding - I really should've looked that one up! Please enjoy this image of the true hell behind Hellevator

I suppose you could say it was a bit of a flawed approach...a "floor"-ed approach..a...ah forget it

Anyway, in general, jazzed about how it's turned out - give it a play here if you fancy!

Although maybe prioritise danger zone games at this point!

Time to start jamming in earnest over in the UK. Desk is a mess, but we move!

A lot of making things look fancier to go and an awful lot of balancing to do. Overall really pleased with what I've got on day 1. By no means perfect but what I've got seems like a solid core game that just needs a bit of finessing.

If only bug fixing were so simple...

For any game about bees, it's very important there is a dedicated Waggle Dance button

Wasn't sure about where I was going with this for a while, but happy with how it's turned out! Particularly as I managed to get in a few "this would be a cool thing to add but isn't really necessary" bits and bobs.

Run a post office in deep space in Deep Space Delivery Service

It's the game people are calling The 349th Best Game Of Ludum Dare 57 - and it's just got a new update!

Ludum Dare is a great source of feedback on a game so I've made a few small tweaks to respond to some of the comments I received during the rating period. So let's dive in to what's new in v1.1.0

Chill Mode

Deep Space Delivery Office I think succeeds in somehow being a slow game and quite stressful at the same time. For folks that want a slightly less (based on comments from @tetrapteryx and @christian-zommerfelds) constrained playthrough I've added a new option to the game to make it a bit more relaxed. In Chill Mode, when the reward for delivering a piece of cargo reaches zero, that cargo will simply disappear, rather than clogging up valuable cargo slots on planets and in space stations. This should make it much harder to hit penalties from maxing out cargo space, and much easier to have a longer, more relaxed session. Chill Mode high scores will be recorded separately to non-Chill (stressful mode?) runs, which leads on to the next v1.1.0 change...

More Info On High Scores

High scores will now show the number of deliveries completed on your high score run, along with the number of days you kept the Post Office running.

Quick Cargo Transfers

Rather than having to select a piece of cargo, then right click the freighter / planet / space station you want to transfer it to, you can now right click on a piece of cargo to transfer it instantly. This will only work if there is only 1 place the cargo could reasonably be transferred to. For example, if 2 freighters are docked at a space station, right clicking cargo in the space station won't transfer it - you'll have to use the old style left click to select, right click on target method for that. At least until I get my mind reading engine up and running. This was a bit of an attempt to deal with some more of the feedback from @christian-zommerfelds.

Bug Fixes / Balance Tweaks

Fuel Tankers can now be sent to refuel Shuttles, and Shuttle fuel usage has been decreased Shuttles aren't really meant to run out of fuel, but I've occasionally run into a bug where they really seem to guzzle the stuff up. So this change should turn this from a minor nuisance into a minor-er nuisance. Fixed a bug where the "Show More" button in the upgrades shop could be clicked when it "Show More" button wasn't being shown. Fixed a number of bugs introduced by changing how the high scores worked You know how it is with these things Not really a bug fix or a balance tweak, but the title screen now handily (for me at least) shows the version number

Please go and have a play here