Hello! After dipping my toe into the jam pool for the first time this year, I've become thoroughly hooked. First time doing a Ludum Dare; really looking forward to it.

Weapons of choice: * Code: Godot v3.1 alpha 2 * 2D: Aesprite/GIMP * 3D: Blender * SFX: SFXR/LabChirp/Audacity

Restrictions are such fun things. I think this might actually be the first time I've actually taken a photo on my phone and put it into a game, but... it works! With that in mind, behold my aesthetic:

Mmm... tastes like the nineties.

But we get ahead of ourselves! "Finding the Lamb" is a game in which you, as the leader of a cult, must prevent the apocalypse by identifying which of your followers is The Lamb, and offering their immortal spirit in exchange for the safety of humanity as a whole (i.e.: murdering them, but with legitimacy). After all, sacrifices must be made.

The inner workings of the game - generating the cult's members and the clues that will lead you to The Lamb - are pretty much all in place; but the nature of a game like this means that presentation is a huge part of how enjoyable it is. And the lack of time means I need to stray from my pixel-art comfort zone, so hopefully the end result won't look too much like it belongs on a Sega CD disc.

The wonderful thing about needing to rely on your own skills is that it gives you an excuse to try something you otherwise wouldn't. In this case, I used Blender to create a very quick-and-dirty scene of some sort of temple, in which our protagonist can pierce the veil of our mortal plane...

The fact that they choose to do this with the use of drugs is, I'm sure, purely out of necessity.

A little distortion, tinting and blurring through a shader complements the effect.

Without being able to use my usual sound libraries, I had to make my own, so for this scene, I recorded a few layers of me droning into a microphone to create the appropriate ambience (think "Snoke" from the Force Awakens soundtrack), and layered myself taking deep breaths in and out to accompany the use of the aforementioned substances - the act of which actually left me feeling lightheaded for a few minutes. So if nothing else, I was in the right mindspace, at least.

It's coming together! I ended up using Blender a lot more than I had expected this time; just about every screen has a CGI environment in the background.

...Did anyone else get the urge to go dust off that copy of Myst just now?

Anyway, for the most part, there's just a bit of topping and tailing to go - a title screen, some intro text, and a bit of tweaking the underlying systems - but with the exception of the temple, the game is mostly silent right now. And given the need for some sound effects for the sacrifice, I wonder if my supermarket has any watermelons in stock...

Finding the Lamb is out! As usual, I found myself petering out towards the end. As it turns out, writing prose about killing a sacrificial human offering, then realising you had the wrong person is not at all fun. Hopefully you'll... well, "enjoy" isn't quite the right word. Hopefully you'll find it compelling.

Blatantly self-promoting link here.

Now to get some kip! And then to play your games.

It's been a little while! I really enjoyed doing the compo a couple of years ago - sound design gets a lot more interesting when you can't rely on your libraries. I've had a couple of thoughts for what I might do this time:

1) Groundhog Day

I'm fairly sure this is what sprung to mind for most people when they first saw the theme. You have a limited amount of time in the game before everything resets, at which point all you can bring forward is the knowledge you've gained in previous rounds. Perhaps you're trapped in an abandoned mansion, and on one round, you solve a puzzle that gives you the code to a safe, so that in the next round, you can open it, retrieve the key that's inside, and escape the room you're in. (Ooh, an escape room, there's a thought.)

2) Bungee Cord

Instead of having the entire game state revert, only the player position is reset after the time limit. Imagine a maze in which you only have 30 seconds to get to the exit, which isn't enough because it's a long and winding path. Now, imagine that you can take a secondary route in your first round to push an obstacle out of the way, opening up a shorter route to the goal.

3) Derailed

You're on an out-of-control train. Thankfully, there are no cliff edges anywhere in sight, and the track is in a loop. You need to lean out and press switches in order to change the junctions so that the train takes a different path.

I'm leaning more towards 1 or 2. I really enjoyed the 3D work and horror aesthetic I did last time, so if I can lean into that, I will.

The beauty of the compo is that it's a great incentive to try something weird. Given how little time you have, and the fact that you can't use any preexisting assets, there's nothing to lose by just opening up Blender and doodling things. So, in the last couple of hours, I made this:

I've absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it. And that's okay.

In the words of that one guy: aw yeah. It's all coming together.

Besides quite a nice desktop background, I've also made some progress on the actual game mechanics. I'm not sure exactly how much I'll have time to implement, so I won't go into too much detail here, but like last time, I'm focusing more on style rather than substance.

It's starting to look like I'm in for a hectic finish. The good news is that I've implemented looking around the main hub with a control scheme reminiscent of the one from FNaF4. The bad news is that the actual gameplay mechanics are barely started, to say nothing of the audio.

I squeezed in one last environment in Blender - this is for the puzzle rooms, where you'll... well, solve puzzles.

I'm going to submit a little early, as I've worked myself into a corner somewhat. Having pre-rendered graphics carries a certain risk with it: there's a lot of effort needed if you need to make a fundamental change, such as changing the layout of a room. The fact that I modelled the environments first, then tried to make a game around them, came back to bite me a bit. However, it still works as a proof of concept for exploring a pre-rendered environment like this, so in that regard, I'm satisfied with it.

You can play it here.

Here's a little work-in-progress update. I've got as far as figuring out the basic gameplay of "shrink down, grow up", so now I'll have to figure out how to make that work as part of a larger level.

Mostly internal changes so far, but the core mechanic is pretty much there. Now to just build the rest of the game in the remaining 12 hours!

My entry to the Ludum Dare 48 compo is up, and you can play it here!

After quarter of an hour's brainstorming, here's what I've come up with: you play as an inspector on a cargo ship, which is laden with the results of a recent harvest. There's evidence that someone attempted to tamper with the ship while it was in flight, so you need to figure out if they successfully poisoned the food, and if so, who the perpetrator and intended target is.

Sounds like it'll be quite similar to Finding the Lamb, my entry to LD43.

What's a guy to do when he has an ambitious scope and tight deadline?

Why, start modelling spaceships in Blender, of course.

The "whodunnit" aspect of my game is in place! The neat part about making games like this is that you don't actually need any assets - the entire game can be played using a printout. For instance:

I think twelve farms might be too many, though.

I've drawn a little inspiration from the descriptions in the original Elite to add some (slightly silly) flavour text.

It's getting there! I think I'll have a working prototype with 24 hours to spare.

With a little less than 24 hours to go, I have a barebones prototype. First thing tomorrow I'll be running around my house with a Tascam for some sound effects.

(P.S. I hope pre-made lens flare effects don't fall afoul of the "make everything yourself" rule...)

A couple of playtesters have discovered a bug in my game which I am completely unable to reproduce or fathom. It might just be easier to say "don't play the Linux build, it's haunted".

Apart from that, The Harvest Inspector is up!

https://johngabrieluk.itch.io/the-harvest-inspector