You can play and rate my jam entry here! (I'm sort of spoiling it in the article)

Well there it is! Several LDs after I first vowed to join, I finally got to work on my own compo project. My name is Kyrio, I make AI for strategy games as a day job and I've been devising game ideas and engine prototypes for a few years now. While I've long been interested in the making of games, I'm still quite new to game dev itself.

A Binding Contract stems from a concept I came up with in the week before LD44: solving puzzles by using the properties of random objects you find around a house. I think this is a great way to prepare for a jam, especially when, like me, you haven't prepared anything else: find the type of game you want to make, and hopefully you'll figure out a connection to the theme. And I did just that on Saturday morning: if the idea is to bind objects together, what if "life" was the glue that made two inanimate items work together? What if you could take the life off one mechanism and use it to build something else? Would that, uh... work on humans?

I had the connection, and a setting grim enough to fit your initial reaction to the theme. Exciting times! So, did everything go right? Nah. While I'm pretty proud of the presentation of my game, it is mostly just a prototype, highlighting the main mechanic rather than really letting you play with it. But there's a lot to learn here, even things that might seem obvious to most jammers.

Let's find some key lessons:

• Prepare! It was fun to go it alone and unprepared, but I lost valuable time either trying to do stuff I had never done before (music with Bosca Ceoil, which I eventually scrapped) or setting up my codebase. I wrote a bit of Lua code in the beginning as I wanted to use LÖVE, a framework I'm pretty fond of, but I soon fell back to Construct 2 to have a working prototype quickly ready. HTML5 is great when you want people to try your game.
• Design! I can't stress this enough. I had my idea, a plan, and after a relaxed start I knew I had to focus on assets. I'd draw furniture and figure out how to interact with it along the way, I thought; what a fun creative process! Don't do that. By the time I was implementing the gameplay, I realized I could only add a few interactions, and none of those I had thought about were intuitive or exciting enough. This almost made me quit.
• Don't, uh... polish that much? I don't know. I can't help myself, even when I'm running late on everything else. I knew I couldn't push the idea very far in a jam, but I wanted my entry to be a teaser of what the game could be. So of course I wouldn't cut the intro, but the UI took more time than I should've allowed. Ask my colleagues if I spend release weeks tweaking the CSS of our debug tools! (I do)

But there's a few good things too:

• Art. Limiting myself to the Game Boy palette and scale felt a bit tedious, but in hindsight I think it helped this pixel art novice focus, and the uniform style gives a nice quality boost. It was exciting to get positive feedback on that aspect!
• Taking decisions. Though I was planning to have more content than that, I'm happy to see I managed to limit the scope of the project as I saw the clock ticking. Mainly, I came up with the point-and-click system because I knew I couldn't spend more time on assets, let alone a walking character.
• Concept. I still like the idea, and especially the lore that appeared when I confronted it with the theme. I eventually stuck to my initial "house mess" setting and got rid of the LIFE meter, but I do regret it. I think there's a lot to do with the mechanic of stealing LIFE from something (or someone) in order to build something else, and a whole game world to imagine around that.

Eventually, I didn't feel like publishing what I had for the compo, so on the next day, I took a few "jam" hours after work to fix some issues and code the ending event. And thus came A Binding Contract, a prototype with a lot of polish and promise, at the expense of things to do in it. Releasing something feels very good, even after a few disappointments, and I'm positive it'll help for the next time. Thanks for reading!

Art from our game, by @notruche, @pekolio and @un-ornithorynque-dans-la-piscine

>> Check out our jam entry: The Glimmering Woods! <<

Hey! I'm Kyrio, a game AI programmer from France. This weekend, my artist friends and I made a topdown adventure game, and after a day of rest we're ready to test and rate your own entries! We'd also love to have your feedback on what is essentially our first game. While my teammates were busy making amazing pixel animations, I taught myself to use Godot, which has proven to be a great fit (and a wonderfully documented engine).

Though being the sole programmer meant I couldn't integrate all our content in time, I'm particularly happy about the pipelines I made for @notruche to help me with it – especially our programmable dialogue system. Overall, the game has turned out surprisingly bug-free... though I suspect our main character has something to do with it. I hope you enjoy the ride!

Highlight: Can you tell who owns the boat on the beach below the village? :sailboat:

Fact: If you're wondering how a particular feature was implemented in this game, the answer is probably coroutines. Can you ever have enough of them?

You can play and rate A Short Detour here, and we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Drive a townful of monsters to work and back in this relaxing game by our trio of French artists and developers. Everything was made during the jam except the bus sounds which we adapted from freely available BBC recordings. We hope you enjoy it in this stripped back, deadline-aware version, and make sure to tell us if you'd like to see more ☺️

We couldn't finish A Short Detour, and yet this small glimpse of a more complete game managed to win some of your hearts. Thank you for an awesome time, and for being the most welcoming community around ☺️

P.T. Bone-um's Fabulous Tightrope of Terror is finally complete with its humble new post-jam version! Rate it here ;)

The circus opens once again! Though we had full time jobs to go back to, we took advantage of those last two evenings to improve on everything that we couldn't get right in time for the deadline. That includes a host of gameplay improvements (jump buffering! coyote time! better hitboxes!), 100% fewer initial snakes :snake: that make you want to smash your keyboard, and most importantly all the spooky sound effects that were ready but we couldn't integrate in time. This is still the same game, but much more enjoyable, so I hope you'll appreciate this bonus version!

It's never been a better time to try out Tightrope of Terror, and we could use your feedback. Now that we're off the clock, we'll go rate a bunch of games too :slight_smile:

With this ominous piece of art by @helicule, I invite you to try our humble game Fur Steam Ahead! Due to work commitments I had zero time to try your games yet, but I already have a backlog. I hope you enjoy our little game, even with the sound effects missing (Wwise sucks!) :wink:

This is our little "ghost train cat racing game". We're working on a new version that includes the sound effects we produced during the jam, but everyone has been extra busy so it's not there yet. In the meantime, I did my best to play and rate games so we could at least hit the 20 ratings grail, but it's been tough. Any idea why some games manage to get a lot of ratings very quickly, regardless of the Smart score? Maybe social media presence, haha. In any case, if you like the art above, do give the game a try, I'd love to see more feedback! :slight_smile:

-> Our jam page

Long story short... after a number of setbacks, our belated post-jam version of Fur Steam Ahead! is here!

Give Fur Steam Ahead v1.2 a try and make a programmer happy!

Although it comes with a few improvements to the train speed and game flow, the real star is the sound effects and voicelines by @saad-memon and @nah. These were all made during the jam but you know sound designers, they have to have the most fancy software that will give the team's programmer (me) a share of headaches. Well, with Wwise successfully tamed by Nah and yours truly, this is the version that best reflects what we wanted to show you at the 72nd hour. Oh, and not to toot my own horn, but I do love this all new countdown animation, so I had to make it a GIF :wink:

Congrats again to all who participated! :steam_locomotive:

:joystick: You can check out our little strategy game here!

We've had a lot of ratings and some really great feedback on our game Flavors of Victory which mixes strategy with... well, cooking I suppose. So, to celebrate, here's the full background art from @gormand-a with parts you can't see in the game! It was drawn on paper and almost ruined by an apple juice spill.

This sepia harvest festival is making me all warm and fuzzy, don't you want to jump in and buy that pumpkin? :jackolantern:

The numbers

You might already know that LD46 was the biggest event in Ludum Dare history, with a whopping 4959 entries mostly attributed to the lockdowns in place in April 2020. In fact, that number dropped quite a bit in October and went back up in April 2021, when at least part of the world was staying at home again.

At any rate, the popularity of LD was at its highest during that time. In fact that's when I started participating regularly as well. However, the trend seems to have run its course, with low turnout for LD51 (2421 entries) and particularly the ongoing event (1601 entries).

Of course, LD52 had a few things working against it: the new January date which is still a novelty, a lack of communication both when it was announced and leading into the weekend (partly because Mike was sick), and probably some amount of holiday hangover. There were also far fewer theme suggestions than usual this time, which was a telltale sign.

Smaller LDs?

The turnout is now lower than before the pandemic and even a few years before that. Setting aside the January issues, I wonder if this shows some amount of burnout among regular participants? There is likely a number of people who joined almost every LD since 2020 and now need a little break. It's certainly true for me, as I skipped LD51 because the previous one had made me unusually tired.

I don't mind smaller events at all, in fact it's probably a little better for rankings if there are fewer games fighting for the same decimal. While I'm not the competitive type, the jam experience can be exhausting and it's certainly rewarding to get a sub-100 ranking in one category.

Anyway, I made this chart for myself and thought it might be of interest to others. What are your takeaways?

Hey everyone! We needed a few days to recover after the event, but we were really eager to show you a version of the game that had all the animations we cooked up during the jam. It's now available!

Doomsday Care is our modest jam entry made specifically for the Game Boy Advance. Yes, you read that right! But we provided a browser version based on emulation so that anyone can test it. It's like Tamagotchi with demons to summon instead of eggs to hatch.

Play and rate Fastigrades here! (there's a Web build ;))

If a trebuchet can launch a 90 kg projectile over 300 meters, how far will a very tiny cannon launch a 1 mm tardigrade?

I'm still going through my backlog of games to try, but I feel like most games are still struggling to hit 20 ratings. We certainly are! So if you think our tribute to Yetisports sounds fun, I'd love it if you could take a look! It's a very quick game to try.

Hey everyone! I feel like a lot of games are struggling to get ratings, and it doesn't help that the number of participants has been steadily declining. If our game, a blend of GBC era pixel art and Ken Sugimori-inspired watercolor, interests you, I'd love for you to check it out!

Play and rate Fighters Keepers!

This bell seems almost out of time...

We were really happy with the feedback on our game Fighters Keepers, where a young squirrel must defend a village from bandits using... any item he can fit in his mouth. We're only seven days away from the final rankings so I'm taking this opportunity to show it to a few more eyes! It was particularly tough to finish on the programming side, haha. See all of you next week!

:arrow_right: Play and rate Fighters Keepers!

Any resemblance to a game series that got a new entry this week is fortuitous! :wink: