Trying the jam out. This should be fun :grinning:

Schedule: * Day 1: Panic over theme * Buy snacks while thinking about theme * Do a few paper drafts * Draw a few sketches * Day 2: Program like mad * Draw stuff * Day 3: Finishing touches * Write some music * Test it out heaps * Prepare for submission * Collapse in bed & sleep

Sounds like a plan! :grinning:

Tools: * Programming: PHP & Javascript. Depending on the design I may use other libraries, or other code I've written before. * IDE: I have my own web server & prefer to develop directly on that, using my own customised Ace.js-based setup. * Art: Pen. Paper. I can't draw to save my life, but I want to try & learn. Also, Photoshop. * Music: Anvil Studio, Synthfont and Audacity are my go-tos

Themes look like a mixed bag ... can't wait for that 10 minute countdown to finish!

The plan is for something like a social party game, played online via the browser. The "small world" in my idea is Earth. Players are aliens trying to conquer Earth. The mechanics are like this: * Players can pick a secret role before the game, giving them particular powers or alternate victory conditions * Aliens take turns to move, one planet at a time * Alternatively your alien UFO could gather resources at that planet * Some planets are trading posts, allowing you to buy stuff there * Some planets are surrounded by space debris, which aliens may need weapons to clear * Aliens can also attempt to use weapons on other aliens, or buy shields - if an alien "dies", they lose everything and respawn at their home planet * To win, players must move to Earth with a super weapon * If Earth gets suspicious about aliens trying to conquer them, Earth will build a defence shield within a few turns, at which point everyone loses - so aliens will want to avoid moving past Earth early

I suck at drawing. I spent the past few hours drawing some concept art of alien characters for my game:

http://imgur.com/a/cLGtV

Each character has a unique ability of some sort. Right, now to start drawing my map. :smile:

So far I have created... * A rough game idea * A basic menu system * Some vague (and terrible) concept art * One piece of music (which sounds post-gamey) * A couple of click sound effects

External stuff I've used so far: * JQuery * Howler.js * Google Fonts

Not a terrible start but I really need to get a move on! Some of the other stuff here looks fantastic already! :grinning: I'm hoping I have enough time at the end to do some voice stuff.

Hey, even if I don't finish, at least I've had fun. I spent way too long prototyping various maps. Here's what I have right now:

You're an alien species, moving between planets along the dotted lines, collecting resources in the yellow planets, buying stuff in the green planets, and hoping to be the first blow up the little blue planet in the middle there (unless you play as the Sramopt faction, who win if Earth is not destroyed :grinning:). Along the way you can hinder other players by blocking certain planets or attacking them.

Progress so far today: * Colored in my alien concept art - and gave them names because I'm weird. * Made a loading screen * Designed & constructed the "board" for the game to be played on * Put up some skeleton code to manage resources and player turns / positions * Started drawing some cards and UI art ie game counters, icons Working on the second music track right now. Then scanning more drawings. So many mechanics to do still! But I think I have the fundamentals down so that's good.

I know all you compo people are pretty much all finished already, so as a jam person I'm really impressed. My game's not even close to finished! Wish me luck as always!

Behold my programmer art! You'll see tons of this stuff in the game. That's your spaceship right there! :grinning:

Seriously though, resource gathering works, and I'm ironing out bugs in trading. The little ship token is also lots of fun to just move around randomly for a few minutes between the planets. I've also implemented the line-of-sight system, drawn a ton of icons, and recorded more sound effects which I can't wait to share.

This alien teenage badass, called Stok, has some extra line of sight :astonished:

Next steps: when trading is finished, I'll need to implement the win conditions, and a few more player bonuses. Then I get to code the AI! Which I've already coded stuff like pathing for so I should get it done. Then add in random events. Finally, the combat system is deadly simple but I suppose I'll need to code that too.

What I may or may not have time for: music, multiplayer, tutorial (I've been putting up tooltips everywhere though so maybe that'll help any stuck people). Also I'm not sure I'll get all the card-art done. There's quite a few cards. I've written like one music piece so maybe that's something.

Anyway, good luck to all you compo folks!

Got my jam submission to a point where you can play the game, win and potentially lose. Battles are working, trading is working, gathering is working - all the basic elements of strategy. All the cards (of which there are hundreds) are seemingly working properly, too. Which is a big milestone for me to finish!

I'm pretty sure I won't get card art done. My art score was never going to be impressive anyway. But with a bit of rushing I should be able to get a few music tracks in there!

My focus right now is on developing my AI which currently does very little. It should be at least making an attempt at destroying the earth, killing the player etc.

I also doubt I'll get multiplayer playable in time, but I can always hope!

Overall that was heaps of fun! This was my first solo LD (I did it as part of a team once some years ago) and boy was it rewarding! :grinning: Some of the other games on here look amazing too.

You can play the game here: http://www.edeb8.com/LD38/index.php And the LD page for it is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/conquer-earth-1 (The LD page includes some basic instructions for the game in case it's just totally confusing)

tl;dr making this was great; I'd love feedback :smiley:

General points: * I'm glad I did the jam and not the compo for my first try. It gave me more flexibility to take the big initial idea I had and just roll with it. * I'd probably want to emphasize the card aspect a little more if I was designing this from scratch. I think it could be more obvious how cards work and where they're going. * I have so much to be proud of! Yes I'm self critical (aren't we all?) but I learnt a ton and can hardly believe what I've achieved in this time.

Things that went well: * I largely stuck with my familiar tools and I think this made my work much faster. Being a web game was good too, hopefully lots of people will be able to play it. * Making the sound effects was a highlight. I mean, I wish I had a better one for when you buy something, but other than that, it was heaps of fun. * Doing it on my own as opposed to in a team was interesting. I think I coped well overall, although next time having a team would sure be nice! * Drawing the art on paper first helped me a LOT! I couldn't have done it without that support. * Given that the music was rushed in a couple of hours I think I did a really good job. I'd have liked more time to write some more in-game music, of which there is currently about 7 minutes, but I feel like what's there is great. * Somehow I don't think the final version is very buggy. This surprises me a lot. I've only spotted a couple remaining and they're not especially game-breaking.

Things to work on: * If I ever do this again, I'd want to plan my time a little more. I definitely felt like I could have used more. * To extend the thought, I spent a whole day writing AI code for this and the AI still doesn't play very intelligently. Heck I'm happy the AI can pose any challenge at all. * Designing the map also took a long time. Probably would have been faster if I had some kind of visual layout tool. Heck it took me two hours to fix a bug in the rendering of the dashed lines between the planets. * Originally the game was supposed to focus more on multiplayer anyway. In the end I had to completely drop my plans for multiplayer because the AI took so long. I also dropped one character and a bunch of faction/card ideas. * I was damn proud of the art that I drew because I'm REALLY not a good artist, but in all honesty for a game of this type I could probably have spent less time on that too. * Also I'll be super interested in my feedback for this! I have no idea how people are going to take it.

I'm VERY strongly considering making an expanded version of this game with features like balance improvements, improved AI, artwork for cards, random events, unlockable factions, more types of cards/counters (I really wanted hidden mines, outposts etc), graphical effects (like visually showing Earth explode), a tutorial, other maps...

... and most importantly, MULTIPLAYER! This game was DESIGNED to be a multiplayer game from the start but it didn't work out! I almost want to do this out of frustration alone haha. You'll see what I mean if you play the game. Anyway I'll see how my reviews go, it would kinda defeat the purpose if I was the only one interested in playing this multiplayer haha.

Before I think too much about that though, I'd say I need a break and a few days of just playing some of the other awesome games people have made! :wink:

So, here's what I got from you guys on my first little jam game. * Mood: #279 (top 16%). This makes sense. I didn't spend a ton of time checking the mood after all. The game had a nice board-game vibe though which I think some people appreciated. * Humor: #530 (top 29%). Well, to be fair 100% of my humor was trying to come up with silly names for cards. I'm not a super funny person, so I absolutely think judges were right on this. * Audio: #66 (top 4%). Aww, that's disappointing, I was hoping to do a bit better on this one. One or two people mentioned fitting the music better to my theme and there was one sound effect I never got around to making. Still though my goal was to be in the top-50 of all jam games, and I do think my game deserves to be there. * Graphics: #528 (top 29%). This one, on the other hand, I agree with. I know I have a long way to go with making graphics! I'm learning and I'm far from perfect at the moment. * Theme: #598 (top 33%). I'm a bit puzzled by this one. Not 100% sure why my score is so low... will need to reflect more on that. Maybe there was too much freedom of movement? * Innovation: #130 (top 8%). Cool! This is an ok result for me, and something I always try to build on. * Fun: #175 (top 10%). A lack of a tutorial probably hurt me a lot here. I want to improve on this and I can definitely see what was missing, which is always nice because that's how you learn. * Overall: #154 (top 9%). This is better than the average of the rest of my scores so I'm glad I made an impression!

Some thoughts: * Even though this was a jam entry, I did everything without a team. Maybe if I had a team I'd have scored higher on a few of these points. For example I spent a lot of time making graphics that sucked anyway. Seems like all the best jam entries were made by teams! * So nice to have meaningful constructive feedback on a lot of these points! Some reviewers really put in a lot of effort! * I am still going ahead with making an awesome version of the game that I hope to release soon. * And I hope to do this all again later!

Thanks everyone for an AMAZING experience!

Alright, my second and final LD for 2017! Woo hoo!

Some of my goals this time around: 1. Include a tutorial. Make the first five minutes of playtime really accessible for time-short reviewers. 2. Use what I learnt last time about AI. If I can I'd like to program difficulty levels and multiplayer. 3. Avoid forcing the player to click a lot in order to accomplish core game tasks. A design issue I came up against. 4. And have at least as much depth as my previous submission! I want depth in browser games to be my trademark ;)

I'm still useless at art but hey, I'll do my best as always. Maybe this time I'll finally make it to the top 50 in audio! I got so close last time.

Anyway, I'm really hyped for this and am looking forward to it.

PS Keen to team up with me? I did it solo last time but I'd also enjoy working with a group. Join me here: https://crowdforge.io/jams/ludumdare/teams/666

I thought I was being kinda harsh. Maybe not given some of the other comments here lol. Looking forward to seeing which themes make it through to the next stage!

On team news, I now have a small number of newer participants who might work with me. I still will likely do the bulk of the work but they all seem like they could support in some way. This will be exciting, because it's my first time leading a team for LD. Many years ago I participated in a team, and I did LD38 solo. If anyone has advice for me I'd love to hear it! :)

So, I figured I'd do one of these as well on my game, Contamination. It still needs a few more ratings so if you're looking for a quick web game to test, check it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/contamination

What went well - This was my first time leading a team for a jam, and we didn't fall apart. There were some excellent contributions by all team members. - I think we set the tone of the setting very well between the art, music and other features of the game. In particular, working with a pixel artist allowed me to address some of my own shortcomings in art. - Setting up a generic map generation tool allowed us to quickly prototype the game on a variety of different maps and allowed the creation of our tutorial. - The tutorial seemed to work well, and the high score tables promote some ongoing competition.

What to improve on - How much each member was invested in the team varied a great deal. Some interruptions are to be expected but in general, I still did most of the work. Which is weird when you consider we were a team of 7. I don't really know what can be done about this though, since we're not a real-life team, just online. - ... which was a bit disheartening because I don't actually really like the genre of game we ended up making. It's not my cup of tea so I had to rely on my team a lot for feedback, which there was little of during development. The design changed a few times so that didn't help. At some stage we were going to do skills instead of construction, for example, but it really didn't seem to work with the real-time aspect when I tested it. Probably the issue was just me not understanding the concept. - I had planned more story-driven campaigns beyond the tutorial. That didn't happen because of time pressure. I'd also tried to create a cooler menu background and multiplayer features. For next time I might start with some more boilerplate code for these things.

Compared to my last LD, 38, I think as a team we accomplished much better graphics and overall mood than I could alone. But I don't know how successfully we managed the genre, and my time management could still be better. Still on the whole it was an enjoyable experience - leading an LD team is now something I can check off as having done, and I'm proud of that.

I forgot to say that I'm in, but anyway, this theme sure is interesting!

I'm planning to make a school simulator with action-packed wizard duels simulated by card game mechanics. So if you ever wanted to build your own Hogwarts, my game will be awesome, I hope.

So far I have a map you can scroll and a loadscreen!

I know it's not much but it's a start.

A while ago I posted saying I couldn't believe I'd spent 4 hours just making a simple isometric map and load-screen.

Now we're like 9 hours into the competition and I've only just managed to add more textures and water to the map.

Also I made my load screen prettier and wrote some music. I've never actually WebGL written code this complicated without a framework before so I'm proud of myself, even though I know I have a lot to do.

Progress is still slow for me... so I drew some trees to pass the time. I always get really low marks for graphics but I must be channeling Bob Ross because I'm happy with these trees.

I may not currently have a game but I do have a map editor. Gosh I've spent forever working on this map.

So yeah, I've spent most of the last 12 hours drawing buttons, making sound effects, optimizing my code so the pathfinder doesn't lag everything, and other not-so-fun stuff. Here's to hoping I get better than 528th in graphics since that's my goal... currently I'm drawing little characters to fill up the world.

I'm about 99% sure I'm not going to finish. I start all my LD projects from scratch but this time I've spent much longer than usual chasing down bugs (I've never done much with WebGL before), coupled with my greater-than-usual focus on getting the art right.

I'm sure nobody wants to play my unfinished game. However if I clean up the underlying code a bit I'd have an excellent isometric game engine. I think I'm more likely to get that done in time and then I could use it in future dares. Plus I'd have what I learnt from this one, which is a lot. A lot of my art will be reusable too. I'm proud of what I've done even if it's not fully a complete game.

On the other hand that would be the first time I've ever seriously started an LD and not finished. I can always keep trying to hack together a game for the finish line, I just know it won't do well and that it'll not be as useful to me. But at least it'll be a game.

Thoughts?