I've participated in Global Game Jams and 1GAMs, but this is going to be the first time in Ludum Dare. Most probably will be using Unity and perhaps Aseprite? We'll see. Good luck everyone!

So this was my first Ludum Dare and first attempt at 3D game. Yesterday I managed to publish my game for compo late at night and went to sleep right away. Today I just got back from work and will dive into reviewing other's games. :grin: If you have some free time please review my game, I appreciate it a lot! :slight_smile: Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/westwood-hills-hospital.

Overview

Westwood Hills Hospital is a short 3D adventure in an abandoned hospital. Best experienced playing full screen and with headphones. The goal of the game was to create an unsettling atmosphere. You decide whether it succeeded. :smiley:

Hey guys. I just wanted to share my joy with you: my game has been played by 5 different YouTubers. I added the game play video in my game's Ludum Dare page over here: >>Ludum Dare page<< or in YouTube playlist over here: >>YouTube link<<

Check it out! :slight_smile:

I present to you "RPG Shop", a fantasy shop keeping simulator.

Please check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rpg-shop

Now, let's play some games.

(a photo of me at the end of the jam)

................

Hi everyone.

So the last Ludum Dare was great. Personally it was the best out of all three last Ludum Dares that I've participated in. I've enjoyed making my game, I've enjoyed playing other's game and most of all I've enjoyed watching others play my game.

There's just something great about seeing other people have fun playing something that you created and put so much effort in. People seemed to genuinely enjoy it and that reflected on the score. The game took the 16th place overall of which I'm so incredibly happy about. Of course there was A LOT of feedback on things that could be improved. And that is yet another great thing about Ludum Dare and its community!

Since the game was so well received I've felt the push to work on it and make it into something more than a 48 hour prototype. And now, nearing the Ludum Dare 42 I'd like to announce that the game is done and that I've just published it on Itchio. I'm very happy with how it turned out! Here are some visuals to get the idea. :)

Good luck on Ludum Dare 42, everyone!

If you'd like to check out the game, you can get it over here: https://lawrence-laz.itch.io/rpg-shop

Original Ludum Dare page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rpg-shop

Best Ludum Dare so far! I was incredibly lucky to score 1st place in a Fun category, and pretty good scores in all the other categories as well. Had a great time making the game and watching others play it. Here are the final results:

Past results

This was my 4th Ludum Dare. And here is how my past results compare to the current ones.

LD39 - Westwood Hills Hospital

First Ludum Dare was also the first time I made a 3d game. I went for a creepy/horrorish game since the theme was "Running out of power" and I got an idea that the player is at an abandoned hospital and his mobile phone is running out of battery life. Nothing innovative, I know. And the scores reflected that. But! I scored 4th in the Mood category, so I was happy that I succeeded at creating a good atmosphere.

It seemed like people enjoyed playing it, so I tried developing it post-jam. I never got to the final version... Maybe some day!

LD40 - Imbalanced

I didn't like that my first Ludum Dare results were so scattered between the categories. While Mood rating was pretty good, the game wasn't as fun and Overall rating was pretty low. So I decided not to leave any categories behind and do a little bit of work for the each one.

The theme was "The more you have, the worse it is". The result was a species simulation game, where you have to control population of plants, rabbits and wolves so as all species would stay alive for as long as possible. As you can see from the score graph above, I succeeded at not letting any category fall behind (almost all of them were rated similarly) and the highest rated one one being Innovation at 112th place. However, the ratings overall were pretty low and I didn't do any post-jam development.

LD41 - RPG Shop

Try harding to get good scores in all categories didn't paid off the last LD, so I this time I had to do something differently. I made a shop keeping simulator with bad physics (in a funny way) crossed with a story based adventure and called it "RPG Shop". I decided to go with the gut feeling and throughout the development didn't think about how to get better scores in what categories. I just tried to make a funny little game with many fun characters one change at a time. And I think it worked! I got pretty good scores: overall 16th, humor 20th, mood 14th.

I was happy with the way people accepted the game and so I decided to work on this post-jam. This was the first Ludum Dare game that I worked until full version and released it on itch.io. Check it out if it sounds like something you would enjoy playing.

LD42 - SWORD1

And here we are now. For Ludum Dare 42 I made a 2d aim and click fighting game. This time I just wanted to have fun while making a game and decided to put most of my effort into polishing the "game feel" and balancing the difficulty and level progression. The game in its core is pretty simple: it's just hitting things with your sword until they die or fall off the platform. I had the core mechanics in first 6 hours (it looked like a gif below).

And I spent the rest 42 hours playing these levels over and over again and eliminating every little thing that I found not fun until the experience was smooth enough. I'm very happy that players noticed that and that scores reflected the same. Here are some gifs of the final game.

If you haven't played it yet, you can try it here: https://lawrence-laz.itch.io/sword1

Let me know what you think. :slight_smile: I still haven't decided on whether to continue development of this game post-jam.

If you read all of my ramblings then kudos to you for the patience and hope to see you in the Ludum Dare #43!

Here's a strange idea that I'd like too see tested in practice: themes in an image format.

Imagine that instead of giving 3 lines of text as a suggestion to LD theme you would have to upload 3 images. I bet that would make Theme Slaughter Round a bit less stale. :smile:

Now that we have only two LDs per year the stress on the theme being good is even higher!

Let's be unique! Let's be different! Let's be interesting!

This LD was the personal best in overall! Super happy, had lots of fun. Thank you everyone who played my game and thank you every single one of you who made and submitted a game yourself for continuously inspiring me!

These are my Ludum Dare 44 results:

Past Results

I've been participating in every Ludum Dare since the 39th one. I'm not going to discuss all of them here (I have another post about it here) but here's a GIF summarizing the past results.

Current Status

There are many places to improve. Previously I've been working on improving the game feel, polish and overall playability of the game. This time I've chosen to focus on Audio. Instead of going the usual road of generative sounds/melodies (which is perfectly fine btw!) I decided to start learning an instrument and spent some time in Audacity for sound editing. Overall, I think it paid off! Of course I'm still very much on an amateur level. But! I was super happy of being able to produce melodies and sounds for this game myself. This added more room for creative process and is something that I definitely plan on doing in the future. The effort somewhat showed in the results as well - the game was rated 15th in Audio (which is a lot higher than I expected and deserve).

Outlook on the Future

Although I will keep working on my audio skills, there is another category where I feel very weak. It also shows through all of my submissions. It is the Innovation. I don't have a definite plan of even any constructive ideas on how would one improve in this, but I guess it will all come down to training. So this is the category in my radar for the next Ludum Dare.

LD44 - Bakemono

As for the actual thing that I've created this time, here it is: an action (sometimes more of a chaos than action) filled bullet hell.

You can try it on Itch.io or my LD page of course.

See you in the next Ludum Dare! :slight_smile:

Did my part. See you at the theme slaughter. Make sure there are good themes! :seenoevil:

This Ludlum Dare will be special. Not only because it is the 48th one, but it is also the 10th and last compo for me. Feels like a birthday. 🥳

Good luck everyone and have fun!

Think you can fly better than this?

Then I need you!

Check out Space Dig: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/space-dig

Hey, some themes aren't so bad this time around!

Also, wouldn't the final round had already started with two days left to the start in previous Ludum Dares?

My compo entry is so difficult I barely reached the end myself:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/gate-keeper

If you manage to reach the final wave, please let me know!

So something very strange just happened to me. Unity crashed (nothing exceptional). Thought that worst that would happen is I would loose the scene which was currently open with unsaved changes. But after launching the Unity again I see that the project is Empty. COMPLETELY EMPTY.

Open up Visual Studio Code from the background - all files that I had open at a time are still preserved by VSCode, but they are marked as no longer existing:

Ofcourse I should have commited/pushed to git at this point, but I didn't... I'm used to Unity crashing and loosing progress of unsaved scene, but not the whole project...

Anyone had a smillar experience? Is there anything I should try? Unity recovery mechanism, or something?

We have a global leaderboard with some pretty good scores. :smirk:

:video_game: Play here