This is my first time joining Ludum Dare. I'm pretty excited!
Some tools I'll be using:Also, good luck to everyone! :grin:
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This was my first LD. It was pretty stressful. At first it was going pretty smooth. But after that just pure stress. Nothing worked, I had so much to do, not much time.
But in the end I finished!
In Bribe or Die you’re a corrupted leader who is slowly losing power over time. To regain your power you need to make yourself great again. To do that you need to bribe creatures. But be aware. Some creatures only want your money and won’t bring you any power and will even drain it more. So be careful and bribe the right guys!
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Screenshot of the final game
Endless, Nameless is a simple 2D platformer. You play over and over one level due to a time tear in the void. When you finish a level you get thrown back in time, but it’s not that simple. The level changes and one terrible (that’s right) is added.
The more levels you finish the more terribles are added.
Every fifth level you can choose which terribles to disable with the coins you collected.
You have to collect 15 coins to be able to buy a time bandage which fixes the time tear.
You can play the game here: link-to-game.
Since the last Ludum Dare (my first one) I haven't been working on games as I have shifted my focus on other things. And also I am pretty bad at game design, or really anything creative, so I didn't want to work on games by myself as they would turn out terribly in the end, if I wouldn't abandon the project first.
I haven't been much excited for this one and that may be the cause it started so terribly and without energy. Ludum Dare 40 wasn't on a vacation, we had school, but at least it was weekend so I was able to work most of the time.
I woke up at 9 am and the first thing I did was open the Ludum Dare website to check the time. After seeing what the theme was I immediately thought "crap". The theme was "the more you have, the worse it gets". It was my least favourite theme and I lost all confidence I had. No idea came to my mind, I was scared.
I let it go for now. I should first wake up properly, wash my face, get something to eat and then get into the proper mindset.
After a nice breakfast I sat down in front of my computer hoping I would come up with some sort of idea, at least something that it is good enough for a game. I came up with two ideas in a span of an hour. They were boring and not something I wanted to make. The next thing I did was what I alaways do, open Discord and complain to others. To my rescue came Snowy. He didn't participate in LD because he had a lot of studying to do, but he gave me an excellent idea for a game. The moment I read the idea I got excited. Finally something that made me happy about this jam.
The idea was that it was a simple platformer where you replay a level over and over again. Every time you finish the level you get a "terrible" added. I didn't have time to make a lot of them but these are the ones that got in the game: slower speed, inverted gravity, black and white screen, spikes, patroling enemy, falling lava lamps, zoomed in camera, smaller jump (but you get a double jump), broken controls, a wall that block one way to the exit.
I got started working on placeholder assets and first time got to use Unity's new tile system. I expected more from it but it's still quite new and I haven't checked all of its features yet.
The game's idea kind of reminded me an awesome game for Android "That Level Again" so I got the inspiration for level design from it. The level wasn't (and still isn't) polished enough, but it was enough for now.
I knew I was going for a pixel art style from the beginning since that's what I can do the best. Didn't even want to think about making a game in 3D. I spent a lot of time on the graphics, and it was tedious to make different sprites for different tile variations. And that's where I wasted a lot of my time as later I switched to a "vectorized" style and I had to draw all the variations again.
First started with pixel art
Ended with this
So far I had decent graphics, but that was all I had. So I started working on a character controller. I needed to make something more customizable as I needed to adjust controller's parameters easily for the terribles. I didn't write it from the scratch, I used a Unity tutorial for reference, since I don't really know how to make one by myself and to feel nice.
Next, I added the first terrible called "FTH Gamer", it switched the controls to F, T and H buttons. It was the easiest to implement and it was mostly just to see how I would go about implementing other terribles.
I always have a tendency to shift my focus from things. I was working on writing an elegant way to handle terribles, which turned out terribly (get it? 😉), and I suddenly got an urge to work on the main menu. My first plan was not to have a lot of words in the game, and I also wanted to make the cat (player) speak in forms of speech bubbles, but it would only meow. I settled on a simple menu with the game's title, the main character and a button saying "MEOW" which was the start button.
And that wraps up the first day.
I went back to working on the "terrible system" and I got it working pretty fast. It added a random terrible each time you finished a level.
One or two terribles obviously weren't enough so I started working on the reversed gravity terrible. Even though the character controller was easily adjusted for this to work I had weird issues where the player wouldn't move when the gravity was reversed. After a lot of time tinkering with it I found the solution. Of course it was something obvious, the player wasn't conisdered grounded with the reverse gravity. It was an easy fix and it worked like a charm.
The whole day I spent on adding terribles, a way to notify the user which terrible he got, some basic music which was there just for the sake of having it, a shop where you could disable upgrades for coins and a small ending, to reward the player in some way. I was rishing because it felt like I didn't have enough time to finish for the compo. I thought I will most likely need to submit for the jam instead. I finished off everything I could and submitted in the last minutes (at least last minutes for me). I felt happy and releaved. It was wonderful.
Someone on a Discord server (server invite) said he played it and everything was broken. I was devastated, seemed like time froze, I was scared. There were all kinds of problems: player getting stuck, collisions weren't working, crashes, freezes, terribles not working. I had to fix the game next day and submit for the jam.
Third day, a day I hadn't anticipated I'll be working on. It was a school day so I didn't have much time to work on it, but all I could think of in school is about my game and it's broken state.
Immediately I came home I powered my computer on and got to work. Most of the problems were easily fixable and I was able to fix all bugs quickly.
I was submitting for the jam so I added some more content in the "extra" time I got.
I published the game, playtested it and gave it to a couple of people. They were having fun playing it and it was all worth it in the end. All the struggle and the stress.
All in all this Ludum Dare was pretty fun. I had fun making the game and people liked it.
We liked the idea for the game so we are now working on it outside of LD.
However, there are things I want to do differently next time:
Use git
Get the main mechanics of the game working before doing anything else
Carefully plan out so I don't end up wasting time
Actually playtest
Don't make game changing changes last minute
Get up earlier so I have more time
Don't make stuff I'm not sure I can implement
Don't start polishing if I don't have a working game 😂
Hello everyone! :D
Ludum Dare 41 will be my third time I'm participating (in a row, also). Last Ludum Dare was kind of a mess for me since I had to go for the jam because I found stupid game breaking bugs. Hopefully this time everything goes smoothly (more or less).
Here are some of the tools I'll be using (basically the same as the last time):
I'll record everything with OBS as I did the previous 2 times and gonna patch it all up with Premiere.
And here's a simple wallpaper (as I made one for the last 2 times also):
https://i.imgur.com/C4BMFYl.png
Run N’ Cook is a run n’ gun plus cooking game mash-up. A famous person has come to the city and you, the master chef, have been task with cooking his favourite meal. But he’s demanding, asking you to get all the ingredients by your hand (he doesn't trust supermarkets).
You use a potato gun to defeat food monsters so you can collect all necessary ingredients to make spaghetti (but only on Mondays).
I woke up to see that the theme "Combine 2 Incompatible Genres" had been chosen. And of course, as tradition, this theme sucks! Can you combine any two themes that may seem out of the ordinary? What counts as 2 incompatible genres? Does that mean that every game will be bad (game play wise) because they're incompatible genres? But I just started brainstorming to get an idea fast and start working on the actual game. So I Googled for a game genre generator and the first result I got was: Run N' Gun + Cooking and I started working with that.
This was my first time using Unity on Linux (and making a game in general) so it was a challenge if I could get by using software I'm not used to (Gimp, Krita, struggling with Bosca Ceoil). And Unity worked really great ( :clap: :clap: ).
So I started working on the chef and character controller. The chef is of course a stereotypical fat guy waring a chef's hat (I really love how he turned out). But I'm not artist, so the animations look really funky (his legs are basically broken). And I never used Krita so learning how to animate took a really long time. Note for myself in the future: don't use new software for game jams.
After that I started working on the potato gun. Which was really easy to do. I decided to make the potatoes projectile-like and persistent (meaning they won't despawn). Also, they physically interact with other objects (such as enemy drops) which I really like, except that if you spam the potato gun you can push all the drops to the edge of the map).
I started working on some enemies, enemy drops and inventory / recipe system. The inventory UI is pretty confusing. You have two tabs. One for the objectives and one for the inventory. But it doesn't really look like a tabbed UI and many people didn't even know there was an inventory.
Not much progress has been made the second day. I mostly just finished off stuff I started the day before and improved. Ah yes, I also made some music! I was struggling with setting up Bosca Ceoil on Linux but I got it to work. Only after making a bit of music I encountered project breaking bugs, so I moved to Windows to make music. Note to myself in the future: don't use untested software in a game jam.
In the end, the game turned out pretty bad. This was my worst LD entry. The game is boring, has very little running, has very little cooking, but a lot of sitting around and spamming the left mouse button. But I was so stressed at the end that I just didn't want to work on it anymore so I just rushed it and uploaded. Note for myself in the future: focus on game design and game play more!
Well that's pretty much all I had to say. This game jam has left me feeling pretty sour, mostly because the theme sucked, yet again, but I guess that a bad theme is a part of Ludum Dare now. I'm not quite sure if I will be doing it the next time, we'll see!
Thanks for reading and good luck on your jam entries! :smile: