Well, I’m certainly in for my second LD. Probably using:

• Engine: Libgdx
• Graphics: PyxelEdit
• Sound/Music: Bfxr, Sunvox

I just finished my second game for this competition! Not for Ludum Dare in general, but for Ludum Dare 38. The idea we (@olf09 and I) had first seemed OK, but after 1.5 days of programming and creating graphics and music, we noticed a slight problem: The game wasn't fun to play at all, so we decided to stop.

Things we did wrong: * Not designing the game fully before starting * Planing very little time for the idea (after ~2h we wanted to start creating) * Creating a game that doesn't give the player many different actions, and that was not very challenging to play

I then went on to think of ideas I could create alone in the 24h I had left. I came up with my new game World Tetris and now even have some time left (I only spent about 7h making this game!).

Don't underestimate how much time you can save with every minute of planning and designing!

We are 3 noble knights (@fuxibut, @jakobusmade and me) from the southern land of Germanien, fighting to win the holy grail of Ludum Dare. We may not have horses (besides one guy pretending to be a horse with his coconuts) but at least we take our daily vitamins. We won't give up with just a scratch, but we will stand till our last limb has been cut off (maybe even after that).

So beware of the Knights of the Coconut! (unless you've got the Holy Handgrenade of Antioch)

This event started a bit rough for our team, we had the idea to make a game about surviving in a cold night by getting warmth from a campfire (seems like we weren't the only ones). We soon encountered the problem that none of us could draw that well and the unusual lighting (one light in the center and no sun) made it extremely hard to do shading for a 2D game.

After creating some assets we didn't like we decided to ditch all of them and commit to a "lowpoly" 2D artstyle.

This looked ok-ish (it reminded some of us of Southparks style) but ultimately didn't create the mood we were going for. Doing some simple lighting helped, but it still wasn't quite there.

Turns out you have to focus on what you can do best. In our case programming. We had the idea to implement shadows (our game is built from scratch, so there was no engine that implemented shadows for us) which turned out to be manageable for the type of scene we were going for. I think the results speak for themselves:

So in the end everything worked out and we managed to complete a moody and atmospheric game in 72h. You can play our game "Lonely fire" here.

Has anyone of you had a similar experience? I know there are many programmers participating that aren't to fond with art. What was your solution to that problem?

Echoes is both in the first and second round of theme voting. I guess that's a mistake, but the irony is overwhelming.