Hello everybody,

I’m really excited because it’s my first time jammin’ :] Let’s have fun!

In this few days I spent playing games, I’ve seen a lot of geometric-shaped and character-switching approaches to the theme. I’m not saying they’re bad games at all, it’s just there is too much of that stuff. If you are seekinng for something different, then have a look at this list I’ve crafted with games that implement “shapeshift” in some novel way. But surely there are many more!  Please help me to expand this list in the comments section!

ORIKAMI, by Mnemusyne. Much more than just another origami game.

Unbecoming, by tomlum. A short story that probably all of us have in common.

Trump: Political Shapeshifter, by Brice. Your political reflection of the day.

Shadow of the Red Hand, by andyman404. A brilliant graphic work.

And of course, I’ll spam this post with my game link, Cloud Sculptor 😛 It falls right into this category, too.

If you like clouds and want another take on them, you can try dröm, by Danny Gallagher.

This is my second jam here at Ludum Dare 😛

This time I worked together with Nuria Pico, who made all graphics and sound.

Our game is a very short story about a room where all of us lived once. You can play it right here.

the worse it is? We want to introduce our LD40 entry: a game about women hair. For sure is something that many people consider undesirable...

Give it a try!

We've been working these days on a few bugfixes for our game, so we're happy to present the post-jam version of The more hair you have...

CHANGELOG: - Fix typo on the ending text - Fix sound bug - Tweak a couple of gameplay parameters

Moreover, now that the most important bugs are fixed, we've released the source code under GPLv3 license, and assets under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Also, we'd like to thank you so much for the awesome feedback received :heart: Play and enjoy.

It's been a while since the play & rate time started, and now we'd like to share with you some insights about our entry "The more hair you have..." If you feel like playing this short HTML5 game, you can do it here before we start with spoilers :D

Let's begin talking about the theme. At first we were working with many straightforward interpretations of the theme, but suddenly we got to this one about women's hair and we found it really interesting. It's still a literal interpretation of the more - the worse, but we could alter it in-game in order to negate its original meaning. So it was something quite simple, but with a twist. Also, we like games with some content about social issues, and thought that this was a great opportunity.

We chose a flat visual style. Something functional to make sure that every player gets it, but at the same time pleasing for the eye. Main character's design was made very carefully: we wanted an average girl, neither skinny nor fat, neither tall nor short, and definitely not hyper-sexualized. You may argue that she is a white girl, and that's not representative of course, but we made it for a reason: we needed high contrast between skin and hair. As body hair is core in our game, it must be easily seen. Anyway, we know that maybe there was a better way to solve this issue. On the other hand, for secondary characters we have 3 skin tones that spawn randomly in-game.

These people are the ones who shout at the girl because of her body hair. As you can see, they don't have neither eyes nor hands, and their heads and bodies are square-shaped. That's because we wanted to depict them as closed-mind characters with very poor emotional and social features. Moreover, you'll notice that some guys have got chest hair: that's true hipocrisy, folks ;)

The tweezers are a key element in the game. The player is forced to use them, as they're the only element that can be directly controlled. Moreover, the game's visual language tells the player to use them in a particular way, that is, to pluck the girl's hair. However, the truth is that the player can choose not to follow the game's instructions and "pluck off" all those jerks instead of her hair.

The core idea of the game is to get over the common prejudices related to women's hair. It is not a call to stop plucking your hair, but rather a statement to say that even when the rules are so clear, they can always be questioned, and eventually defeated.

Although the gameplay is not very complex, there are several possible playthroughs depending on what kind of player you are. If you target the jerks as soon as they appear, you'll get to the ending soon. But if your first response is to pluck her hair, you'll notice a shadow that is slowly covering the girl's body. The shadow gets darker whenever there is someone shouting at the girl. If you remove her hair completely and all the jerks leave, the shadow will stop darkening, but it will only get brighter if you actively use the tweezers against them. With this feature we wanted to represent the girl's self-esteem, that gets damaged not by her body, but by other people's judgements.

If you keep plucking, eventually the help tip will appear on the screen in order to give you some clues about the ultimate goal of the game. Below you can see the help text on the left and the ending text on the right.

We're not going to talk very much about programming because the game is pretty simple in that aspect. Just say that it was made with the awesome Phaser Engine, and that the source code is available at github.

Well, that's all! Thanks for reading, and don't forget to play and comment if you have not already done so!

Friendly reminder that video games are a form of expression for many of us. I know many games are set in fictional worlds and they help us escape from reality, but many others are also a way to share our feelings and tell stories about our lives and personal experience.

In this context of pandemic crisis, it's totally understandable that we see lots of theme suggestions that talk about viruses and quarantine. And for sure we'll see lots of entries about these topics no matter what the final theme is.

So please stop raging against covid-19 related themes and :pray:PLEASE:pray: do not flag them as if they were offensive. If we flag every theme we dislike, the flag button becomes meaningless.

After all, most games are a mixture of fiction, reality and various abstractions, so nobody's forced to make a literal interpretation of the theme.

That said, it's true that there are many shitty (and duplicated) themes, but it's our task to find the hidden gems between them.

Have a great jam! Cheers! :purple_heart:

We'd like to introduce our jam entry, Crab It Alive!

Give it a try at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/crab-it-alive

We had a great time making this game and we want to share it with you. So we are preparing a postmortem to explain how we crafted the game's graphics, sound and code.

:crab: Play and have fun! :crab:

We're happy to announce a post-jam version of our entry Crab It Alive! New version includes fixes for some of the issues you reported after playing our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/crab-it-alive

Changelog: * Add toggle fullscreen option. * Fix bug when grabbing trash at the bottom of the screen.

We’ve also released the source code under GPLv3 license, and all the assets under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. You can find a link to the source code in our entry page.

Finally we’d like to thank all of you that are playing and commenting games. Ludum Dare community is awesome :yellow_heart:

Today we'd like you to take a closer look at the art of our entry Crab It Alive!. Actually it was Nuria Pico on her own who did the 100% of the work! She's a graphic designer at Viravira Estudio.

We've released all these fantastic assets under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, so feel free to use any of them in your projects: https://github.com/Minimuino/LD46

Nuria chose a flat visual style and different color palettes for each part of the game: blue shades to create an underwater illusion, grey shades for the fishing boats and a wide range of colors for the living creatures of the sea. She wanted to present sea life as diverse and colorful as opposed to the grey and boring human machines. Also, we wanted to add more animation and movement to both characters and the environment but we ran out of time.

Music and sound effects were made with very little knowledge on that subject: Nuria had never composed a song before, we used LMMS for the first time in our lives, and Audacity with little previous experience. Anyway, we're proud of the result, especially of the electricity sound: it's made of two recordings of Nuria making tssssssshhhhhhhhhtttststsssshhhhhh with her mouth :smile:

The game programming part was made with Godot 3.2, a free (as in freedom) game engine that works like a charm and I encourage you all to try. It has many features that make development of 2D games easy and fun (can be used for 3D as well but I don't have experience with it). Below you can see a preview of the final result:

That's all for now, if you like what you see go check out our game and share your thoughts with us!

:crab: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/crab-it-alive :crab: