Still plenty to do, but it’s look pretty decent so far.

If you’re participating in the LD27 theme slaughter, you may be confused on when to choose slaughter or what a theme really is.  Here’s a pretty simple rule that you can use to make sense of it all.

If you could say the sentence “a major theme of this game is <instert theme suggestion>” and that sentence makes sense to you, then it’s a theme.  If not, send it straight to theme hell.

For example, you could say “a major theme of Super Metroid is solitude”.  Therefore, solitude might be a valid theme.  On the other hand, you wouldn’t say “a major theme of Super Metroid is space ship”.  That doesn’t make sense because “space ship” is not a theme. Themes are usually conceptual/abstract and rarely places or things.

Hope this helps… Happy hunting!

We’re going to be doing a bonus 3-in-1 stream for this LD.  Come stop by and say hi!

http://www.twitch.tv/teamguardian

Programming, art, and music all being created simultaneously on one stream.  Check us out

http://www.twitch.tv/teamguardian

We’ve got 3 people doing dev all at once on the same stream.  Come join us and say hi!

http://www.twitch.tv/teamguardian

Want to watch a bunch of fools try to continue making a game that’s way out of scope for another 24 hours?  Join us on our stream!

http://www.twitch.tv/teamguardian

So this is our very first jam entry into LD and it was an absolute blast! The net code was absolute hell to do from scratch and several people almost died but we did it! So come join and beat the hell out of eachother, throw some bombs and dragon punch some rocks to show your ULTIMATE DOMINANCE OVER THE EARTH.

Megapunch is a 16 player online brawler where the level structure changes and items randomize every 10 seconds! PREPARE YOURSELF!

PLAY IT NOW!

Programming- Nick Weihs (@NickWeihs)

Art – Ayden Polat (@16bitboss)

Audio – Chris Nash (@FMBigBoss)

This is my 3rd Ludum Dare, and the first time I’ve tried doing the solo competition.  I struggled a lot with this theme, but in the end I decided to make a game based on China’s one child policy.  I had a vision for the game which was probably out of scope since I’m not an artist and the art took way longer than I expected.  But who needs sleep when there’s games to be made!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=21927

Have Fun!

This contains the map editor/engine and base gameplay code to make 2-D platformer games.  It’s not really ready for prime time open source yet, there’s no documentation and there are a lot of bugs still, so I’d be weary of anyone using it, but if you’re really really really enterprising, you might figure it out.  It’s written mainly using XNA/Winforms so it will only work on Windows.  There is a monogame based backend for publishing to the OUYA as well as a PSV port.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/78aj0hts7sh60ie/Stormbrewer.zip

I also made a script to import everything into Unity.  This contains the sample project.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6t6hs6nav466e32/StormbrewerUnity.zip

Hello friends,

Join me for some Ludum Dare game rating.  Watch me play your game!

http://www.twitch.tv/rengowrath

Playing/rating more games on my twitch channel

Stop by, link your game, enjoy yourself!

http://www.twitch.tv/rengowrath

So I made “Animancer” for this LD and I’m pretty proud of the result.  It’s an action platformer where you summon woodland animals to help you fight against the robot menace.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=21927

Playthrough here: http://youtu.be/h5JT8bGcqKI

I think I learned a lot from my last game jam that I applied to this one. Namely that drawing in full color over the course of 48 hours when you have a pretty severe color-blindness is an exercise in futility. So I forwent the frustration this time and just made the entire game grey scale. After watching a pixel art stream by one of the makers of the game Crawl, I was inspired to do something much lower res than my last jam. It worked pretty well. Animating a run cycle when your legs are a single pixel wide makes things much more pleasant. Another thing that worked pretty well were the effects, of both the visual and sound variety. I did a couple of impact and explosion effects based on some ideas from 1Ship2ShipRedShiftBlueShift, which is another low res pixel art based game. The explosion technique is really easy to get right and something I would definitely not have come up with on my own. I wanted to have a classic SNES feel for the explosion sound effects, and I think it worked out by taking a recorded explosion sample, cutting it and speeding it up. The rest of the sound effects were also based off of real samples, and didn’t sound particularly good on their own, but with the addition of music and other sound effects they did their job just fine. The music is more dancy than anything I’ve ever done, but it turned out pretty good as well.

I still ran out of time though. I think somewhere around Saturday night, things started taking a lot longer than I expected. This meant not only a lack of sleep for that night, but it also bleed into the next day since at the end of the jam I only allotted myself about an hour and a half for level design. I didn’t get the chance to add some pretty important sound effects like hit reacts for the player and enemies. The hovering sound is pretty bad. Several of the animations were not tuned and had their default frame timings, so for example, the cat run cycle looks like it’s in slow motion. The environment art looks decent except for the foreground which is entirely composed of the same square black block everywhere in the game. I still haven’t managed to find the time to properly render out my characters. All of the robots are super flat looking like they were drawn in MSPaint (they weren’t). And then there’s the ever elusive screen shake and particle effects that I never seem to have the time to add in systems for.

All in all, I don’t think I learned as much as I did last time, but I think the end product is better. Next time I think I’m going to focus on making something more into the innovation category, and try to work on my pixel art shading.

This will be my 7th LD (I think)

Custom Engine : https://github.com/hamfirst/StormBrewerEngine Custom Pixel Art Tool: https://github.com/hamfirst/StormSprite Audacity FL Studio Visual Studio 2017