The overwhelming consensus is that Dark Moles is HARD (hence the name). We went into this as a team of two developers and one illustrator with little-to-no game development experience to speak of. Can’t say the finished product is “brilliant,” but for two-days worth of work (and some polishing up during lunch today) it’s not half-bad. Definitely looking forward to Ludum Dare #30!

Submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35875

Source: https://github.com/ninjascribble/LudumDare-29

What a blast! My team has been lucky enough to have started and completed two Ludum Dare jams this year, and you can bet we’ll be in for LD31.

Divided We Fail started off as a couple of different ideas all mashed together. When we saw the theme –“connected worlds”– we knew that we wanted to try controlling two characters at once. My first thought was something along the lines of The World Ends With You, where both characters required separate actions. That was going to be way too big for one weekend though, so we settled on an infinite runner instead.

The two stages are randomly generated and speed up as you go. When the robot collects a helicopter it spawns an angry bee in the little girl’s world. Conversely, when the little girl catches a butterfly, rockets come flying towards the robot. We wanted the worlds to feel truly connected, even though they’re so different. I think it worked out.

You’ll notice that the little girl has a watering can in her hand, and that the robot is looking downwards. Originally we’d had the idea that the girl would have to water flowers as she strolled along, while the robot would be busy shooting rockets at buildings. This meant stopping for a second to perform the action, and it really felt like it ruined the pace of an infinite runner. No time to update the sprites though, so there you go!

We got a lot of grief because our last entry was too hard, so hopefully this entry scaled it back enough. Either way, enjoy!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2014 at 10:13 pm and is filed under LD #30. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This is the fourth time we’ve participated in the game jam, and for two programmers with limited free time and no artistic merit, I can honestly say that I think we get better every time. Ludum Dare 34 introduced us to Tiled and EasyStar, and gave us the opportunity to use ES2015 with Phaser. I’m not going to say it’s the best game ever, but we’re spending less time on the boilerplate and more time on the interesting stuff, which is a coup in my eyes.

“Goblinheart” is an 8-bit inspired zelda-style dungeon crawler with a twist: Instead of a sword, your goblin hero is equipped with the POWER OF LOVE! Persuade enemies to join you and fight for your honor as you make your way through a labyrinthine dungeon for no apparent reason. That’s right, we didn’t quite get to the point of having an end game, but it was an awesome journey!

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=35875

In House of the Rising Sun, you play as a wizard who is responsible for keeping the sun aloft for as long as possible while hordes of vampires make life difficult. You are armed with your Tome of the Sun, a book that adds to the sun’s energy for as long as a powerful-enough wizard is reading it. Leave your room and the book shuts, letting the darkness slowly creep in. Let any vampires into your room and the sun sets more quickly. Do not go quietly into the night!

This game was built by a team of two, with a third who contributed sprites for the vampires and the book (opening and closing the book looks great, btw!). We used PhaserJS and Webpack to keep the dev process as seamless as possible.

Play the finished version here!

The Good

All of the graphics-are home-grown this time, which is a first for me and my team. This was also the first time I’ve had the chance to play around with WebGL shaders, which provides a setting sun as the game progresses.

The Bad

No major roadblocks this time, which is a refreshing change from past entries! I’m sure next time will be a disaster to make up for it 😛

The Ugly

The code base started off relatively clean, but eventually we gave into pragmatism. Magic numbers everywhere, lots of tight coupling… I’d hate to have to refactor this guy, but fortunately I’ll probably never have to! C’est la vie, there’s only so much time in a weekend!

I spent waaaay more time than I’d like to admit tweaking the hitbox for the wizard’s projectile attack. Future me should take note that the Arcade physics engine in PhaserJS does not allow you to rotate physics bodies.

Whew! This was a fun way to spend the weekend, but I am glad to be in submission mode now. Hope you all enjoy it, and be sure to leave some feedback on the submission page when you get a chance!

It's a Jam entry, but I've got work tomorrow and I need to stop messing with it so... Done! This is my 6th entry into the Jam, and my first using Unity 2d, which was a little different but definitely made some things much, much easier.

Play the WebGL version here: https://ninjascribble.github.io/LudumDare39/

Dauntless Run is a top-down shmup/endless runner mashup where you try to keep your speed up by collecting fuel cells while avoiding enemies. Hope you enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else managed to get done as soon as voting begins!