DETOUR meaning, of course, my Ludum Dare 53 entry :smile: Actually, my first ever Gamejam!

It's a small (you bet) puzzle about robot trying to deliver (you bet!) boxes and trying to keep his wires safe.

Finally participated in my first gamejam! "Delivery" was a generic theme, but I think I still managed to come up with an interesting concept, and even made 10+ unique levels for this game!

(gif is sped up x2 for convenience)

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/detour

I belive most of you lay out some ideas on paper first: levels, designs, math calculations. For me, these are one of the most adorable parts of game development (I still have on me my very first paper with code testing for first game from 10 years ago).

Would be very interesting to look at your sketches and chaotic calculations for this gamejam :D

Here are mine:

And here is the finished product (sped up for convenience):

(You can play my little arcade puzzle DETOUR here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/detour )

When I was going into LD-53, my first ever gamejam, I didn't know exactly what I would get out of it. Will it be new Godot skills? Fun from brainstorming ideas? Excitement from being completely in the flow for three days? Playing other peoples' games and finding hidden gems?

Well, it turns out that yes, all above, but there was one more, experience-defining aspect: overwhelming amount of positive and constructive feedback! After the first day, when everybody needed to play and comment others games, my game was also played and commented. And this was actually the first time I had my real game being played and reviewed by so many strangers. And, oh boy, it was so much fun! Serotonin level went through the roof! It's hard to explain this, but probably I don't even need to explain: I guess you all already know this and at least partially come for this feeling.

Also, I got a big reassurement of my skill at creating interesting mechanics and designing good levels. It's somehow 10 times more impactful to hear this from complete strangers than from friends.

For me, it is worthy to participate in future Ludum Dare-s even for this feeling of euphoria alone.

Here is our thanks for all those who already played DETOUR, and at the same time our in-game end card! We had no time to colour it properly, but it still has its own charm this way. :smile:

P.S. You can still play DETOUR, our little mixture of puzzle and arcade game, and it looks a bit like this:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/detour

Thank god we had 3 days for completing the game, there is no way we could be proud to ship the game at day-2-state :laughing:

Day 1, no graphics, no delivery, just glitchy (trust me) rope physics and level designs "on paper":

Day 2, we already have some of the logic behind enemies, robot can deliver boxes, levels start to form:

Day 3, all sprites and necessary logic for moving enemies/restarting/progressing come together:

P.S. Sorry everybody who had seen this game on forum a couple of times already, I promise there is only one post left: technical one, about math behind the rope behaviour.

You can play DETOUR here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/detour

Hello! As last idea for a post about our puzzle-game DETOUR, I wanted to make an overview of how I implemented rope physics (or should I say "wire physics"?)

What do we want? - We want to draw a line between the player and the charging station, and this line to update on player's movement. - When this line touches pillar, we want to "bend" the line around the corner, adding a new turning point for the line.  - Repeat for each corner we meet. - Also, if we start to "unwind" the wire, detach from the pillar when necessary.

example from our final build:

So, how do we implement it?

One way to do this is use some physics engine: pillars are collidable objects, rope is a chain of collidable objects, they collide with each other. This method was scrapped early on because of one big reason: physics is wonky, rope will wiggle around, glitch at corners, and in general behave not 100% predictable. Not what we want for a puzzle game.

So we choose the "nerdy" way: maths. It actually turned out to be easier than I expected, but still required lots of steps to be implemented. I'll try to explain step by step. I am using Godot and its internal objects like Line2D and Area2D, but the concept should work for any game engine (or even extrapolated to no engine at all, if needed).

1) For visuals, I use Line2D. In its primitive form it's just a set of lines connecting your points in order.

2) Points are stored in an array somewhere in code. First point is always charger (which is immovable), last point is always player (so on player's movement we update last point's position and redraw the line).

3) Also, on player's movement we trigger a special "update detection" function. For each pair of points (at first it's just 2 points in line), we add a rectangular CollisionShape to the Area2D detection of the line, with the length of distance between lines and the width of the line (more or less). It looks something like this:

It’s arguably the only use of build-in “physics”, but in our case it’s just for detecting intersections between rectangles, which technically could also be done manually by calculating intersection of two rectangle’s edges :)

4) Add small collision rectangles to each of the 4 corners in each pillar. When some of the corners detects an intersection with one of the line’s collider, it sends its position to the line. Line adds a new point before the last one, basically splitting the last edge in two new edges (not forgetting to add a new collider for newly emerged edge). Corner remembers which two parts of wire it is already touching, so we don’t create new points for them. The result already looks promising:

There is only one caveat: we can’t unwind the rope for now. For that, we’ll need more math!

5) How do we check if we should be still touching the rope? The secret is just to compare angles! Let’s assume that line between player and second to last point is angled at Y degrees to the horizon, and second to last + third to last points form an X angle:

Now we can see that if Y>X, then player is still “around the corner” and the wire should still touch the corner. And if the player backtracks and Y becomes lesser than X, then we should “unsnap” from the corner by deleting the second to last point. Sounds good? Let’s test:

They got us in the first half, not gonna lie.

But we missed just one last calculation:

6) If we wrap around the corner “counterclockwise” (in comparison to “clockwise in step 5”), we should actually wait for Y to become greater than X, because everything is mirrored. There is an easy fix: when our line collides with the corner, we also check which side from the edge is the corner situated. It’s actually also just a math comparison between two angles:

We store this side alongside line’s points and use it to determine whether we should use “>” or “<” in step 5.

Well, seems like that's it! How does it look?

Awesome, it works now!

---

Of course, this is a generalisation of the whole idea. I had to implement some “usual game hacks” to make it work as expected: - Corner’s point is a bit outside corner’s collider - I needed some “small negative delta angle” in unsnapping function so I don’t unsnap immediately after snapping, - Comparison between angles behaves funnily at +-180 degrees

Also, this logic has limitations. I can’t have moving blocks (but should be easy enough to implement, just moving points inside line and more angle comparisons). Also I tried to do a maze level and failed miserably because line touches dozens of corners at the same time (and I was too lazy to fix that for only one level):

What is the moral of the story? Idk, maybe that some complex looking ideas can become simple enough if you can destructure them into simple steps.

If you liked this post (I genuinely don’t know if this was an interesting read), please leave a like and play our little rope-based arcade-puzzle DETOUR :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/detour

I've always adored (from a distance) gamejams as a place where lots of cool and innovative games are born. But I didn't dig too much into it, and was surprised that lots of the titles that came from jams most of the time did not even score that good.

This time I joined LD53 as my first jam, and of course after getting some encouraging comments like "you should make a full release out of this" I got into thinking - is my game idea worth continuing working on?..

So. What is a "marker" for you? Is it getting a top-10-ish place in the end? Not being able to stop thinking about enhancing jam build? Encouraging comments? Just having free time and nothing else to do?

(No specific reason, just had some free time)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjsqsLrGS78

But we already got ~100 votes, so better go and play some games in the danger zone :smile:

Everybody is writing a postmortem, and so do I.

Also, hey, Overall: 25th and Fun: 19th. I would say pretty cool for my first jam :)

Also, Innovation was something I was aiming for with this game, and I am very glad that I got top-10. I have SOOO MANY more mechanics in mind, and there is so much to improve in every aspect of the game, that I think I decided: I'll make a full game out of it!

If you by chance played this game and want to stay updated for full release, probably best place is my dev-twitter, second best place is my itch.io page

If you missed DETOUR, my game looks and plays kinda like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjsqsLrGS78

Also my first track that made past drafts and into the public.

Also first time I tried to incorporate my personal feelings and experience in a game (struggles of moving furniture in small apartments).

Also first time I made some gameplay-based jokes :)

I love gamejams for experiments like these!

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/feng-shui-struggles

During brainstorm had this idea, that is super non-scientific, but still could be very dank: we play as a spaceship that wants to catch up with the expanding universe. Like, they learned that it is finite (limited), so let's reach the boundaries.

And you have to uprgade your ship, watch stars and galaxies flying by, upgrading your ship in an "incremental-game-like-cookie-clicker"-way, making it faster and faster, and at the end breaking some laws of the physics in a cool way, overshooting the speed of light or finding a wormhole or something: by some means reaching the universe and "breaking" its boundary in a cool final cutscene.

In the end I went for some other idea, but I would be super happy if there was anyone who made a game with such or similar base concept.

I would prefer 1 week and would totally understand 2, but 3? Seems too much... Maybe I am missing something?

P.S. I understand there is an "Extra" format now, that lasts 3 weeks, but afaik 3 weeks of voting vere even before this Extra category.

Hellow everyone! This was a nice jam, had a blast making game in solo and playing other's games.

This time I decided to go almost without any blogposts, but still got lots of reviews, thank you all!

So, as now the jam is over, I made a small post-jam update: - You asked, and I delivered: easier dragging! During gamejam I decided to imitate high friction between furniture and walls to reflect the real-life misery, but for long-term enjoyment of the game this is not necessary. - reworked a couple of hitboxes and sprites - remastered music! (made it less muddy)

For those of you who played this game -- I would love to hear about the dragging change.

For those of you who did not play -- enjoy the ride :)

Updated build is on itch.io.

Remember DETOUR, my puzzle game from previous Ludum Dare, about robot on a wire?

Well, I've been cooking a full game out of it the last several months.

10+ "worlds" with different mechanics, 100+ levels to wrap your head and wire around (haha, get it?), and my infinite love towards good puzzle mechanics and levels.

See you all in a month or two for a demo, and in half a year for the full release!

Wishlist the game on Steam!

And look at this gorgeous poster:

Much love <3

Nozomu

For the last 7-8 months, my team and I were working on a full release of our game DETOUR from LD53. And today we released first public demo on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666840/Robot_Detour/

The game is now much nicer in all aspects, has more mechanics, and even more to come!

It looks like this:

And like this:

Would be happy if you gave it a try and wishlisted :)

Steam link

Seeing Folklore losing in LD54 was sad, for me it sounded like a fresh limitation (setting-wise and not mechanic-wise, as usual)

Write that down is a tribute to older games where you needed to physically write some information down in order to progress (to analyze, to remember, to draw a scheme, etc.). Miss that in newer games a bit.

And Learn the rules - we just can't have too many games with knowledge-based progression!

Last year, I took part in Ludum Dare 53 as my first gamejam (with DETOUR which took 8th place in Innovation)

Since then, basically the world turned upside down for me: I opened a tiny game studio with my wife (https://nozomugames.com), we made 6-ish games in 2023 (4 of which were made on gamejams) and working on 2 more now, even participating in showcases with our games and talking to publishers!

And LD53 was what made me think that we can go bigger. Happy to hop onto the upcoming LD55. Hopefully many more gamejams to come!

"What, deckbuilder? For a gamejam? Are you insane?!"

Yes we are! And moreover - it was our first card game, and even first jam entry of such calibre.

We overscoped a bit and some edges are rough, but I hope it's still enjoyable to play, to look at and to listen to.

You can play it here

Our entry: "Burn with me"

Was much easier to draw on paper and than redraw in Affinity Designer.

And here are a couple of final creatures! I wonder, what are their abilities?..

...and our composer took it seriously and produced the coolest dark jazz track we could ever hope for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Le3muTZSE

I hope Angelo Badalamenti would be proud of us.