Together In Thousands is a lot of firsts for me; first game jam, first time using LWJGL, first of my games that actually has an ending (sort of).

Description – Use drops of fluid to guide your bacterial colony toward total domination of the petri dish. Each fluid represents a different attribute that will boost the ability of your colony. Together In Thousands (currently) features four individual levels and six fluid types.

Here are some gifs of the first level.

I used the following programs/libraries;

Eclipse/Java

LWJGL, Slick-Util

JarSplice

GIMP

You can play and rate my entry here.

This was a great experience. I really enjoy the positive, supportive atmosphere of the LD. It is awesome to see a lot of good feedback on a game, and it is fun to see what other developers with similar time constraints are able to produce. Count me in on the next LD!

I’m going to participate again. I hope to perform better than last time, not talking about rankings.

I learned about these obstacles the hard way:

Know the software you are working with.
-I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my textures were blurred.
Add an in-game tutorial/help screen.
-No one reads the game page description.
Save time for assets.
-Hours and hours balancing mechanics = no sound.

Moreover, I apologize for the lag in Together In Thousands. Apparently it is frowned upon to call
new Random().nextInt(#)
hundreds of times every update.

This time around I’m going to try the Compo. I will be using the following tools:
Eclipse/Java with the libraries
– LWJGL 2
– Slick-Util
– Ridhvl (my own starter/template library)
GIMP
Caustic/Bfxr
Jarsplice
Github

Good luck to all, and may everyone have time to polish!

I did it again. I attempted to turn a real-world boring scenario into a “game”.

Its a game about the stock market. Simple as that. Well ‘that’ isn’t actually very simple, it turns out. There were a lot of complaints about the game being too complicated. As I was designing the game I felt like I was adding far more instructions and tutorial elements than last time, but I guess it still wasn’t enough. Lessons learned for the next Ludum Dare.

This time around I was able to get a basic game done much faster, thanks to my custom library. I spent the last day polishing what I thought to be lacking – sound, art, bugs, etc. I added a ton of corporations, and actually spent a decent amount of time on the interface and visuals.

Because of this the game had no major bugs, or at least none that have been found yet.

I’m pretty proud of the game flow – you drag these little digital cards that can hold ‘stock’, placing them on different parts of the interface to buy/sell. I also managed to get some sound effects that wouldn’t interrupt game play. All in all it worked out well, and I’m happy with the product.

This time I did not have an FTC tournament in the middle of development, therefore I was able to do the compo.

Corrugated Fidelity

Congrats to everyone who finished their game! I’m really impressed/intimidated by the jam side this year. It is unreal how much can be added to a game in so little time by so few people. Again, great work everyone! Here’s to LD33!

I think I’m going to cry. Seattle why…

D’: