My entry, Oversize Load, is done. Play it here.

This will be my 22nd Ludum Dare. My toolset will probably be (depending on if I decide to go with a 3D game or a 2D game):

• Engine: libGDX or UE4
• IDE: Intellij or MSVC
• Language: Java or C++
• Graphics: GIMP, Blender
• Sound: Audacity, Abundant Music, Bfxr

Good luck everyone!

My Battle Royale/Racing game, which will probably be called "Last Car Standing" is nearly done. Here's a GIF of me narrowly avoiding the blue wall of doom:

My entry, "Last Car Standing", a sort of Battle Royale/Racing hybrid, is done!

Play/rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/last-car-standing

This will be my 23rd LD48. My toolset will depend on if I'm making a 3D game or a 2D game:

• Engine: libGDX or UE4
• IDE: IntelliJ or Visual Studio
• Graphics: GIMP, Blender
• Sound: Bfxr, Audacity, Timidity, Abundant Music

If I use UE4, I might use my ue4util. Good luck everyone!

Overminers Inc. is coming along pretty well. Hopefully this is pretty close to the final graphics:

This will be my 24th LD. Depending on the theme, I might make a 2D game or a 3D game, and my toolset will depend on that:

• Engine: libGDX or UE4
• IDE: IntelliJ or Visual Studio
• Graphics: GIMP, Blender
• Sound: Bfxr, Audacity, Timidity, Abundant Music

If I use UE4, I might use my ue4util. Good luck everyone!

This will be my 25th LD. My toolset will depend on if I'm making a 3D game or not:

• Engine: libGDX or Unreal Engine 4
• IDE: IntelliJ or Visual Studio
• Graphics: Blender, GIMP
• Sound: bfxr, Audacity
• Music: Abundant Music, Timidity

I might also use my experimental libGDX multiplayer framework SMAF or my Unreal Engine 4 code generator.

Good luck everyone!

I'm in! This will be my 27th Ludum Dare. My toolkit:

• Engine: Godot/UE4/libGDX
• IDE: Visual Studio Code/Visual Studio/IntelliJ
• Graphics: GIMP, Blender
• Sound: Audacity, Timidity, Abundant Music

I may also end up using a couple of my utility libraries: * https://github.com/Quadtree/godotcslib * https://github.com/Quadtree/ue4util

Good luck everyone!

I've finished and submitted my entry, Space Station Express:

Play it here, and be sure to use 64-Bit Chrome if you play the HTML5 version.

This is a post mortem for my LD46 entry, Space Station Express.

The Idea

Usually when the theme is announced I jot down a whole list of ideas, and then choose the one I like the most. For whatever reason, this theme only really made me think of one idea: transporting some live cargo in a spaceship. It seems like there are more ideas you could come up with from this theme, but that was the one I thought of. I decided to name it Space Station Express in a sort of vague Futurama reference.

What Went Well

• I was using a new game engine for this one, Godot. Previously I've usually used UE4 for 3D stuff and libGDX for 2D stuff. I made a nearly complete game before the LD started to get some practice with Godot, and it mostly paid off in that I didn't have to deal with too many surprises (though, see below 🤦‍♂️).
• I'm pretty happy with the idea. I think it mostly hit the sweet spot of simple enough for new players but complex enough to allow for some varied gameplay.
• Most of the graphics. In particular, I'm pretty happy with how the background turned out.
• I used my library of helpful Godot C# functions, which came in handy. I even added a few new ones that I created during the LD.

What Did Not Go Well

• For this project, I decided to go with Godot's most experimental flow, HTML5+Mono. This was only added in 3.2 and it's still very new and experimental. I'd used it before, so I thought I knew all the pitfalls, but as it turned out I did not. In particular, it seems that garbage collection doesn't work at all, which means that unless you can somehow have zero allocations, you will inevitably overflow the available memory leading to a crash. I tried various fixes, and at one point I thought the issue only affected Chrome, but as it turned out, it affects all browsers. I've opened a bug with the developers, but it looks like it's not going to be easy to fix, unfortunately.
• Sound levelling was another problem. For some reason, all sounds were shifted too high but I failed to notice this during testing. To help not blow out people's ears, I've reduced the sound level by 25 decibels.
• Some people mentioned that they couldn't figure out how much health they had. This confused me until I realized that I have a 1600 pixel tall monitor, and I'd foolishly set the window height to 1080 pixels. With the window decorations, this meant that for someone with a 1080p screen some parts of the UI would likely be pushed off the screen. This was why people were saying they couldn't figure out how much health they had. I fixed this by making the game fullscreen by default.
• It's fairly minor, but once again I forgot to allow for people with AZERTY keyboards. Nobody actually mentioned it this time, but I still should have remembered.
• Not directly related to the game, but it looks like I started judging other people's games too late. I'm only at 15 ratings even though I've rated 57 other games.

Anyway, if you want to try Space Station Express go here. I'd really appreciate a few more ratings.

Some people have reported crashes on the Windows build of my game Space Station Express, so I've rebuilt it with Godot 3.2.1 instead of 3.2 in the hopes that it'll fix it. It doesn't change the way the game plays at all, but hopefully it's more stable.

I only need maybe 1-2 more ratings to place, so if you haven't done so (or you tried and it crashed :slight_frown:), try it here.

I'm in! This will be my 28th LD.

My toolset:

• Engine: Babylon.js
• Language: TypeScript
• IDE: IntelliJ IDEA
• Graphics: GIMP, Blender
• Sound: Audacity, Timidity, LMMS, Abundant Music

Good luck everyone! I'll also probably use this base code.

I've finished and uploaded my entry, Station 8. Not the most inspired use of the theme, but I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out. Play it here.

This will be my 29th LD. My toolset:

• Framework: Babylon.js
• Language: TypeScript
• Graphics: Blender, GIMP
• Sound: Audacity, Leshy SFMaker, Abundant Music
• IDE: Visual Studio Code

Good luck everyone!

My entry, Cloud 57, is done: I do wish I'd had a little more time to balance the difficulty, but all told I think it came out pretty well. Play it here.

Ideas

As always in the LD, I jotted down a few ideas I had after seeing the theme. Like pretty much everyone I think my first ideas revolved around digging:

• A roguelite sort of like Spelunky, a sort of sidescroller with RPG elements that took place underground.
• An underground colony sim. colony sims are one of my favorite genres, and I've always wanted to make one for the LD.

In the end, I abandoned idea #1 as it seemed too obvious, and an underground strategy game was too similar to my previous entry Underminers Inc.

My third idea was some kind of space game involving a cloud... or asteroid field... or something. Originally I imagined a FTL-like real-time with pause type game, but in the end I decided it wouldn't be all that fun. From there it was a simple matter of paring down my ideas (my original idea had jump points and other complex stuff).

Development

What Went Well

I'm fairly happy with how the gameplay turned out. The different ways the enemies interact is interesting (in my opinion, anyway).

In the past I've used all sorts of strategies for generating music for my LD games. In every game prior to LD47 I used the result of a music generator. In LD47 I directly composed the music on my keyboard. For this LD, I used a combination of generated music using Abundant Music and custom made segments in LMMS, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think I'll do this again next time.

Babylon.js graphics worked out quite well, with few surprises, although it certainly helped that I'd used it in LD47. I did notice that performance in Chrome was much better than Firefox. I'm not completely sure why. In the past it's seemed like they're pretty comparable.

What Didn't Go Well

I probably should have been a little more careful in testing. In the end I fixed most of the critical bugs, but some I mostly found through chance: * Due to the collision issues mentioned below, shots would simply damage the nearest hostile object when they hit anything. This led to a funny bug where the shots could hit eachother, damaging the boss. This made the boss pretty easy to beat. * There was a bug where old ships from your previous lives would hang around, and when you pressed "fire missile" these "ghost ships" would all launch as well, causing a huge storm of missiles. This was caused by me not disconnecting the input callbacks when a player ship was destroyed. * There was a bug where the boss would despawn if you ran away immediately, causing an instant win.

Babylon.js is primarily a graphics library so its physics support can be a little iffy. The collision callback system is a bit hard to use, so I had to add some hacks that sort of caused one of the bugs I mention below.

It also supports collision filtering, but I wasn't able to get it to work properly. In the end I simply adopted a very simple approach where shots would always spawn outside things to prevent the possibility of self-collision, and couldn't collide with other shots.

Finally, there's a bug where imported glTF files don't have their transformations applied correctly. In the end the fix here was pretty easy: I just applied the transformations in Blender.

I spent quite awhile tuning the difficulty, but this is always hard to do in a solo event like this. For me, this is basically how the difficulty levels work:

• Easy - So trivial I can beat it without having to dodge.
• Medium - Trivial as long as I remember to dodge.
• Hard - Hard enough that I have to stay on my toes, but I can beat it on the first try.
• Impossible - I can beat it but only after a bunch of tries.

However, it sounds like this is one of those cases where I got sort of good at it due to hours of testing, so the difficulties are too high. I'll just have to remember this for next time.

Conclusion

That's about it for Cloud 57. Play it here.

I'm in! This will be my 30th Ludum Dare. My toolset:

• Engine: Godot
• Language: C#
• IDE: Visual Studio Code
• Graphics: GIMP, Blender
• Sound: Leshy SFMaker, Abundant Music, LMMS, Timidity

Also, if anyone somehow remembers the troubles I had with my LD46 entry, the mentioned bug is now fixed and I've finally uploaded a seemingly working HTML5 build.

I'll also probably use my Godot function library. Good luck everyone!

My fighting game where you try to knock over your unstable opponent is coming along nicely:

My game "Rolling Tower Clash" is done and submitted.

Play it here.