Squatchin’ is my first LD entry, and the first game I’ve made that has even approached a finished state.

It’s pretty far short of my original plans, but I had a lot of fun making it, and I learned a lot. Mostly how much I still have to learn 😛 I’ll definitely be jamming again in December.

You can check it and vote for Squatchin’ here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56477

I’m looking forward to playing a bunch of fun games tomorrow!

This my second time participating in the Ludum Dare jam, and this time I thought I’d put together a quick post-mortem about what I learned, how I improved over last time, and where I can still do better. You can play and rate Charge! here.

I was actually quite pleased with the choice of theme. There were some of the others that I felt I had more original or innovative ideas for, or ideas that were closer to my heart, but I did have a solid idea for “Two Button Controls” that I felt I could implement competently, so I wasted no time in getting stuck in. This time I was prepared in advance with a basic title screen and SFX and music architecture.

I initially was going to go for a low-poly 3D art style (but still with gameplay on a 2D plane). After adding a couple of layers of background terrain I decided that I didn’t want that sterile look, and I didn’t want to tackle character modelling in Blender, so I switched to a pixel art style. Initially I went with a more standard colour palette for this, but soon switched it up again with a palette selected by a web-design tool.

Next I added the “monk” enemy as a brown box placeholder sprite, and the player as a red box, and implemented the basic gameplay. Aside from some struggles with the animation system (as usual for me), this was really quite simple. I described the gameplay as 2D above, but that was a lie, it’s actually 1D – everything is based on the x position of various objects.

With the basics down I turned to the music and SFX, because a major criticism of my last game was that it was too quiet and had no music. I’d messed around with Bosca Ceoil a few times in the weeks prior to the jam. I don’t know much about composing music, but enough to pick a common chord progression, make a few variations of it, and base everything else off of the chords. I wanted a sort of metal feel, and I think I spent longer trying to pick a distorted guitar instrument that I liked than I did on composing the tune. I added a “bagpipe” instrument as the melody, because I read that the Vikings may have had such a thing. Finally I made a variation of the same tune with half the guitar chords and drumbeats removed and a more melodic instrument than the bagpipe, to use for the title screen. I picked some sounds from bfxr for all the things I would need.

After that it was all animations animations animations. I animated the second enemy type as I was creating it, rather than using placeholders, because by that point I had a good workflow down.

What went wrong

• The biggest disaster was when I went to prepare a release in the last hour of the jam, only to discover that my UI was not being scaled correctly when run full-screen. I scrambled to find a fix for this but couldn’t. I’ve actually seen the same problem in other games from the jam, so I think it is a Unity bug I upgraded the day before the jam, which was an obvious mistake.
• I thought the colour palette would make the game stand out and look more interesting, and I think it does to an extent, but I also think I stuck to it a little too religiously. I should have chosen one limited palette for the background elements, and another for the gameplay elements. As it is the gameplay elements blend in a bit too much, and there’s a few spots where details disappear completely.
• Some of the sounds are quite good, like the impact sound when an arrow hits your shield – very satisfying. Others are a bit grating, like the treasure collection sound. I wish I had had time to tone that down a bit. I would like to figure out a better way of doing sound effects in general actually.
• The art – I wish I had gone for a lower resolution. It was my first time attempting this kind of art, so I wasn’t sure where to start. I don’t think it’s as impressive as my last game.

What went right

• The animations. After some initial struggle with Mecanim it finally started to click for me. Most of the animations are only two frames, but they feel punchy and bouncy and convey what they’re supposed to. The run and idle animations are even in time with the music. That was accidental, but I love it
• The music. Nobody has commented on it either way, but nobody is complaining about my game being too quiet either. And they’re not complaining about it being annoying. To me that suggests that I made music that’s not amazing and awe-inspiring, but it compliments the gameplay and doesn’t get on people’s nerves. That’s a success in my book.
• The basic gameplay was really easy to implement, which left me lots of time for tweaking and polish. I didn’t have to bother with physics or colliders. I felt that my last game was clunky and awkward to control, but this one is responsive, and is more fun as a result.
• The frivolous elements. I think the gameplay stands on its own, but being so simple it could easily become boring. I think things like the praise and admonishments on death, and the random battlecries form a reward system on top of just getting further each time, and were much easier to implement than new gameplay elements.

Overall I’m pretty happy with my game. I got much closer to achieving what I set out to than I did last time, and I had a lot of fun. I will probably even improve on it a bit and release it – I think it would be good on mobile.

Please check out Charge! and rate it, I hope you enjoy.

Third Ludum Dare for me (previous entries Charge! and Squatchin’). I’m hoping this time around to be able to work on a 2D top-down shooter about robots, or space, or robots in space, Theme willing.

This jam I’ll probably be using:

• Unity
• Tilemancer, PyxelEdit, The Gimp
• Tiled, Tiled2Unity
• Blender, if my ideas end up leaning in a 3D direction
• Bfxr, Audacity
• Bosca Ceoil, or maybe GarageBand

I’ll be posting progress on twitter (@randomhuman) as soon as there’s anything interesting to see (or maybe before).

Good luck and good fun everybody!

(Click to play Write Only)

I’ve been really neglecting the ludumdare.com posts this time around – no “I’m in”, no “I’ve submitted”… But I did submit my game, “Write Only”, on time, and there is now even a post-jam version!

The game is a cover-based top-down 2.5D shooter about robots in the distant future who are fighting over a sacred artifact from their creators – a 3.5″ floppy disk.

Combat in progress

This style of combat is one I’ve been wanting to try out for a while, and would like to incorporate into a larger RPG. With many additions, of course – smarter enemies, grenades, melee combat, maybe some stealth mechanics… Any feedback or suggestions welcome! The main criticism so far is that it is too difficult, so in the post-jam version I toned down the enemy rates of fire and some other things, and introduced health pickups.

You can play and rate Write Only here. I look forward to playing your games!

Play and rate Mediator here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/mediator

I always have a lot of story-driven adventure-game type ideas for every jam. Usually, I wisely choose to ignore them and try something with much less art & writing required. This time, for some reason, I was not wise... but I didn't like any of the simpler ideas I had come up with for the theme, and somehow I convinced myself that I could pull this off in a very minimal fashion quickly, and expand on it later. I was wrong, and this is the first LD I've participated in that I did not complete to my satisfaction.

Still, I am happy with certain aspects of my game, and I learned some stuff.

Art

A few weeks before the jam I came across a suggestion on how to best use colours to create paintings with a unified feel. The suggestion was basically to choose one colour to be highly saturated, and form a backdrop and context, and have every other colour be more desaturated the further it was away from that colour on the colour wheel.

I didn't quite take that suggestion because I thought it might be too overpowering in a videogame to have the backdrop be highly saturated. But I did use the suggested approach to designing the palette, with a single colour-ramp (minty green) being massively more saturated than the others. I intended to use this for characters and interactable objects. I limited myself to 7 colour-ramps overall, and I think it works well to create a separation between the action and the background.

I think this might have been my first time doing a walking animation. I felt it was passable, but a little bit stiff. I'm not really sure how to improve it at this resolution, but I will be trying.

Music

I hadn't really intended to do anything special with the sound and music, but it was probably the area where I ended up learning the most.

I wanted something gloomy and tense for the music, and a 12-bar blues in a minor key seemed to work quite nicely without having to try a bunch of different chord progressions. After a few attempts at this that were either too dark or too upbeat and intrusive I hit on the version that made it into the game. It features low & high drones throughout, and a sparse melody of some of the "pad" instruments in Bosca Ceoil.

All of the instruments are heavily filtered, similar to the sweep pad pictured above. The "atmosphere" instrument I brought down the y axis of the filter as well. I don't really know what this means, technically, but I've found that it distorts the notes and makes them unpredictable. This instrument overlays the melody bars and produces a discordant and, I hope, disquieting effect.

Finally, I underlaid the whole song with two tracks of white noise - one solid and one broken - intended to be reminiscent of radio static. I don't think it quite achieves that, but I like the effect anyway.

Unfortunately I failed to export the tune as a perfect loop, and there is a significant click when it restarts in the game. I always struggle with this a bit with Bosca Ceoil because it doesn't include the reverb from the end of the song at the start of it. I generally fix this in Audacity and I thought I had the process down, but clearly something went wrong this time.

Sound

One big change from the usual for me was that I didn't do any of the sound effects in BFXR, and instead used Bosca Ceoil for them as well as the music. I just didn't really feel that BFXR's bleeps and bloops would be right for the type of game I was making this time.

It was tough to find the instruments I needed to create the effects that I wanted, but it was just a matter of trying things out and tweaking them until they sounded right. The footsteps, for example, were done with a really low "bagpipe" and a slightly higher "glockenspiel". I think they sound convincingly enough like footsteps on a wooden floor - not quite right for a spaceship maybe! I'm sure there are other music production tools that would do a better job, but I never seem to make much headway with anything else.

Out of Time

I realised quite early on Sunday that the game I'd chosen to make was not realistic for the jam. At that point I was still working on the basics of displaying text and dialogue choices, and although I had the music done and a main character designed, there was still the entire story to write with dialogues for at least two or three significant characters, and art for maybe six locations. That wasn't going to happen, but I decided to bring the introductory scene on the ship to as high a standard as I could and throw it upon #LDJAM's mercy.

For the next Ludum Dare I am going to make sure I have a framework in place for putting story/dialogue driven adventure games together quickly. They're not the only types of ideas I have, but they are a significant portion of them, and they are some of my favourites. I feel confident that if I was able to spend the whole weekend working on the art and story for something like this, I would be able to put together a complete experience.

Bring on #LDJAM 39!

Many thanks to everybody who played and rated Rattendorf over the last few weeks, and left us such kind words and valuable feedback. Our team's programmer (@NoAim91) has been hard at work adding new features to the game, so keep an eye on the itch.io page or our twitters (@randomhuman and @No_Aim91) for updates in the new year. Also check out our composer, oniwaka, on soundcloud if you want to keep track of what he's working on.

Congratulations of course to the winners and placers and everybody who took part, and many thanks to @pov, it has been a great experience as always and I'm already looking forward to Ludum Dare 41!

:heart:

This will be my 8th Ludum Dare I think. I may or may not have some assistance on the music side of things from @failpositive, but it will depend on how his weekend goes.

My goal this time around is to learn the Godot engine. I really like what I have seen of it so far. I hope to be able to make a twin-stick shooter or some other type of top-down action adventure game, theme willing. But if I can't think of something in that style to fit the theme then I will do something else.

Good luck everybody!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SULiHU5i3pU

I put together this timelapse of the art for my entry, Guerrilla Gardening. There's also a playthrough of the game at the end. I've been getting some great feedback and I'm looking forward to incorporating some of it, and some of my original overly ambitious ideas, into a post-jam version.

In the meantime, please play and rate Guerrilla Gardening here if you haven't already! Thanks so much if you've already done so! Also drop a link to your Mac/Web game in the comments and I will try to play it during the week.

I have made a start on the first of two post-jam updates to my game, Guerrilla Gardening. The first update will mostly just involve polishing the jam version based on the feedback I've received, though there will be some gameplay changes. The second update will be a bit more comprehensive, and take the game in a more story-driven, RPG-lite direction.

You can read more about my plans, and follow the development, on itch.io. I will also be posting about most major changes on my twitter. I hope to have the first update out at around the time the Ludum Dare results come out.

But if you're looking for games to rate for now, don't bother with mine. There are still over 50% of entries without enough ratings to qualify for results, so I encourage you to play some of those instead!

https://youtu.be/5vQTrTkmd14

The first post-jam update to Guerrilla Gardening is now available to play on itch.io!

I got a lot of great feedback from my fellow Ludumites, and I couldn't wait to polish up my entry and make it the best that it could be. This update includes:

• Succulent, bouncy strawberries!
• A new enemy type and improved enemy behaviour
• 3 difficulty levels to try
• New gritty, grimy, and animated, background art
• Clearer notification system to tell you when plants are thirsty or under attack
• Full controller support

...as well as too many other tweaks and fixes to recount!

I hope you enjoy the update - more will be coming in a few months time, including a new narrative focus for the game, deeper farming mechanics and a more expansive world to explore. You can follow the development on itch, on my twitter, or anywhere else linked from my website.

Thanks so much to everybody who played my game during the jam and gave such great feedback, and congratulations to everybody who took part. See you in August for LD42!

I've started working on a post-jam version of my game "People Poker". I want to both add some of the features that I didn't get to include, and respond to some of the feedback I've received, mainly that it is too hard and unclear what to do.

So far I've added several idle animations which were missing, which adds a lot of life to the game. I also have the NPCs turning to look at the player, and shouting advice and encouragement, a great suggestion that a commenter made.

To reduce the difficulty, I added a lot more cover, and also changed the tentacle behaviour so that it is possible to dodge them. I will probably remove cover and increase the speed and accuracy of the tentacles as the player progresses to create a difficulty curve.

It'll probably be a few days yet before I'm ready to release the update, but in the meantime you can play and rate the compo version here.

I put together a timelapse of the art for my game, "People Poker":

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

I put together a timelapse of the art for my game, Gophers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jPLMCfSE0w

Congratulations to everybody who took part in the jam! I look forward to playing lots of great games over the next few weeks!

Gophers is my entry, a short adventure game about maintaining a gopher network in a post-apocalyptic world.

The basic concept is one I've been kicking around for a while as a sort of casual RPG/survival game about maintaining computer networks on scavenged technology, so it came to mind immediately when I saw the theme ("Keep it alive").

I've been really interested lately in gopher and other low-overhead technologies, and what the internet would look like if the industries that sustain it collapsed. I'd previously envisioned a relatively cheerful solarpunk game about connecting distant sustainable communities, but I think it took on a much darker tone because of recent events.

Art

I did all the art in Pyxel Edit as usual. My goal was to keep everything abstract and as high-contrast and readable as possible while still allowing for a nice parallax cityscape. I started with a mock-up of the exterior scene, and then essentially flipped the background and foreground colours from that for the bunker scene. I only used 7 colours in the end.

I put together a timelapse of the art so you can see the whole process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jPLMCfSE0w

Code

The only reason why I considered this a viable idea was because I had previously developed a cutscene graph editor plugin for Godot. It was untested in any game but I thought it would give me enough of a leg up that I would have time for the art and writing.

So in effect, the "gopher network" in the game is actually a dialogue tree!

Actually using the editor in a game did reveal some issues with it, but nothing significant enough to prevent me from finishing - and now I have some ideas on what needs work before I use it for another game!

I also took some code from a previous game of mine for doing the menus and dealing with the settings. Every bit helps when you're entering the jam solo.

One thing that really came together for me in this jam was using coroutines to manage sequences of events. I've always struggled to wrap my head around them previously for some reason, and would clumsily hook up signal handlers for every step. Using the yield statement in Godot made handling interactions much easier and quicker to write.

python func _on_Terminal_clicked(walk_target, face_direction): _player.set_destination(walk_target) yield(_player, "arrived_at_destination") _player.face(face_direction) GameController.set_spawn_location("bunker", "terminal") GameController.set_spawn_direction("bunker", "right") FadeMask.fade_in() yield(FadeMask, "fade_in_complete") # Switch to the browser scene self.get_tree().change_scene("res://browser/Browser.tscn") FadeMask.fade_out() yield(FadeMask, "fade_out_complete")

Sound Effects

The most exciting part of working on this game, for me, was doing the sound effects. I bought a fancy mic a while back (a Røde NT-USB) to do foley SFX rather than my usual SFXR beeps and boops, but this was the first chance I've had to try it out.

For the Geiger counter sounds I ran my finger over the teeth of a comb. For the bunker door, I rubbed a hammer and a spanner together in various ways. For the dripping sound in the bunker, I just used an eyedropper to drip drops into a glass of water. The footsteps are real footsteps that I recorded, and the cloth sounds when you're walking around the exterior are me crinkling a vinyl jacket. It was a lot of fun to record all these and I don't think I was even being all that creative. I couldn't figure out how to do buzzing or flickering sounds for the electric light within the time I had though, unfortunately.

One big problem I encountered was that my apartment is apparently incredibly noisy, as am I. It was a windy day and the shutters on my window were banging constantly, my neighbours were going about their noisy lives, oblivious, and my body stubbornly refused to go without oxygen during the recordings. Noise reduction in Audacity helped a bit (make sure you record periods of "silence" to enable this), but there are definitely some extra environmental sounds in there. Thankfully I think they mostly just appear as mysterious underground reverb or get buried by other things. It's something I'm definitely going to have to think about for next time.

I did a bunch of post-processing in Audacity to pick the best bits out of the recordings, and make things sound better. I had to reduce the pitch on the bunker door sound to make it sound heavier, for example.

Music

I was so proud of the sound effects that I almost wasn't going to do any music, but I'm glad I did. I got to it in the last few hours of the jam, so I had to keep it very simple. It's mostly just the notes of a Dmin7 chord played in a few different arrangements on pad instruments, with some slow bass drums coming in and out. The title screen music layers a couple of different pads as well as a Rhodes doing sus4 arpeggios from each note of the chord.

I put everything together in LMMS. I spent a good chunk of time experimenting with different instruments so even though it's really minimalistic it still took a while!

Abandoned Ideas

I had planned several other game elements, including the protagonist saying things to himself (or the player), and another type of interaction involving connecting cables and swapping out computer components.

A full game would probably have more complex survival elements instead of a simple timer, and would see you having to scavenge in the environment for computer equipment and other supplies.

We'll see if anything like that comes to fruition in the future!

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This post was adapted from one on my blog

Out of Gas is my entry to the jam. It was intended to be a blatant FTL rip-off, but in having much simplified clicker-like combat mechanics and an unusual cars-in-space aesthetic, I think it is sufficiently its own thing (I hope anyway!) Here's some thoughts on the idea behind it, and the development process.

Concept

My initial thought was more of a straight sci-fi concept of travelling into deep space, facing combat and resource management challenges similar to those which ended up in the game. The first thing that came to mind as a title for this was "Out of Gas", after the Modest Mouse song of the same name:

Out of Gas YouTube

Thinking about that song got me thinking in another direction - essentially the same mechanics, but Earth-bound, set in a Modest Mouse world of highways and drifters, fleeing problems and starting over. The problem to flee in this case would obviously be debt - something that you can get deeper and deeper into.

As you can probably tell by now I ended up combining these two ideas! I didn't want to let either of them go, and I quickly fell in love with the idea of a universe where space combat meant winding down your window and firing a handgun at your enemy.

The combined concept suggested that a new, sci-fi twist on the debt problem was required, and that's where the idea of a constantly growing cryptocurrency debt came in. I've been thinking about cryptocurrencies a lot lately since they're going through another hype cycle. One commonly touted feature of them (or some, like Bitcoin, at least), is that they're deflationary, so any debt denominated in them would constantly grow in value instead of decreasing in value like debts denominated in inflationary fiat currencies. This seemed like the perfect notion for the bizarre world of my game. It doesn't really have any impact on the gameplay, but I think it's a nice bit of narrative flavour, and it fits the theme perfectly.

The final piece of the conceptual puzzle was the characters. I couldn't very well have two anonymous nobodies riding along with the player on a trip like this! I turned to two characters I had vague notions of making a game about years ago, Haze & Lee, a gun-toting, post-apocalyptic outlaw couple. Unfortunately I don't think their personalities really come across in the game due to time constraints, but at least they have names!

Art

As usual, I did all the art in Pyxel Edit. I started off very rough with just pink boxes for the ships and a partial circle for the background, and moved immediately onto the gameplay with those placeholders. This is a somewhat unusual approach for me as I usually try to tie down the look of a game early on.

The thing about rough mockups is that by the time I came back to the art a bunch of stuff in the game was already tied to the resolution and shape of the outlines. I wasn't even sure I had done the perspective correctly, but I was stuck with it anyway, and I guess it was close enough because nobody has complained!

I had planned to do some character portraits as well for the narrative side of the game, and express encounters as dialogues between characters, but unfortunately there wasn't time for that.

The map screen also didn't get much love, with the initial placeholder art surviving into the final game.

Code

As for my last Ludum Dare entry, Gophers, a cutscene graph editor plugin for Godot that I had previously developed was essential to getting this game done within the time constraints of the jam.

I had done a lot of work on this plugin in recent months, applying lessons learned from using it for Gophers to improve the workflow, functionality, and stability. This paid huge dividends, and I found almost no issues while churning out encounter cutscenes. The cutscene graphs created by this plugin power every encounter in the game up to and after combat.

My main task on the first day was to get the map screen working - it wouldn't be much of a game if you couldn't travel between systems. I implemented it as a graph defined by custom MapSystem and MapConnection control nodes.

The new fun thing about this for me was declaring the MapConnection class to be a "tool" script, allowing the connections between systems to be drawn in the editor. This kind of custom tooling is important for the efficient design of systems in larger games, so it was fun to give it a try. Here, it mostly served to prevent me from getting confused about which MapSystem nodes I had already connected to each other and which I hadn't.

python func _draw(): if usable or used or _can_draw_in_editor(): _load_nodes_for_editor() # TODO: Decide on proper colours for this var color = Color.gray if usable: color = Color.hotpink # No idea why the offset is required var source_center = _source_node.rect_global_position + CENTER_OFFSET var target_center = _target_node.rect_global_position + CENTER_OFFSET var start = source_center + ((target_center - source_center).normalized() * SPACE) var finish = target_center + ((source_center - target_center).normalized() * SPACE) draw_line( start, finish, color, LINE_THICKNESS, false )

Implementing the combat was a lot tougher. The battle scene is almost entirely UI nodes, which was perhaps a mistake, and for some reason I struggled most of day two to even get player input to register properly. I don't really remember now what the obstacle was to this - maybe I was just tired.

Sound and Music

There's nothing special about the sound this time around. Unlike for Gophers I didn't have time to do any foley work, and I figured I would probably have a hard time creating gunshot and explosion sounds anyway. Instead I fell back to SFXR (specifically, jsfxr).

The music I put together in BeepBox, my favourite game jam tool for chiptune music these days due to its simplicity. I tend not to get as bogged down with it as I do with LMMS. I initially wanted to try to create something in the style of Modest Mouse, given the game's inspiration, but it was hard to recreate a guitar sound. Instead I ended up with a simple arpeggiated chord progression over a bass drone that I hope feels kind of epic, kind of longing and lonesome, I dunno.

The battle music is a variation of the same tune but just swaps out one of the instruments, doubles up the drone, and compresses and spreads the arpeggios across more octaves for a more urgent and chaotic feeling. The two tracks play in sync throughout the game and just cut between each other as necessary.

Abandoned Ideas

As usual there were many ideas that I had to put aside due to time constraints. I had planned to include a small number of missiles which could be fired during combat with devastating effect, to allow the player to pull themselves back from the brink of defeat. I had also intended to have targetable/damageable systems on the ships, including injury to the characters, so that you could take out the enemy's weapon to gain a reprieve from being fired upon, or their engines and reduce their chance to dodge. You can see the proposed UI of these mechanics in the initial mockup above. Finally, I had planned a system of weapon upgrades which almost made it in, but not quite.

On the art side, I had wanted to include a number of different backgrounds to improve the sense of travelling between systems.

A big regret that I have is that I wasn't able to include the character portraits, and express the encounters primarily as dialogue between characters. I think this would have introduced a lot more personality to the narrative side of the game, as opposed to the third-person narration that I had to go with.

Post-Jam

I like this game a lot, and I feel it is one that could be polished up and rounded out into a complete experience with relative ease, so I am determined to do a post-jam release with some of the missing features described above, and some of the problems with the jam release resolved (such as the RNG sometimes producing the same encounter multiple times in a row). I have already begun work on this, and I hope to have it completed in the next few months. I'll do another post about my progress on it so far, but for now here's a little sneak peek:

You can follow the development of that on my itch.io devlog.

This post was adapted from the original on my blog