The third Ludum Dare our team has participated in! Here we’ll post our individual thoughts about our game. If you haven’t played it yet, go do so! 

What Went Right

Rose

• Teamwork / Friendship: The four of us have worked on two other LD games, and have gone through college together. We work comfortably around each other and are not afraid to take risks/try new things. We have a handful of inside jokes that kept us giggling throughout the jam.
• Google Hangouts: Amazing how technology can bridge thousands of miles! We more or less were able to collaborate despite all being remote.
• Art: I have a lot of fun designing the quirky characters. I wanted to lean toward the whimsical and silly with my character designs. The ‘Goat’ sub-theme proved to be a fun inspiration. Also put more attention into animation than previous jams: animated in Flash instead of the silly Photoshop animation tool.

Iterations for the main villain.

Cast of characters.

Johan

• Teamwork: We coded together on the same project without stepping on each others’ toes. We also wrote tools that theoretically would let content creation be more separate from coding so we didn’t block each other. Levels and other settings were set up in XML where we had previously just put everything in code. Theoretically, it would have made content creation (aside from the raw art/sounds) extremely quick once the engine was set up.
• Google Effects: I don’t always use video chat systems, but when I do, I prefer Google+ Hangouts.
• Music/sound quality: The sounds came out pretty nice considering how long it took to make them!

Vu

• Task Separation: Once we had the game idea mostly figured out we were able to jump right into working. The tasks just seemed to split up on their own. Me and Johan worked with the same project in Dropbox. It was amazing how we hardly stepped on each other’s code.
• Data-Driving: Johan did a really good job of making an XML parsing system and data structures to store and retrieve content. It made tuning and modifying the game extremely simple. We could make dozens of levels in just a few minutes if we wanted.

What Went Wrong

Rose

• Art Consistency: I am usually a stickler for consistency, but this time I was focused too much on the technicalities and little details. The colors felt too muted for the villainous-yet-whimsical feel we were going for, and the logo style is completely different from the game style. A year+ in the industry makes me really critical of my work :/
  I also never got around to the UI/layout of information, which meant that some screens looked like art with default text slapped over it. Ugh.

Poop.

• Wasted Time: Not enough time spent brainstorming and fully fleshing out the game design.
  We were no longer in college, which meant we all had relatively healthy sleep schedules and couldn’t stay up as late as we normally do. 3 out of 4 of us had to work on Monday, making Vu the only one working on the game that day.
  The team was split up in three different timezones, which basically meant there was only a window of a few hours a day where all four of us would be in Hangouts at the same time.
• Scoping: You would think that as game jam veterans, we would have learned to scope games accordingly now. But I think this time we didn’t take into account the lost time on Monday.

Johan

• Incomplete Design/Scope/Work/Timezones: We had a lot of ideas but didn’t really take into account just how much time we would lose on Monday, since three of us work fulltime on weekdays. We brainstormed late Friday night and I could only work the full day on Saturday. On Monday, we didn’t have final music or any sound effects yet, and we couldn’t get in touch with Hal due to work, so when I got home (with a little less than an hour left!) I ended up taking/slightly polishing one of our drafts and making as many sound effects as possible! A good bit of those sounds didn’t quite make it into the submission version of the project, but will be in the post-jam version, whenever we feel ready to post it up.

Vu

• Late Start: Friday was the last day of my 8 month co-op and so my coworkers wanted to take me to see the Hobbit after work. It was fun, but it meant that I would not be able to join the team until saturday morning, so I missed out on a lot brainstorming and idea generation. I felt like this head us back a lot since everyone had to wait on me before we could agree on an idea and start working on it.
• Distance: Although we were able to collaborate well using google hangouts and skype, not being collocated meant that we wouldn’t have nice things like whiteboards, post-its, and just being able to look at each other’s works directly and give immediate feedback and inspiration.
  Additionally, when we work together it’s easier to stay up all night and work harder because we can see everyone else working hard and not sleeping either.
• Slow Prototyping: It look a lot longer than usual to get a prototype of the game up and running. We couldn’t really gauge the gameplay until the game was basically done. We had a lot of trouble deciding key aspects of the game such as whether or not the play should have HP, do enemies have HP?, where do enemies come from? These were things we should have had locked down before we started working.
• All Alone: On Monday everyone had to work except for me so I had to put together the rest of the code by myself and lacked support for sound, art, and general feedback on the gameplay. This put a lot of stress and pressure on me.
  I was scrambling to get all the basic screens and generally code in. I wanted to make sure that we had everything that makes a game feel more like a complete work than just a gameplay prototype. I wish I could have spent more time tuning the gameplay and adding features. I feel like I wasted a lot of time tweaking screens and chasing minor bugs on that day. Thankfully we were able to get some additional content and musics and sounds in at the very last second when everyone got out of work.

What We Got out of the Experience

Rose

• Extra practice working with the technical side and the full art pipeline. Animated bitmaps in Flash instead of Photoshop’s animation tool, which allowed me to create smoother animations. Then had to figure out a quick way to export into a spritesheet, which took some roundabouts (GlueIt) but I was pretty happy with the process. Also, XML!
• This was the first time any of us had worked on a game remotely, which is a good experience to have.

Johan

• Used Torrunt’s Developer Console in a personal project for the first time! Being able to type in cheats/functions that you want to call at runtime was pretty much amazing. Previously, we’d tie cheats to button presses, but in general, it’s tough to remember to clean those up, especially with time constraints. It was also useful when setting up features in code (especially with all of us working on the “same branch” at the same time), since I could do test calls/functionality from within the cheats instead of having to compile and use possibly-broken code.
• Wrote an AnimationBuilder class that lets you determine sets of Flixel animations in XML without going into the code yourself :D. Definitely going to add this to my code library!
• Mostly successful completely-remote working experience.

Vu

• A fresh new game! Although the game is a runner at heart, it feels different because of the spatial layout of levels and environmental involvement. It may not be exactly what we originally planned out but it’s definitely on the right track and illustrates the basic gameplay we planned. With a little more work we could expand the game into what we originally designed and incorporate the feedback we’ve gotten so far.
• Proof that remote development can work well. The HCI person in me wants to try to improve this and make more/better tools for communicating these kinds of ideas. If we had a simple collaborative animation board I think we would have been able to communicate some ideas better.

What Will We Do in Future Jams?

Rose

• I saw in some Post-Mortems that other artists would set up a moodboard before the jam to establish a style and color scheme without wasting time doing it during the jam. I definitely want to try this next time, and make sure the game has a more consistent mood throughout.
• It would also save a lot of time to have a nice library of fonts, textures, actions, and brushes ready in Photoshop. I spent far too long searching for free ones to use.
• Timelapse!
• I wish to be more involved with understanding the code side. I have done an individual jam once, learning AS3 along the way. More of this!
• Have the full art pipeline set beforehand. I’ll need to research more powerful and up-to-date programs to create spritemaps.
• I made an animatic to show the programmers how I wanted the prop-throwing mechanic to feel in the game. They did a fantastic job of recreating that procedurally, giving it realistic physics that varied slightly every time. I strongly suggest making plenty of mockups and animatics to make sure the team has the same vision in mind.

Early background mockup.

Johan

• I’d like to experiment with some more code/design patterns
• I’d like to have more patterns/setups in mind, so while not exactly copying code from previous projects, I’d be more prepared to set something up quickly to solve a problem I’d already thought about.
• Maybe have more of a hand in the gameplay coding…or be quicker with setting up tools. Also goes with my previous point though. Mental preparation!
• I’d like to better-design how objects in the world are set up, with a better relationship between XML (data) and code (behavior).
• Design with non-desktop platforms in mind!? It’d be a pretty fresh experience to try that out.
• Maybe it’d be nice to escape from Flixel at least once. 2D game development has considerably less overhead than 3D, so I’d like to stick with 2D/Flash for game jams. Flixel’s FlxGroups are just too handy though.

Vu

• For other jams we sometimes have two running ideas that are prototyped extremely quickly (by the end of the first night). I’d like to do that again to prove out ideas before going full force on any one idea. We didn’t have time to do it in this case since we lost a lot of time due to schedule conflicts and time zone differences.
• I’d like to spend some more time planning out the flow of the game and all the important systems and have them fleshed out way before starting detailed systems
• Do more art! I didn’t have my tablet or any good art programs on the laptop that I used for the jam so I wasn’t able to help out with art content at all.
• I’d like to be able to have the game pretty much done way earlier than the deadline so that we can just add polish and do testing much earlier
• Try out more some unexplored territory. We’ve tended to stick to single player games with a set of core mechanics. I’d like to branch out in future jams and do some games that are more story driven, multiplayer, and/or totally abstract.

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned for a post-jam version!

Tags: another castle, postmortem, tl;dr

We made a weird game about a rash. Warning: you might feel a bit itchy.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/$59550

As we are coming up on the last 24 hours of LD41, I thought it'd be a great time to share a post-mortem of B.E.A.S.T.S. (Break Everything And Stack Towering Structures). Though my team Cosmic Adventure Squad has been jamming for the past 10+ years, we rarely write post-mortems. But I think there’s a lot to share and a lot to learn from each jam! So without further ado...

To be honest neither one of us were very excited for the theme when we first heard it, as it just felt too open-ended and prone to blandness. We sat down, sketched some ideas, and eventually had a toss-up between a restaurant sim/pipe-connecting puzzle and a city builder/city rampager. Typically, we would draw out a really rough paper prototype of the gameplay to get a feel for how the game will look and be played. When we found how much fun it was to think of monsters and destruction mechanics, we knew which idea was going to make the cut.

Gnocchi giving us a paw in the brainstorm process

Our developer, Strega, quickly built a rough playable prototype in Unity that we sent to our musician, Tenlki, and some friends who were also participating in LD. Together, we playtested and refined the gameplay even before any of the art went in, which was a common technique we’d use in past LDs.

Basic controls, combat, movement, level generation

Destruction and first bits of art

We decided on using MagicaVoxel for the art assets early on -- I didn’t want to get bogged down with the nuances skinning, rigging, texturing, etc and all the 3D features that I’d commonly find myself losing too many hours in. Since my role also involves UI/UX, technical art, and asset implementation, I needed to make sure there was a balance.

Though I’ve worked with MagicaVoxel in the past, I completely forgot that exported geometry was by no means optimized -- each building part came out to be almost 3000 tris! Optimization is no small feat, especially with procedurally generated levels and a goal to have a WebGL build that can run on most browsers.

cut down tris by 99% by re-modeling and UV texturing each environment piece

After a decade of jamming together we’ve learned to scope our games really small and make sure a full, submittable gameplay loop comes together as early as possible. That way the rest of the time can be spent polishing the crap outta it, being chill, and having a good time. By Saturday night--music sketch, characters, environment, placeholder UI--basically something we’d be happy with submitting if we ran out of time. We added some fun little details here and there: - Making the score bars represent the characters (fire beam and giant fist). - A control reassignment screen because we couldn’t come to an agreement on how two players would play on a single keyboard - Character portraits, win certificates, and hand-painted title screen for extra oomph - Numbers popping up for feedback, color highlights

We read every one of your comments and loved the feedback! Some things we’ll add/improve in a future post-jam build: - We definitely need a single player mode! Some ideas include highscore, puzzle-based, or have AI players to compete against. - Although we had a key reassignment screen, this was not immediately discoverable by many players. Maybe a help button in-game or a brief popup at the start of the first round will call attention to it. - Alternatively, let people use controllers! - More playable characters. I had sketched out a mech and a giant wolf character but sadly they didn’t make it in.

Thanks for reading! And don’t forget to check out our game here:

B.E.A.S.T.S.

I love game jams and try to share my enthusiasm for making games with others around me. Ludum Dare 41 is the first time I convinced both my siblings to also participate, and I couldn't be more proud of them. It's interesting to see how we each have our own style, approach, even game engine despite playing the same games growing up!

Please check their games out! Shooter Maze in particular doesn't have enough votes yet. Thanks!!

>> Shooter Maze <<

Genres: bullet hell and maze

>> Solitairey In School <<

Genres: card game and dating sim

We still need a few more votes on our web game, Sacrificial Run! Try to get to the deity at the end and let us know how many people you ended up with! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-run

If you're a fan of robots, puzzles, or platformers, come check out our game, Coin-Op Kid!

Play it HERE!!

We weren't sure how the heck we were supposed to follow up our entry for LD44, Coin-Op Kid, but we wanted to try something new and bold. We present to you EPOCH, a journey through the birth and death of the universe.

>> Play EPOCH here <<

Thanks for taking a look!

~-~-~

This is the 15th Ludum Dare my team and I have participated in! Here's a few visualizations of our progress:

Orange highlights categories which we placed top 100 or better. Medals show top 3 status. Our best game yet was Coin-Op Kid from LD44!

This line chart shows raw scores out of 5 per category per game. We tend to not focus on humor, resulting in some low scores there.

When taking into account the total participants, the results are more insightful. Our game Don't Be Rash may not have won any medals, and "only" 31st overall, but it was well within the top 5% of all entries! Or how Planetration, our first ever LD entry, came in 17th place for graphics but out of 90 entries, that's just barely in the top 20% of entries.

~-~-~

Hoping to keep up the upwards trend. Even though we didn't perform as well with our LD45 entry, EPOCH as we did with Coin-Op Kid, we still feel that we're improving our skills and having a great time with each Ludum Dare jam.

~-~-~

Thank you all for so much for playing our games! Here's links to all of them:

LD21 Planetration

LD23 The Tiny World of Fiorella

LD25 Another Castle

LD26 Double Hydra

LD27 10 Seconds of Joy

LD28 Rations, Please!

LD33 Super Sea Serpent Simulator

LD37 RubixRoom

LD38 Six-Sided Sojourn

LD40 Don't Be Rash

LD41 B.E.A.S.T.S.

LD42 Keeper of Balance

LD43 Sacrificial Run

LD44 Coin-Op Kid

LD45 EPOCH

Step 1: quick concept thumbnail Step 2: color mock with general mood and layout Step 3: start pushing pixels

... to be continued ...

Making some progress on Extinction Intervention! What other dinosaur types should we add?

I need names for these good bois

We finished our game, Extinction Intervention. Protect the dinosaurs from being wiped out by keeping disasters at bay. Can you make it to the modern day?

.:: Play it here ::.

Also, check out the timelapse of our art creation process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XoCi4D6d_g

Check out the art creation timelapse for our game, Extinction Intervention:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XoCi4D6d_g

Taken over the course of 20 hours (There were several hours of brainstorming, concepting, and sketching beforehand that I didn't capture). There are fun moments like:

🌊 Researching the Great Wave off Kanagawa painting to base the giant wave disaster off of (3:35)

💀Melting the dinos down to their skeletons (7:11)

🛸Making a UFO at 8:15, spending like 2 hrs animating and implementing, then realizing it was 1/2 the size it should be and redrawing it frame-by-frame at 9:05... 🤦‍♀️

Have a quick progression shot from concept to final

And if you haven't done so yet,

you can play and rate Extinction Intervention >> here <<!

When we got the results from our latest game, Extinction Intervention, the results were a bit disheartening.

We had gone from first place two jams ago to 772nd. Our 16th jam together as a team may have been our worst yet, but that won't discourage us from continuing to create, learn, and have fun. We had decided to try something totally different from our previous games, and we are still proud of the final result.

Looking back at our jam process, we've identified areas where things worked out the way they were planned, areas where we could improve upon, and what our takeaways were from this LD.

For this game we tried to make a frantic, arcadey clicker game. Although the core mechanic is just clicking, each extinction source contributes to gameplay in a different way, vying for your attention.

The meteors represent a constant unstoppable threat, something you have to continuously go back to. The volcanoes force your attention away, if you leave them unchecked they make the entire game space more chaotic even though the threat of a lava rock actually hitting your dinos is pretty rare. The big wave is essentially a tank mob in any other game, with high hit points, if left unchecked will wipe out all your dinos, but takes a long time to get rid of allowing the other disasters to build up. The UFO directly targets a dino, making it the highest priority target.

The goal was to make the player strategically decide what to focus on at any given moment. However, because the core action was too simple and even tiring, it failed to give enough variety and depth to the gameplay. Perhaps if there were different actions to perform, and a greater variety of threats, the game could have been seen as more fun.

Additionally, if we had broken the game up into different Eras of time and focused on delivering each disaster/mechanic with more depth, players would get more moments of achievement and rest and could enjoy the game more.

~Vu (programmer)

From my earliest sketches I’ve always wanted the game to be bright and colorful to evoke a sense of urgency. Pixel art was always on my mind, mostly because it’s a medium I want to improve in. Although I am more comfortable with lower resolution pixel art, I thought that since the game takes place on one single, static setting, I could experiment with a 512x512 canvas.

That decision proved to be fairly costly. The clouds, ground, and water would take me the better part of a day to create, often placing the pixels one at a time, to maintain the pixelart aesthetic I wanted to achieve.

For animated dinosaurs and disasters, I kept the animations around 4 hand-drawn frames to preserve my sanity. The UFO, however, somehow inspired me to hand-animate a painstakingly detailed metal spinning sequence, which was about 9 frames long. To make matters worse, I realized that I had operated on the wrong scale and made the UFO too small. In order for it to be playable, it would need to be twice as large. Scaling up any art means filling in missing information, and with pixel art it means essentially quadrupling the work. Needless to say this was a long and painful ordeal for all 9 frames to be up-rezzed.

Looking back, I could have probably achieved a similar aesthetic with a painted look, and could have saved precious time. But seeing as graphics was our highest rated category this time around, maybe the struggles were worth it in the end.

~Rose (artist)

This time around, I had some external circumstances that kept me from really getting to the audio for a while, and basically just had one shot to come up with an audio theme. I ended up picking a lot of inspiration from the headbobbing dinosaurs. There were some ideas that I really wanted to do, like have separate tracks based on what disasters were active but just didn’t have the time to get to it in the end. The final song has the different tracks put together except the UFO track.

~Johan (musician)

looking back at our entries you’d see that every game we've made varied in its gameplay, art style, and feel. This contributes to the range in our scores and placement.

If you look purely at the placement, it doesn’t give you the big picture. It certainly feels like we were doing better in the earlier jams, consistently making top 50, while now we’re struggling to maintain top 100.

But when you look at the rating value, it tells a different story. Our early sub-50 placements were hardly hitting any 4s, while later we see higher and higher ratings throughout. The quality of our games continues to improve, and a couple drops here and there doesn’t reflect on our abilities, just something may not have vibed with the community.

And finally, we look at the percentile, which takes into account the total number of jam entries:

Out of 3576 entries, 776th place is still in the top 78% percentile. Still the worst overall out of our entries, but not as bad as it may feel! (Fun fact, there were exactly 776 entries back in LD27) It’s astounding seeing the growth of LD and the sheer number of amazing entries each time.

There's definitely an upward trend, as we learn and improve each time! We're trying new things faster, more efficient, and still having fun in the process. We learn new things and pick up new tools along the way. We engage more and more with the community and give back. Most importantly, we'll never stop creating. We'll never stop taking risks.

Thanks for reading!

>> Play Deepest Sword <<

Venture deep into the Cavern of Longing and plunge your sword deep into the dragon’s heart! How deep is your resolve? Post your best times in the comments!

>> PLAY HERE <<

First, we wanted to give a huge thank you to all who have played our game!

We did not expect our little jam game about a funny knight with their tiny sword to get such a big reaction, and we want to thank everyone for their kind words, their excitement, and their rage playing our game. We never would have thought we’d have gotten almost 1000 ratings-- you all are incredible!

In this post-mortem, we’d like to share some of our processes and thoughts while making the game.

The first night the team started the ideation process by noodling through a bunch of different ideas based on the theme “deeper and deeper”. We made a brainstorm doc and put down everything from a game-within-a-game, to a platform digger, to a deep space Pokemon Snap. Eventually, during dinner Rosypenguin exclaimed “Drive it deeper into its heart”! This became the inspiration for Deepest Sword. After voting on the idea, we began to flesh it out by creating some quick mock-ups and describing key gameplay moments.

Our “ideastorm” document where we put our initials by our favorite ideas.

Next was engineering. Strega put together a quick playable prototype on the dawn of the second day. He made sure the gameplay mechanics felt fun and responsive using placeholder art before creating the rest of the game structure. He also focused on making tools and shortcuts to be able to quickly test different aspects of the game making tuning and level design a lot faster and easier.

On the third day, Strega focused on designing the stages and tuning the movement mechanics. The goal of each area was to ramp up the difficulty while also focusing on a specific method of using your sword. To make the game deeper, earlier levels had to be designed in such a way that longer swords forced you to rethink the puzzles.

For the art, Rosypenguin wanted to try out LDTK to build the levels. The tiles she built for Deepest Sword were inspired by the Cavernas tileset by Adam Saltsman but given its own dragoney flair. She also picked five distinct color palettes to represent the increasing difficulty of the cavern. As for why a cute dragon for the boss? Well she likes to draw dragons, and asked herself “how can I make this dragon different?” and slapped on some eyelashes…

The sounds didn’t come in until later. Strega used JFXR to create the sound effects and Animalese.js to create the fun dialog effects. Tenlki made a fun, addicting track to use as the BGM. He had a bit of an artist block coming up with a fitting song, playing with different styles and scrapping at least 3 different tracks. He wasn’t originally happy with it, but all the feedback about the song and hearing people sing along with the track while playing changed his mind. Listen Here!

Before the last day, Strega had uploaded a build of the game to Itch.io and submitted it to the LDJam site just in case we wouldn’t have time to work on the game due to having to go back to work on Monday.

We woke up on Monday ready to start a regular work day-- and out of nowhere we saw that we were getting comments and plays already! That’s when we learned that AlphaBetaGamer posted a review of Deepest Sword overnight-- and on a pre-release build too! With the increasing number of views, Rosypenguin scrambled to take the day off work and put together final versions of the title image and ending screen (inspired by some of the... interesting comments that were coming in). Strega was able to also get in some additional polish elements such as screen transitions and VFX. And Tenlki got in the final version of the music, just before the deadline.

The weeks since had been a whirlwind. AlphaBetaGamer’s video reached over a million views, it got viral on TikTok, spawned several pieces of fanart (many NSFW ones), and built up a small but dedicated speedrun community. We are always delighted to see streamers and VTubers play and react to our game, and have jumped in and interacted a few times too!

video

We have a few plans on the horizon to add more options and support for this little game. No promises on new levels or expansions, but we’ve already listened to the fans and added in frequently requested features such as key rebinding and volume control. There’s also plans for a Steam release. Please join our Discord to share your ideas, speedruns, fanart, or just ask us questions!

We're working on a game about making games. One of the most important parts of making a game is petting cats... Right?

In Game Name, you are making a game for a game jam with the theme "Every 10 seconds".

You have to do it all, from art, to code, to music, to petting cats. But you change up what you do every 10 seconds.

Enjoy this collection of 12 fast-paced minigames, and try to place in the top 10!

>> CLICK HERE TO PLAY! <<

I asked ChatGPT to write a limerick about Ludum Dare:

There once was a game jam called Ludum Dare

Where developers would gather from far and near

They'd build and create

Till the early morning's late

And emerge with a game that is rare

Our upcoming game will be a peaceful fishing simulator in the archipelago of Nekotuna. Just don't fish the tuna to extinction...!