Found some objects or creatures lying on the ground? Tribute them as part of your summoning ritual!

And don't forget to check the guidebook and see how each item you tribute changes the outcome of the ritual! Learning how each item shapes the direction of the ritual will help you summon newer and newer items, which you can reuse as a tribute, until you manage to summon the final prize!

Html5 and downloadable versions are available: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoning-guidebook

First of all, I'm not blaming the entries, it may be something different with my setup, but I always have to drag the headphone's volume down to 1% (and even 1% is louder than I'd like).

Under normal use (YouTube, gaming), it's usually set between 15% and 25%, but the games submitted are blasting my ears.

Again, I'm not faulting the games for these, I don't rate them any lower for being louder, as I said, may be a setup difference. Just curious if anyone else is experiencing the same problems. And it also makes me wonder whether my game sounds too quiet for other people, because I adjusted its volume based on my setup.

I thought I'd share the visual progression of Wave Rider from the beginning. If anyone's interested in trying it, it's playable here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/wave-rider

Before the jam, we already brainstormed the core concept of the game. I came up with the idea of the player moving along a sine wave, with the ability to change the amplitude and the frequency of the wave, and not having other control of the player character besides that. My teammates liked the idea too, and it was the theme I wanted to win the most.

(This image is taken directly from our idea board we made to prepare for some themes).

So we already had the concept down, the theme just had to win.

I remember, first day I woke up at 4am, my eyes barely open as I checked my phone, and was immediately very hyped to see that "Signal" won the voting. I immediately started working on it, and got this first version, where the "enemies" didn't move yet, but it was possible to change the frequency and the amplitude of the wave, and the "player" (cube on the left) already followed it up and down.

By the time I've done this, my teammates were still asleep, so I was trying to figure out the environment, player character, and the general art direction I wanted to go for alone. To be fair it wasn't bad to brainstorm about that alone, as I was the one going to model and do the visuals anyways.

After some thinking, the idea of a UFO trying to dodge asteroids came to me, so I roughly modelled them out, just to get the vibe of the game before really making it.

Then my teammates woke up, and we began working on some features. Not wanting to step on each other's feet with the merge conflicts, after a while I decided I'd just do some visual upgrades. I wasn't satisfied with the look of the asteroids, so I updated those, and made a looping background too (thank you spray tool).

Also added materials to the UFO.

Of course I'm skipping over pretty much all of the feature implementations, as images can't really capture features all that well. At this point I did find the UFO very dull, so I added some details to it, along with some light emission.

Back then, the light was always the same color and the same intensity. Also replaced the "missing material" on the wave's line renderer. (It was about time, it's been that default magenta since the beginning.) Then I created the shield, the logic for it was implemented soon after.

I still wasn't satisfied with how the asteroids looked, so I completely remodelled them again, and I was more than happy with the outcome.

Meanwhile the features were getting done quite fast too. The Phase Shift and the Phase Inversion abilities were added by my teammates, and then I got an idea: what if instead of having icons on the bottom of the UI to show if abilities were ready or not, the ship had visual indicators to convey this information.

And with that, I've updated the UFO model: now, the intensity of the yellow lights indicated the energy levels, added a blue strip around the middle of the ship, glowing when Phase Shift is ready. And blue circles being emitted from the bottom, to tell that player that Phase Inversion is off cooldown.

We made a battery on the UI though, as the light intensity isn't the most accurate way to measure energy levels, and that was a resource the player needed to really manage.

As finalized as the visuals looked at that point, there was a serious issue that we started noticing more and more: sudden frame drops, inconsistent performance. It was getting annoying to test too, and at first we weren't sure what could have been the cause.

Then, I took a look at the asteroid model I made in Blender. And found that while the model I made was 18k triangles, which should've been fine, the subdivision surface modifier I added increased the triangle count to... 300K triangles!

Per asteroid!

Then I just removed that modifier, and while the final version of the asteroids didn't look as smooth anymore, it immediately solved our performance issues.

And that's the final look, which was finished on the 2nd day of the jam. The 3rd day was pure chaos though when it came to features, sudden bugs, stuff breaking, everything on fire. That's a whole different story. But around 2 hours before deadline, we managed to make it.

And of course there was a lot more going into this game in the background, but visually, these were the main milestones.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this little visual progression post!

While I know there are certainly things I could've done better, and I agree with the criticism on the game, I'm proud of how it turned out! Just wish the last day wasn't as chaotic and we didn't have as many things on fire that required high priority from us, as that's when I was planning to REALLY playtest the game and finetune the pacing, really balance it out, and make it smoother to play. And the biggest issue with the game is the pacing from the feedback I've got (and from what I've experienced). But oh well, it was a 3 day long jam, and not having time to do everything because of things breaking and going wrong is part of the process.