I finally finished my game 😀

Here is the link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5360

Philarmon and I work at the same sofware company. We are both very passionate programmers and gamers. We talked about making a game every now and then, but didn't consider to make one. But then last week, we were talking about game developing again and decided that we join ludum dare.

And now we finished our first game together: Demon Pact. (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/demonpact) The theme was not that easy, but I think we found a way to include it. I hope all of you had the fun we had. It was a great time and we are thrilled to play all of your games :smiley:

This is our first ludum dare and we are super happy that we could finish something. It was a very exhausting but fun experience. Thanks to all of you who gave us already feedback to our game. We appreciate every feedback we can get. So if you are interested, please play our game and share your thoughts with us:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/demonpact

We want to share our development process in a Post Mortem post, so here we go:

Preparation

On Wednesday the 24th of April Philarmon and I decided to try to make our first game at ludum dare. The last theme voting round was currently running and we sat together and talked about every theme and which ideas we had for each one. Our favourite themes were "Limited memory", "Your life is currency" and "Ridiculously overpowered".

Day 1

We met at my home and started to setup the development environment. Our setup included Visual Studios with MonoGame, the library Nez and Tiled. For source code management we used github. We know from our previous brainstorming were we wanted to go with the game, but a few details were missing. Our goal was to make a basic 2D dungeon crawler, where you lose health constantly and get life back if you kill enemies. You also could buy upgrades with your health. We decided to implement basic combat and only two-way animations (left and right). At the beginning we used some sprites we found on the internet. We finished the first prototype at the end of the day. It consisted of a character you could control, an enemy which stands still and you can hit until it dies. We lost some time to search for sprites and learn how to use the Nez library. But it was a solid start.

Day 2

We only slept a few hours. At the start of the day we split our work into two main tasks: AI and map generation. We worked for a while and constantly exchange our thoughts and process. Then we decided to look for some better sprites, eventually we bought one. We found a really good looking sprite sheet from Pita on itch.io. This was a 4-way sprite sheet for the characters. So we decided to give it a try and implement 4-way combat/movement. This was a very frustrating at first because we finished some of the combat mechanics already. We used this time to refactor our code, so we can work better. At the end of the day, we had a few rooms, an AI with 3 states (patrol, chase and attack) and the UI.

Day 3

We had no death animation, so we decided to implement a blood explosion. This took a while, but it was very fun. Then we tackled to implement collectables for upgrades. We chose to test this with a simple gold asset. There was not much time left anymore so we left the gold and decided that the gold adds additional points to the high score. The upgrades and shop were scrapped. There was so much to do: start screen, game over screen, many rooms for the generator. We focused on this for a while until we were satisfied. We had 2 hours left and wanted to do one additional feature, but decided to only make a short intro sequence and fix some bugs. We were afraid if we added a "bigger" feature that we make it very buggy because we were sooo tired.

Conclusion

It was so fun and we are very happy that we decided to submit here at ludum dare. There is so much we have learned, so much that we will do differently the next time. We love the ludum dare experience. The coding, the frustration, giving and getting feedback, playing your games, reading and writing posts. We hope you had at least the same fun we had!

Hey everyone, I hope you had a great experience and much fun the past three days. Philarmon and I had it. It was our second time to participate in a game jam. It was a blast. :smile: Now we will try out your games and we are thrilled and exicted to see what awaits us.

Here is our jam entry: In the beginning. A little arcade shooter. We would love to get your feedback and share with you our experience.

Finally home after a long day of work. Now chilling and playing ludum dare games :smiley:. Feel free to try our game and have some fun. Feedback is very welcome.

Quite a lot games played today. I had so much fun! Thank you for your submissions.

We got so many feedback, thank you so much! :smiley: We made a short trailer video for our game (video editing is hard...):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I65QCQmBDP4

Thank you all for playing our game. We got amazing feedback! We had so much fun working on this. We play with the idea to port this game to mobile and add new stuff. Let us know what you think would be great additions :smiley:

Do you want to fly a spaceship? Do you want to fight space pirates? Do want to destroy asteroids with your powerful laser beams? Then look at our game "Scrap Cargo", where your only concern is to keep the spaceship alive. At all cost! Your feedback is very welcome! I hope you had fun! I can't wait to play your games.

Do you want to fly a spaceship? Do you want to fight space pirates? Do want to destroy asteroids with your powerful laser beams? Then look at our game "Scrap Cargo", where your only concern is to keep the spaceship alive. At all cost! Your feedback is very welcome! I hope you had fun! I can't wait to play your games.

You can post your game in the comments and I will play, rate and give you feedback. Happy gaming! :smiley:

Do you want to fly a spaceship? Do you want to fight space pirates? Do want to destroy asteroids with your powerful laser beams? Then look at our game "Scrap Cargo", where your only concern is to keep the spaceship alive. At all cost! Your feedback is very welcome! I hope you had fun! I can't wait to play your games.

You can post your game in the comments and I will play, rate and give you feedback. Happy gaming! :smiley:

Do you want to fly a spaceship? Do you want to fight space pirates? Do want to destroy asteroids with your powerful laser beams? Then look at our game "Scrap Cargo", where your only concern is to keep the spaceship alive. At all cost! Maybe YOU can survive 10 Minutes and win the game! Your feedback is very welcome! I hope you had fun! I can't wait to play your games.

You can post your game in the comments and I will play, rate and give you feedback. Happy gaming! :smiley:

We are finally done, what a ride! The last minutes were exausting! But we had so much fun. I hope you all finished in time and that you had as much fun as we did!