My first Ludum Dare, having a blast so far. Thought the theme was pretty tricky at first, but managed to come up with an idea. Its a tetris style stacker, about stacking dogs onto the bed and making sure they don't get too jealous about not being on the bed.
So many dogs to make! Not 100% sure if we will commit to this look or try something else if time permits. I hope we can finish it on time :)
So many dogs to make, got most of the poses worked out, made them a bit more playful as well. If there's time I'm keen for make a couple more dogs. So far I love the T shaped dog, hes very goofy looking and that's the theme we're aiming for.
Our programmer has most of the placing mechanics down packed and is starting to implement scoring/loss conditions.
Finally got to play a build of the game after much discussion. Its actually really fun! My first ever game, it feels so awesome. Still a bit to do on cleaning up some of the systems and making things feel intuitive, adding in a couple of sfx/music and intro/help screen (with better font).
Finished up texturing the dogs, may have taken the detail further than intended, but i think we can get away with it. I may have to re-do some of the bed textures though. Time for sleep!!!
Gif is sped up a bit just to get an idea of how it works.
What a fantastic experience, my first game ever! This was an absolute blast. At first i thought the theme was going to be impossible to create something, but after a while the ideas came flowing in. I teamed up with a programming friend i used to work with and we got stuck into it only a few hours after the event started.
We used discord and facebook to communicate with each other since we worked from our own places. The art came together pretty fast, however i did underestimate how long it would take to pose the dogs (dogs are weird btw).
I was pretty happy with the way it all came out. There are a few visuals and design flaws we ran out of time to fix. The dogs turn blue when they are cold, but we tested this on white dogs, but once they were textured it became a bit confusing and we had to come up with a quick fix. The scene is a bit flatter than originally planned, one of the problems with working from 2 different locations. There is also occasionally a problem with dogs spawning behind stacks of dogs, its not a huge bug, but it can catch you out which is frustrating. Overall it came out just how i pictured it in my head which makes this all the better. I'm already look forwards to the next one.
I hope everyone else has enjoyed their time.
I Watched a few twitch streamers playing our game, and it was a really enjoyable. I highly recommend you go chat to some of the streamers and ask them to check out your game.
However, it made us painfully aware of our lack of 'teaching' players how to play. We discussed ways we could have improved introducing the player to the dogs 1 at a time through completing levels then gradually introduce the stacking mechanics and cold mechanics. I also think this would have made the progression flow a bit nicer, and give a feeling of achievement as you moved through the levels. I added in this image to the LD page
To try and and help the player understand that you can stack multiple dogs and that stacking order is important. Since the image was put up, i have found people understand a lot faster on how to play the game correctly.
We would love to hear your feedback
TLDR: I would like to know if you think my game has enough potential for an artist to continue working on it Y/N why?
If you havent played it heres a Gif of gameplay or you can check it out Here
I worked in a team of 2. A programmer friend and myself as the artist. I have talked to our programmer and he said he's not interested in continuing this project any further.
After a few days I've been watching streamers and checking out feedback and it's been a really rewarding experience. Some people really enjoy the game, others don't think it's that fun, some struggle to understand some of the mechanics and some people just like dogs. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to add some features and fix some of the design flaws. This is something I would love to do, I have so many ideas to fix peoples issues and make the game more fun.
Here are some examples:
Levels:
Introducing mechanics one at a time so the player has time to figure out how to play the game properly (this is something that stopped people playing because they kept losing without understanding certain mechanics eg stacking order).
Creating new levels with different puzzles and themes. I was thinking it could get crazier as you play (eg dogs in space), and eventually have some mechanics built into the level (pressure pads with dog weight, fire that keeps the dogs warm or makes them 2 hot, conveyor belts etc).
Items:
That have special effects (bones that take dogs off the bed, or jackets to keep dogs warm).
Tighter controls:
I'm considering changing from the current rotation to snapping so its more obvious where dogs are being placed (this I'm not 100% sure about but its something to test). Also improving the hit detection so dogs can be interlocked easier.
Design:
Fixing the cold meter indication to be more obvious, changing the floor colour and overall visuals to 'pop' more.
Story/character:
Adding in more personality to the dogs, and creating a story as you progress through the levels. Already made another dog who would be the 'guide dog'.
Unlocks:
Unlock multiple breeds of dogs, unlock new furniture or character avatars sleeping in the bed.
So my main question is do you think the game has enough potential for me to consider taking the project any further? I was made redundant this year and have yet to find a new job, my partner is willing to support me, so this would be perfect for me. However I don't know how to code, but I do have the drive to learn to code. I also know the basics of play maker in unity and could see most of the mechanics working with that system. I would appreciate people thoughts and feedback.
Hi Everyone, First update for today. I've been wanting to do another Ludum Dare for the last couple of years, but i keep missing them or have other things on when they are on, so this time i planned months ahead of time and of course after all that planning i get sick this weekend. We're working with a team of 2 programmers and 1 artist (myself). The theme was the 1 theme I had spent the least time thinking about, so that was a bit of an unfortunate curve ball for me. We discussed a few ideas, but ended up settling on a wave based game where you play as the tiny creature Mr Wallace the mouse fending off all sorts of creatures. So far I've spent most of today setting up the mouse model and a few additional props the player can pick up.
I've included some of the WIP shots from the art side. I started with a very basic block-out, i then moved onto the head first and built out a very basic grey box version of the mouse. I then went back over and added the details like hands and shoes after i had the main block out done. Once the general shape of the body felt right i started giving the mouse some clothes. After a bit of discussion we thought the face could be cuter, so i made a few adjustments to the face to make him look more friendly. I did the textures and set his colour to a yellowy brown, after a few revisions i settled on white looking more friendly. Hoping to get a couple more tiny creatures done tonight, then fingers crossed i can get some sleep. Looking forward to seeing everyone's entries.
Hi Everyone!
Day 2 down, we've got a bit more progress on the character and enemies with our character being able to move around properly and enemies now attack and we're in the process of trying to get it polished up (we'll see how we go with the time frame).
We spent some time trying to hone in on a couple of elements, like finding the fun, the atmosphere and the general feel of the game. I think we're still not quiet there with the fun element, but its getting much closer than what we had hoped by this morning.
For me on the art side i spent most of the day working on a new spider enemy. I set up a control rig which is something i haven't done in years, so it was nice to see it all coming back to me relatively easy. I wasn't hoping to do as much animation at the start of this project, but to get the enemies feeling better I really wanted to try and go the extra mile and add in some animation (even if they are a bit average). The rest of the day was spent making all the environment props, the one I was the most unsure about was doing the terrain textures, I'm not great at hand painting, but in the end I felt pretty happy with the result. Overall I'm very happy with our progress. Would love to hear peoples thoughts and things we could adjust to find more of the fun.
Sorry for people that don't like spiders
Video:
https://youtu.be/BVpvARaCKVU?si=BeRuqRf-E4fMwNaF
We're done! Really happy with the overall outcome and final quality. Would love for people give it a go and let us know what you think.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/whisker-warrior
Results are in and I honestly thought we would get slightly higher then where we landed, almost everything is significantly worse than my last jam about 6 years ago. I wasn't expecting top 10, but i thought we would land a bit higher than were we did.
My main goal was to try and beat my previous graphics score of 186th and this time i landed at 304th. I'm not sure what i did wrong, I honestly felt like I had improved the graphics from my last game jam, maybe I've just got rose tinted glasses on.
Would love to hear peoples opinions on what I could have done differently (mainly on the art side).
Here's the game if anyone is curious:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/whisker-warrior
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/$413053
Well I originally wasn't going to do the jam because I didn't have a team and I barely know how to code, then the theme wasn't super inspiring, but I hoped in unity just to see if I could come up with something, and it just kind of flowed on from there.
First time solo and first time making a horror game. I would have loved to spend some more time on the visuals really beefing up the look of the whole game, but thankfully being in the dark makes it much easier.
I hope it gets someone's heart pumping.
What a solid jam! The last stretch turned into my first all nighter but i think the final outcome feels worth lacking a few hours of sleep.
This year we had a 2 man team, with me solely doing all the visuals.
PLAY
The collector theme certainly wasn't my first choice of themes, so it took a bit of brainstorming to figure out where we wanted to go with it. After a while we settled on a Dune/C&C inspired sand crawler collector/harvester "tower defence" game.
I sort of went with the design of some sort of militaristic style combine harvester. From there we started working on upgrades and enemies (of course we went with drones to avoid extra animations).
After we got the basic loop in of the drones and turrets shooting each other I started working on the resources and minor environmental props.
After we had some stretch goals to get a player weapon + tool into the game so I worked on modelling those (unfortunately the weapon did not meet stretch goals and has been added to the game as an easter egg).
I'm not a UI artist, however i also did some work adding UI which I'm happy enough with.
The rest of my work mainly focused on trying to add as much juice as possible on most of the interactions. Collecting the resources, destroying drones, turret upgrades etc. I spent longer than i wanted on a bunch of particles and either sourcing or blending new sounds.
The remainder of the night mainly focused on playtesting with only a few hours to go, I'm not sure how well balanced the game is. It takes a while to get to the end, so I didn't quiet have enough time to test if its fully winnable, but i certainly got close, which made me think its do-able.
Overall massive respect to @lordsheo for the effort he put in, we matched each others energy and smashed it out, super impressed with all the programming work he did. The way the turrets and drones aim at each other looks really great!
My wishlist for features: -In game tutorial and story -Drop ship which picks up your deposits -More node upgrade types -Player Weapons -More crawler upgrades -More enemy types
Let me know what you think of the game and if you have any suggestions of what you would like to see? Let me know if you find the hidden collectable.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/siege-crawler
We decided to continue working on some of the stretch goals we were unable to reach in the jam.
Here is a list of some of the main things we added:
We added some more feedback on the mining tool. A particle was made in the jam but never got implemented for the final release.
We improved the economy scaling a bit, so that there are more ways to win the game than just the one strategy. New bulldozer blades for more resources!
Chekov's gun has now been added as a special purchase (it's op, but takes a bit to unlock)
We now have infinite scaling on the waves so people can get lost playing the game for as long as they can stay alive. (I would love to hear how far people managed to get).
Added some more guidance at the start of the game with some tutorial text.
When depositing money for the end goal we included a dropship which comes to pick up the resources (it feels very cool).
We added some easter eggs for people to find.
Would love to hear what peoples thoughts and feelings are on the adjustments we made. You can play both the new or old versions on Itch.
Here's where you can PLAY it.
Great jam this year. Some really amazing entries!
I had hoped to get above 200 so just short of that goal, but also not unhappy with where we landed.
We're thinking of continuing work on our game and making a slightly more fleshed out version. So i'd love to hear some peoples opinions on where we could have gone to improve our rating to have made it to the top 100. My assumption based on some of the comments is our UX could have been a bit better, however I would love to know if there are any other thoughts or opinions on what may have held us back.
I'm finished and with time to spare for once!
What a journey this jam has been. I didn't expect to partake in this jam with my standard programmer out of action, however i thought i may as well see how far i can get.
Day one was a complete write off, i kept trying to make the concept work and every approach i took felt really terrible, nothing was working the way i had pictured. It got to day 2 and i decided to scrap everything and start over with my new knowledge. Everything instantly fell together so fast. The concept was working.
I think overall, the game design might be a bit weak but I'm just glad to have finished. I would have loved to polish it up further and made it more fun, but i think i hit the theme pretty well. Im not sure how well balance the whole game is, and i think there are some performance issues late game, but it is what it is.
I'd love to see how well people can do, I defiantly think there will be some people who are able to get some really high scores with some practice.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/rail-rush