Interested in participating in this for the first time. If I like the theme then I will make something completely amazing and revolutionary! Or something worse than humankind has ever seen. Most likely something in between. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Visual Studio, XNA, GIMP, Audacity, sfxr and Kevin McLeod’s music will be my tools.
We shall see how things go. Good luck, everybody!
So finally I’m entering Ludum Dare which will be my first one.
I was gonna use Dart but in the end I’m think I will go back to tools I’m more familiar with:
My blog: http://rhapsody.st
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw7XC0NTlG-rlUGmT64iGSg
Trying to get some ideas with a Kexchoklad and some Redbull….
First two hours was staring at the screen with no ideas at all.
After a little bit more sleep I just started to work on something which currently is some kind of “rogue:ish” shooter:ish.. ish ish… where the whole level is on one screen.
I’m probably gonna participate in my second LD.
Tools I’m gonna use:
* Maybe Dart and one of the game libraries for it but most probably Java and libGDX.
* Gimp for graphics
* BFXR for audio
* Ableton Live if I’m gonna do music
* If I need to generate random landscape levels I might use the public domain version of SimplexNoise
Some of the themes can fit a gaming idea I started prototype a bit last weekend in a LD warmup.. so if it match I will throw away that code and graphics and start from scratch with it..
So.. Lets do this!!
For the second time I was in a bit of panic and just started programming something and along the way came an old school shoot-em up that brings my memory back to my childhood and the C64.
I kind of already had the game finished after 14 hours or so when I took some time to play around in Ableton (I’m doing music as another hobby) and made a small tune for it that is repeating itself trough the whole game.
Then this morning I added in some intro screens and an ending and published the game. If I had been having more time I could probably have polished things more and added in more enemies but I had to spend some time with my family too.
My 6 year old son tried the game and he liked it and watched me playing it. “Watch out for the chili dad!!! DAD!!! you forgot to pickup a pumpkin!!!”
Anyway in the end everything went well I’m really satisfied with the result 
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=30731
I have participated in LD twice but only in the combo. This time it was time for a jam with a friend and colleague.
We spent 15 hours of work in a meeting room at the office and mostly finished the game in that time. We lost some hours trying to make it more advanced but in the end “Keep it simple”.
It went very well and as my jam buddy said “This was the funniest thing I have done in a long time!”
Our entry is called Pegs in space and is no graphical masterpiece but a simple game play. Check it out at http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=30731
How many wall can you pass trough?
This is what they got away with in the late 70s and early 80s. Games like Berserk and Pitfall, people paid for playing these games. Those days was ancient counting computer technology years. So we decided to have an ancient theme to both the game, the gameplay and graphics.
It’s my fourth time doing LD and the second time doing a jam. Every single time I’m surprised that I/we actually getting a game both done and finished. Even if it doesn’t feel like that tapping away on the keyboard on Sunday afternoon discovering new weird bugs.
We had lots of ideas that we wanted to add making use of more ancient technology and possible crafting to solve some puzzles. But in the end it become quite simple. Too much time was put on random room generation but in the end (with some dirty tricks and hacks) it came out quite good.
Now lets see how this new “voting” will work and we are already looking forward to LD37!
Our entry can be found at http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=30731
For the sixth time.. Lets do this!
Tools to be used: Java, libgdx, intellij, Gimp, Piskel and probably a few more like bfxr..
Can you save Smolwurld? It's under attack and it's only two days left to try saving it!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/attack-on-smolwurld
If you are looking for a game to rate please try out Attack on Smolwurld. We are two votes short at the moment and not much time left.
It's a fun game.... You will love it... Also there is cake.... :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/attack-on-smolwurld
We have received votes in all categories but is missing one vote in the audio category. So if anyone wants to give a vote please do. Would be a shame to miss the audio category with all the work that went into the music.
Oh. And you will also get a chance to stop the attack on Smolwurld!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/attack-on-smolwurld
We had to let LD39 down since it simply occurred at a difficult weekend for us.
But we are back for LD40 with a new game called Asteroid Breaker. A physic game in space which will take a while to master and understand.
We had the idea straight away and got down into coding quite quickly. Some ideas had to be scratched but the base is there. The finishing touches took a bit while longer than planned but with three hours to go we have to release it.
Enjoy our space physics game!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/asteriod-breaker
/ Smiley and Mashas
With 3 hours left we finally pressed the Publish button on our game!
We didn't like the theme to start with but in the end it turned out to be a quite fun combination of a survival game with zombies and a golf game.
Everything went very well this time. We didn't end up in any mazes with math problems or weird bugs.
Another new thing this time was generating .exe-files (with bundled openjdk) instead of HTML5 export. It's been tested on a few computers and so far it seems to work. The performance difference is huge campares to html5 and the game runs without issues on an 10 year old Macbook.
Now! Lets go and play some Survival Golf!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/golfz
First time I tested Unity was back in 2013:ish and I didn't really like it and I stayed with Java and LibGDX.
Earlier this summer, after Apple announced that they are deprecating OpenGL, I decided to install Unity again and test if it has improved over the last 5 years.
To cut the story short I ended up using Unity for LD42. It was a fun ride and apart from the random crashes and a few WTFs I enjoyed it.
I need to learn how to draw sprites as fonts. I ended up doing a very silly pixel copy from my sprite sheet to an UI Image to get out sprites font to show up. It's very limited but was the quickest way I could find now.
Compiling for other platforms was easier in Unity compared to LibGDX since I didn't have to worry about shipping a copy of java with the game.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/the-skeletons-took-my-boat
We both was uninspired by the theme and just started to work on some vague idea of gas clouds covering an island. After a bit of tweaking I'm pretty happy with the result. I feel like it's missing a few bits and bobs but unspired + shifting platform + limited time = happy that we got another game done.
I have experince of PerlinNoise since earlier and decided to generate the islands randomly on each run. Luckily Unity includes a 2D-version of Perlin. Then some magic happend and my brain just wrote code and I did stand beside and watched.. somehow I managed to create islands of all different sizes which we then limited since the idea is to have a quite small island covered with gas clouds.
So if I have to pick one fun moment of this jam it was that one hour in the zone where things just happend magically.
The only thing I want to add are smoother borders between the layers but I wasn't really up for that challenge.. maybe the next time or in a possible post-jam version :)
It's available but in the end it become a bit too laggy and we decided to not include it. I guess I went a bit too crazy with the particles thing :) Also I noticed it doesn't work in safari (no lights) so decided to keep only the downloadable versions.
This wasn't our favourite theme.. during voting we said things like "it's too similar with the previous theme", "no good ideas of making a game on this theme" and we did give it negative score.
But when we did meet up to start working we had two ideas very quickly and I'm glad that we did pick this idea. A tower defense game with a graphical style like Geometry wars. After the first day we had a pretty solid working game.
The suddenly when we added the health pickups we discovered that we kind of had made mixture of a tower defense and a clicker game. At the end of day two it was almost a finished game but lacking music, sound effects and a way to actually get game over and restart the game.
So day three was polishing day. Small details here and there that made the game even more solid in the end. During day three I also started to play the game more and more while testing.. and if you get lost 30 minutes playing your own game instead of working on it that's a good sign, isn't?
Basically everything.. the flow this time was almost magical compared to previous games.
As always so much more ideas that we didn't had time to put in. * drones picking up hearts for you * more upgrades and possible a few more weapon towers * different levels after reaching a number of waves.. the code for different levels is actually in there but no way for switching and no levels designed.
Something happens with the mob spawner and things go crazy.. but I have heard someone at least reaching wave 20!
Oh the game.. it's here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/ticker-clicker-defence
Now I need to go back and try to beat wave 19.. I mean to Play and rate other games :)
We all should read this post from the old Ludum dare site on how to package the game.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/2016/04/21/how-to-make-your-game-into-a-single-exe/
1hour and 18 minutes left to submission. A quick post with a link to the game here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/bbblz-trbblz
As always I'm worried about performance and what works on my computer might not work on some other computer and break the game.. but hopefully it's all in place.
Another 72 hours gone too fast!
So I was just gonna warmup a bit for the next Ludum dare and somehow I got into the zone and well.. I completed a short playable full game called Squares have more fun. So I guess I'm warmed up now :)
It's a game about a square in a platform puzzle kind of game. I really enjoyed making the game and I have ideas on more content that I might work on after the next Ludum dare (or during easter).
Sorry for the small small gap in the music looping but it shows up only in the WebGL build but not in the Unity editor :(
Play with WASD and space or use an Xbox controller (On Windows 10, MacOS didn't fully work because of differnt button numbers on the controller).
Hit X to show speed run details while playing with elapsed time and deaths.
Hold R for two seconds to restart from level 1.
Play the game at: https://cloud.rhapsody.st/ld46warmup/ - WebGL
So lets have an easter competition and post your best score in the comments (if you can make it to the end)