The jam is over for us (@Katutt & @Daegonz) It was our first game jam since what felt like forever and it was so nice to get back at it!

The theme inspired us to make a surrealist narrative experience and we are very happy with the result.

We have a WebGL and a Windows build that you can check out there: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/far-gone

The game relies a lot on audio and it was a bit of a challenge for us considering none of us had any experience with sound design or voice acting (@Daegonz did an amazing job there).

Now it's time to play and rate other games, we can't wait to hear about your thoughts on ours!

Well done everyone :)

Far Gone was made in 48hours and now that a week has passed, we had the chance to see multiple streamers play the game and offer us really positive feedback.

Most of the times they experience the game the way we intended but there's some minor tweaks we wanted to do to provide an even smoother experience to every future player:

• Add the possibility to move with the Arrow Keys instead of WASD
• Fix the cursor sensibility that wasn't framerate independant
• Tweak some spatialized audio so they are still audible without headphones
• Tweak the first objective spawn distance to try preventing the player from getting lost at the start of the game.

Those changes aren't much but we believe they can improve the global feel of the game and we thanks every player who left us feedback.

We also updated the cover image of the game on itch.io. Here's the old one:

And here's the new one:

Obviously the .gif quality is better, but we also added a cover image for the first frame and changed the content to be the first clock of the game instead of a tombstone (We thought maybe seeing "R.I.P" at first glance wasn't the best way to get player to play the game). I feel like we never take enough time during/after the jam to do good promo art/gifs/banners and other, even though it's maybe the most important thing to do if you want many people to play your game.

This will surely be the last update on the game, there's obviously a lot of things we could add or change to make the game better but we still want to respect the original vision we had during the jam.

Thank you for reading this and come play Far Gone if you haven't already! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/far-gone

• The Far Gone team -

Hello! This time I entered the compo and I hadn't done it in years. The last few hours were a bit intense!

I encountered last minute issues when trying to build for web for my game, so I only have a windows build. Is it still ok if I upload a web build later today? (after work :p)

On another note congratulation to every fellow compo participants and good luck to those who haven't submitted their game yet!

Shaky Structures is out!

It's a construction/puzzle game based on verlet simulation. There is also a sandbox mode to play around with the physic system for creative players.

I had already experimented with basic verlet simulation before but I never done any collision detection or response before so this was a challenge!

This was also my first compo in years and I forgot how different working alone could be than working with a team! I tried to stay as minimalist as possible regarding graphics to keep it as clean as possible and I'm quite happy with the end result.

As usual though during game jams, I never take enough time to do audio, all the audio was done in more or less 30min.

The theme was composed with GarageBand and the sfxr a sound effect generator.

Anyway if you want to try my game, here's a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/shaky-structures For now I'll try to play and rate as many games as possible, congratulation everyone who submitted! (and those who will submit soon)

Shaky Structures - A physic puzzle game

• Draw your structures by placing lines
• Hit the Build button to simulate physic on your structure
• Reach your objectives and try to stay stable.
• You may have to recycle some of your lines to go higher!

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/shaky-structures

Shaky Structures is a game about building weird looking structures barely holding together

The physic system is based on verlet integration. The first day of the jam was spent making the physic system work and react to collisions. Here are a few gifs of the process:

If you want to try Shaky Structures here's a link to the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/shaky-structures

Shaky Structures Post Jam Version is out !

First of all, I'd like to thanks everyone who played the original jam version of the game. As I'm writing this, Ludum Dare results have just been revealed:

I am particularly pleased with the Overall and the Fun score, the jam version had lots of quality of life issues and I thought that people would be more bothered than them than they really were.

What about the post jam version now ?

As teased in the title, this post is less about results and more about the new update of Shaky Structures. So what can you find in this update ?

• New levels! (15 levels in total with an additional Sandbox Mode)
• New gameplay mechanics in the latest levels
• A lot of quality of life improvements, better feedbacks when deleting lines, a replay button and a mute button!
• Graphic update, overall harmonization of the game graphics (and a new title screen to celebrate)
• Bug fixes (mostly physics issues)

I'll probably leave the game as it is and won't work on it any further (maybe a mobile port if the game does well on itch?) but it was a great fun to work on it!

Feel free to try it and leave comments !

Well done to every jammer!

For the 50th Ludum Dare we tried something a bit bigger than we usually do: an exploration game in a time loop, with puzzle & narrative elements.

It was a great fun crafting this world during the weekend, all together in a house for 2 days, working, making lunch and having drinks.

In the game you wake up few minutes before 22h38, the time of the end of the world.

Hopefully you can touch Shrines to gain more time and try to stop the inevitable.

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/22h38

We'd love to hear your feedbacks!

Now that we had some time to rest a little, we have been playing a lot of different entries and we found some really great ones. Well done to everyone :)

22h38

Theme reveal

For us the jam started the saturday at 11am. We had a few drinks the night before but we eventually went to bed before the theme was revealed.

The first thing we did was a quick visual mockup of what we wanted to have for an artistic direction:

We knew we wanted to make an exploration game with a focus on narrative so the idea of a time loop came pretty fast.

We then quickly scrapped a simplistic level editor tool in Unity, that allowed us to quickly do some level design and navigate in it. We realized that we could easily make very different environments with little art assets so that was a good news.

Audio

One of our team members brought an asmr microphone and a guitar. We also had a ukulele lying around, so at around 3am on sunday we recorded 3 different music theme and a 4th one wich is a rearrangement of the 1st one. Then with some music mixing magic, we had some audio in the game. We went straight with unity audiosource system, but next time we will try to use an external audio engine.

Explosion

One of the key feature of the game was the "end of the world". It needed to look impressive and not visually boring because the player would encounter it many times in its playthrough. We hesitated at first between a volcano or a meteorite, but we finally decided on a sort of earth explosion because we really liked the effect.

Web build

We wanted to be able to build the game for web, so we had some optimization to do regarding the size of the world and the explosion effect, but in the end we are happy to report that the game runs smoothly on web. We also encountered an issue with users using high DPI monitors on the web game having UI scaling issues. We finally found the culprit (a canvas scaler component not properly set), but we had to submit the fix post-jam. (turns out a lot of ludum dare users have high DPI monitors).

If your curious about how the game turned out, check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/22h38

A sneak peak of the world of 22h38.

22h38 is an exploration game set in a time loop. Here's a picture of the world in the editor!

Obviously, there is some optimization done behind the scene, mainly through occlusion, but here you can see how we build the world of 22h38. Each area of the world was built independantly then merged on a master scene, through a very buggy custom level editor built for the jam.

If you haven't tried the game yet, here's a link to play it (web build available):

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/22h38