So the friendly reminder for you to checkout our game

And share your games if you want to in the comments! I will try to check them out!

Our game

Think you can make Mom's houseplants look like they belong outside? Only one way to find out... https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/extreme-plant-sitter

"Make your time"

* - is time based puzzle game, highly inspired by "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes", where you have to defuse bombs *alone at fast pace in order to survive **

We had a pretty rough start at LD50, as we had some IRL problems, that wasted pretty much all time

So there are some improvements we had to make:

Changelog:

• Improved room light, so it doesn`t trigger epilepsy
• Changed light switch sound
• Fixed rare bug that could softlock player

Try it here!

Live right now

My friend c0m1n1 is online right now on Twitch! I will be there too! Come join us: https://www.twitch.tv/c0m1n1

How to !submit

More info in a previous blog post by the streamer: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/$276537/happy-anniversary-let-me-play-your-games-on-twitch

I'm doing my 3rd LD submissions stream tonight at 6:00 p.m. eastern (10:00 p.m. GMT)

follow/come share your game: https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

you can view all the games I played monday and tuesday as well as the live queue here: https://tigerj.itch.io/tots-c-the-officialist-tigerj-stream-companion :potato:

Only you can stop the Meteor Wizard from turning into a mighty meteor and colliding with the Academy of Magic. Will your spells and speechcraft to save the day, or will the Meteor Wizard do you in?

Play it here and please let us know what you think! We love to make games and hear about your experience playing them :grin:

If you want feedback on your game, feel free to drop a link in our Quite Good Community Discord! Our favorite part about Ludum Dare by far is getting to play all the incredible games out there.

Congratulations everyone on another amazing jam! :smile:

Because people seem to really like the music for my jam game And then you Fall, I've gone ahead and uploaded the game's OST, including several unimplemented tracks! Enjoy!

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

I'm PLAYING LUDUM DARE GAMES, liveeeeee on twitch RIGHT NOW!

Find me on twitch :3
https://www.twitch.tv/rainbeeeeee

Come say hai and let me know you have a game that you'd like me to try out! You must be in my chat for me to try your game out!

I have a bot queue where you can add yourself, and when your turns comes if you're there, I'll play your gam

I can only play WEB GAMES (in Firefox) on stream, but if you have a non web game, I can still attempt to get to it after strea

The best way to get me to rate/play your game is to rate and comment on mine :3

I have a list of games to try out tonight because since the jam ended my brain has been absolutely mush! So last night I wasn't able to muster brain power to play any!

SO COME ON OVER AND SAY HAIIIII, and chat with us while we play some games and if you ask i'll even show you my game :3

My games :3 ---> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/baking-simulator-2022

FWOG is a physics-based infinite runner with unusual controls. Hop, flip, and roll to avoid the giant laser!

Check it out!

How far can you get?

As my first game jam, this was tense but great!!

Our game "Watch it" was finished just in time, that's why it's a bit rough around the edges technically, but we're proud of it!

I love reading about what people liked and disliked in our point 'n click visual novel, and if you want to try it and share that too it would mean a lot :D (sincerely, we really appreciate the feedback, you probably did the jam too, you know what I mean)

The game >>>> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/watch-it

One thing I wanted to clarify is that in this game we offer you to try again at some points, as videogames do, but reaching that "Try again" button is a valid end in itself and if your story ends there, that's fine. There's no ending more valid that the other.

As the dev, I have to say a huge "thank you" to Miiyuka who basically did everything for this game. She made all the art in a day and wrote the story in an afternoon, she was fueled with passion and true crime the whole time and produced something great. Meanwhile, I was there producing what's probably the second worst code of my life, just after that calculator I did in highschool, I was fueld by passion, self doubt and bad coding habits. That's why the end is kinda buggy, not "game breaking" buggy but still, apologies for that. If I had one more hour I could have fixed it very simply (playing an empty dialogue would probably have done the trick but I only realised that way after the end of the jam).

Despite crappy art and a few bugs I'm very proud of my procedural buildings that actually shatter from meteor impacts, with fragments killing fleeing citizens! It's almost just as fun to not play and watch the city get destroyed :D

Since making it I've been contemplating doing a much cooler 3D version. :)

Please try my game and let me know what you think!

Hey, just trying to get at least 20 ratings on my game and checking out others

its got mount and blade / sekiro style inspired fighting with directional block / parry and dodging certain attacks

try to reach 30 kills and fight the golden ninja!

direct itch link to play on web

https://fidrik.itch.io/endless-ninjas

LD page

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/endless-ninjas

I will be showcasing my game live, and playing and rating others' games, tonight at 6pm CST on my twitch channel at http://twitch.tv/flyingkaida.

Come by and say hi and I'll totally try to play your game! As long as it's web based that it.

Also if you rate mine I'll definitely play your game too! My game link is, "https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/outrun-the-darkness"

These are the best ways to get me to play and rate your game ~~there are so many I might miss them otherwise!!!~~

I am SO looking forward to playing some of the jam games. They were SO fun! I can't wait to see what you all came up with!!!

Hey everyone, I've really been enjoying all of your games. So many of them out there are great and feel so polished. This was kind of our first official gamejam and we're just amazed at what everyone came up with. Such diverse ideas and solutions to this theme. Overall an amazing experience! I'll defintely be playing a bunch more games over the next couple of days.

Of course we are also trying to get as many of you to play our game ShadowRush as possible. It's a fun little racing game where you're chased by yourself as a ghost from the past. Try to stay ahead, dodge them and set some record time laps, please check it out and let us know what you think!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/shadow-rush

Cheers everyone!

When she died I thought I would never forget her, but time passes, and memories fade

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/flowers-photos-pills

If you want a fun challenge try beating this game:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/dreadlife

It’s a dungeon crawler game where your main mechanic is the ability to drink potions to delay your death
It's also a tough game, but the ending is worth it ;)

But maybe you can score first here

Now is the time for rest.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/crab-battle

Hi everyone, I will be playing more of your games on stream over at: https://twitch.tv/basicmilky

If you haven't yet, feel free to try out our game too: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/keep-it-steaming

Come to my stream at https://www.twitch.tv/scalphamission to get your game reviewed and rated live

Prove your dedication to the company! Just don't piss yourself...

Firstly, thanks a lot for all the positive comments!

Secondly, we are a team from Spain... So we are proud to announce a translation to Spanish of our game.

Original game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/playing-dave

Spanish Version (external): https://makingenemies.itch.io/playing-dave-spanish

Did my first ever live stream today and luckily, everything went quite well, and even more awesome, it was a whole lot of fun! Some great games in there, check them out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YpXlNnSS0s Games in this video:
The Great Horde by @lcstark: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-great-horde
Timeflight Alpha by @quinn-patrick: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/timeflight-alpha
Hold The Line by @pwnofprophecy and @griggy: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/hold-the-line-ludum-dare-50
Gods of Divine Stuff: RAgnarök by @anaxie-studio: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/gods-of-divine-stuff-ragnarok

Very much looking forward to the second one tomorrow, once again at 6pm / 18:00 CEST. If you'd like a chance to be featured, just fill out the survey and tune in on my channel:
https://forms.gle/XwC8zZZG6FCgfkjw7
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR0okiWDbwLgyLb-AoZUunw

~ Flameline ~

Hey Jammers!

I did music and most of the SFX for a little game called Hang Up! @kylazaur programmed it and @jesse-j-jones did art. It's been an absolute blast to watch all of your reactions and I think it's about time I return the favor. I'll be streaming it live on twitch so come hang out on twitch and get your game rated!

https://www.twitch.tv/whirlguy

See you soon!

Climb your way up the Tower of Googly! Can you make it to outer space??

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/tower-of-googly

:eyes: Hangin in there :eyes:

:eyes: Just Starting :eyes:

:eyes: Tower of Googly :eyes:

I thought this theme was going to inspire everyone to make zombie survival games, I guess it was just me, I'm THAT guy lol

PLAY THE GAME HERE!

I know it's a huge to complain about the theme, but for me personally this was kind of a tough one. There are plenty of genres (tower defense, wave shooters, even puzzlers like Tetris and Bejeweled) and mechanics that fit right in to the 'delay the inevitable' mold, but they are all ones that I don't care much about. I've never been a competitive or achievement gamer, so racking up high scores while delaying the inevitable demise hold little glamour for me. In retrospect, having played a bunch of games by others, it's clear that many others didn't want to take that easy route either, and I'm seeing a wider variety of genres and approaches than usual. I think normally there are a few main routes people take in regards to the genre and a a lot of games are similar in that sense, but with Delay the Inevitable, at least so far, I'm not seeing that.

There's obviously a bunch of similar ideas floating around and one we took - flipping the assumption of the "inevitable" being a negative thing on its head - had been in some other games too (like this very crabby procrastination game). We started off with a mechanic that was traditionally pretty fitting to the theme, tower defense, mixed with having a controllable main character exploring the area. The first day was spent mostly making the essentials and putting stuff together, but on Saturday evening I felt like what we had was a pretty bad tower defense game, mechanically. For a TD game, having to do stuff with the character felt clunky and the menu I had built felt way too unwieldy to use, and just distracted from the action of managing the towers. In art and music we were definitely going to the right direction, with the game already looking and sounding pretty great. I also realised that since I don't really play TD games, I have little previous knowledge on how to design a good one, especially in such a short time! Around Saturday evening, I added a more narrative mechanic: short "prayers" to the petals we were using as a resource for building the towers. The idea was that you'd need to balance between fulfilling and sacrificing the prayers, depending on their contents. However, this just added to the overall hectic feeling.

So on Sunday ~~morning~~ afternoon, I backpedaled a bit and added the unlit towers, so instead of using the menu and cursor to to build them, you'd just light the ones already in the map. I also wrote a short intro to add to a more fairytale-like feel and a dialogue with the Demon Lord. This made the game a lot less about tower defense and more about exploration and story, which I think was ultimately the right choice, though one we maybe should have taken much earlier. Monday was used mostly for fixing things, finalising the map and balancing it more towards a slower story-driven game and the earlier fight against the inevitable horde of demons. I think, in the end, we did manage to get it quite right, though of course there's plenty that could still be improved. One thing is having better indication about the demons whereabouts, such as a minimap, or at least a bit more warning when they are approaching the Sakura tree. The feedback has been very positive however, so I'm ultimately happy with the result.

For me, this was a very learning experience in a couple of ways. One, I think in the future I need to put what I feel comfortable making above the theme, especially design-wise. We jumped into production a bit too quickly, not properly considering if the ideas we had were actually fun. That is, of course, how prototyping often works, but with LD that might mean a bit pivot one third or even halfway into the jam, when you finally start to actually feel the game. Secondly, we went with Unity's 2D and Tilemap and though I have some previous experience on them, there was a lot of new stuff I was not even aware of. Especially the Sprite Masks a very useful tool I'll certainly make use of in future 2D projects. There are limitations, of course (e.g. you can determine from script if a point is inside a mask or not), but overall it was quite exciting to get to use the new 2D features.

I had a lot of fun working with @cheezegami and @danae and I think we had a good shared understanding on what kind of a game we'd like, even if getting there took a bit of time for me.

Gamepad and Keyboard Supported

Play and Rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/dlays-buffet

Story

You are the Shaman of the Island Kalani.

DLAY, The Inevitable, is almost waking up from his sleep. His hunger has no match, no matter how much you feed it. The time to face him and release the island from this curse is near.

Grab and throw sacrifices at him to defeat him and avoid his attacks.

So 5 days into my 3 day jam my game is finally done and published! WOOOO!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/cosmic-castaway

I really like the new Extra category a lot. I like to enter my games non competitively and it allowed me to get this game finished. Even though it took me 2 days longer than planned. To be fair to myself if I'd taken Monday off work I should have been done in 3 days but whatever, it's all come together in the end.

Tomorrow I'm going to post a post mortem as I have a lot of thoughts about how this went.

I'm also now looking forward to playing a load of your games.

Hey folks! Our game is about delaying the meltown in an nuclear power plant. You have to complete simple tasks like fixing the electricity or refill the cooling water to delay the meltdown and save other people against the time.

The 10 best highscores are updated in our highscore list with your LD-Nametag. So try to save as many people as you can and put a screenshot in the comments. You can also link your game in the comments, then we will test it out.
If you like our game please rate it and give feedback. We appreciate it :smile:

This was our 4th LD, visit our website at https://www.desertmaw.de to play all our games!

As of today we've passed 35 ratings! We're super glad folks in the community here have wanted to try out Hold The Line. We've been taking lots of notes on recommendations from you all that Griggy has been implementing for an update once the jam is over. For now, Celebration Horse is here to get the party st-Oh...Oh god...He's got his AirPods in and he can't hear us...CELEBRATION HORSE! TURN AROUND BRO THEY'RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!

We may have to delay the party. In the meantime, check out Hold The Line here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/hold-the-line-ludum-dare-50

Rate our game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/they-are-coming-1

You are in a steampunk world invaded by roboters. The mission is to defend the city until you die. This game is a little fast paced ego shoter.

Here's my game scene with default lighting

And Here's the same scene after just fiddling with every lighting setting i could find (plus a nice skybox)

Any random model i drop into my scene now looks beautiful

my game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/taoreta-mura

Hey guys, I am still streaming today the Ludum Dare Games! If you guys wanna play my game too: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/will-there-bee-another

Here is my Twitch link: https://www.twitch.tv/gabstche

Hello! I’ve been playing our game over and over to try and get past level 4. I’ve gotten super close. My main two strategy’s are large mask minions and healing towers, or dart towers and poison with wisps as backup. Let me know if anyone else is able to get past level 4 and let me know how you do it!

Our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-hero-always-wins

Hi! I'm Clément, a Level Designer also know as Kemsou, I created Cosmic Contact with a friend akitl during the Ludum Dare 50 game jam and I wanted to share a little bit what my design intention was, as it was quite experimental for me :nerd:

I've wanted to design horror game for a while but I was always scared to not be able to create the right mood and to fall flat. But hey, Game Jams are for trials and errors so here I went :grin: I'm pretty happy with my first result :sunglasses: Let me share with you how I tried to use the space of my game to build tension and uneasiness for the player :ghost:.

What a friendly place, so easy to navigate!

So, one of the aspect that makes us enjoy a game is when we build knowledge of the space as a player, right ? When we can navigate complex maze with ease and are able to build a mental map, it feels like we built a territory where we are safe.

*That's a corridor you learn to know during the first phase, quite cozy, right ? :smile: *

But what happens if this territory suddenly changes? Something is off, this space you used to know and dominate is not so safe anymore. A bit like the uncanny valley, you know :robot: . That's EXACTLY because the space is familiar but a little detail has changed for no reason that it feels creepy and even threatening.

*The same corridor in phase 3. Not so cozy anymore :sweatsmile: *

In Cosmic Contact, there are roughly 3 phases, the first one is calm and chill, the player is told to talk to everyone in the ship, this has the purpose of posing a context and, more importantly, let the player build familiarity with the space. During the second phase, there is an emergency and the player has to use their knowledge of the space to go quickly from a point A to a point B with just a few details that changed to start building tension and uneasiness. And finally, third phase, we totally crush the player bearings by totally changing the space. (for those curious how we did this, we just teleported the player to a new place that looks exactly like the one they are in, but with a difference afterwards)

Well, I won't lie, lighting and sound design also play a huge role and to be honest I wanted to change the space way more than what I did in Cosmic Contact but you can only do so much in 72 hours :clock1: I hope some of you were interested at understanding a bit more what I tried to do with this entry and I hope you will enjoy(or already have enjoyed) the result :wink:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/charitable-duffy

Procrabstination is now available for download on the Google Play Store! If you're looking to play on Android and don't like manually installing APKs, this is for you!

There is an absolutely obvious Omori référence in my game. I was expecting everyone to point it out but NOONE did. I'll give COMPLETE AND DETAILED feedback and design tips to those who will find it. Hint : it's at the end.

Yes I'm frustrated XD

Also, I'll play and give feedback on everyone's game that leave feedback on mine ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/nightwaker

Once I'll be done, I'll post it to my ytb channel : https://youtube.com/channel/UCcGSRDYUYBQIsujY2QXpg

I'm looking forward to see your games !

After finding out that our game is crashing half an hour before the submission to the Jam category, today I finally submitted our game to Extra!!! We are very relived...

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

This is a asynchronous multiplayer auto-battler card game!

Where you deck of cards gets more and more bloated until it cant measure up anymore! Give it a shot! PLAY HERE

Arbitrarily cutting this off at 30 ratings received at the time of this writing, 'cause we can all see which games are near the top of the "Grade" section. Just a few games I thought deserved a little more attention!

Delaying Ludum Dare The gameplay is pretty much "basic sidescrolling platformer", but it's a solid one that works well and is fun to play if you like platformers, and there's a twist with all the elements surrounding it that makes it simply charming and great. Seriously brought a smile to my face.

Feast or Famine A simple top-down twin stick shooter with rooms in the vein of Binding of Isaac or old school 2D Zelda. The vampire theme works well and is incorporated into the gameplay, and it just plays well and has plenty of levels and a good difficulty curve.

Ydunian Prune A Cookie Clicker/idler type game with gorgeous pixel art graphics and some interesting thematic/story elements. Not everyone's favorite genre, but if you like these games like I do, check this one out.

(...and shameless plug, check out mine if you're into story-driven survival adventures).

We started working on an update to fix some of the minor bugs left and improve the overall gameplay. Thank you all for your reviews and feedback! If you haven't checked out the game yet: https://ldj.am/$287038 and don't forget to comment!

¿Are you a great survival artist?

We are working for a bigger community!

Gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/c/mrfilton-deluxe-rutsvq

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MrFiltonDeluxe/

Hi all we are playing your games in the studio again! all are welcome please come say hi grab a drink dance along and even present your game if you want to!

live now

https://www.twitch.tv/potkirland

...was the menu buttons. Since the main mechanic required a trail following your mouse cursor, it felt pretty cohesive to do the same thing on the menu screens. I just need to get the opinion of the "button feedback lady" herself, @elysiagriffin, before I can really say it was a good choice :laughing:

Check out Space Ninja and let me know how you like it!

Omni Empire

Build guns, factories, units and more to defend Planet Earth against waves of aliens!

You will have to mine asteroids to collect mass and build units and shields on various planets.

See how long you can delay the inevitable annihilation of Planet Earth! :wink:

Here's the link to my game: https://arqitech.itch.io/omni-empire

Josh needs games, I am taking the night off. Bring him your games to stream.

https://www.twitch.tv/retroindiejosh

I wanted to shout out the Majellan our LD50 submission! You are a jellyfish and you are exploring three different zones while avoiding hazards and collecting diamonds.

Explore as far as you can, and drink fountains of youth to keep you young. Become more powerful as you age over time, but drink fountains of youth to prevent your demise.

Check the game out here: https://nicolekg.itch.io/majellan-and-the-fountain-of-youth

Are there any improvements or ideas brewing in your minds? Feel free to link your your game and chat about something your learned or something you want to improve in your game!!!

Heeey you all, after all the feedbacks, we fixed a few bugs (not all of them)

and now the game is playable on mobile, although for some reason the music does not play on Safari :cry:

thanks for everyone who played so far and helped us find the issues :smiley:

Playing and rating your Ludum Dare #50 games online. Send your links https://www.twitch.tv/ozzysden

Hey people, we've made a game for this jam literally called Mecha&Aliens, and boy oh boy, we have BUGS in it (and not the ones of software kind)

Now, we might see what you're gonna say: "Meh, that's yet another top down shooter, played that, been there" - but don't you be hasty with assumptions. For you see, in this game, you are not exactly playing the Mecha... You are playing the bugs!

Will you be able to stave off the inevitable alien defeat at the hands of this chunky oversized battlesuit? Will you be cheering for the "defender of humanity" instead and do your best to protect him? Are you actually then one in control of the game at all?

Well, up to you to find out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mech-aliens

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/1-man-6-bullets

Finnaly got 20 rates! If you havent check my game out go https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/bossfight-but

Is this your goat?
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-pit-2

🔗 Feedback: https://ldj.am/$288633

🕹️ PLAY: https://risedev.itch.io/ld50-sapper-master

Guys, thanks to everyone who left feedback to help us improve the game - it's very important for us.

We made a decision not to wait until the end of the jam, but to continue development now. In the near future we will: 1. Starting game tutorial 2. Interface and level system for the game to increase its difficulty. 3. Working on bonuses and improving the gameplay. 4. The main game mechanics will remain the same, but we will improve it, make it more flexible. 5. The most important thing is that now you can win the game and get points.

My game got off to a good start so I had to grind out a ton of reviews to finally get some more, I leave detailed feedback on every game I play and now have more reviews given than received but my smart score is still awful. Does anyone have any advice? Not sure what more I could be doing.

Edit: this is more a comment on the smart rating system, I’m willing to leave plenty of comments and reviews, it just doesn’t seem like it should be this low given how many ratings I’ve given

The lonely fisherman seems to free his mind at night...

Stone Sabbath is a PS1 and Dark Souls inspired game based on Cornish Mythology

As with any Ludum Dare project, the amount of bugs found after final upload eclipsed the euophoria of finally uploading our game. So now, after a day of rest and an evening of fixing bugs, I present to you our 1.1 changelog:

• "Escape" to exit game was not previously working
• Fixed a few holes that allowed you to fall out the world
• Some sets of stairs were randomly duplicated and breaking collisions
• A sequence break allowed you to skip half the level. Not anmyore.
• Enemies now follow you up stairs. They will follow you from start to finish now.
• Enemy colliders now disable after death, stopping them from blocking you into corners
• Enemies now no longer push you around, climb on top of you, or teleport behind you.
• Huge laundry list of game flow issues fixed. Replaying the game just outright did not work before.
• Campfires were only respawning you 50% of the time now. I like to think that's at 100% now.
• Removed debug code on Giant boss fight, which previously allowed it to be killed in 3 hits.
• Enemies are no longer able to damage you while in their death animation
• Enemies can no longer hit behind them
• Music had bagpipes in the wrong place. Sorted.
• Menu readability problems ironed out. Font completely replaced.
• Piskies and Knockers now have textures
• Most sound effects that were previously bugged and not firing off are now working
• Giant health bar and praying UI animation now working as intended

There are still a few bugs to go, bur we're all very satisfied with this as a 1.1 release. Godspeed!

Swing by https://twitch.tv/jitspoe and type !LDRaffle to enter.

Come try our game DeadFlame
We have a WEBGL build up now, I would recommend using the standalone though!
You play as one of the last members of humanity just trying to stay warm and stay alive in a zombie filled woods.
https://nightember.itch.io/deadflame

The results are in: Icebreak is, in fact, a game. Play it here!

I just finished my second ludum dare game called Time Bandit. Would love some reviews and feedback on how it could be inproved even more in the future! :smile:

The first gamejam where I was the main creative. I have bipolar disorder and therefore I really wanted to show the problem of mental disorders and co-dependent relationships.

Play here

One of the players of our game shared their creation with us. A very nice looking concept!

Can you beat @wegpast and make your party last longer?

Play my game and I'll play yours! Preferrable to play on the web build version as the windows build is from earlier in the jam, it's missing a few fixes and a QoL feature but is still playable.

Had a lot of fun in a tiny team building this game from scratch and we're building it up further, and are planning to release a more polished version after the jam! Please read the Ludum dare page description before playing, there's some info in there! Post your games in this comment thread and I'll be happy to play them!

Anyways, here's my team's prototype game created for Ludum Dare!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/jupiter-station-v0-5

In Prestidigitaxation it's up to you to fend off the tax collectors for as long as possible and get deeper into the magical world of debt!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/prestidigitaxation-ld50

We're halfway to 20 ratings on SICKLY VICTORIAN BOY! Our 2.5D point and click medical adventure features minigames, hand drawn animations, and scurvy! If that sounds like your cup of leech, give us a try! We welcome all feedback and try to return the favor whenever possible.

Hey all! First of all, congratulations on submitting your game! Now the second best part of a game jam is trying out the games, giving and receiving feedback, and overall, get to know more people that enjoy making games as much as you do.

...and I am about to start doing exactly that over at https://www.twitch.tv/theserot

Please comment on this post if you want to be added to the queue, and I'll see you very soon. Thanks!

This has been a wonderful experience and even though we didn't like the theme at first, (shocking. I know.) we absolutely love the game that came about as a result! We plan to keep polishing our game post-jam, so any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/jailbound-joyride

Our game, Different Strokes is a huge, sprawling labyrinth of user-generated content.

Several versions of images for each and every painting submitted by users must be uploaded to a cloud server, and loaded in when the game is played.

It must cost a fortune to host all those images and send hundreds of them to every client on every play session, right?

Nah.

The storage and cloud functions are both handled through Google Cloud, which has some pretty generous free tiers. I'm looking forward to hosting this game for as long as possible, and with costs like these, I'm not worried about the future.

Feel free to check out our game if you're curious what can be done in a weekend with some basic cloud tech.

Cheers!

OSTRO is a sandbox system-based investigative mystery.

In OSTRO, the player is tasked with investigating a suspicious corporation through internal servers.

What will you find? Can you stop the Collapse?

Try it out if you like hacking games or a good mystery!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/ostro

For more updates, follow us on Twitter!

https://twitter.com/TotteriStudios

It's no secret that we've made more than a few narrative games for LD now. What's perhaps less apparent is HOW we make them, or more precisely: "How do you make narrative games with branching outcomes in 3 days and not go insane?"

Lets take a wonderful journey through the history of our narrative LD games. What worked, what didn't, and how I changed my approach each time.

The first stab I ever took at telling an actual narrative was waaaay back in LD34. There was an attempt with an earlier entry actually, but it's mostly been lost to time (and it was mostly just a last minute joke) so lets start here for the sake of cohesiveness. LD34 predates the new site, so a direct link to the entry can be found here.

In this entry, I originally just wanted a way to show the controls and some hints, but at the last minute I added a simple story to it.

Implementation wise, there's not a whole lot going on here. The levels are defined with a length in pixels, and at any given offset we can inject text into it.

In this example, there is a bit at the beginning of the level, and a bit more halfway through. The actual levels have predefined patterns, so the dialogue is placed at times where no ships are on grid, and we can pause the timer until the player clicks through the dialogue.

Next comes LD36. Once again, this predates the new site, so here's a link to that entry. This was my first Jam, complete with an actual artist, so I had a surprising amount of extra time, which I used to tell a more detailed story. For this most part, the technical approach was the same as the LD34 game, but since this game had lots of menus, there were more places to drip in additional pieces of narrative. For example, the shop:

Shop items all have little bits of background info in them, which helps build in world building. The shopkeeper also has a pool of dialogue he selects from on top of the usual "Welcome!". Nothing magic here, just a quick string array.

Which brings us to LD40.

With Lovely Kana, we were writing what was essentially a text adventure game, so there was a stronger need for dialogue variation and, more critically, a need for players to make choices. So I wrote this abomination:

No, the code hasn't rotted, it just really looked that bad for reasons. Anyway, this system essentially existed to build a condition based event pool. For each phase of the game, it would run through all of the possible events in a given group, then discard any that didn't meet the requirements given the current gamestate. From the remaining events, one was selected and run.

This works quite well at a glance, and it let us build a wide variety of events quickly. However, a lot of time was wasted building the tool itself, and it was difficult to visualize which events applied when. There was always the risk that changing a stat somewhere could create a "gap" where no events could match certain situations, or that an event would fire at the wrong time due to a typo. The tool itself also just kinda sucked; it's pretty hard to write a comfortable to use tool and the rest of your game inside the LD window, and I had to do both the code and the writing, so the actual tool was mostly just wasted effort.

Enter LD43

Silent whisper took what we learned from Lovely Kana, and doubled down on it, with a longer, darker, and more cohesive story. Rather than just being purely random events, the game was more a series of events and sacrifices you had to make to get to a finale.

The biggest change here was in how the writing was actually done. Rather than wasting time on a gui, the events were written in a giant XML file. In here, comments could be placed and events could be organized more logically. This didn't actually solve most of the problems from LD40, but did save a lot of time, as the time saved not writing a GUI could be invested into writing instead. The XML gave just as much insight as the old GUI, if not moreso, and could be more quickly updated to match changing requirements.

If there was a lesson from LD43, one might think it would be "Don't write GUIs". But what it really taught us was that the problems we faced with Kana weren't just one-offs. Even though I had more time to write, the script complexity issue was only amplified by it. It became this black box of data, impenetrable to even the one who wrote it. What would happen if I adjusted this number? no idea. Are there any bigs? probably. Can I find them? Only if I hit them during testing. Even then, the solution might just create another bug.

In retrospect. It's a miracle Silent Whisper worked at all. But I knew after that something had to change. And thus began my search for the Perfect Tool.

...which didn't exist. Sure, there are tools out there for writing dialogue in games, like Yarn Spinner and Twine, but none of them really did the things I wanted them to do. And so I wrote one.

Its debut was for LD45

With Zermatt: Zero, we had a goal in mind to push our narrative skills, and this new tool was going to be the way we did it. Calling back to retro visual novels, we had to deal with a lot of branching dialogue, game states, sequences, and other problems that would be extremely difficult to map out in text alone, so the solution was nodes.

This tool served its purpose well. Being able to more easily visualize the game flow through nodes made it much easier to quickly deduce state at any given time. Whole sections could be organized and discarded without worrying about breaking unrelated parts of the game, and even debugging was easy, since you could quickly jump through the story.

Another key aspect was finding the right balance between code and node. The goal here wasn't to re-invent blueprints; just to move high level game flow into a place it could be more conveniently visualized and edited. Essentially, nodes can do things like change what scene the game is in, set the CG, music, prompt the user for choices, and display dialogue. The game itself was responsible for actually responding to those events, and handling all the finer details of those interactions (like when to show movement controls, etc). There's always a cost to placing each node, so make it so only had to place as many as you needed to control the flow of the game. Busy work should always be moved to code.

This tool saw some incremental updated through subsequent LDs, with the addition of containers for better organizing, improvements to the UX, and adding additional features to it such as remote console and debugging features. But there were still problems. One of the biggest was simply that it was time consuming to place complex logic trees. Since each condition needed to be an explicit node, you would often have massive trees of conditionals that were just as hard to parse as their old XML counterparts.

Which leads us into LD50. This entry is an interesting jumping point since the general premise of it is similar to that of LD45, but with newer tools and more experience.

With latest iteration of our narrative tool, the biggest goal was down to improving readability and ease of use. Simple logic can be placed directly inside links (highlighting them yellow). Logical blocks can be surrounded with comments to quickly identify what they do. And the contents of each node has been moved to the inspector/side bar, instead of on the tree itself. This moves a ton of visual clutter out of the tree, and makes it much easier to rapidly identify what nodes are doing and where you bug may lie.

Further, since this new tool is integrated directly into our engine, nodes can interact more directly with our engine. For example, dialogue nodes pop up a live preview of the in-game interface at the current line, so you can adjust the expression, line length, and pacing without needing to run the scene in the actual game.

There were also some under the hood changes like moving away from JSON, towards a custom format that survived git merges better, and changing how the engine interacted with nodes such that we didn't need giant piles of macros to keep things type safe.

Are we at the perfect solution yet? probably not. LD50 has once again highlighted issues that need improved. For example, we need a way to visualize the how the game will execute through the various game states, as a common bug we hit during development was when none of the conditions were met, and the game just soft locked. But we already have a solution in mind, so it's just a matter of iterating and trying again next LD.

With each game we learn something new about our workflow, and find more ways to optimize it. As a benchmark of progress, between LD45 and LD50, our script grew over 3x in length, which implies I've either gotten way faster at typing, or the latest iteration of our tools have just enabled me to be that much more efficient.

Hopefully this look into how we write our games has sparked some ideas within you. I'm not about to assert my way is the best way, or even a good way, but it's certainly not the worst way we've done things, and hopefully it'll help you add something cool to your next LD entry.

Thanks!

It's not perfect, but a friendly commenter told me I should post gameplay screenshots so here you go!

Trash Compactor

I may not be super proud of the game (the fire potions don't work which is especially annoying). But I'm v proud of the music which I did myself during the jam!

I'm out here playing LD games as one does after participating and I just can't help sharing this incredible music from the awesome entry Stone Sabbath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5qws5a0SGg

And here's the game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/stone-sabbath

Wanna get down and spin in a deadly dance with demons on a floor that is falling apart? Cause that's what our game is about!

Go check DOWN the DUNGEON: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/down-the-dungeon__

I'm looking for a few folks to jump on Discord or Tabletop Simulator and play Royal Ruckus with, online. Its a fun quick betting game themed around WWE. Come join in at https://discord.gg/JugGPSYd

In Super Mowser World, flee from the angry Bario that tries to steal back princess Cheap ! He is relentless, but you can still build new castles to slow down his progress !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/super-mowser-bros

Hello everybody!

I just wanted to drop a serious message. People have been asking how we came up with the concept of Giraffe o'Clock. The truth is, I had been struggling with depression for a long time. As things got better I wanted to create things that would put people in a good mood, that would make people laugh. With that in mind we went out of our way to create Giraffe o'Clock.

Watching people laughing their asses off while playing the game on stream has really made my last few days. Thank you all so much <3 Game development is amazing and I love all of the submissions I've tried so far, looking forward to trying even more!

Here's a GIF of a dancing giraffe just one more time.

Thank you for reading this serious message.

Come hang out and drop a link to your game in chat, I'll check it out! :)

https://www.twitch.tv/lectvs

Hi Guys, we just finished up a long list of games to play and are looking for some more! We'll be doing lots of game playing in the next 24-48 hours and will leave feedback on each one.

If you're interested in having your game rated and receiving feedback, share your game below and we will check it out!

Don't forget to check out ours too! :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/cant-tax-me

Running another ludum dare play/rate stream right now, duck on in! https://twitch.tv/squuuidly

If you want to get feedback and ratings, you can add your games to the comments.

and.. don't forget to take a look at my game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/lets-make-gta-6

See if you can beat my personal best of _16 waves_ in my game GRIDLAST!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/gridlast

Try out my Compo entry "The Pit" now with a browser build. None of the coding has been changed from the original. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-pit-1

Hi, I'm Earthshine. I am one of the creators of Bonananaza. https://shieldgenerator7.itch.io/bonanananza

I'm really happy with the result of the game we made. I've done countless jams and I'm getting in a good habit of making decent games. Uploading early and overwriting with the finished version. Not so much the version that got out in the jam deadline. Me and the other programmer had different ideas on balance. He liked being swamped by the moneys I like a smooth flow. He won out because we didn't have time to put in accelerating monkey count. We eventually got there the post- jam balancing and fixes.

Out the gate, one of the teammates got sick possibly rona. So we were immediately down one person. Luckily it was a designer so we had to work from memory and not formal documentation. Luckily, I started getting good at managing teams from my normie job as a trainer and tutor.

I'm really proud of the look and AI system I got working. Building an AI in such a fast time frame was interesting and empowering. I had no idea if I could actually do it. Well! I did! And in a ridiculously short time frame. It came out great and now I want to do more with AI. Sadly, I ended up creating art and animations for 5 enemy types, and 3 powerups that didn't make it in time. Unlike others the stretch goals don't seem as out of scope. I'd like to give it more pinball and action mechanics.

I learned a process of assessment way back in the day where you detect any parts that are possible to fail. Anything that you haven't done a million times before. Then plan contingency if it fails, it did, but I was able to save the AI after the other programmer couldn't. He doesn't really have the same interest in AI that I do. I love the AI and Games Youtube channel, read some books, listened to podcasts. It helped to think of it like pac-man's ghosts for me. I used alot of randomness. Figured I'd share the knowledge.

I knew from the beginning I could do art quickly, me and the other artist knocked out everything but the cutscenes and lesser assets the first day. Overall I got in all the hats, switching only when done with the last one.

I don't work through sleep so it requires a very clear vision of the intended outcome.

Hope you all had a happy jam!

I'm reflecting on last weekend and what it was like working on IBYH!? (If Bad Y Hot!?) [https://ldj.am/$281532] and yeah, I just love drawing hot people LMAO

It was a really fun process. I always wanted to make a game, but I never thought my art would be part of it I guess. I love creating all types of OCs and I draw them, I characterize them, I do everything, but I always saw myself as more of a concept artist. It felt unreal to see my art on the title screen once it was finally finished and it was a blast to actually draw all of the portraits. I was never confident in my art style, but it looked really nice with the aesthetic, I think.

I worked hand in hand with our narrative designer and the whole group decided there should be 3 characters and a dog. The dog was the first to get designed ... unfortunately for her we immediately decided she should be ... well like this:

Yeah that's what I think Chihuahuas look like. Anyways, we decided she needed to be completely unhinged and I think people appreciated that. Also, I wrote the capitalism is a mistake line xoxoxo.

The next design was of Gertrude. @Potatomika wanted an inventor like character and it didn't take me too long to decide on her design. Honestly she kinda provided me with descriptions for most character, but I did my own thing and only took some suggestions (lol). @PotatoMika was firm in wanting her to have an old lady name despite being hot and so Gertrude was born:

She's definitely the most competent and she's a hard working gal. She doesn't take any crap from people though!

Then came "the muscle". I had previously joked with our Programmer @Trabasura that we should have a character named Bart (Trab backwards) in our game and he requested that this be him. I honestly just made him 1000x cooler than Trab and called it a day. Here he is:

His clothing and accessories were suggestions from other team members really. He's more stoic and a little less expressive (unlike Trab).

Now the main character ... I HAD FULL CONTROL OVER HIM LET ME TELL YOU LMAO. He is my favorite, I love him, I stan him, he's great. @PotatoMika wanted him to wear a suit, but I wanted him to wear a durag and so ... boom he's wearing both. Who would make that fashion statement you ask?? Only Lightskins. Not Sorry. We immediately made him a player and he's certainly the most charming as the leader of their group. I absolutely adore him and he ended up with the name Yug Dab (Bad Guy) thanks to a suggestion from a friend:

The group decided he needed to be a short king and I gave it to em!

It was a really nice experience and I even helped some of the dialogue (I forced a Deez Nuts joke in the game you're welcome). I definitely would want to make another game after this, it was great!

Play and Rate our Game!!:

https://ldj.am/$281532 https://trabasura.itch.io/ibyh

So I've been practially working the last 2 days and nights to add this because most people were confused by our mechanic :(

(which I can totally understand, it needs a bit to get into but once you got the hang of it I think it is it is really fun! (Like Snake Pass or Octodad or something, it adds a physics based difficulty :))

Did you guys ever expirience your players not understanding your mechanic at all and how did you deal with it?

Anyway, glad it's done and hopefully makes players have an understanding and now I finally have time to catch up on that games I promised to play in return! Those guys probably hate me already, haha!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/catronaut

Devlog #2

So, mini games that lead up to the inevitable. I came up with 10 but here's the ones I managed to get to with 1 extra that got cut.

The first one involves a boulder rolling down a hill. The mechanics for this one was to lessen the gravity being applied on the boulder so that it rolled slower via the player pressing the space button. Obviously to avoid this from coming to a complete halt it was clamped to a small value.

The second was a cat sitting on a table with a glass of water. I definitely got inspired by that classic video of the cat looking back at some lady and her shouting no while it slowly knocks the water off. The animation in Unity had some kind of bug so I couldn't do multiple animations because the transitions were locked to 1. The cat moves to the right and the player can shout by clicking on the words HEY which move around. The shout delays the cat from moving for a small amount of time.

The third mini-game is doing pushups. The player can ward off the decay of their health by doing pushups when they press the up and down arrow keys. When a pushup is finished the health bar will get a small amount back.

The fourth game involves an apple quickly molding and the player can click the mold to "scrape" it off. This basically just lowers the scale by a percentage as it quickly gains it back.

The fifth game was meant to be shooting zombies until one eventually gets you, but time was running out. I could feel the inevitable end of the jam approaching. The player instead just gets to run away from zombies which are just a tad bit faster than them.

The sixth game didn't make it in. It was going to be waves from the tide attempting to destroy a sand castle and the player would press a button to raise a shield. The goal was to reward good reaction time.

The seventh game was going to be a bomb that you couldn't defuse, just delay. I'm sad this one didn't make it in because I actually had quite a few ideas on how to make it interesting.

The eighth game was going to be a spaceship dodging bullets. I was thinking of a schmup but without the chance of victory haha.

The ninth game would be two words displayed and a child in the center. The child would rapidly age and the player could click the word that seems more childish to slow growing up.

The tenth game was just going to be a simple coin flip.

Each game was designed to try and be different with how it is played and what the overall theme of it was. While the theme wasn't what I wanted I think it worked out fairly well. My idea allowed me to basically cut it off at whatever I made it to on the list without worrying about an unfinished game.

However, I think I could of probably polished one of those mini-game ideas and turned it into a full game as well. The bomb mini-game would of been the likely candidate for that. I might go back and revisit that idea as I think it could be a good bit of practice!

Interested in trying?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/inevitable-the-game

This was only our second ludum dare and we are amazed by all the positiv feedback we received. And all that with a simple push-your-luck trash stacking game.

Thanks for all the love and let us know if you have a cool web playable game we can try to give something back.

Play it here

Hey guys,

I'm going to either be writing or recording reviews for your Ludum Dare game - if you choose to submit it!

They will be uploaded on my Instagram page, here: https://www.instagram.com/harrywhiteproductions/

To submit your game, fill out the short form here: https://forms.gle/nQ656wmRU9XK2oSZ9

Have a damn good day!!

Just noticed a very subtle bug in my game, is it against the rules to make changes after submission - the bug wouldn't affect gameplay.

My game "WE ARE DOOMED" almost received 50 ratings and I couldn't be amazed more by this fact!

This community is simply amazing, never thought I would get all the feedback that I got here this fast and simple. Thanks to this community I already have a few ideas that I might implement either in this same game or a new one, might even port it to phones!

I'm surprised that this game got that many feedback because I don't even consider it to be any good. This has been a tough weekend filled with constant laziness which led to the fact that majority of the game was being developed in the last 7 hours, those were very stressful. Had to sleep for about 2 hours before school for two days in a row but now I see that it was definitely worth it!

Thank you!

If you haven't seen our sleep deprived hysteriascape of a point and click yet, that means you don't know that we have an online leaderboard.

Explore the apartment while keeping your sanity above 0 and preventing your alertness bar from emptying out in order to maximize your score! Some items and interactions will increase your score at the cost of those resources.

The longer you stay awake, the more score you earn, and the stranger things get as you wander from room to room.

We're looking forward to seeing how far people can push their scores by the end of the judging period.

Hey there, if anybody wants to give my game a chance I would love to pay back the favor of trying and rating your game too. Thanks and I hope you like it :D. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/fly-and-dive

I added a build to play on Opera GX for anyone averse to playing on windows build. (You have to use Opera GX browser to play it.) It’s also got a built in leaderboard to track your high score! Sorry no HTML build, but it really messed up this game and I’m not willing to sacrifice my pretty shaders :)

And if you like the game, don’t forget to check out my devlog once you play/rate it!

Making a TEN SECOND game?? - Ludum Dare 50 Devlog https://youtu.be/0AMRercUO6w

Appease the gods in glorious full-motion-video!

The gods are always fighting about one thing or another, and as their fleet-footed messenger it's your job to keep them happy! One of these days one of them is going to snap and bring about the end of times, but, if you do things right, it won't be today.

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mythical-mediator

Fun for the whole family! This game is largely connected to music and impending DOOOOOM. Let the game do the shooting for you while you evade damage.

We will play any game in our comments. P.S. I highly recommend our shield upgrade

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/quadratorum

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/department-of-demise

Have YOU ever wanted to be a Grim Reaper doing menial office work, underappreciated all the while and sitting in an old cubicle? :skull: :office:

Then we have just the game for you! Come sign up for your first day at the Department of Demise, and try not to get your feelings too hurt if you’re let go. (We do have standards, after all.) :notepad_spiral:

We’ve been fortunate enough to be featured on a handful of streams, and are working hard to give as much feedback to your games as possible. We are currently working down the list of those of you who have already commented on our game! Feel free to hop in line! :hourglassflowingsand: