We really need someone to replace Boris (who we just fired because of his stupidity, as shown in the picture below)

If you have two thumbs and a little bit of gumption (not like Boris), that you are passionate about soups of all kinds and dream of making this passion your professional career check our job offer below.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/boris-and-the-miserable-factory-of-mr-bossman

We're so happy that you've sent us such a possitive feedback! If you still want to play our game, check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/tactical-ghosts-the-impification

:ghost:

I made an Android Port of my game You Are A Bomb! You can check it out here

I'm going live at twitch.tv/Outfrost and will be playing your games on Linux desktop as well as my Steam Deck! I wanna check out what you've made, especially if you don't have a lot of ratings yet, so please do swing by!

I'll be using a progressive raffle, and games with fewer ratings will get more chances!

come play our game it's called KRANT cya <3

Hopefully the last update/bug fix during the voting period! Bombs placed by the player should now actually hurt the player. Try out the latest version of Icebreak here!

we decided to get away from the usual explanation of the movement of the character, and made an interactive one,

How do you like our tutorial?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mr-second

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.

Guys hello, in my gamme 5 level is broken, can i fix bug?

It has been 6 days, and there is 6 hours left on the clock. Help feed Gogo to make it a week.

Here is a link to the entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/save-gogo (or click the image)

Thank you all for everything so far. It has been a great Ludum Dare for me. I enjoyed interacting with so many different people.

I've been having a blast with Ludum Dare Extra! Check out my devlog where I'm writing updates about my game's progress.

We want to thank everyone for playing the game and providing great feedback. To improve on the game we have committed to making a number of improvements. Since these improvements are focused on new features and quality of life, we obviously won't be releasing them till after scoring is completed on April 21st.

Here's what we have planned: 1. Improved formation placement controls. 2. Added flags above formations to help players better identify unit types. Think Total War formation flags. 3. Many players appreciated the 3D models, so to show it off more we added an "Action Camera" which will constantly show the player combat up close. Really excited about this feature! 4. Adjusted UI elements to be out of the way of the action. 5. Gave the UI a significant visual facelift. 6. Improved 3D models and textures without sacrificing the overall 90s low poly aesthetic. 7. Number of other small quality of life improvements.

Thank you all. Try out Hold The Line in it's current state here!

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

I made a gif

Play Now!

Just the guide - WASD / Arrows to move + Space to shoot ( * or mobile controls for post-dare )

There is no winning - only a count of time the inevitable destruction of the space station is prolonged, and the count of bean-dudes saved in the process.

Hello everyone!

Thanks for so many great comments about the music I made to our jam game RIITA. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about the process and how it was made!

As the main focus of the game is playing the Finnish instrument called Kantele (Kannel, Zyther) which is a string instrument somewhat similar to a small harp, I wanted to incorporate it to the soundtrack as much I could reasonably fit. I dug through my old stuff and was happy that I found my old Kantele from high school. The kantele I used in the soundtrack of the game is the typical smaller five string version. To differentiate the two sides I played with the tuning of the kantele and even played it differently as you can also use harmonics on the strings like on a guitar.

The kantele parts of the soundtrack are a mixture of me recording and playing my actual kantele and samples of the strings that I recorded and played with my DAW. So every time you play our game and hit the notes you are actually playing my own kantele :)

Anyway thanks again to all the people who have played our game and enjoyed my music!

If you haven't played our game yet I highly suggest you do!

Here is the link to our game!

And here is a link to the soundtrack if you are interested:

Riita Soundtrack

Thank you for reading!

-ALKS

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/before-we-all (not my game)

:rat::rat::rat::rat::rat::rat::rat::rat::rat:

For anyone that played Exterme Plant Sitter, I just found and fixed a nasty bug that caused the Infestation and Dry Air alerts to trigger at double the minimum intended rate! It turned out that the lookup curve for triggering these alerts was inverted :( This is what caused the crazy difficulty spike when the spray bottles get introduced. Note to self: DON'T LEAVE TEST VALUES IN FINAL BUILD.

Give it a try!

Try to feel a new experience of playing platformer. Remember, every 3.5 seconds you go back.

:link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mr-second

Intro

Howdy. whiskeybadger here. I was on the art team for Tearcell’s Ludum 50 Submission, “Somnipathy”. I was brought on a few months ago on Cosmic Canidae, and this is my second game jam! It was a blast to get to work with this amazing team of devs again!

Prepwork/ Early Dev

Upon receiving the “Delay The Inevitable” theme, the first night we set to work brainstorming ideas on what direction we wanted to go. A number of ideas were put forth and discussed.

We spent several hours developing a different game than Somnipathy, and although it was an intriguing idea, we had trouble coalescing those ideas into a clear vision with defined gameplay and design principles. From both a practical, and artistic perspective, we couldn’t come up with a clear idea of what this game was supposed to look like. What we did have also wasn’t well developed or would be too complex to get done in a 72 hour period.

A few hours in we dropped our initial concept and picked up the game that would become “Somnipathy”. Again we had a team discussion on how the game should play and what it should look like. We started out stronger with some solid ideas of what we wanted the game to look like visually. We wanted to pursue a pixel/illustrated art theme, and also dabbled in some use of a limited palette, 2.5d isometric layout, and visual themes of madness and insanity.

The inspiration for the visual style came from a number of places. The colorful, playfully twisted realm of 90s pixelated action and adventure games and modern indie games is readily apparent. “Zombies Ate my Neighbors” and early “LucasArts” adventure titles such as “Monkey Island” were two big sources of inspiration. The goal was to capture that creepy, yet still fun and playful atmosphere.

It was also around this point that concept art started to be developed for the characters that would inhabit our game space. Again, our art influences are readily apparent in the design. The two main featured actors in the game, Aggy and Sleeper Creeper(still a working name) began to take shape here.

Challenges

Time

Time was our biggest constraint. We only had 72 hours to kick this pig out the door, so we had to have a quick turnover on our assets. We only did a single round of concept art and pretty much just started building assets from there. Pixel Art was used quite a bit. Pixel Art is by no means a shortcut when building assets and characters for games, as by its nature it carries a lot of constraints, but with some practice, one can develop assets in relatively good time. We also had to prioritize and keep close watch on how much time we could devote to any one asset, and had to make hard decisions on what the game needed and had to be produced, and what we wanted, but wasn’t necessary and could be cut without negatively affecting the game. Going with 3 frames of animation for many of the actions looks a little choppy, but still visually communicates what's going on enough to get the job done.

Limited Color Palettes

A number of visual elements in the game use a limited color palette. Limited color palettes can create a uniformed visual language that can tie a game world together and make your space very visually appealing and streamlined, however, the obvious challenge is that you only have a small number of colors to work with. This forces an artist to get creative with their palette, experimenting with different color combinations and color themes to ensure things contrast and stick out to the player. It requires more thought when deciding what colors to use where, and demands a solid knowledge of principles like value, contrast, shape, etc. It turns out some of those early art principles you had to sit through in art class still have some merit.

Tile sets

Going with an isometric layout gave us quite a bit of real estate to play with when building the game. One of the most challenging, or at least time consuming portions of the art development, was building the first tileset for the level textures.

In retrospect, the game might benefit from some slight changes to the perspective, but by the time that was apparent we were already too deep in development to make those changes. This brings up another important and highly valuable lesson in game dev. Perfect is the Enemy of Good. Maybe there was a better perspective we could have used, but what we had worked, so that's what we went with.

The other thing to point out is that once this initial tileset was built for the game space and the layout was identified, building subsequent tilesets would be much easier. But we had a working game space, and in a case of what we need versus what we want and the clock ticking down to the deadline for the game’s submission, we moved on to building other assets.

Methodology

Again, with the 72 hour game dev window, there isn’t a ton of time to develop solid methodology or pipelines for building assets. Mostly it was just a case of “get an idea and start building”. We had limited concept art, and some mock ups of game levels and characters, but once we had serviceable versions of those, we set to work.

The character pixel art was started almost immediately after our first bit of concept art was done. Photoshop was used to draw the assets, animate them, and build their sprite sheets.

We also used early prototyping in some cases. Delivering rough, early versions of assets to the coders and level designers to incorporate in-game to test out how they actually looked in engine. Prototyping is good.

An initial mock up of a game level was just drawn in photoshop as well. We used the mock up to start building the actual tileset. Mapping out layout and testing tile repeatability, testing to make sure the level designers would have all the assets they needed to build the levels in game, and delivering those assets to them to load into our engine, Gadot.

This required some refinement, and we had to make some fixes and additions to the tilemaps once the level designers discovered shortcomings when trying to use the maps ingame.

Lessons Learned

As a member of the art team, there were several lessons taken away from developing “Somnipathy''.

There were some points of just plain luck. Especially given the 72 hour dev window.

Aggy and Sleeper Creepers' design just came through strongly on their first and only pass. One can cycle through a number of designs for characters and still not hit something memorable. Aggy and Sleeper Creeper both came off as distinctive and charismatic, and honestly, that was probably just luck.

The use of color in a limited palette. There were a lot of challenges here and pushed a lot of creativity. One being the thought to assign certain colors as identifiers to certain things. Aggy’s green skin was one case of this, and frankly, more of a “happy little accident” than a thought out creative decision. Just playing around with the limited palette showed that Aggy’s green skin fit her character’s sleep deprived madness pretty well, AND had made her contrast clearly against our main red and pink hued background. Green ended up becoming the main signifier for Aggy, and it would be advisable to reserve that hue for her, and to be very thoughtful when using green elsewhere in the game space.

Again, all this was done by accident and only really realized after the fact, but it’s worth noting that when you're doing visual design for a game, find out what works, ask yourself why it works, and then build rules from that to apply to other visual assets later down the road.

Conclusion

“Somnipathy” was an absolute blast to make. I am incredibly grateful to be part of the Tearcell team, and can’t stress enough how the success of this game is the direct result of a team of very passionate, and hardworking devs.

The experience was filled with challenges, setbacks, solutions, and a fair amount of our own sleep deprivation and exhaustion. We tried a lot of things, some things worked, some things didn’t. Being not only able to understand what did and didn’t work, but also the “why” of the matter, is crucial to growing as a developer.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the dev log!

-R. Godshalk, aka whiskeybadger

Here's mine. it's a pretty cool shader node graph that was generating 50% of static textures in our game. Yes, static textures that could be easily replaced with some texture files, which was my original intent. Instead, we had this pretty graph used every frame for basically a majority of pixels on screen. But it's not like it would do much damage performance-wise, right?

In any case, this is now a thing of the past, as I've replaced all materials using this shader with static texture files, as well as removed some other potential performance issues. They said we need to make a game in three days, but they didn't say it has to run smoothly lol.

Anyway, pretty random post, thought it's worth sharing (no, it's totally not made to encourage y'all to play this very cool escape-room puzzle game we've created called Exit, which you can play on Web, Windows or Linux). Does your project have any cool shader nodes or any other nodes you want to share?!

rating games with web-build (give me your best shot)

also time to plug my game again, whee https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/battery-buisness go check it out if you can

Probably easier than a gif.

Play here Web/HTML5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocA5Ua6-RI

Hi all! I made a online co-op multiplayer game where you work together to stop a rampaging kitty!

The game is a lot more fun if you play it with other people, so to help people get the multiplayer experience for rating it, I figured I'd post about it here! If you're reading this now, come and join me and defend our mouse village!!

Play it here (Web, HTML5)

And here's the link to the game entry page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/kitastrophe

Not only is LD50 my first game jam, but this is the 😱 first game I've ever made, Journey in Spacetime: A Text Adventure.

Got home from work late last Friday and didn't even look at the theme 'til Saturday. Took some time to mull over an idea. A thought hit me:

What if you had a flashback to something that never happened?

My noob self wasn't about to make a game complete with cutscenes, so I thought about how to adapt that idea to a text adventure I could make in Twine. I moved through drafting a flowchart, linking and coding the passages, writing some exposition, and basic formatting of the text. I moved on to music, searching up some open source stuff, and at that point was almost out of time. Threw in a few stylized open source images and finished the game Sunday night before bed, but updated the jam/itch pages on Monday after work.

This was such an interesting experience. I learned a new markup language, Harlowe. Also used some variables, conditional logic, and a little HTML. I didn't venture to any outside forums/chats, but everything I saw on the LD site, as well as multiple Twitch streams was friendly, supportive, and encouraging 😊. Thank you to everyone who has played so far and given feedback in the comments and/or on stream! With more time, I'd have liked to include some ambient sound/music on every page. And I think the biggest flaw based on feedback so far was not getting the premise across well enough. I hope anyone else who checks it out has fun and I hope I've set an example for finishing and submitting a game to my middle and high school students participating in the Games for Change Student Challenge. 💜

PEACE CONCIL is a game about keep balance between aggressive countries. You play cards to affect local economy and thus change the relative strength between the countries.

Note: I have updated the game after jam and it is much more enjoyable. But when you rate the game, you must download the jam version to judge fairly.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/peace-council

I am so proud of this, I wanted to make a time travel sokoban proof-of-concept and it ended up pretty good. check it out at https://qwrt.itch.io/xanthippe-winters-and-the-crystal-of-time

Serve some customers and fend off the zombie invasion!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/crisis-chef-28-plates-later

I've been wanting to make a dumb gif out of this dumb run cycle all week, so here it is!

Check out the game if, you too, you want to run around on stage while playing an epic solo. Maybe you'll manage to convince your bandmates that you have to play one more song!

One More Song is a short point and click, playable in your browser.

This is my 5th day streaming LD50 games =) I've been having a lot of fun and hope to be able to check out more of the games in the coming days. Please submit your game here: https://forms.gle/YoHaMWiPmj63WiwL9, and I'll prioritize the ones of the developers who are watching the stream.

My stream will be playing at https://www.twitch.tv/msmiachar

Please also feel free to check out my team’s game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mias-bear-service

I look forward to playing your game and seeing you on Twitch 🙂

Finally I'm going for the new "Extra" category. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but I'm happy to have delivered something though. The game is now playable on the web and there are a few more elements in the stage to make the experience a bit more interesting.

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

There are eldritch horrors manifesting in your basement! Use your holy symbol to banish the evil runes that keep appearing everywhere. You might just be able delay your inevitable end…

Eldritch Crossing is a first-person game that you can play either with Keyboard & Mouse or using a Gamepad.

Go give it a try, if you haven't already: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/eldritch-crossing

Follow us on Twitter on YouTube on Itch

REBUILT ENTIRE GAME FOR HTML.

• moved the action closer to the middle of the screen

• made actors bigger on screen. (jelly fish and shark are 4 times bigger than before.)

• made shark faster

• made turn rate faster

• rebuilt for html.

• version 0 is still available for windows download.

If you're in need of a game rating, I'm still looking for more games to play and test out!

Anyone who rates/comments on my game, i'll rate and play back!!

*This is my game, I made a baking simulator \o/ *

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/baking-simulator-2022

I look forward to seeing your games :3

Hello everyone

I hope that you Jam was well and that you are proud of your game (if this sentences sound good for you or not) I'm going to launch on https://www.twitch.tv/teamchoochoo for testing and rating game

(I'm looking for project with anecdotes and sneak peeks of creative process to make an special show on my streams, if you have anything like you can say it on my twitch (or send me an email to TeamChooChoo.GameJams@gmail.com))

Did you my easter egg?

i hid my logo

Give it a try!

Hello! We are working for a full release for the end of the rating phase. We need bug reports to solve all the bugs we can find. We are currently working to solve the strange freeze and tp bug.

https://gitlabstudents.isartintra.com/r.tan/ludum-dare-50

Hello I still have not reached the 20 mark ratings so will be helpful if you could spend some time rating my game. Comment in the Ludum Dare page of my game and I will play and rate your game. (NOTE: I will rate only if your game has HTML5 format, because for few reasons I can't download anything)

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/knighthood

Finally got a chance to reflect back on my second ldjam attempt. I haven't done much of game dev since last event and I thought I would try to get some practice doing graphics, modeling with blender and deving in unity. But alas, real life commitments made practice time non existent.

Day 1

As I'm not afraid of challenge I started somewhat late, and came up with a decent idea for the game about a dog who has to juggle a balloon by bumping it with his snout. Again not being afraid of some challenge I decided that 2d graphics would be a good idea, even though I haven't done any for the last 15 years.

So here's the progression of drawing my first sprite since 15 years:

Started by quickly drafting some sort of dog form. Ended up pretty scruffy.

Adjusting some proportions and adding shading. I was satisfied with the first sprite.

Then it was time to look into animating the sprite... This is why one would need the practice, I ended up wasting couple of hours looking at dog running videos, tutorials about dog locomotion and what not, while trying to block out even a simple run animation. So it was time to go back and redo the first sprite and go simpler:

I liked the simpler look and it had some nice character to it. And most importantly it was much faster to do, so I started to work on some simple animations.

After an hour or so I finished some initial animations for running, jumping, blinking and panting (which didn't end up in the game). I finally fired up unity, created a 2d project and started looking at how to get the sprites in game and moving. By the end of the day I had working prototype where you could move the dog around, jump and bump the balloon over some simple background. I was quite happy with the progress although it felt a bit slow so far.

During the night I was playing around with ideas what to implement in the game, the main problem I had was how to let the pleyer actively keep the balloon within the play area. I finally came up with the idea of having to bite a wire that controls traffic lights, biting the wire makes a truck drive by which will push the balloon to the right. For the right side I had couple of ideas, but finally settled on the seagull who protects her nest and bumps the balloon to the left. I felt all the other ideas were too hard to implement or draw.

Day 2

The next morning I started by doing the start and end screens and the game loop itself. I'm not super happy with how they turned out, need to practice ui work to get some nicer ones made in the next jam. They do really give the first impression for the game.

Whole of day 2 was maybe 5 hours of work as I had other commitments. I made some moving clouds, grass sprites and a simple parallax for some of the background elements. Quite a bit of the time was spent trying to get the camera movement limited in such a way to hide all the cut off sprites and stuff outside of the play area. I had to go back on day 3 and day 4 to do some more fixes for the camera as it didn't quite work right when the screen aspect ratio changed too much.

Day 3

Had to go to work on day 3, however after work it was crunch time. There was around 12 hours left so I had to get a move on. I first got the truck and traffic light sprites and mechanism working. Next I spent an hour or two making some sound effects, I had some trouble with my Rode mic generating some weird hissing when recording on the laptop, so I had to record the sound by recording vide on my camera.

The game was still missing a lot of gameplay features and I knew that I couldn't get most of them in so I started working on the seagull and decided to do one more "Dog thing" to do, which ended up being the mark your territory as I had made the sound effect for it. This was basically the minimum to make the game playable, unfortunately time was running out and I couldn't make any animations for the dog, it would have made the game a much more fun experience.

If I had used 5 more hours on second day I could have done more gameplay testing and balancing as the final game ended up being too easy and a bit too slow paced to be alot of fun. I think the idea and gameplay could be quite fun, perhaps I'll spend a weekend to do some more work on it for practice.

Final words

If you read all the way here, thanks for your attention I really appreciate it. If your game needs some reviews hit me up and I'll check it out. Looking forward to playing everyones games and having a fun time.

I made a timelapse video for my Compo entry Eternal Crisis

https://youtu.be/jPx5rfK00VU

It was my first Godot game so most of the video is spent in the code editor and googling stuff lol.

If you're interested in reading my post-mortem analysis of the event, you can here

Hi all ! Thanks for you feedbacks !

I'm starting a post jam version of my game with friends!

T-Knight againts the Hydra

Based on the same concept but with more content and a little story around the concept.
Really like the graphics style, I want to see what we can do with it.

You can already find a more advanced version with more effects and tweaks on the game page (windows only :/). Sound will come later ;)

My game needs just four more ratings to reach the 20 votes goal! How many treats can you collect before you need to go to bed? Play it here, feedback is highly appreciated! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/chasin-dreams

Hi everyone! It is me again!

As usual, I’m playing and rating games.

So if you like, please, write a comment below and I will play and rate your game :) I prefer games with less than 20 ranting, but I do not mind, if you have more.

I already have 20+ ranting, so if you want to play my game - thank you, but if you have limited time, then please, go to the Danger Zone instead, here:

https://ldjam.com/games/danger/all

The games that are out there still need more ranting to get to final scoring.

And here is progress on my crazy goal of playing 400 games!

Less than one hour. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/save-gogo

Before today, we had witnessed high scores of 12 from @kuviman, 11 from @arthurds...

Internally, @brainoid had 16 and @elysiagriffin try-harded and got 21.

We then watched @Team-Choo-Choo smash those scores! 28 researchers saved is the new high score!

Here is a clip of him being so close to 30, but mother vine had other ideas! https://clips.twitch.tv/GlutenFreeCleanSpaghettiNerfRedBlaster-v55zt0O-F7KTcKOS

Let us know if your high score, and we'd love to hear any feedback on the game if you play it ♥

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/defence-under-construction

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/carrot-grove

I bet no one expected a narrative-based visual novel about Slavic culture for a LD50 but here we are! C heck out Carrot Grove and we surely would return a favour if you comment.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/carrot-grove

Hey! Do you have an HTML5 game that needs ratings and feedback? If you write the link to your game's page down here i'm going to play it!

Thanks to everyone for playing and rating our game 'Mythic Garden'!

'Mythic Garden' is an action-packed and wacky plant watering game. You are tasked with taking care of the most exotic British garden. From flaming trees to teleporting flowers, you will improve your arsenal of water weaponry. Will you be able to make it to the end?

Play/rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mythic-garden

Mythic Garden (Original Game Soundtrack) 🎵

I had a lot of fun composing the cheerful music/SFX for this game and I was heavily inspired by games like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, old-school SNES era RPGs (town/village/world map music) and of course The Great British Baking Show ;)

The 'WAAATER', 'happy plant sigh', and 'gasp for air' sounds are actually recordings of my wife Marija, and they were all completely improvised/unrehearsed. I basically just hit the record button and told her to close her eyes and ‘pretend to be a thirsty plant’ lol. We’re so happy they made it into the game and brought some smiles, and she is also stoked to have her first official video game credit/cameo!

The feedback for the music/audio so far has been really great, so I've decided to release the original soundtrack (along with a bunch of other game OSTs, remixes, etc.) via my new videogame-inspired record label imprint Retrograde Arcade (http://music.retrogradearcade.com).

Thanks again for your feedback and if you’re ever looking for music or sound for your games feel free to get in touch!

Listen to 'Mythic Garden (Original Game Soundtrack)': - Stream/download: https://music.retrogradearcade.com/album/mythic-garden-original-game-soundtrack

As we've finished the last update of our game, I finally have the time to play and rate more games. You know, trying out all these fun and relaxing projects really makes my day better. I've started questioning my sanity after making yet another horror game, nonetheless this one turned out really well. If you haven't already, check out our game. I'll definitely be checking out all the games of people who'll leave reviews. Have a nice day! https://ldj.am/$287038

It has been along week but for this jam I decided to participate in Extra mode. Despite a lot of hardships along the way I managed to finish my game "Scarecrow Swarm". All I have to do now is the playtesting, building too WebGL & Windows, and publishing. Hopefully it will be done soon but, in the meantime, here is a quick sneak peak of what the game looks like.

Give it a try!

Whouw, a lot of people played SensenCemetery. Which means that the cemetery fills up with tombstones pretty fast! In SensenCemetery your deathlocation leaves a tombstone with your design in your place for everyone to see!

The problem is... people noticed that they didn't really pay attention to these tombstones, as they where running for their lives themselves :runner_tone4: , as the Sensenmann was comming for them. Those stones were a mere reminder of their inevitable demise! :skull:

*In the 1.4 update, you can now look at everyone's tombstone designs in piece, as the Sensenmann took a day off in this mode. *

To activate this feature, first press “P” in the main menu to activate post-jam features, then press “F” to pay respects at the cemetery.

Chonky cat - check ✓

Space - check ✓

What could go wrong, right?

Did I just shamelessly use our ridiculously hairy cat to emotionally manipulate you into checking out our game?

YES AND I'M NOT EVEN ASHAMED you have no idea how much time has been wasted on vaccum cleaning, it's about time for that furball to contribute too! :3

(I didn't try to make the Catronaut have any kind of explicit likeness, they just both happen to be fat cats ^^)

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

Will play your games in return of course <3

But now, I'd like to explain a little how we made our game map. Who knows, maybe it could interest you!

So first, once we had the overall gameplay settled (moving around the town to eat people while evading guards), there were two things to do: - First, create a town big enough to avoid guards (when there aren't 50 at once, of course...), while remaining small enough to not get lost too much. - Second, include some points of interest, while making sure they're not too close to each other. This was for both the buildings and the little civilians.

First Map iteration: The Rough Sketch

Bloody heck it's horrifying (and in french :flag_fr:)!

Yes, it all started from here: with a basic drawing on Illustrator (or to be honest, with a paper draft even more hideous but I'm probably the only one able to read it or even understand it...). Anyway, at first, the Manor was a Tower ('Tour'), and the Concert was still very vague (simply titled 'Hiding Spot' or 'Cachette'). But the Church ('Eglise') was already supposed to be in front of the Manor on the main street. The Graveyard ('Cimetière') was decided too, but its final (resting) place still had to be chosen.

And as you can see, this is a top-view, not an isometric view. It may not seems a lot, but that has a lot of implications I'm going to explain next. In any case, what I had in mind while designing the map was to make sure there were room for the player to avoid guards, at least at first. The player is fast, so this map size isn't too much of an issue to move around, even with limited time. The Church and the Manor are in the middle because that's where the player needs to go often (to slow the night and stop the priests), while the Concert and the Graveyard are on opposite sides of the map.

Second Map iteration: Isomectric Draft

Looks better, but there's still some problems...

At this point, work was well on its way. Our talented artists made some beautiful buildings and our devs implemented the basics for the map creation. But it became necessary to redo the map in an isometric view: after all, this was very important for the camera works and the gameplay. So, by using placeholders and the available buildings, this map was made based on the previous map... Still with Illustrator, though :smirk:

And that's where we realized a few shortcomings: the important buildings weren't facing the right directions, when they weren't totally hidden. It became necessary to change the map orientation, but also the placement of the Concert and the Graveyard (because we wanted the music to be at the top of the map, and the ritual at the bottom).

But rather than making yet another sketch, we elected to make the map directly in Unity, now that the main prefabs were implemented.

Third Map iteration: Playable town

Hey, now it's starting to look like something good!

If you played the game, you probably recognize the layout. It was almost final at this point, but from the previous map, it was more or less mirrored. But one thing was notably changed: the Graveyard was moved up a little. Why? Because its orientation would have made it unreachable with its walls. And it felt better right in the middle of an empty place rather than next to a house. Of course, you can still see some graphic bugs, but such is the life of a jam...

Anyway, we also found out that the Manor and the Church were hidden by the houses, so we chose to give them a little more space. And then came the time for the props!

Fourth Map iteration: The last tweaks

And there we go! :bat:

We added grass, trees, rocks, mailboxes (yes this was important), and the outer walls. With that, the night town looked better than ever! Eventually, we set up the final spawn points for civilians, guards and priests, as well as their paths (the necessary tweaks, ya know'). And after that, it was up and running for your enjoyment!

Of course, there's always room for improvement, but for a 72-hours game it's hard to add everything you want. At some point, we had an idea for a wandering Bard circling around the town, and spending some time with him would grant you bonus points. But priority to priorities!

I hope you appreciated this (not-so) little insight, and don't hesitate to share your development stories yourself!

If you have time to play another WebGL game and try to "avoid" the inevitable, please give this a try: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-endless-junkjard

If you have some time and want to play another WebGL Game to try to "avoid" the inevitable please give this a try: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-endless-junkjard

Stay alive for 4 minutes and 10 seconds to beat the game. Have fun trying. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/leaf-the-ghost-behind

We are 🔴 LIVE - Twitch!

Quick fire mode today, max 10 minutes per game, Web builds only! 🔫 I'll be prioritising some regular viewers/subscribers, but otherwise I'll be using the raffle bot I'd made for Elysia Griffin to choose who's game to play next.

You are able to submit your game here and you can see the submitted games here.

Hey guys, I will be streaming today the Ludum Dare Games again, so bring your games to me and tell your friends too! I had a little problem yesterday and I couldn't come back but today I will be here almost all day long! 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

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

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/volcanic-dash Please help me get to 20 ratings

Huge Thank You for playing and rating our game * Snail Always Trails! *

With your votes we reached +20 rating :star2: That means a lot!

If you haven't seen the Snail Always Trails! the link is down below. We'ld love to read your feedbacks!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/snail-always-trails

But can you score first?

Wao! i gain 10 votes in few hours! Thanks :)
I passed 20 votes thanks to you.

https://youtu.be/35l3wYgoiaU Give it a try!

I had a lot of fun this jam and have seen so many phenomenal games already! If you are in need of ratings drop one on mine (and comment) and I will rate yours back \o/ Web builds preferable

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/cabbage-defense

Hey everybody!

Just stopping by to drop some GIFs of post-jam preview gimmicks. These are just some basics, but I can assure you, I've got some surprises for you all! By the way, if you haven't yet, please give Giraffe o'Clock a try and drop a rating and/or comment, appreciated highly!

Giraffe o'Clock content patch will hopefully drop on Wednesday (might be Thursday or Friday, instead)

See you all then!

We are testing games on twitch, come and suggest your game!

Use “!submit [link]” to register your game and “!join” to participate to the raffles If you won Raffle Points previously, they are still valid!

https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis

The pit is a "deck losing" game where you use card and they will permanently disappear. You get more cards as reward but they will eventually run out.

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

If you like card games, and enjoy a short random card games (and looking for games to review) why not try out the pit :D. It is HTML5, so you don't have to download anything ;)

Okay, I got to admit. This time round I was quite busy after the jam and hence couldn't play much games in the early days of the review period. I probably have some times to play a couple more next week. So if you have HTML5 games that need reviewing, do drop them here ;)

This is the first time that I received so much feedbacks. Really thanks!

Play

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=roYIPuil6is&t=3s

Hey guys, I am still streaming today the Ludum Dare Games this sunday so please stop by! 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

Hey everyone,

we'd like to thank all testers of our game for their feedback, we just updated the game with a few bugfixes and an additional indicator regarding the placeable amount of traps!

Please check it out how to stop karen!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/stopping-karen

Thanks <3

Thanks to Extra, I could still participate!

I'm making First Contact, a timeloop puzzle/adventure game inspired by Outer Wilds and Carl Sagan's Contact! :smile:

There's still a lot to do but here's the first week's progress! Hopefully I will finish by next weekend and I can still get a few ratings! :)

Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbzD99MTjqI

Loor concept art, basic model, & final appearance in-game

Loor's initial concept designs were put to a vote by the team, and elements of the most popular picks were combined to create the final design

Scythe concepts & final appearance in-game

While some liberties had to be taken with the chunkiness of the scythe to match the in-game aesthetic, the core of the "Moonlight Scythe" was retained in the final version.

Level design & Final Map Overview

While we initially had some scaling issues, the final result ended up being very close to the original plan. It worked out great even after rebalancing for a better gameplay experience.

I haven’t promoted much, due to me being busy. But I’d really appreciate it if I atleast get a rating! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/terra-defensio

Piggy, Piggy, into the pit!
Don't you just love immoral wizards?
Try it yourself:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-pit-2

Whiskeybadger, our mysterious character designer and pixel artist, made a post yesterday where he talks about his experiences in the jam. Did you miss it? Well don't worry, we've saved his words on a devlog over at Itch.io too! This was his 2nd gamejam ever, so if you're curious about his process, take a peak on itch.io here!

And if you want to see his work in action, try a round of Somnipathy!

Hi!

Me and my wife had a blast last time trying some great coop games in Ludum Dare and would love to try it again :slight_smile:

So post your coop games in the comments and we'll play and review as many of them as we can manage!

Finally this week full of game development paid off and I'm pretty satisfied with the end result. I look forward to seeing what everyone else made, and if you'd like to checkout the game here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/scarecrow-swarm

We have carefully reviewed your feedback and have implemented an update

-Fixed hitbox collision

-Fixed level 5 was broken

-Big jump training

-Fixed mechanical arm

we left the old version

Give it a try!

exactly 0 smart balance

I’m gonna stream and record playthrough of your games here https://www.twitch.tv/caudatecoder/ for a couple of hours

Come submit your game (preferably on twitch than here, so we could interact and maybe get some interesting details about your game)!

Writing the music for this game as been an adventure of his own. Since I was not only dedicated to the music and SFX for this jam, but also had to show unity to one of our programmer, program stuff and do UI. I had a lot of job to do and little time to put into the music itself. However, I really tried hard and manage to make the music approximatively 4 hours.

I started with the music for the final cutscene. I had this idea of a string quartet or trio playing a sad music when the ship is sinking to make a reference to the movie. For this part I really knew what I wanted to hear and the idea popped up really fast in my head. I wrote the score in less that 20 minutes and since I’m a violin and viola player. I also recorded myself instead of using computer sounds to play. That way it would feel more organic. And than, under one hours the music for the final cutscene was done! Here’s the score for curious people :)

After that, I still had to write the music for the main scene of the game. I knew that I wanted something upbeat to convey the feeling of stress the game is suppose to give you. Although I knew what style I wanted to do, I sat for like one hour just trying to find a theme I would like. I finally came up with something and than I got that genius idea. What if I hide the theme of “My Heart will go on” as an easter egg in the music? So I did! I have hidden it all over the song although you can hear it more easily at the beginning of the second part of it ;) The real challenge was to have an original song and not copy the titanic music.

For those who played the game or will play the game, try listening to the instrument in the background that plays a melodic line under the main theme. There’s a variant of the beginning of my hearth will go on in minor. And at the beginning of the chorus, the flute plays the beginning of ‘My hearth will go on’ chorus. try and see if you hear it ;)

For those wondering which tools I’m using, I like to write my score on Finale and to render the playback, Note Performer really do miracle with little to no work for those kind of game!

To try out our game, go here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/definitely-not-titanic

Peace! :)

Hey everyone,

@UnitedFailures and I recently released an update to Cabbage Crashers fixing bugs and making balance changes based on your feedback. Turns out that writing a commodities market simulation and balancing random events is not easy to do in a weekend even for an experienced data scientist 😅.

While it's certainly not perfect, we hope you give it a shot. For my first game jam it's certainly been heartwarming seeing the positive feedback. Thanks so much to this awesome community, we wish you the best in defeating big cabbage! And as always, let us know of your feedback.

Play Cabbage Crashers

I need to free some space on my hard drive, but while I do that, Imma play some browser game :stuckouttongue: Reply with your game's link and I'll play and rate! And as per uzz', here's our game if y'all wanna lay some eggs on some turtles :egg: :arrow_right: :turtle:

It's an incredible feeling: just now, right before our eyes, our game was completed by TOBUGIS, for one of the two possible endings! You guys are freaking awesome! Thank you so much for that stream!

I wonder if anyone else will manage to get through the game, but to another ending. Looking forward to your screenshots in the comments!

Each walkthrough gives us not only a bunch of positive emotions, but also food for thought. We refine the prototype by following your advice and watching you play.

We're really, really pleased that we were able to make not just a cute game for Ludum Dare, but a prototype of what we really want to release.

Stay tuned - as soon as we have any news about Post Solis, we'll tell you about it right away!

And don't forget to follow TOBUGIS on Twitch!

We've got one last batch of Ludum Dare 50 interviews; Catch an interview with the devs of Keep It Steaming, The Lars Mission, and more!

Drop by to get indie developer insights, find out how others built their games, or submit your own project to the stream:

https://www.twitch.tv/bluishgreenproductions

LIVE now!

The plan was to create all guns animations inside the shaders. Including muzzle flashes and also hit test bullets.

However the guns were rebelling against this plan.

Then they started mocking me.

Then they proceeded shooting some sorta colorful glitch strands.

Ultimately we came to an peaceful agreement. RGB vertex colors are used to masking the shader animations. Where R is for back and forth, G scale/push outside and B for rotation. The muzzle flash is having vertex pushed outside by an animated noise mask and the bullets are basically a gradient mask panning over a tube mesh that also gets noise distorted.

Here you can build your own gun tower of guns with these guns that I wrangled into existence https://tocogames.itch.io/bullets-for-hell

I've finally got the main loop implemented, albeit woefully un-tuned. Come dig out some gems and survive in XORN.

Check it out!

Play Donchar: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/donchar

Can you keep up with these needy plants? Find out here!

So guys, me and the artist of Will There Bee Another? decided that if we got 1000 views by 7 days of Ludum Dare 50, we would do a commercial version of the game and it's almost over and we only need 43 views, so help us by playing our game, rating and sendind to more people if you enjoyed and help us achieve our goal!

By the way I am still streaming if you want me to play your game right now: https://www.twitch.tv/gabstche

LD 50 is over for Gogo.

I'm curious what phase people can reach. (We also need some more votes, so that would be appreciated as well :sweat_smile:)

My personal best is 13, interested to see who can beat me :wink:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/concave-knave

Asteroids? Well, everyone knows a lot about them. There's one little catch though - you cannot always stop them. If that kind of a situation happens, there's only one option: Try to evacuate everyone!

Welcome to UADS - Untitled Asteroid Defence Simulator. A game in which you have to delay the inevitable by holding the asteroid as far as you can, for as long as you can, while evacuating as many people as you can !(some unlucky guys would stay for a bit warmer summer...)

Link: !https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/u-a-d-s-untitled-asteroid-defence-simulator! UADS Image.png

Come submit your game here: https://www.twitch.tv/oddlyspecificgames

Hello all !

We wanted to take the time and show you some of the pixel art we did for our game Baggy & Maggy.
The goal was to have a cute and friendly esthetic throughout the game.
Here it is

The match stick

Simple yet effective. It's the perfect example of a Game Jam compatible sprite, straight to the goal.

The Zippo lighter

More complex than the match stick, only half the frames have been made to spare some precious time, notice that the lighter is doing a back and forth and not a full 360° rotation.

A falling leaf

Those are leaves falling out of the trees, each leaf is animated like this, then of course in-game, they are translated to make it feel like the leaf is falling of the tree.

And to finish it of, a screenshot of what it looks like in game :smiley:

Some art tips

All the pixel art have been made using GraphicsGale, a free and simple software to make pixel art !
For the colors of the game, we opted for pastel colors, we got inspired by some color palettes available online. Color palettes are great tools to make harmonious pixel art !

That's all for today, you can check out Baggy & Maggy here for some more cute pixel arts

Hey folks, now everyone's playing games I first want to throw out a huge thank you to everyone who played my game there's been a lot of really kind comments and they're much appreciated.

I want to do a quick post mortem to write up what went wrong and what went well for the event. I want to celebrate feeling good about finishing a game while also reflecting on the lessons learned for the future.

I'm going to do another post this week about how I made the game because a few people have asked who have an interest in making a retro point and click and especially because the process was fairly easy I want to share that knowledge as best I can. That's for another day, onto the post mortem.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Scope

This should be no shock to any game jammer. I even warned everyone before the event that my single piece of advice was make a simple game. I thought I was making something simple but still my reach exceeded my grasp.

My core idea was there's a vault door you need to get in and I figured I'd have three simple puzzle rooms that each give you part of the combination to get in the vault door. I figured I could make three really simple puzzles in a day and spend day 2 polishing and bringing the whole thing together.

In reality each puzzle room took me nearly a full day to put together so I cut the third room by the end of the second day, which thankfully made finishing the game still possible. I was always planning to enter the new "Extra" category as I don't like making game competitively but I wanted to stick to the 3 day Jam time-limit but I ended up working until day 5 before I was happy with it.

Next Ludum Dare same plan but better executed. Make a game in 3 day Jam timeline but enter it as an Extra game. Smaller scope! NO SMALLER!

Against the Grain

I was using a really simple toolset designed for exactly the type of game I was making which was Adventure Creator within Unity. Adventure Creator is a fantastic tool than handles most of the heavy work for building a point and click adventure game and even has logic tools so you don't need to write code. Not that I mind writing code but it's handy when you don't have to.

However the core of my design was a little off the traditional style of adventure games. I was making a point and click that was more inspired by modern escape room design. It was about interacting with props and solving puzzles through knowledge rather than using and combining items. Although I got this done it made things hard for myself.

I had to built a ton of custom UI interfaces for these puzzles and had to find ways to mix my own escape room style puzzle logic with the puzzle systems of Adventure Creator. I found solutions to all these problems but they slowed me down massively as I was fighting against what the toolset was designed to do rather than working with it.

It also meant I wasn't even using the 9-verb interface to it's full potential and I barely used the inventory at all. I should have made an even more traditional adventure game to take best advantage of the time i had.

External Commitments

I knew I wanted to work on the game for 3 days, however it occurred to me too late I should have taken Monday off work to make that happen. So as I only had a few hours in the evening each night I ended up working until day 5 to get finished. If I'd had Monday off I could have finished all that polish work in a single day.

This was a fairly dumb oversight I should have seen coming and could have easily avoided. For LD51 I shall BOOK MONDAY OFF WORK!

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Clear Design Goal

My core design goal was to make a classic feeling point and click adventure game but instead of success resolving around dialogue trees and using/combining items it would instead rely on player's knowledge. In the way someone walking into an escape room who knows the answers could just unlock all the padlocks I want that same ability in this game. You are not blocked by arbitrary barriers in the game, just your understanding of the world.

I had this concept in mind before the jam started. It didn't dictate the game I would make, just the direction I wanted to go. Having such a strong principle helped me shape everything that came afterwards. Once the theme was announced it became about combining the theme with this design principle. The puzzles and the story weren't decided ahead of time, I just developed them as I went and this knowledge based approach became core to all of it.

That's not to say the specific principle I chose is amazing and should be used again, just that having one allowed me to keep all my work focused in a specific direction. It's kind of like having game pillars, but I'm a bit of a pillars sceptic as they're more often used to beat interesting ideas out of a game rather than generate new ones.

Simple Flexible Toolset

I can't sing the praises of Adventure Creator for Unity enough. I've been using Unity for over a decade I could have spent my while jam time trying to program all my own systems but I didn't have to because all the work is already done for me and I could focus on content. It's a tool I've had a for a long time and experimented with a bunch but this is the first time I've used it properly and it was just great.

It's been in development for a long time and used on a bunch of commercial projects so it's already battle hardened in the way you want it to be. They even had a custom plugin for the kind of retro 9-verb adventure game I wanted to make. The tool is very flexible in what it can do and lots of freedom for you to do things you own way.

The most complicated code interaction I had was hooking up my own custom logic for some custom UI screens. The fact that Adventure Creator can make standard Unity Calls and has a simple API for reading its variables meant it was a painless interaction between my code and theirs.

Rapid Artstyle

Adventure games can be fairly content heavy. So before I went into the weekend I had to figure out what I was going to do about art. Since generating characters and environments quickly would be essential or the whole jam time would get eaten up by it.

For characters I found that the AGS (Adventure Game Studio) community had created a community asset pack for helping people get started. In there I found a really good female character art sprite set that I could essentially paint over to make characters quickly. I had originally planned the NPCs move around more and I even made movement animations I ended up not using.

For environments drawing these was out of the question and 3D assets packs were the very obvious tempting route to go down. However getting those kind of assets packs to look good and well lit can be a time consuming process. So what I tried was assembling some scenes with assets packs and then resample screenshots of them down to retro adventure game resolutions (320x200) and then making 2D adjustments in photoshop. You know what... it kinda works. Scenes that would probably have looked pretty copy and paste in HD glorious realtime 3D looks pretty nice as low resolution downsamples.

While the final art style isn't something you'd be happy with if you bought a boxed product I think it allowed me to produce a reasonably nice looking jam game in a few days.

Healthy Work/Life Balance

This one is simple I didn't burn myself out making this. None of the days did I work from waking to sleeping. I worked in a few hours chunks, had food, watched some Netflix, played some games. I spread my day out so I got a lot of work done but I didn't create an environment of stress or burnout.

I know this isn't always easy for everyone to do, especially if you're chronic procrastinator but I'm fairly good at managing my time and staying productive. I've been making games and jamming for a long time and this is one of the most important skills I've learned over the years.

If you can end a weekend of jamming with a cool game, and you didn't ruin yourself to do it then that's an absolute win in my books!

I am still working on my entry, luckily I have enough time thanks to the new "extra" format.
The fire can now finally be fought using the fire truck unit. It can extinguish up to three tiles at once, but is limited to roads and thus can only reach tiles adjacent to those. You will also need to watch out as they can be destroyed if their current location catches fire. It can only withstand the heat for so long, so you can push through burning roads or make your getaway, but be fast with it.
Fire is also affected by wind now and spreads accordingly. You can use this to your advantage, as fire will not move against the wind, but a sudden change in wind direction can catch you by surprise!