Got through a few more games this weekend! Some of favourites are as follows:

Untitled Arrow Game itch | LD

Really straightforward game but it's got a really nice level of polish and has an excellent ramp up of difficulty where you start getting layers of visual noise on top of a really clean art style to add a good level of complexity to a simple central mechanic.

Enlit itch | LD

Quite a thoughtful a sombre game. It's a very well put together use of a game as a medium for telling a story and conveying a particular feeling.

Sir Blocksalot itch | LD

Not really sure what genre I'd place this in (action / puzzle maybe?), but it's a lot of fun! It's difficult and quite fast paced but the way the dragons attacks are telegraphed means it never feels particularly unfair, just keeps pushing you to try and try again.

Shepherd's Island LD

Definitely a puzzle game, I can place this one! It's a really smart puzzle at that with a central mechanic that fits really nicely with the theme. Plus who doesn't like a good game about saving some cute sheep?

The Pit itch | LD

Nice and simple card battle game. Ties nicely to the theme by having your cards be an expendable resource that you can run out of, so each battle is delaying either you running out of health or cards. Lots of different things to think about strategically in this!

Stuck In Space itch | LD

Super well polished Pico-8 survival game. It is quite simple, but it's put together exceptionally well!

Isn't Land itch | LD

One of my favourite of the "delay the inevitable climate disaster / global warming" games that I've played. The way all the different building types feed resources into each other feels complex, but the game itself is quite approachable without having to fully grasp every detail to have fun.

HutHut itch | LD

HutHut is absolutely brilliant! I've had such a great time playing it. It's an excellent blend of a sort of classic arcadey "shoot down the aliens" game alongside an RTS / city builder style management game. The single colour per object art style works really well.

And of course a bit of self-promotion...

InevitaBallistics itch | LD

An action game where you have to avoid some missiles chasing you through a maze!

In keeping with tradition, I've hit 20 ratings so it's time to look at how things went/are going.

Preparation

I've recently been reading a lot of Game Design books, and some of the advice from "Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games" has stuck with me. Long before the themes were announced, I knew I'd be trying to make something turn-based (to simplify balance), competitive (to simplify design of the win/lose condition) and based on ambiguous choices (for fun).

I drew up a short list of game ideas -- almost all related to chess :sweat_smile: -- for all themes in the final round, but I definitely got lucky; my idea for "Delay the inevitable" was the one I was most excited about.

Polish

My last few Jam entries have paired the pixel art of finalbossblues with the music of Eric Matyas and I think I've hit on a winning combination. As my familiarity with their assets has grown, I've become a little more confident in my ability to mix and build upon them.

I'm really proud of how Long Live the King looks, feels and sounds. It's exactly what I had in my head.

Humour & Mood

I don't want to spoil anything, but I'm really proud of the (short) story that I wrote for the game and how it ties into the game mechanics.

I wrote a bunch of different "endings" for the game and some lines that made me laugh. Unfortunately, the way that I structured the game almost guarantees that most people won't see them :face_palm:. Several people have pointed out that the characters should spew humorous dialogue throughout a game instead of just the end, which is the first thing I'll fix in a post-jam release.

Distraction: Controller Support

As usual, I only had about 6 hours of development time (aka "nap time") to work on the game. Things were going well until I noticed that I'd only implemented mouse controls, and that this could potentially prevent people from playing.

An hour later, I had alternative controls set up for keyboards and controllers, and button prompts that adapt automatically based on recent input. Should I have worked on adding more levels instead? Probably. :laughing:

The Post-Jam Release

This is the first Ludum Dare where I'm seriously considering a non-trivial post-jam release. I've had a few comments from people encouraging me to produce more levels, and I wish I'd had more time to explore the concept. I think there is a lot of scope for interesting mechanics (see: Chess), and a few different directions I could go in.

In addition to the regular ratings, I'm really hoping to get some constructive criticism to help me figure out where to go next and what to improve.

Thanks for reading this far. Back to rating!

that can be the only explaination. nothing else could explain how i have 23 downloads and 26 ratings.

seriously though is there some imprecision with itch or something?

The trailer of our game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-gallows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF43cgJqdeM

It was a delight to join @bluishgreenpro's channel for an in-depth interview about our team's LD50 entry Battery Low. Please check out the ~30 minute interview for a deep dive on the development process of the game, cut content, and future plans.

Watch the interview on Twitch!

[Re-posted for US time zone]

...like, literally

One of my teammates put together an iteration of UI for the boss in a way that it NEEDED at least 2 child objects to work. And it did have them, until I came in and deleted everything except one thing. Which made THE WHOLE BOSS break. He would spawn in a wrong place and just... stand there menacingly.

The fix? Make an empty child object for BossUI. It didn't have to be named like this, but I couldn't resist the joke :smile:

Anyway, we now have a Post-Jam build! We've added more visual feedback and polish, SFX, and a highly requested boss healthbar! So, if you've already played our game, we invite you to give it another look! And if you're new, try the Jam version!

Check out DOWN the DUNGEON

Hello everyone, I am a professional Unity developer and I will talk about some programming tricks that we used to make our game, The Endless Night.

Unity3D is all about 3D

Unity's original name was Unity3D because it was only focused on 3D game development. In the recent years, even though Unity has developed multiple tools to faciliate the development of 2D games, this doesn't solve all problems.

A 2D game is basically a 3D game where perspective is void and replaced with what we call orthographic view. A small drawing is better than big words.

Simple but mandatory

In addition to that, a 2D game, as its name implies, only has 2 axis X, Y compared to the 3 usual coordinates X, Y, Z.

Unity's shenanigans

That's how it should work right? Well in Unity things gets a little bit trickier because of how the graphic engine works. As I've explained, Unity is still 3D even when it displays 2D sprites. There is an order on how and when a specific sprite should be displayed. I won't enter into the details, but this order can be quite chaotic.

Completely normal 2D game, nothing to see here

Welcome to the 3rd axis in a 2D world

However there is one thing that we know for sure is not chaotic. An object that is physically in front of another object on the Z axis will always be drawn first.

Now, our next step is to understand how do we use the 3D capabilities for our 2D game? By using the Z axis to make sure that our sprites gets displayed in the correct order.

What value should we use to get the correct new Z value? The simplest would be to use the Y axis. If a sprite is higher, it's supposed to be in the background, and if it's closer, it's supposed to be in the foreground.

We then just make sure all our sprite's Z axis value is set to its Y axis, and it's done!

Lies, deceptions!

What about tall sprites?

When a sprite is lower, it should be drawn in front as we established before. However, what happens when a sprite is so big that it hides our character?

Hello there!

It's kinda like in a 3D games when you're in a top camera for instance. When your character enter a building, but the camera is not attached to your character, then it's mandatory to hide the building in order for the player to see its character.

Well, we did exactly that! We just cast a ray straight to the character, and if that raycast went through a sprite, we get that sprite, and we just change its transparency.

A raycast

After that raycast, we just change the transparency of our sprite, and voilà!

Ah! A ghost house

That's a wrap!

Thanks for everyone reading it, I hope it was informative for some of you, and I hope you will like our game!

The Endless Night

A highscore battle has been going on in the comments of our game, Re:Placement. Players dedicated to becoming the absolute best have been fighting each other, and attempting to steal the world record from the developers. Will you be able to defeat them, and claim the title for yourself? Try and find out!

Hi everyone! I know board games often don't get the feedback they deserve on here so I wanted to try and collect some of them to try out!

One of the drawbacks to participating in a Jam as you are still learning programming is that you may or may not realize the importance of Capital letters in folders. Our estimate is that my mistake cost us about 4 hours of work during the jam itself and one major bug fix by Cyzaine to squash the bug once and for all. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/somnipathy runs much smoother now that he did though! Hop and over and see if you can top the leader board!

Play now Web/Mobile

It's like a platform version of asteroids - blast rocks with your lazer, save the escape portal as long as you can.

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

Plz play: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-IgJXmR-r_zPxncPyr4Xg5KAnnC04TsR/view?usp=sharing

so normally I wouldn't do this as I honestly don't care about sharing in our development process, however I think this was interesting enough to warrant sharing. Our game doesn't just look like paper, every object from the car, to the buildings to the road tiles was designed on graph paper at the same scale to fit seamlessly together in the world. It was also entirely modular.

The car:

The buildings:

The roads:

The end result:

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

Appease the gods in glorious full-motion-video, now with a web build!

The gods are always fighting about one thing or another, and as their fleet-footed messenger it’s your job to keep them happy or else they might throw an apocalyptic fit! Carefully choose conversations with a wacky band of powerful personalities. Build cities and towns to keep them happy when that doesn’t work, and see how far you can get in the Hardcore mode! The fate of the world holds ever in the balance, but I believe in you. Good luck!

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXELiNNhvsA Our trailer wasn't that good. We decided to redo it! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-gallows

Light snow crunches under your boots. The cold snap happened so suddenly, it's a miracle you had winter gear in the back of the car.

Hi! I'm @Celtican. I'm the programmer that helped make Against the Dying of the Light, a story-driven adventure survival game. The above text is the first line of dialogue the player sees when playing the game, but I'd like to talk about the dialogue another time. Mind if I talk about a peculiar but very basic visual effect in our game? Thanks!

You can call it different things, "Ghost Image," "Shadow Trail," "Bleeding Image," etc., but I'm talking about the blue trail behind the player when they walk. Look:

I came up with the idea pretty early in development, before any assets were made. I don't make any non-technical art (I leave that to @Gardenovena), so I tend to think about how I can make things interesting with code alone. Usually through tweening, shaders, other other such effects. In this case, I created the ghost image effect with the intention to emphasize lethargy. Unfortunately this kind of effect is also associated with super speed, but the effect was artistically interesting enough that we kept it in the final build.

You might be able to tell how the effect was made already. The character itself is animated with Dragonbones, a skeleton animation software. @Gardenovena only used Dragonbones a few times before LD50, this walk animation was the first animation she ever completed. We took her animation and exported it at 8 FPS (we thought it would look nicer that way), and then every frame I create a copy of that frame in the player's position. The newly created "GhostImage" is then colored navy blue (the primary color of the game), and fades out over the course of 0.25 seconds.

You can see it more clearly when I ~~destroy~~ hide the world:

By the way, I only noticed when making this gif, but apparently the legs are missing a frame of animation. No one (at least not us) noticed while playing because the legs are often hidden by grass, and you usually aren't looking at his legs in the first place. Oops!

To programmatically create the GhostImages, I made a CreateGhostImage() function that fires every time the frame changes. I don't detect a frame change, I leave that to Godot (I'm using Godot by the way) ala signals. I setup a signal (basically an event) that fires on the "frame_changed" event, and it connects directly to the CreateGhostImage() function. The CreateGhostImage() function itself is relatively small:

```cs // Player.cs

// various relevant variables private String _lastAnimation = "stand"; private int _lastFrame = 0; private float _lastScaleX = 1;

public void CreateGhostImage() { if (Animator.Animation == "walk" && (Animator.Frame == 0 || Animator.Frame == 4)) { // every time the character takes a step walkSound.RandomPlay(); // Really, this code should be in another function. // But, you know Ludum Dare, we love spaghetti code here } // Since CreateGhostImage() is called after Animator.Frame is set to // a new value, we need to fetch the old value. I opted to do this // simply by keeping the previous frame information in memory Texture frame = Animator.Frames.GetFrame(lastAnimation, _lastFrame); _lastAnimation = Animator.Animation; _lastFrame = Animator.Frame;

// I hate loading the resource every few frames. I was probably so much
// in crunch mode that I didn't even realize I did this.
Node2D ghostImage = GD.Load<PackedScene>("res://scenes/GhostImage.tscn").Instance<Node2D>();

// GhostImage doesn't have any code, so its behavior is handeled
// all in Player.cs. This includes its position, scale, and tweening.
// In production code, I would probably put this code in a static
// GhostImage.Instantiate() or similar.
ghostImage.Position = Position;
Sprite s = ghostImage.GetNode<Sprite>("Sprite");
s.Texture = frame;
s.Scale = new Vector2(s.Scale.x * _lastScaleX, s.Scale.y);
// This is used when I flip the image when the player transitions from
// looking left to looking right, or visa versa (I didn't make a gif
// that shows this effect, but it's pretty basic)
_lastScaleX = AnimatorHolder.Scale.x;

// I specifically want to put the GhostImage behind the Player in update order.
// If I did not do this, the GhostImage would render above the Player while
// the player was moving left and right (because their order would not change when
// their Y is the same)
GetParent().AddChild(ghostImage);
GetParent().MoveChild(ghostImage, 0);

// Lastly some tweening. Just to make it fade out nicely. I'm tweening
// the GhostImage's color from its default (#482d3375) to invisible
// linearly over 0.25 seconds. Godot has a useful Tween node class
Tween tween = ghostImage.GetNode<Tween>("Tween");
tween.InterpolateProperty(s, "modulate", s.Modulate, new Color(s.Modulate.r, s.Modulate.g, s.Modulate.b, 0), 0.25f);
tween.Start();

// And... it's done. Honestly not too much code for a nice effect.

} ```

Additionally, I accidentally made the GhostImage slightly offset from the Player. This resulted in the GhostImage showing up when it is created even while the player is standing still. This doesn't happen normally because the "stand" animation's FPS is set to 0, but it does happen when I manually create a ghost image. I create a ghost image whenever the player chops a tree, and builds the bridge. It's pretty nice actually, there's a tiny bit of feedback even though we didn't have time to make the chop/interact animations. You can see this a little bit in the second gif on this post.

... Actually, we did make a chop animation. We made it in the last 20 minutes of the jam. That's correct, I was pressured to code this animation AND test it AND submit a build to itchio in less than 15 minutes. The crunch rush actually caused some major build bugs that prevented the game from running, needless to say the animation didn't make it. Which is a shame, really, because it demonstrated the ghost image effect much better than the standard walk animation. This is because the chop animation has much more movement, and so the trail is easier to see, even though the player is standing still while the animation is running. Here's the animation in the dev environment by the way:

This animation, made in 10 or so minutes, caused me so much hell. Particularly the delay for the chop sfx and tree disappearing was what made the crunch so difficult. Anyways, I'm still sad we couldn't put it in. Actually, that was the only asset that didn't make it in, which is impressive since our previous jams had many assets that didn't make it in the final build. But they were content-driven games, I suppose.

Anyways, this effect was super easy to add and was made probably in around 15 minutes or less. Most video game polish is done without any assets at all! I typically find that "game feel" is found through a combination of tweening, particles, shaders, and a bit of sfx. Of course, wonderful art really adds to the experience as well. This game would be nothing without @Gardenovena's pretty pictures.

I've been reading a book about game feel, I admit I haven't come anywhere close to finishing it though (I, uh, have more important things to be reading). Game feel is super important in video games, and is pretty easy to add (I tried to link some YouTube videos but the formatter bugged a bit. See "The Art of Screenshake" and "Juice it or lose it" on YouTube). I probably could have done more polish on my game, but I'm pretty content with the amount of polish it has.

I hope you learned something, and that this was insightful? Maybe? I've been writing a lot about the game in its comment section. Either way, feel free to link your own game so I can check it out and rate it. See you next time!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/against-the-dying-of-the-light

Here's my game! I'm pretty proud of it for the little amount of time that I had to work on it :smile: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/delay-the-inevitable-4

So, this was supposed to be a Compo entry, but real life (TM) clobbered me last weekend, and so I missed it. But hey, now the Extra category is a thing, so yay!

It's a kind of investigation/puzzle game - soooo... a little different fare. Give it a try if you'd like!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/princess-unwed

but I'm still not finished with my Extra entry :laughing:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/pixel-panic

All the assets in our game were made by us! Including every piece or art, voice acting and music (One song... that I wrote in about 10 minutes due to super limited time.) Come check it out and let us know what you think!

We want to improve it for post jam and have a lot of good ideas and great feedback already!

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

Yo, I wanted to tell you about the development of our game 1Man6Bullets.

Until the day before I didn't even know if I was going to participate but I don't regret it was fantastic. We are a team of three, we are about 18 years old, two are in game-design school (Isart) and I draw on my own by working on the side (mcdo, f* this job). The Dream Team! We met in the morning following the announcement of the theme, the first morning was mainly a debate on the mechanics that we could develop around the inevitable and the delay. So many ideas were brought up but we stuck to this idea: You're surrounded by zombies and you only have 6 bullets left. But you're a badass so kill in a max and delay the inevitable. It's a pretty common trope in the zombie genre but it seemed solid so we started detailing the interesting mechanics (ricochet, time stopped when we're not moving etc) while I started sketching in Photoshop and them coding in Godot . 6 Balls was certainly inevitable, but it really didn't seem fun and we were afraid that it would make the games really short, so we looked for ways to flesh out this gameplay loop without distorting it. Especially since just moving around our temporary levels with an enemy was very satisfying and fun so we were afraid of making the wrong choice. Earlier, the potential ricochet mechanic was mentioned. So we thought it would be really interesting to make the bullet ricochet to kill as many zombies as possible and recover the bullet when it passes over us.

After some testing it seemed perfect. The day passed quickly and I had time to set up our first level somehow, and it was while I was working at the mcdo that the devs continued to code, integrated the level and when I come back we already have a game that holds up, it was incredible. We were so motivated that two of us spent the night improving the game, integrating the berzerk bar which would encourage combos, parallax which gives a wonderful effect on the whole game. most of the play was done during the first 24 hours, the rest of the time was mostly a balancing of all the ideas integrated during the first day. I'm not a dev so my explanations are a bit vague but I took advantage of this time to make some nice assets, help with level design and game design. I'm pretty proud of what I was able to add to the game. During the night we had added the hud, but we had blocked on the animation of the skull during the berzerk. I had the sprites but we couldn't integrate them into the game even with a spritesheet. In the end when the second dev (hello sagiii) got up he was able to put it in place without too many problems. During the entire development we have always kept in mind a goal of elegant design. What annoyed my colleagues with the famous less is more. This design was important for the tutorial for example: you appear in front of an enemy, a simple diagram tells you to shoot, this one will ricochet the bullet in your direction so you understand that you are picking up the bullet when you pass over it. Chinoir is very proud of it and I understand it, he absolutely did not want to put a text to explain the controls, according to him showing the mechanics is better than explaining them. However, we should have better explained the combos, their importance, the time related to travel.

We're still working on the game, we're extremely proud of it, it's the first jam for two of us and it's also the first game I'm actually working on that isn't just learning how to use a hum hum engine. For the moment we are working on a polishing of the game, optimization and a graphic rework as well as a rework of the level-design which turned out to be a little unbalanced if we know the right strategies. Many of you enjoyed the game and I thank you and the whole team. If you have any questions, we will be happy to discuss them with you

Big love on u

If you haven't tried our game yet, it's happening here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/1-man-6-bullets ;)

Play The End Is Coming Here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-end-is-coming

I added a new high score system into the game and a leaderboard on the Ludum Dare page

I challenge you to get on the leaderboard!

Lucky Lefty suggests not being too greedy.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/lucky-lefty-loves-late-night-literature

Hello! I'll be up tomorrow and planning on playing some games, so please give me a list of games you'd like me to check out!

And if you haven't, I'd appreciate it if you checked out my meta infinite runner about the end of everything, Bitboy!

I feel really stupid I couldn‘t figure that out myself, but I was just wondering where I could see the amount of submissions?

Or will that only be visible after the results? 🤔

Edit: okay, found it immediately after posting, lol.

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

I was bored running out of things to do after the jam...apart from rating games lol.

So i decided to challenge myself to make As Much Extra Format Game As I Can until the end of the Play N Rate session. Its going to be interesting as I had a TONS of extra ideas after the jam so like look foward to probaly 3 to 5 games or more!

Heres me game btw, super difficult fun bossfight! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/bossfight-but

play my game.

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

<3 <3 <3 <3

Come and try!

Looks like BARIO is angry, maybe kidnapping princess CHEAP was not the best idea after all!

He is the hero of the story, so there’s no way he can be stopped forever.. but you can make his life harder!

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

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to fictional characters is CLEARLY NOT coincidental! :smirk:

Next post will be detailing our process, see you there!

If you're looking for a chill, atmospheric puzzle experience, check out my game The Great Flood!

"Beer for the king" is an economy simulation where you have to delay the king's plans for starting a war by delivering beer to the king 🍻

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/beer-for-the-king

We now made a Tutorial Video showing how to build barrels and sell them on the market in order to explain the basic concepts. 🍺

We are always happy if you play and give us some feedback 🍺

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe-0VQ0w3mw

only a week later I finally have had time to rate some games and make a functional webgl build of our LD submission!

while we still recommend the download, you can now play it in browser check it out! https://lorenzolion.itch.io/airborne-retribution

For how many days do you rate games?

The whole time? Just a few days? A week?

Would be interesting to know

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

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

For more updates, follow us on Twitter!

https://twitter.com/TotteriStudios

Hello everyone ! The default configuration for webgl build is not really handled well by itch.io : the default display size is tiny, and the fullscreen button does not work properly unless you set the right option in the project configuration, and even there it's still a bit clunky. But for this jam, I discovered this little template that is still not perfect, but works way better right off the bat : https://seansleblanc.itch.io/better-minimal-webgl-template. To install it, you just need to put its files in your Assets folder and select the template in the project settings. By default, it locks the aspect ratio, but there are instructions for how to change it if that's not what you want. It's not the most beautiful option, as it leaves black bands on the sides of the screen, but it ensures the screen always has the same shape, so it prevents a lot of UI scaling bugs.

I hope it helps ! I know a lot of teams struggle with webgl builds, but it's worth it, as a lot of people only play web builds...

I hope you had fun during this jam, we surely did ! You can check our game here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/super-mowser-bros

On conception, Flickerlight was a much larger game. Here's a short list of things that didn't make it in: - combat and swords. - teleportation network. - three times as much dialogue as we ended up actually getting done. - an entire audio track that we didn't have time to write the music triggers for. - these cuties (thanks to Valintone for pulling off the extra work, and sorry they didn't get used!):

This one is clearly scheming something:

LOOK AT THIS ONE HE'S PERFECT I'M SO SORRY YOU DIED OF SCOPE CREEP YOU DESERVED BETTER

We'd never done a game with dialogue before, and I think that was our main - well, I hesitate to say 'downfall' as I'm pretty happy with the end result given the time constraints. But we definitely had less experience in scoping this sort of thing than we do our usual offerings, which tend to be 2D physics sims with scaling-difficulty-based game loops and some emergent behaviour. This was a whole different category of beast.

The biggest difference was in...let's call it prototyping. With a physics sim, you usually have a playable game loop by the end of day 1 and the rest is balancing and polish. Here, the core game loop didn't really become playable until well into day 3, at which point all the art and dialogue and resource management logic finally started clicking into a cohesive whole.

Having dedicated artists on the team made a big difference - but again (sensing a theme here) it was something we weren't used to and didn't really know how to make the most of. As much as Flickerlight isn't really what you'd expect of a 'game jam game', I'd love to try this sort of thing again.

Speaking personally, there were three problems with doing dialogue without prior experience. The first was learning the codebase and dialogue system (as I am not the main mechanics programmer on the team), and the second was estimating the time the work would take. The third problem is less directly relevant - as I am the team's jack of all trades, I often failed to account for how much of my allotted 'dialogue time' I would actually spend on other things, such as sound effects and minor mechanics tweaks.

Those who stumbled across the dialogue path pictured above may have noticed that there was a LOT of backstory, compared to the remainder of the dialogue. Judging optimal dialogue tree depth and levels of recursion was very much something I had to learn on the job, especially once the task management system was finished and every character with a 'complete' dialogue tree suddenly had to have job system compatibility edited in.

The one good decision I made this time around was to do the music first, rather than at 6AM on the last day (Australian time - AEST). This took the pressure off - but it also gave us a moody audio track to use as basis for the theme and mood of the whole game. Personally, immune as I am to listening to the same thing for hours on repeat, I played the main track for the game in the background throughout most of the rest of the jam.

Other than this, there's not much else to say. I worked with some new people, who were a lot of fun to build and cooperate with, and some established teammates, who pulled their weight admirably. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Looking forward to the next one :)

This is the first game for the challenge i setup earlier which is https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/bossfight-but/bored-so-i-challenged-myself

This idea came after the jam ends sadly, because it would have been my Best Theme-Based Idea i ever got! Its about facing a Flood and a Rockslide at the same time!

You have to prevent the Flood Pool from filling up more than intended as the rocks from the rockslide fell down and filled the pool! Very simple, yet realisticly make sense!

And yes I'm making this inside my phone, like all other submissions i made in the past!

Our game CUP HALF FULL is now officially available on GOOGLE PLAY

This is super cool, as it is my first game ever to be officially uploaded to a platform that isn't itch.io :smile: Feel free to test it out and let me know what you think!

Got some great initial feedback on my Carmen Sandiego-esque Princess-dodging-arranged-marriages game entry. As a result, I've added supplemental tips and charts to the game page that should make it easier to get figured out. I'd love if you try it and let me know!

Try it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/princess-unwed

Nice.

Nice.

The making of Reactor meltdown is on youtube, Check it out if you are interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuWOVqFUyXs&feature=youtu.be

Hey everybody!

(If you haven't played Giraffe o'Clock YET, now is your chance! It's said to help people get into a good mood so what are you waiting for!? :D)

Development on the postjam content patch is still going but I'd like to show off just another preview of what you could potentially expect from this update!

The patch might be a little delayed, not sure if it's going to be out on Wednesday, but Friday should be the latest release date! Stay tuned!

Kepsert - The Giraffe guy

Hey! I wanna play some LDJ submissions, and if you wanna your game there during the stream session, please submit the link below. I'm playing the HTML builds usually, so if you game requres downloading I can't promise I will play it, but I will try to anyways :)

https://www.twitch.tv/leokrechmer

I plan to stream in 45 minutes from now :)

Thanks!

PS: possibly could have a cat during the stream!

Asteroids? Well, everyone knows a lot about them. Though there's one little catch - 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!

I'm working on a game on scratch when it's done I'll upload it here!! Xx

I'll be streaming some ratings followed by some general game dev stuff in about an hour. If you'd like to have your game rated, leave a comment and I'll try to get to it.

Come watch and hang out https://twitch.tv/DrentsoftGames

If you can't watch live, feel free to drop by for the VOD.

In the meantime feel free to check out my entry The Demon Trainer

Our Post-Jam version finally brings sound effects to the game! Also more polish, more juice!

Try out our web build

It's been a week since LD50 ended so I wanted to share some thoughts on making the art of STUDY LADY (cookie mix)

The Concept: An Upgradeable Music Video

The idea @PeachTreeOath and I decided to explore is an upgradeable music video. We both love the livetune - Transfer music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayL4pzictu8 We wanted to do something similar but as a game where our character is constantly trying to delay something from happening which would be the main animation loop, and the player would help by upgrading the world around her to unlock future worlds (to continue the delay). So for visuals there were three main things we needed to figure out:

1. The main animation loop of delaying something
2. The different worlds (we decided on three)
3. The upgradeable objects in each world the player would interact with

Our original brainstorm sketches were extremely busy & rough to say the least...

Friday: Figuring Out The Story

We liked the idea of delaying a small disaster as we thought that'd be funnier (and easier to implement.) Basically trying to recreate the stress and doom around delaying something relatively minor from happening. The original story was one of a cat knocking down a vase while multiple family members try and fail to keep the vase from falling. I actually even started working on implementing that idea:

As I was working on it I realized it'd be too ambitious. It involved multiple characters and since we were talking about scenes being 3 seconds long at the time I thought it'd be really hard to convey something that made sense without a lot of details to tie everything together. Five hours had already passed and we still didn't have an idea of what we were doing so it was time to go to basics. I gave myself a 15 minute timeframe and storyboarded the first idea that came to mind that felt feasible:

And that's pretty much what we ended up doing! I can't remember where the idea of referencing lo-fi study girl came from, but I decided to go with that for the first scene and world. Then scene two was going to be the ridiculous scene where you see the girl try to catch this milk cup. Scene three and four I wanted to be fun perspective shots that would be interesting to look at. Finally scene five is the breather shot of just the milk cup going to the next world.

Saturday: Main Animation Loop & World One Lines

I had two goals for Saturday which was to draw out the main animation loop and figure out the scenes of world one. For me, LD Saturday is all about working on big pieces & items while you have energy. The whole day was spent drawing in Procreate without exporting anything to Unity. It wasn't until maybe one hour after midnight that I finally completed my goal and the first pieces of not placement art got put in. The following is messy since it's showing all the frames at once:

Sunday: Fleshing Out World One & Three

Sunday was a push to see what was really doable in terms of creating finished assets. I wanted to completely color the main animation loop as @PeachTreeOath was working on animating it in Unity. At this point we hadn't figured out how long each scene would be which would be important for figuring out everything else. Figuring out how long it'd take to color world one was also important as that was the most taxing world as a more realistic painted world.

Near the end of Sunday there was definitely a lot of fatigue happening so I took a break from coloring world one and worked on world three. I think when you're pushing yourself during a jam it's nice to be able to switch between different types of tasks. I knew I wanted world three to be a fun sketchy world. We ended up deciding on a space theme and after nearly 14 hours of working on world one it was a lot of fun to just scribble around a bit drawing something new.

Monday: Everything Else

Final day was absolutely crazy - it's honestly kinda blurry! I was definitely running on adrenaline, and we absolutely worked down to the last minute. I remember writing down a prioritized list of all the things left to do and just systematically going down it. Kanban boards are great, but when you're short on energy & time nothing beats a good old to-do list in notepad. Main things were completely creating world two, finishing world one and three which I had only fully colored the first scene for, and drawing UI pieces. I remember just having ten minutes left to scribble out the logo, but somehow - we made it!

(SPOILERS) All the final art without Unity animations & UI pieces:

Conclusion

• Drawing something you enjoy is key to staying motivated through 72 hours. World three was so fun for me to draw I didn't mind staying up for it, and it went by so quickly. In general for jams I think scribble art is best art!
• Figure out a minimum canvas size early and use that - I just did a large canvas size as I'm used to it but could have saved me a lot of probably unnecessary pen strokes.
• Taking your own reference photos for specific poses and angles can really help save time.

If you've gotten this far - thanks for reading! Also thanks to everyone who has played our game. If you haven't and want to check it out please do: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/study-lady-cookie-mix

If you're interested in talking games & game design with us also feel free to chat with us on our discord: https://discord.gg/feafSea

Happy Monday everyone! Hope everyone is having a good time recovering & playing entries

Hi everyone ! I would like to share with you how we made the music for our game called The Endless Night.

The vibe

A background music needs to be fitting the theme (obviously), so I made sure to use instruments that would make the player think of vampires/Halloween.

The pace should be slow and calm overall. I chose to go with 120 BPM to achieve that, and it means that the metronome would tick exactly every 0.5 second, which makes it even more realistic.

For this kind of game (and the time we had to make it), it is important to have a melody that loops properly. It shouldn't get too annoying because of the repetition, so it can be quite a challenge.

The instruments

||Tracks| |-| || Violins are the basis of the music. I used a combination of minor and major chords to have this feeling of "worrying but persevering" vibe. | || I added a metronome which sounds like a clock, so the player is subtly reminded that each second is important and the vampire might run out of time. | || I used a glockenspiel to add a "mysterious" side, because the game is also about being discreet and careful, and its light sound reminds a sneaky walk. | || The bell makes a sound that can remind death (or death sentence), which the player needs to delay as much as possible. It also reminds the church present in the game. | || The pipe organ is one of the most popular instruments in Halloween culture and is perfect to get spooky vibes. It makes both the bass line and the lead melody. |

At this point, it felt like there was already enough instruments, and adding more would be too much.

You can listen to the result here (adding one track at a time) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH1t3WNCSdA

The concert

One of the mechanics of the game is to hide at a drum concert. We thought it would be a nice touch to have a drum solo when using this mechanic, so I added 2 drum tracks : * Basic pattern : triggers when the player is near the concert. * Crazy drum solo : triggers when the player is hiding in the crowd.

These tracks fits perfectly with the background music because of the tempo (120 BPM for both). The tricky part was to synchronize them with the music. We chose an easy way, which isn't the most optimized, but was the probably the quickest : When the game starts, the 3 tracks (BGM, basic drum and crazy solo) start at the same time, but the drums are muted until the player approaches the concert.

Sound effects consistency

In order to avoid having some sounds (e.g. QTE sounds, priest sounds) that break the melody, I made sure to use notes that blend in with the chords, so whenever we hear them, it fits the background music. It might feel like a small detail, but it is actually quite important !

I hope you liked this post :grin:

If you want to try our game, you can find it here : The Endless Night

New Steam Deck score! I'm surprised I got past 150k, but the stick + trackpad combo seems pretty effective.

Thank you for 50 ratings and all the wonderful comments! :sparkling_heart:

Re:Placement is our factory assembly line simulation/survival game, where you compete against an ever-improving robot that will inevitably replace you at your job. Try it out, and see if you can get a high score!

We've already been thinking about some potential improvements: * Adding some slightly more obvious hints on the parts and connectors, especially the heatsink * Ability to rotate the assembly base - we had this in mind during the jam, but didn't have time * Ability to lean over / zoom in on the base * A short moment to familiarise yourself with the parts before shift timer starts * A brief pause between assemblies to check your stats and messages * A brief pause after timer runs out to allow your last assembly to fully roll out on the conveyor belt * Different difficulty curves in terms of available parts * One or two slower training shifts, before the actual challenge begins * Probably changing the "any key to skip the stats screen" thing * A better stats screen; I know that wall of text can be a little overwhelming to read

We'd like to do a post-jam polish pass. Let's see if we manage!

1. Roguelike game with the search for resources
2. Delay the bomb
3. Platformer with a tsunami
4. Toy factory
5. Leaning Tower and Mr. Second - platformer with time return

Give it a try!

Think you have what it takes to save yourself from the hex that has been placed on you?

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

Hi Everyone!

Some of you might remember Fronk Frizby from our LD49 entry Milburt. Well guess what, he's now starring in his very own game! Drink, swig and glug your way through a whimsical turn-based RPG. Battle unsettling ememies, encounter familiar faces and confront the most sinister foe of all: your addiction to caffeine.

It was intended to be a JAM game, however due to a scope that was too ambitious, we opted for the Extra category instead.

Enjoy it - and let us know what you think!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/fronk-frizby-qoffee-cuest

My Brother just broke the high score :grimacing: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/chase

Hello everyone. This is my entry for the 50th LudumDare session. A few hours before starting, my computer let me down. I used an old laptop to participate at this event, but you can imagine that it was not really easy for me. For this reason, I did a simple casual game in which you control a bullet in an infinite loop trying to avoid other sprites - but the end is just inevitable. There is a leaderboard on-line in order to save your best score. Rate my game and I will rate yours. Leave a comment. This way I can find your project quickly. Have fun ++

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

Use Left Mouse Button to change direction or SpaceBar

Avoid the bad mark the fate want you to get. A shooter game to fight against your teacher and win the test !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/zero-project

Celebrations!

Today our team is celebrating :tada: 50th rating! :confetti_ball:

Thanks to everyone who played, commented, and rated our game. Even to those who just chatted on our Twitch streams. Your feedback warmed our hearts :heart:, and at the same time we learnt a lot about our own game thanks to your feedback. 50 is more than double of my previous submission from October last year, where I managed to get only 24 ratings. Now there is still a whole week in front of us. Will we get to 100? Maybe? Perhaps, that can only be achieved with your help. Play our game on web

Opting-Out from Audio rating

Many people positively commented on the music and sounds in our game, and while we mixed a lot and credited everyone, we didn't make it ourselves. And as we played other games, read and heard stories of how someone's dad made music, or someone used exotic instruments like Kalimba, or another team made a rhythm game based on their folklore music, we felt it wouldn't be fair to those people and Opted-Out from Audio category.

We believe that choosing the right track, or mixing it well is also a skill, but it can be rated in Mood or Humour categories.

True Before & After

A couple of days ago we posted our progression post

But we also found our very first concept art made on a collaborative board. You can see we pretty much nailed how our game will look in the first couple of hours of brainstorming.

Hello everyone, I just wanna say it: Thank you so much for everyone that played "Will There Bee Another?", I am glad to announce that we got more than 100 ratings and great feedback from everyone! You guys are amazing and I am so glad that this game I think it receive so much great messages!

Here for you guys that wanna see our ratings! If you guys wanna play it yet let me know <3

See that poor piggy being hurled into THE PIT?
You see, wizards don't care about individuals, they care about the bigger picture.
At least that's what they said at the academy...
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-pit-2

Solve the puzzles before your time runs out!

What you need to play:

• four directional keys to move and push things around
• one shift key to make mistakes at an even faster rate
• one space button to erase your regrets

Play Push Rethink Undo Repeat

If you are expirienced in delaying the inevitable waking up every morning, you can test your real-life skills in our short game. :alarm_clock: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-snooze

We will be glad for any feedback or comment. :pray:

We would like to play some good WEB based games from Ludum Dare 50, so we will definitely have a look at your suggestions in comments. Is it sleeping/waking up related? Even better!

Have fun and try to stay sleepy at least till 6:30. :dog2:

It's time for that part of Ludum Dare where I take a deep dive into my entry, going through some of the tricks and techniques I used to develop it, and some of the things I learned in the process. As ever, though, I'd like to start by saying a massive thank you to everyone who's rated The Flower of Marasca so far and left such amazing feedback! I promise I'll get round to reviewing your games in turn!

The visuals

I decided to recycle the visual style I used for my Ludum Dare 43 entry, The Gods Are Angry. The background is a black void, with features like walls and floors gradually fading away into the blackness. This gives the game a distinctive, gloomy feel, but also drastically cuts down on the amount of tiles I need to draw, as I only need to fill in the outlines of the rooms and corridors, not the spaces inside or around them.

Things like enemies and power pickups are drawn in brighter colours than the surrounding environment, in order to make them stand out. Unfortunately I forgot to apply this logic to things like the levers and braziers, and a few reviewers have mentioned that they didn't realise those objects were interactive. Oops! Lesson learned on that one.

The AI

This (among other things) killed me last Ludum Dare, so this time around I kept it simple. Enemies move backwards and forwards along a fixed path, and some enemies will shoot bullets at regular intervals. That's all this game required.

Animation

The Flower of Marasca makes use of TIC-80's mget and mset functions, neither of which I've really worked with before, to animate objects on the map. This is used for major gameplay mechanics like opening doors, but also for more subtle things, like the bloodstains that appear on spikes after you fall onto them.

Tile animations are also reversible, allowing for levers and doors to be reset, and repeatable, allowing for the flickering flames of the lit braziers. Which brings me on nicely to...

Particle effects

In my last few entries, I've used animated sprites for effects. This time, I returned to using particle systems instead, as I felt they'd fit the game's graphical style better (and I also just really like particle effects).

The Flower of Marasca has two different types of particle effect: emitters, which spawn a new particle at set intervals for a set period of time; and bursts, which spawn a whole bunch of particles all at once. Both types allow me to configure the angles, velocities, colours, and lifespans of the generated particles, allowing me to easily generate a wide range of effects, from dust being swept up by Feather Jumps to blood spurts when you die and, of course, the sparks rising up from lit braziers:

Collision systems

Ah, yes, my eternal nemesis. This one's worth sharing as an example of what not to do.

In previous games, I've had two types of collidable object: ones that are solid in every direction, and ones that can be passed through from underneath. This time round, I tried to be clever, and used tile flags to determine separately whether a tile can be collided with from above, below, left, or right. The ceiling, for example, can be collided with from below. In fact, it should only be collided with from below, so I don't need to bother setting the other three collision flags, right?

...right?

Whoops.

Factor in a handful of missing collision flags, and a bug that meant ceiling collisions weren't calculated correctly anyway, and you get yet another Ludum Dare entry with serious or game-breaking collision detection issues. I know this is one of the perils of using an engine that doesn't handle that stuff for you, like Unity does, but still, after five years of doing this, you'd think I'd have gotten better at it.

Phew, that's a lot! If there's anything you think I've left out, though, feel free to ask below! Over the course of the week I'm going to try and get the first post-jam update done, and then over the weekend I'll perform the post-mortem.

Hello! I've been streaming and giving feedback to games for a week now. It's been a blast -- there's just so much great stuff! I need a bit of a break though...

While taking a break from streaming I wanted to give you a list of my 18 favorites games so far: 9 JAM and 9 COMPO (the numbers aligned absolutely randomly :sweat_smile:). Here's a list split by categories (that I partially made up) in no particular order:

Puzzle: * Fuse Lit! (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/fuse-lit -- really nicely done puzzle game with clever mechanic and great visuals * BOX IN OX (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/box-in-ox -- aesthetically pleasing and clever take on a tetris-like game * Death Is Real. (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/death-is-real -- great combination of puzzle- and skill- based mechanics with a well balanced difficulty progression * Battery Low (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/battery-low -- small but stunningly beautiful game with impressive attention to details and polish about a rover trying complete it's science mission before running out of energy

Humorous: * Stalling The Dictator (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/stalling-the-dictator -- small and funny game about trying to stop a dictator with great graphics and voiceover

Platformer: * Giraffe o'Clock (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/giraffe-oclock -- "gameboy-inspired, full of chiptune bangers, story-rich, dialogue-heavy, game about a baby giraffe, afraid of the dark, who goes on a massive journey to transcend space and time in order to manipulate time so it’ll never turn dark". All that + great platforming mechanics and level design

Thought provoking: * Granting Immortality (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/granting-immortality -- I'm just going to quote description "A short interactive fiction about deciding who is worthy of receiving the gift of everlasting life". Makes you question your values and principles without in-the-face morale or judgement * Eschaton, Dark Forest of the (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/eschaton-dark-forest-of-the -- a bullet hell game with a charming set of characters and thought provoking dialogs about the inevitable end of everything

RPG/Action RPG and the likes: * Caring Hero (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/caring-hero -- a very funny take on the theme. A game where you try go through a zelda-inspired dungeon to face a boss. The boss is dying though and you need to heal him the whole time to give him an honorable death * Before Impact: Meteor Fantasy (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/untitled-meteor-game -- a solid and very polished auto-action RPG where you must stop cultists and become powerful enough to save the world from a meteor * Healer's Handbook (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/$280256 -- a game where you take the role of a healer, trying your best to save your party-members from inevitable demise by God

Strategy/Tactic/Management: * Whoa! It's like a space game or something! (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/whoa-its-like-a-space-game-or-something -- a surprisingly complex and big for a compo space trading and shooting game * Zom-Beware! (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/zom-beware -- "Zom-Beware! is a strategic city builder/defense game with a cutesy board game aesthetic". Build your city defense to try to stand against endless waves of zombies * The Lars Mission (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-lars-mission -- impressively complex and polished base management game. "Overcooked vibes with hints of Among Us mini games, set in a beautiful sci-fi laboratory." * Aster Defense (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/aster-defense -- a gorgeous tower-defense-like game where you defeat Earth from asteroids. It's quite easy and becomes a very meditative experience after a couple of minutes

Innovative/Immersive/Other (sorry couldn't quite make categories for the rest of the games) * Park Lane (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/park-lane -- ‘Park Lane’ is a short PSX-style horror experience about waiting for your train late at night in a dark and lonely Park Lane station * Elephant In The Room (COMPO) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/elephant-in-the-room -- an innovative and unexpected use of wikipedia to make a game where you try to find a topic for a long conversation * Will There Bee Another? (JAM) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/will-there-bee-another -- a dialogue based game where you try to delay the inevitable end of a date

Huh.. that's it for now. If you'd like to discuss these games or share your favorites please go ahead! Thanks everyone :heart:

Come and watch the trailer for Baggy & Maggy, the best platform-puzzle-adventure-exploration game about keeping tea warm!

Baggy & Maggy

https://youtu.be/ll8hiee_I5k

I've made a surprising amount of tools for this jam, which really sped up the game making process.

Ruler

I've made this ruler which could store different length presets. It allowed me to accurately measure the distance between every platform without having to guess and test over and over again.

Test point

In day 3 I've started working on the hardest section which took a lot of time to test. As it was at the end of the level I had to frequently fly there, which got annoying pretty fast. This is why I've made the test point - a point which I can place anywhere in the scene and quickly teleport to (+ enable some debug settings for testing).

Console

My game was using qASIC (my own asset) and it's built in developer console. I've made a lot of commands during the jam, which proved to be really useful. Here's a few: - noclip - For flying - speed - I think it explains itself fairly well - testpoint - Teleports to the test point and disables heat - stopheat - Stops the heat clock

Debug displayer

Once again, the debug displayer is a part of qAISC which allowed me to easily display information on screen. At first I didn't have any UI and the displayer proved to be quite a handy tool.

Interested?

You can play my game here and see if the tools were worth it.

But you can score first here!

Hi all,

@krisztian from our team has made an update that you asked for: our leaderboard is now online! Hop in the game and see if you're quick enough!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/faces-of-the-beast

Special thanks to @elysiagriffin , @brads-space , @tigerj , @haayaargh and BasicMilky for their wonderful and tireless LD game streams <3

…just use your pets as inspiration ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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

https://www.twitch.tv/oddlyspecificgames

I failed my game for LD50, but I will gladly join the next one.
My game didn't fit well with the theme and I ended dropping out.
But, that shouldn't stop you from showing off your work
and hanging out with me this (and many other) Saturday(s).

Submit your game here.

Help me reach 30 followers on Twitch <3

Hello everyone! In this jam I decided to attempt drawing for the first time since I started doing Ludum Dares back in LD46. For our game Fronk Frizby - Qoffee Cuest I decided to use Aseprite for crispy pixly goodness. :pencil2: :space_invader:

It was my first time using the tool, but I think it worked out quite nicely. Check out that skull!

Any way, we hope you'll try the game. It's a very short turn-based RPG with a lot of comedic flavor.

Most of all I want to say thank you to everyone who has played my game and especially to those of you who have given me feedback. Also I wanted to give a bit of background.

The story of Escape from Nowhere

This was the first time I took part in Ludum Dare since 2015 and my third time in total (the first time was in 2012). Given how positive the experience was I hope to return next time.

Having not touched game development since I started university in 2017 I wasn't very well prepared to make a game in a short period of time and it wasn't made easier by the fact that I spent the first day on a miserable idea. I also started this Ludum Dare with the intention of using PhaserJS (which I had used a few times before) only to change to Godot when I saw all the posts of people trying it out for the first time.

With the first day wasted I gave up all hopes of finishing a game this Ludum Dare and instead decided to take some time practicing sprite drawing, which I also had no experience with. As such, I started working on a car sprite and was so delighted to see how well it turned out that I couldn't resist to have another go at finishing a game.

Due to the above I didn't finish on time for the jam or the compo (which had been my initial plan) and instead had to go with the extra format.

Final words

Since Escape from Nowhere is now an extra game there's nothing stopping me from adding more stuff as some people have pointed out, unfortunately I won't have the time to do that as I'm currently writing my master's thesis.

In case you haven't tried the game yet I'd encourage you to do so and in case you want a challenge I'd encourage you to try and beat the current world record of 388 points.

Anyways, thanks for a fantastic Ludum Dare and see you all next time (and hopefully I will finish on time for the jam or the compo then).

EPIC ROYALTY-FREE MUSIC!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZONep_eUuBg

Innovation?

What drives us as a species?

What pushes us to the furthest reaches of the world to achieve the impossible?

We've gone from the deepest depths to the heavens that reach far beyond our microscopic existence. So, what drives mankind to let go and explore the unknown, risking life and limb for the chance of experiencing something beyond their conceptions of reality?

Who knows?

What we do know is the sweat unrivaled feeling of playing the game known only as Blizzard https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/blizzard

Accolades

Gluten friendly and three-time winner of the J.D Power Awards. Praised by critics and lizards alike, but don't believe us, listen to the testimony of these three journalists:

"I was a little hesitant at first. But after the accident the game just sort of clicked." 10/10 - Implied Journalism

"HELP ME! I've been locked in here for 4 days they have a robot that's prepared to (crack)... I LOVE THE GAME, MUCH JUMP, GREAT TIME" 10/10 - Robob The Reviewer

"Innovative! A love-crafted project for the agesss to misss thisss experience would be to deny yourssself a happy life. Excussse me while I hydrate my eyesss." 10sssss all around/10 - Ssslippery Expectationsss journalissst

Thank you everyone! We're gonna be rated! You can play our game here!

You control a cute lil’ bomb. You wouldn’t want it to explode right? Then run, fire is catching up on your wick.

A dozen of levels to run through to avoid the fire and use your wick to your advantage!

Hi everybody!

I'm one of the two devs of Giraffe o'Clock and I wanted to announce a little bit of a fanart "competition". Starting as of right now, until the rating period ends, you can submit your fanart either here or as a reply to our LD page. At the end of the rating period, we'll give whoever's fanart we like the most a little goodie. I'm mostly just curious to see what y'all come up with, the little goodie is just an incentive! (Might be a steam gift card but I won't spoil anything hehe)

Also, if you haven't played Giraffe o'Clock yet, give it a go and drop us a comment, much appreciated <3

-Kepsert

As a celebration, I made a video fully showcasing the game!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wmDAX6ldBw

:heart::heart:A HUUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE THAT PLAYED IT!:heart::heart:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/carpe-diem

I've done ludum dare a few times now. I usually try and create a timelaps but I thought I would try and devlog this timearound. You can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAQhaCZEYpQ

It's not every day I can say something I've worked on has been given life by such a talented artist (let alone a game jam project!), but it's a thing I truly cherish when it does happen.

This beautiful piece by the incomparable @ Scribble_Knight- drop a follow!

Go play to our game. We need more return on this game. I had a lot of fun doing it and I really like the final render because it’s exactly what I wanted :) Illustration by @ratatouillaxxe

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/ultimate-mushroom-damocles-revenger

https://youtu.be/lesOmZZ8YEc

After receiving many complaints about the game being too confusing, I slapped together a pathetic attempt to try and explain it. Please let me know if the video actually teaches you how to play or if it leaves you with more questions than answers

Hello everyone! This is my first time participating on a game jam. I hope you enjoy my game as well! It's called: "Not Enough Time: The Game". The objective of the game is survive as long as possible before time runs out! The most important thing about the game is that you can reload, and you should kill zombies to survive too!

Here's a gif and a link about my game:

Game link

Thanks to everyone who's played our ridiculous full-motion-video game!

We dedicated one of our living rooms to turn into a full filming setup. Thankfully we didn't have to buy most of the expensive things as we were able to borrow them from a friend who was out of town and couldn't participate in the filming (although they did end up making the music!). Basically the entirety of Saturday was dedicated to this, and while I did get some programming done that day, most of it had to be done in a mad rush on Sunday and Monday. All of the editing, too!

Here we are figuring out how to use the free trial of Adobe Premier to see if we were even going to be able to get the greenscreen working at all. None of us knew how to do this before the jam began after all. It's amazing how far you get get on free trials if you only have 3 days anyway, although I suppose next time we do this we'll have to pay up.

And finally, for the cat points, here's the little monster who kept waking me up every night, and who wouldn't let me take notes in peace. But we love her of course.

Anyway, most of the rest of this went down basically the same way as all of you. Learned alot, got some things right and alot of things I'd like to change, but overall I'm really happy with the final product! If you have an opinion on it, I'd love to hear so we can make something even better next time!

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mythical-mediator

Hello!

I will be going around and reviewing other people's games again. If you need some reviews to get into the ranking, or you have something cool to show, please comment on this post and I'll go look at it!

If you could look at my meta infinite runner, Bitboy, at the same time, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Thanks everyone for playing my little game!

We have now reached 100 ratings on it :boom: I am EXTREMELY HAPPY with how the game turned out, now figuring out how to go about making it even better.

If you would like to see the game developed further, and have more races together in the future, I invite you to our discord server.

Also, records have been broken!

We now have

• @arthurds at 3rd place with 90001 score.
• @bogden at 2nd with 92211
• And the king @meep at 115428. It is really interesting since the game only generates obstacles up until 100k since I really thought it would be impossible to reach that. Well, I guess my math was wrong, ggs.

Cut for Power finally got english version

Play and rate here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/cut-for-power

Everything started with a idea. A bad idea maybe... To create a game about something very funny for us. But... Really we have a very peculiar sense of humor, I could say >.<

We did a brainstorm about the main theme: Delay the inevitable! And we decided to do a hiper casual game. Like I said, a hiper casual and funny game! We think about space or a leaky boat game, but in the end we choose the water way. That same day, we think about The Simpsons theme and "Waterfall" name. We like to think Homer is kind of a distant cousin of our main character. So after that... WALTERfall born!

We think about the Walter's family:

We think about a inpiration song:

Things flowed very naturally after that. We defined the obstacles, came up with a lot of mechanic ideas, and prioritized what would be applicable with the time we had.

We define the color palette:

And we focus on the development of the arts:

From the interface studies:

And in the mechanics with the Dev:

We were very happy with the result! It was fun to create and we learned to work together on this first challenge.

We still want more for Walterfall, we already have ideas and add to the amazing feedback we've been getting! You guys are awesome! Thank you so much for playing and for helping us keep Walter safe... At least for a little while, since the delay was inevitable

Edit: Thank you everyone for rating my game! :smile:

Hello everyone! Thank you for rating my game, I've got 18/20 so I only need 2 more! :smile:

Delay the Inevitable is a sh'm'up game where you have to DELAY a ship, named THE INEVITABLE :wink:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/delay-the-inevitable-4

And you were absolutely right!

Persist-Ant is now actually playable!

Check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/persist-ant

• Jumping is consistent!
• Snail-clipping has been nerfed!
• Some physics weirdness has been normalized!

Give us another try if you feel like it - thanks to everyone so far for the constructive feedback on our very first game!

Hello again!

I have gone through the last post I made and rated all the games, so I'm posting this here. If you want/need ratings for your game, or you have a really cool game you'd like to be looked at, please post them here and I'll go check them out tomorrow when I wake up!

At the same time, I'd appreciate it if you would check out my game if you haven't yet, Bitboy. It's a infinite runner that initially seems really simple, but quickly turns into something unexpected. The game is getting really close to 100 ratings, which is really exciting! I'd love to see it past that threshold and make it into triple-digits.

Until next time, stay curious, and if in doubt, refresh.

Hi there !

I have been playing a bunch of your games and they were amazing ! Well done guys !

Some of you have played my little game too and left a review, thanks a lot !

I am really pleased with the feedbacks and have done few changes to The volcano has woke up ! in a post-compo version. - It came back to me that the game felt like it was a lost battle way too early, so I balanced the difficulty a bit. The difficulty curve should be a bit smoother now. - Some player had issues determining how the fire was expanding/spreading. Which I agree with. So I added arrows to show where the fire will spread next turn.

The original version is still available (of course) and should be the one to be rated. But if you want to play with a better experience, feel free to try the post-compo version ! :) Here is the compulsory link to both versions of the game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/the-volcano-woke-up

Have fun !

Play it here

Congrats to everyone who played our game and succeed to make a room to the top 10 !

-We made some iterations on the game with feedbacks we received !

-We added a lot of signs / juice : Double and Triple dynamites have UI and SFX when they spawn to make them more visibles.

-We did a new balancing (17 min wasn't a score expected tbh !)

-We've also set a new leaderboard ! (the old one is still accessible from the previous build)

We hope you will enjoy this new version, with a leaderboard of 50 entries instead of just 10 ^^" Good luck !

https://paully.itch.io/snip-snap-boom

Thank everyone who enjoy my "game". I have also uploaded the game to itch.io! https://albertoz.itch.io/trex

In previous posts we already mentioned that Post Solis is full of easter eggs and references to Ludum Dare. Originally we planned it as a little joke, but now we thought: why not?

It's no secret that in recent days, emboldened by the feedback from players, we're developing a full-featured version of the game for Steam and probably Itch.io. So we decided to announce a contest!

Contest conditions

The first person to find all Ludum Dare's in-game easter eggs will get a free copy of the full game, and his name (or nickname) will be mentioned in the game itself.

The contest will last until the end of Ludum Dare (April 21). Post screenshots with all easter eggs you found in the game comments section. As soon as a winner is detected, we'll let you know by publishing a special blog post. Cheers!

Find'em all!

It's been a week of LD50 Play+Rate. Does your game still have less than 20 ratings, and needs more in order to get into the final ranking?

Do you have a Web or Linux build?

Link your submission below, and I'll give it a go on my Steam Deck while my work computer is busy... computing! :smile: Games with mouse or gamepad controls will do best, but if keyboard inputs are needed, I can make it work too (after all, Steam has an amazing controller configurator). I'll try to especially prioritise games with <10 ratings.

Best of luck :heart:

(Yes, I will keep flexing that I can play our LD game on Deck. You can't stop me. ... Ok, maybe I'll stop.)

Come and try it out!

Looks like ~~MARIO~~ BARIO is angry, maybe kidnapping princess CHEAP was not the best idea after all!

He is the hero of the story, so there’s no way he can be stopped forever.. but you can make his life harder!

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

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to fictional characters is CLEARLY NOT coincidental! :smirk:

The title says it all :sweat_smile:

My favourite one so far has been Carrot Grove, by @ehon and friends. If you fancy some (terribly balanced) JRPG, do not hesitate to check out E P I L O G U E.

Run away from the devil for as long as possible, while the devil - knowing how much you hate trivia - has made a game out of every crossroad in his endless maze

Two of the roads are filled with traps while one is completely safe, but don't take too long to decide as the devil is right behind!

Can you juggle surviving many different traps and answering trivia all while running away from the devil?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/no-way-out

A Cat, a platformer and running out of health on every action. Sounds interesting ?

Then give it a try.

Play it here