Please play and rate my game :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/pay-or-die

Submit your jam game (HTML5 exports only!) to Submission form

Stream starts ~15:00 CET at Haru's Twitch channel

Cheers, Haru

We decided to continue working on some of the stretch goals we were unable to reach in the jam.

Here is a list of some of the main things we added:

We added some more feedback on the mining tool. A particle was made in the jam but never got implemented for the final release.

We improved the economy scaling a bit, so that there are more ways to win the game than just the one strategy. New bulldozer blades for more resources!

Chekov's gun has now been added as a special purchase (it's op, but takes a bit to unlock)

We now have infinite scaling on the waves so people can get lost playing the game for as long as they can stay alive. (I would love to hear how far people managed to get).

Added some more guidance at the start of the game with some tutorial text.

When depositing money for the end goal we included a dropship which comes to pick up the resources (it feels very cool).

We added some easter eggs for people to find.

Would love to hear what peoples thoughts and feelings are on the adjustments we made. You can play both the new or old versions on Itch.

Here's where you can PLAY it.

HEre is a peak how the game looked when the prototype phase was finish (after about 8 hours) and how the final result looks. I was able to spent only about 14hours of work on this jam, but still super greatful I was able to deliver. You can try my game here and see, how long you can survive

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/collect-or-die-1

A week ago, my game was indexed and it took off. 1.7k players on the first day, 2.5k on the second (that was the peak). This is an absolutely incredible result for me!

Now my stats are as follows:

I also briefly reached the top 4 of all Web Games

and the Fresh Games on the main page

Looks like I'll have to finish the game. Oh, I said have to, I meant want to xD

I had to make a small update mid-week to fix a few annoying issues. Forgive me, Ludum Dare community, but I left the jam version as downloadable. I've seen some people do that.

Of course, I'm incredibly motivated to keep working on the game because of this response (here and on Itch). And most importantly, I was doing something I love <3

LD link

Itch link

We have made an improved Version of our game that is now available on itch.io!

Play the original version here

You need to collect ALL. THE. MARBLES. :sparkles:

:arrowright: Let's go ! :arrowleft:

First: thank you for your votes. I love to get feedback.

Second what i want to tell you:

LDJam is a full process of making games

What i really like about this is that you have a full process. - come up with a good idea - make a game plan, GDD - development cycle - publish - AND: advertisement your game to get votes

So the last part is about like this post. Also you get feedback. Some games are great, some games are not. Some games will become a full release - but most of them not. And thats ok. It is about creativity.

So as that said - only some days left so just play my game hehe

Catlosia - Play it now!

These last few days there have been the usual "We need a few more ratings!" posts.

A lot of these are from people who according to the stats on their game page have rated enough games to not be low on ratings, but they're all fairly low on karma for feedback given. A few years ago the Smart sorting was changed to prioritise that, so the way to get ratings is no longer to just rate a lot of games, but also to give constructive feedback!

So, if you're low on ratings and you don't understand why, go give feedback on the games you played!

Many people will like your feedback for just a "nice game" which will satisfy the algorithm, but really, do try to go into a bit more detail, you know how much you like reading useful feedback yourself!

This LD was interesting for sure, since it was the first I did by myself since LD37 in 2016 and I massively over-scoped the game because I didn't manage my time for art and FX and stuff.

This led me to crunching super hard at the end and scrapping a ton of features, just generally overdoing it.

I crunched so hard I basically couldn't even bring myself to play games I was just so tired, so now... of course... with 4 days left I need to play all the games to try and get my game to 20 votes ASAP!

I'll be playing games this upcoming week anyone who also needs last minute ratings let me know for sure!

If you get the chance to play my game please do!

Here's my game if you want to try it out!

Following the time-honored tradition of using Ludum Dare as an opportunity to try out a completely unfamiliar game engine, my team decided* to write our game using purely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Here's some thoughts about how that went for us.

*technically I decided and they were forced to deal with the consequences

Big differences

There are some similarities between a web page and a real game engine:

• The DOM is in many ways very similar to the tree of nodes found in an engine like Godot.
• The Web Audio API is extremely capable and can handle mixing audio tracks, looping, and effects.
• You can use sprite sheets with CSS.
• ... and so on.

But in practice, the differences far outweighed the similarities. Many tasks that are trivial in a real game engine were a huge bother in a web page, either requiring large amounts of code or deep knowledge of the quirks of web layout. For example, something as basic as positioning entities at specific coordinates in our game window required some fairly esoteric CSS understanding: the "game window" div has position: relative, and each entity has position: absolute and then is given coordinates using the left and top CSS properties.

Screenshot of the browser devtools showing *one part of how we positioned entities using CSS*

The bad

Here is an incomplete list of things that we had to do by hand (that a real game engine would have done for us):

• Ensuring all assets are loaded: Our code handles this, but poorly, by making you think the game is completely broken until everything is finally loaded.
• Resetting/reloading levels: We had to write a lot of code to move elements back to their starting positions, hide/unhide them, etc.
• Editing levels: There's no easy way to place a thing in a position and save that. We hard-coded the starting coordinates for every object in our code and tweaked the numbers by hand as needed.
• Sound: We got it working well, but it required more code and more troubleshooting than expected.

The good

On the other hand, there were some things that the web made easier for us:

• Browser devtools are powerful: The console was super useful for debugging code, the inspector was great for understanding why positioning quirks were happening, etc.
• Easy debug UI: It was trivial to throw some <input> elements on the page and use them to control stuff while we were developing.
• Animations: We just plopped animated GIFs directly onto the page. Luckily we didn't care about starting/stopping any animations, because that would have been difficult.
• Creative freedom: Our game is not confined to the "game window", and I feel like we barely scratched the surface of what could be done in this environment.

Screenshot of our debug UI

Would we use it again?

It's likely! I certainly think there is a lot of untapped potential for fourth-wall-breaking gameplay which would be fun to explore.

Would you use it?

Let us know in the comments!

If you'd like, try our game (it's quite short).

If you liked the music, both tracks are available now on my website (CC BY-SA), and they'll also be appearing on streaming services in the next few weeks.

So far, I think this has been one of my favorite Ludum Dares in terms of how fun and creative he submitted games are! (hot take but I also loved "combine two incompatible genres"...).

In any case -- a huge congratulations to everyone! I'll be taking sometime to reviews few more games over the next few days -- please feel free to drop yours in the comments, and I'll try to check them out.

And if you are willing to take a few minutes to play our entry, Halloween Knight -- please take a look here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/halloween-knight. It's HTML5 enabled and works with a controller -- and we are only a few rating shy of 20!Here's a little screenshot as a teaser:

As the rating period is coming to an end, we decided to release another small update. We already have enough ratings, but we felt that the game needed a few fixes and small improvements. The main thing we fixed is

No more memory leaks!

Some friendly advice; don't lerp the color of Unity's TextMeshPro... It seems like it rebuilds the mesh every frame because the color is passed as a vertex color, causing very big memory leaks that never seem to get cleaned up. It caused some crashes, especially when people tried playing multiple rounds without closing the game.

How we fixed it.

We were changing the alpha of the TMP object to fade out the floating numbers when playing the turn animation. We added a canvas and changed the Component from TextMeshPro to TextMeshProUGUI. Then we added a Canvas Group component, which allows you to control the alpha (transparency) of all it's children nodes. The effect is the same, but memory isn't leaking. Hurray!

Region developments and upgrades used to be "applied" during the turn calculation phase, after some other things were already calculated. This caused a bit of confusion, as the order of events wasn't properly explained, and there were quite a lot of things going on between turns.

We don't really need more ratings (and rating the updated version goes against the game jam spirit), but we would love to get some more feedback now that the game doesn't randomly crash anymore. Find Taxcellent at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/taxcellent

This was the inspiration for my game!

Would be very happy if you checked it out here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/notebook-flight

A lot of games still don't have enough ratings to be eligible for getting results

The rating is almost over, so let's try to help those in danger zone! I understand people don't want to play PC builds, but there are still plenty of web builds that wait for your feedback.

So I've been rather unmotivated to do much of anything this entire Jam. So like, if you want me to play / rate your game then leave a comment on this post (preferably web games but I should be able to try most Linux/Windows builds as well)

I'll try to get some plays/ratings in later today since my "day" job has me keeping really odd hours.

Best of luck, Jammers!

For our game Super Sucker, we will take the essence of the pico-8 game and will make a fully fledged 80s style retro game out of it! Here's the work-in-progress of the intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qr-0uPFO_U

Four days to the end of LD ratings, just in time to drop trailer of our game

just a friendly little trailer

A large part of them did not respond, so we can only rely on ourselves to actively check and help. I am still busy with my club work. Sigh, the rating work is about to end soon. I hope they can be saved during this time...

Anyway, I gained a lot from this LD. Thanks to the graders for their hard work!

I will try to play and rate the games of each commentator.