Also rate my game pretty please :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/friend-friend

so, 4 days left. it's been a long ride, but we're almost done! before we sum up our results, we want you to play our game and give it some attention before the end! we're always open to receiving feedback from you guys! you can send your games as well, remember it

(these pics came out straight from the depths of the internet i think i've somehow developed my photoshop skills lol)

PLAY AND RATE HERE BEFORE THE END <3

Check out our math puzzle game for LD! Add up monsters to the correct sum in the rows and columns!

You will be addicted, and if you need more puzzles there is a post jam version with 10 more puzzles!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/sum-monsters

Play Diner Dash and become the fastest waiter the world has ever seen!

Hey Everyone,

This is my nth game jam... I sort of stopped keeping track unfortunately. The Ludum dare is always my favorite and I've participated in an LD event every year for 11 years. Ah, so many good, stressed out memories. Over the years, there have been things that have stood out: I usually don't need a full 48 hours, I always end up with more work than expected, and my "Fun" rating is always one of the lowest... 🥲 I never admitted to being good at making jam games, but I am experienced.

In my experience, there are 5 learnings that I wanted to share. These can help in places outside of jams, especially in the context of the professional world.

1. You don't actually need 48 hours. Get sleep. Live your life. Find a balance, don't celebrate burnout.

Jams are a great time to practice a lot of skills. Time management and work/life balance can be skills to practice as well. Learning to manage time can be just as beneficial as learning a programming/art skill.

2. Scope to one singular game mechanic/feature, and prioritize off of that. Never take more than twice as long as you initially expected. It's better to abandon one aspect than run out of time with no finished game.

If you get stuck on something, zoom out and check your priorities. You might need to just move on. Make and update a to-do list periodically, and when you get stuck, check back with the list and make sure you always have the full view of the project in the back of your mind.

3. Practice with your tools. Don't learn a new tool the weekend of.

Game jams are a great playground to learn. But I would recommend at the very least doing intro tutorials for all of the tools you plan on using ahead of time. You don't want to get stuck on export settings with 20 minutes left to go.

4. Develop a personal asset library

That list of unfinished projects you have? use it. Organize it, use it for inspiration. IF you have a texture that you like, or a model that fits well with anything, keep it in a safe place and make note of it.

5. It may be boring, but do a retro.

You don't need to share it but for your own sake, write what you did well, what you could improve for next time. Game Jams are an opportunity for learning.

6. BONUS TIP

If your goal is to get the most people possible to play your game, please please please export to a web GL build. I don't like downloading random people's executables onto my machine. All computers have a web browser too. You can read my tutorial here. How To Host your Jam Game on the Web - The Byte Bistro

I hope these tips help anyone who is new, and looking for ways to improve their jamming. I am by no means an expert, but I have progressively gotten more out of these jams over the years, even with less time and energy.

If you haven't had the chance yet, I'd love for you to try my game, SOME-MAN: Play Here.

Also comment on this post and I'll check your games out!

And also good luck for when the ratings release (only 3 days ahhh)!

Hey hey, I'm playing your LD games on stream! Come join the stream and send me your game link through twitch chat. It'll be quiet, so I should be able to play your game right away! It'll probably be a short one today, but still a good one, I look forward to having you there! :heart:

https://www.twitch.tv/justcamh

We kinda knew opting in humor was not super clear, but there are a few jokes / funny answers in our narrative game. And most of the people actually rated us (maybe poorly but that's ok) in humor. However 10% of the people didnt rate us in humor and so it got me wondering what do you guys consider a game that can be rated in humor ?

(I have a theory that 10% of the raters actually didnt really played the game, and that would be confirmed by some really ellusive comments -> which also for me brings back a problem that occurs at every jam, the ability to give more karma to real good feedbacks)

Also, special mention to the guy who rated us only in graphics, like...what ?

My compo game Summoner's Pit still needs a few more ratings. Check it out :)

Summoner’s Pit is a fast paced old school survival FPS. Collect scrolls, summon helpful creatures and survive for as long as you can.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-pit

New video about how Manku came to be in Ludum Dare 55! All the behind-the-scene, everything during 3 days! also, we are 1 rating away from reaching 100 ratings! So, Play NOW!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqzMsl7P4ek

"Ratings received" metric on my game is above 20 but there are less than 20 votes in each category.

Perhaps, that's because I've opted out of one of categories after receiving few votes there.

I'm a bit worried if I will be able to get a final results, despite not spending much effort on the game this time.

Maybe you already played Ludum Darons's :crown: last game Blood Sweat And Seals

The game is an Age of War like where you have to draw different ~~sigils~~ seals to summon different types of creatures.
The idea is that you can mix the 5 different seals models to get combinations of summons.
For example, if you draw a seal that is halfway the seal summoning the tank and the one summoning the archer, you would summon... a tanky archer

However the pain point about our game was the weakness of our shape recognition algorithm.

Jam algorithm: Hu's moments

To compute the likelyhood between a drawing and a model, we first calculated the drawing's image Hu's moments, which conceptually capture the shape of the drawing.
We then applied and euclidian distance to each of the model seals, and applied a softmax function.

While this worked quite well with some specific model seals, some of them were very hard to obtain.

We estimated the accuracy of our first algorithm to roughly 37%.
Note that this is fairly better than pure randomness (20% accuracy).

Postjam algorithm: DNN

As postjam, we decided to improve the recognition system.
We knew image recognition was a task that a deep neural network could easily deal with. However, it was inconceivable to build and train such model during the jam.

First, we built a fancy web tool to constitute a dataset.
Using this tool, we created a dataset containing ~800 drawings.

We then designed a small deep neural network using pytorch.

This DNN takes the image moments as inputs, and outputs the score for each of the five model seals.

The full dimensions of the neural network is:
24 (moments) :arrowright: 64 *(hidden layer)* :arrowright: 5 (model seals)

(We also applied some regularization methods such as dropout)

After a quick training of 190 epoch, we could achieve an accuracy of 93%!

We then implemented the deep neural network directly in godot, imported the training weights and... tada! :v:
Happily, our neural network implemented in godot is really quick to process an input (approximately 50ms).

Feel free to test the brand new postjam version of our game :wink:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/blood-sweat-and-seals

Will you help me get qualified with enough rating?

[1] YES https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/hton (WebGL)

[2] NO

After I finished the compo, I really haven't got any time to rate and play other games due to the horrible timing of my school finals.

My school finals ends next week, but considering tomorrow is May Day, I will finally have some time to play and rate some games! Yay!

Hm... what else should I say... Oh right! I have to plug my own game, right friends?
So, while you're here, why don't you check out my submission, Sum On! ;)?

play Sum On! here!

Hehe, Thank you very much <3

And again, I must thank you too for reading this blog post!
Stay safe, everyone! :D

Sincerely,
Altaf

For y'all metal folks out there, give it a listen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLsx0PDZqxI

... here is where you can see which games you've rated & given feedback on: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/my/grades

:D

Play game here: Summon the Waiter

Hi. Thanks to everyone who played and left feedback! Thanks to your comments I'm already working on a future update! Unfortunately my game still needs to be rated and I would appreciate it if you could take the time to rate it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-dungeon-1

Please, leave a comment if you also need to get your game rated. I promise to play it and leave a review within the remaining days.

Hey, I missed yesterday's livestream since I had some stuff to do, but I'm back today to do some more!

https://www.twitch.tv/gabrimer

PS: I plan on streaming me drawing a character in this exact stream a few hours later, so beyond that point I will NOT be playing any more games, but still feel free to come back Thursday for the FINAL stream of playing your games!

We just wanted to let you that we have a post-jam build out! We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it.

We were careful to take as much feedback into account as possible while making this patch;
We've improved visibility and distinguishability of objects, implemented a tutorial for new players, and added more sound effects to match the gameplay.
The troops have been rebalanced and there are also a few new enemies to check out!

Do let us know if you have any feedback on this version or encounter any bugs, and we will be more than happy to take a look!

You can try our game here!

Hello!

Just wanted to ask anyone who comes across this post if you want to test and review my game? I would really like to come up to 20 ratings and I am very close.

It would be very appreciated!

Thanks! :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/cauldron-crafters

Hi! Guys! I'm finally on vacation! I will play a lot of games today. Please leave a message below and attach a link if you want to be played first.

Here lies Analytics

Hey everyone! I’ve been analyzing game data from Turret Queen (from players that didn't opt-out) and wanted to share:

Tough Spots

I plotted where and when players tend to lose their lives. It’s interesting to try to make sense of it!
Here is where people die the first, second, and third times: Here I broke it down into the time of death as well: This one is a bit weird, but I ranked the top 5 moments of the game where people lost, by grouping every death timer into 5-second splits, counted, ranked, then cross-referenced it with the positions, and got this: (Now I notice it is kind of hard to see the colors here, I'm sensing a pattern with me :confused:)

Enemy Fire vs. Collisions

It turns out that enemy shots are a bigger threat than running into them. Total deaths caused by enemy shots: 102.0 Total deaths caused by collisions with enemies: 70.0

Turrets!

I found out which powerups are grabbed the most (which is basically a tie). That kind of confirms the fact that they are hard to see and identify. But also that I was able to balance the powerups that appeared without using any random function. Total of Powerup 1: 427 Total of Powerup 2: 432 Total of Powerup 3: 406 The strongest turret ever built had a total sequence of 22 Powerups!!!
Specifically:
Powerup1: 3, Powerup2: 15, Powerup3: 4 Worthy of note, the ship only holds 10 powerups at once, and the game only counts the same consecutive powerup But if you are fast enough, you can grab more powerups during the turret assembly.

Top 5 constructed turrets:

| powerup1| powerup2 | powerup3 | how many | | -------- | ------- | -------- | -------- | | 1 | 1 | 1 | 195 | | 1 | 2 | 1 | 32 | | 1 | 1 | 2 | 25 | | 2 | 1 | 1 | 23 | | 3 | 1 | 1 | 17 |

When Players Quit

I looked at how many times players die before they decide to quit or restart.

| Deaths | Session Count | |---|---| | 3 | 22 | | 1 | 15 | | 2 | 8 | | 6 | 3 | | 21 | 1 | | 10 | 1 | | 13 | 1 |

Average deaths per session: 3.057 Average victories per session: 0.076 The game was only beat 4 times.
Maaaybe I need to fix something. (sarcasm)

Death Maps

Cool heatmaps: Game over man, game over

A bit on how this was done: - Data was sent via a AWS lambda - Saved on a dynamoDB instance - Exported the whole thing to a few csv files - Used some magic python libs on jupyter to plot these graphs

Anyway, from the data and feedback, it is apparent that the moment the first enemy shot appears is way too punitive. Also the time between losing the first life and then the 3rd is way to short, also confirming the feedback of multiple players, that the game becomes very hard after the first life is lost.

Thanks for playing. I hope you all enjoy looking at tables and graphs as much as I do! If anyone wants to know more, let me know, I would love to share.

PS: I was writing this and inadvertently closed the tab and lost the whole thing, had to write it all over again (its 2AM) so please forgive any weirdness. (I could not find the draft on my user page even thought I saved it)

v0.2 - Post Jam Update

We've made some updates to our entry and smoothed some of the rough edges. Things like: - Options/Remapping keys - Cooldown indicators - More intuitive abilities - Performance fixes for HTML builds - A new intro level - Secrets

Itch.io Link

Go play our Ludum Dare game Crypt Decrypt before it's too late! It's a platformer puzzle game where you must summon various types of skeles to solve puzzles. It's a bit buggy but I hope you enjoy the effort my team and I put into it! Read the description for controls.

Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/crypt-decrypt

Our game Neon Citadel, a Scifi Summoning Tower Defense just hit 20 ratings today! And If you haven't played ours yet yet we'd love to get more ratings so Check It Out!

Now we should help people get their games rated! Anyone still needing ratings should comment their game below with a quick description and then go and play and rate everyone else in the comments games!

Now go get those ratings!

Reaching the end of the jam, guys! Should you play my game? If you want to, here's the LINK:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/danger-zone-ld-2o24

Hey we would really enjoy a little feedback on our game

So if you like the idea of summoning a snake with your voice (needs microphone input) maybe give it a try :)

LINK TO GAME

First, thanks to everyone who played our game and provided feedback, also congratulations for any participant who finished a game this jam!

You may know this but you can customize the built-in loading screen for Godot. While I appreciate the minimal look of the default one, I always wanted to make something custom for our browser-based games. The summoning theme lent itself well for some magic using the 2D CanvasAPI in JS, which I used to create this little animation for the post-jam build of our game The Culling.

Next I'd try adding a "hint slideshow" of some sort and make this html shell a bit more complete (to cover errors better and the "indeterminate loading state") and reusable so it can be plugged into future games more easily.

If you also have some custom loading screen please comment below (could be for webgames outside this LD too) :)

The Idea

I woke up early on Saturday to get at least an hour of PC time in before leaving. With the fact of only having one day to implement everything in my mind (totally not), I started typing the following ideas:

• Summon Cats with Food and Other Things
  • Cats get summoned by dropping food in their bowl
• Cats Sit in the Way
  • Cats get summoned in front of you if you carry something heavy in a narrow space
• Avoid Getting Summoned
  • You are a demon and just want to continue sleeping

I can definitely tell that I just converted the experience of the first few minutes after waking up to these great ideas 😄

So I left and had the entire rest of the day to build on them.

The Concept

Somehow my brain almost immediately discarded the "Cats sit in the way" and "avoid getting summoned" ideas, so I just kept building on the first one.

At the end of the day, I had the following bullet points I wanted to implement:

• Dry food mine click to receive food
  • Recruit “miners” to automate that process
• Place chairs where people try to stand up from to summon a cat in their lap
  • 10 sec until the cat stands up and becomes a warrior
  • Once the cat has been summoned, the person wanders off-screen
• Food is poured into the bowl to summon a miner cat
• Cats fight against aliens
• Aliens drop dry food
• Aliens want to steal the dry food mine
• Cats shoot lasers from their eyes at the Aliens
• Aliens only try to reach the mine (they don’t attack)
• Maybe a summoning phase and a defending phase?
  • No just increase the amount of Aliens attacking over time
• Dry food is the score
• There is storage for it the aliens try to reach (?) (Maybe it’s better to space out so you have to increase the territory)
• Or the aliens just attack the next best thing but then everything needs to be destroyable
• Or aliens attack mines and the storage
• Mines don’t have to deplete because the player wants to expand to get a higher score
• Start with 2-3 miners

What a solid game design, what could go wrong?

The Process

Sunday 7 a.m.

Let’s go!

I started by setting up a general to-do list for all assets that I need: art, SFX, music. Then I jumped into Figma and created these masterpieces.

Sunday 9 a.m.

Now with the art ready, I created my coding to-dos and started hacking away.

Sunday 11 a.m.

Solid start, I got every entity and building set up and I'm ready to implement the mining.

Quick breakfast and more hacking.

Sunday 3 p.m.

Ok, I got them moving, but something doesn’t seem right.

[mining_0.mp4] -> Imagine a video showing miners moving in a zick zack movement between mine and storage. (If you don't have enough imagination you can read the post with videos here -> kana.games)

Time for a break. The weather is nice, so let's take the bike for a spin.

Sunday 5 p.m.

Oh look, I found the issue.

[mining0fix.mp4] -> Imagine a video showing how I click the "one shot" checkbox on the timer node.

This is the mining timer that starts once the miner enters a mine, so as soon as they entered the mine, they got a piece of dry food every second and felt the need to bring it back to the storage.

Sunday 6 p.m.

Ok, mining is kind of working now, they still get stuck sometimes, but whatever, I can fix that later. Time to get some food.

Sunday 8 p.m.

Sooo let's take a look at the to-do list.. Ohh. Ok, it got to me during the time when I got stuck on the timer issue that there is no way I will get this out in the COMPO time, so I already was prepared to move to the JAM where I had a full 24 hours of additional time to work with 🤯

At this moment, all I have is 3 cat-like blobs walking to a mine waiting there for a couple of seconds and moving back to the storage. Oh, and this animation:

![chair.mp4] -> Imagine a video showing a 2 spheres jumping on a chair.

Not much more happened this day. I got the miners kind of working better by adding a target counter to the mine so the miners don’t have to race each other to the next mine. That leaves:

• Aliens
• Warriors
• Fighting
• Altars (and with that spawning Miner and Warrior Cats)
• SFX
• Music
• Page Publishing

No problem. Except I have to spend 8 to 9 hours working in the office on Mondays.

Monday 7 p.m.

Ok, so I survived the day in the office, got some food in my body, rocking a bit of a headache, but nothing an energy drink and some painkillers can’t fix.

Tuesday 3 a.m.

Wow ok, it’s a mess but somehow I managed to get everything in. As is tradition in my jam games, I spend 30 minutes on sound effects and 15 minutes on creating music. Had no time for proper playtesting and just prayed that the export and upload will work. Just slam everything up on itch and call it a day.

The Good

• I’m very happy that I managed to get anything somewhat playable out for the jam, and it feels like a big step up from my first entry.
• I really got into a flow on Monday that allowed me to pump out all the missing pieces. If I had time to get started on Saturday I might have managed to put out a solid game during the Jam time.

• The art is definitely something I want to do in

  the next game jams, the highly lo-fi vector art leaves a lot to the imagination of the player without looking distractingly bad. I just have to focus on making it remotely recognizable.

• Spending the first 1 to 2 hours just throwing around ideas and thinking about all assets and programming that has to be done for each is a good start.
• Also, a rough plan with to-dos for the chosen idea is very useful to not get lost during the deep coding phase. Always knowing what to do next is a massive time saver.

The Bad

• Scope - as always it’s a constant battle no matter how manageable something seems always multiply 2 to 3 times the time on top. This also means some ideas just can’t be done in a COMPO (depending on the skill level). I should have probably thrown away the idea I went with just based on all the parts I needed to get the game working.
• Getting stuck on stupid stuff, I think working at least with one other person can help mitigate something like the Timer problem. Maybe I manage to find someone stupid enough to join a team next time 😄

The After Jam Game Plan

The Game has some very obvious issues even for a little jam game.

Winning the Game

Adding a way to win the game would have mitigated the risk of a defender game where it’s totally possible that the player just can’t lose. So adding maybe some mother ships for the aliens that have to be destroyed, or a final boss wave would have been great to not leave player guessing if the game is finished or not.

Exploration

I added a couple of alien clusters between mines that attack the closest mine to them if a warrior gets close to them. The issue is the player has no incentive to move the warriors anywhere but around the storage to defend that. If I continue this project I would probably add some fog of war, that has to be cleared off by the warriors, so the miner only move to mines that have been cleared. Maybe the aliens then also attack the warriors instead of the mines (maybe the aliens even hide in the mine!) so there is a risk of losing them. I would love some outpost or upgrades that are hidden in the fog, so the player is not only incentivized to explore to expand the economy but also some fun roguelike upgrade for mining speed / movement speed / fire rate.

The Conclusion

I really enjoyed my time working on this and will be back on it probably the next jam will be MFGJ 24. There is just something magical about starting with a blank page and having something playable after a short amount of time.

Regarding the future of Summoner's Cat Defense, I will most likely leave it as is. I currently want to focus on getting the Mod Loader to work with Godot 4 and getting Circle Pusher out there.

This is my personal list of my favourite entries based on how fun or cool I think the concept is! I'd like to share them with you in case any of them need some love in the final days of rating!

Repeater - A well executed and cool premise. It feels like it could be a test straight from Aperture Labs! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/repeater

Grishnek Legacy - A challenging rhythm game with that "just one more game" energy. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/grishnek-legacy

Salmoning - I just love the play on theme and the cozy environment. Cutting around on the bike is fun as hell! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/salmoning-1

Faemori - A cute auto monster battler with a solid retro aesthetic and feel! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/faemori

Necrotyper - A very polished and surprisingly addictive typing battler! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/necrotyper

~DISCLAIMER~ I have only had time to play 50 entries. So if your game rocks but didn't make the list, don't worry about it - I'm a nobody!

Are you able to get out of the dungeon? Be careful, the dragon is protected!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBG_4yz1Ru8

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-seven-crystals

72 games are very close to getting the 20 ratings needed to get a score.

Help get them over the line here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/games/danger/all

Only rule: I don't play horror games.

https://www.twitch.tv/yellowkamel

➡️ If Tenacious D can sing it (yes they did and very well by the way, I can also quote it).😎

This is it, guys! 🚀

Only 2 days left, and we still believe we can gather more votes and it's only up to you. Our belief stems from all the comments we've received and the patches we've made in the past few days. Yes our team was able to improve performance and remove a few small bugs.🛠️

So if you want to summon Sheep Norris our red hair biggest sheep, go for it !

In the mid time, here's a gif of the best rock band of all time.

There's not much time left until the end of the jam! If you haven't had a taste of the rabbit arena yet, now is the time!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-arena

Unlock'em all!

Play Ribbit Craft

Before watching the video I recommend you spend 5-10 minutes playing bergs and experience it for yourself first.

https://youtu.be/jDyqu_xiPzs

When watching people play bergs, I noticed many of them abuse bugs and glitches to cheese their way through the levels. I think that this is awesome, and fully encourage it, but some people were confused on the actual solution to the levels. So for those curious, I made a short gameplay video showing the intended solutions to each level.

If you haven't played our little puzzle game, bergs yet, you can do so here.

The Rating Marathon is almost over!

Life has been busy, but we managed to finish a post-jam version of our game!

The Jam version fell way short of what we envisioned, but it was… educational. Now that we were able to complete the vision of what we would have loved to push out, we’re quite happy!

What we made initially was buggy and empty, but even in this initial state, we think you can see what we were going for, and in particular, our drive to find a clever take on the theme!

What changed? - Squashed most of the bugs 🐛 - Ported to GDScript so we can web export - Fail state and win state (NOW IT'S A GAME!) - Pause menu and endgame menu - Finished adding the quests we wrote but never added - Added the rest of the items we drew during the jam - Cool effects and animations (you get speared now! ☠️) - Tweaked balancing and timing - More UX feedback (while keeping it simple like a jam game should)

If you haven’t played it yet, go check out the Jam version and see what we mean, then gib ratings pls! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/servant-of-lord-doof

Now that you’ve done that, check out our post jam version and see how we progressed: https://rainybyte.itch.io/servant-of-lord-doof-post-jam

I hope you hear the bells in your dreams 🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔

Nate from Video Games are Good happened to catch my game in an LD stream while he was already planning to write an article on the engine I used, Pulp for the PlayDate. We did a quick interview, and now my little weekend game is in an article alongside two lovely award-winning non-jam games.

https://www.videogamesgood.com/post/playdate-pulp-makes-game-dev-free-accessible

If you haven't played my game yet and are interested, give it a try! It's for PlayDate, but there is a webplayer available as part of the Pulp IDE, and I have detailed instructions in my game's page. You do have to create a dev account to access it, but they don't even verify your email address, so it's nice and fast.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/i-am-a-wizard-and-my-shoulder-hurts

I also do plan to touch up the most obvious issues and release an LD+ version on itch.io in the near future, and then I will attempt to motivate myself to do a full proper release on the PlayDate catalog at some point. I'd say the best way to look out for that is to follow me on Twitter, but Twitter isn't actually good for announcements, so there isn't actually a good way to look out for it, sorry.

Peeps, two days left and if you're active and missing some ratings post me your game here and I'll make sure to play it and help out :)

Picture taken from BloodRite: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/blood-rite

The title is pretty self explanatory, but if you comment your game (preferably playable on this website), i'll probably play it.

Please if you haven't had a chance yet go check out || rate our game Soul Pact: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/soul-pact

I just made a step by step guide on how to solve Soul Pact to make it easier for everyone, here it is: https://youtu.be/8x5l5jQqB-4

Welcome to our post-jam version of Chicken Slayground!

We had so much fun this game jam that we kept working on our game the past two weeks. You can now play our post-jam version on our game page or here as this event comes to an end.

And if you have not rated our game yet, feel free to play our jam version!

Here is a quick overview of what we did in our freetime:

• We actually have a UI now
• New Start, Win and Loose Menu
• Visuals (post-processing, wiggly grass, enemy sprites tear when damaged, runes emit stuff)
• Hopefully less lag (mesh cutting for the cardboard-destruction effect is no longer performed every time an enemy dies)
• Some balancing tweaks
• Bug fixes
• And most importantly: Smaller tree hitboxes :=)

Thanks for all of your feedback and comments, see you in 6 months!

Have you tried game yet?

If not, this is the purrfect occasion to do so! we just released a post jam update with lots of quality improvements and some new content!

here's a video of it!

https://youtu.be/HNdEtFYcTSY

So get your cats ready and destroy those stupid fishes grahhh !!

You can try the original as well as the post jam version here

Remember the good old days of the arcade classic Dig Dug? Do you like the idea of building a platforming level as you play? Do you quiver with excitement at the thought of summoning guardian mantises to fight off coldhearted worms? If you answered yes to any of the above... you should try our game, Legend of Lady! She's a spunky ladybug committed to saving the overworld from the terrors of the underground.

Try it in your browser here!

Hi all! It's been a pretty busy few weeks since the jam... Only now did I get the time to add an endgame survival mode: once you upgraded all the weapons to the maximum, enemy waves now spawn automatically around you! You can enjoy the full upgraded weapon tracks with a brand new guitar added solo on top!

It's also a lot easier to get there than in the jam version (no collision on the blobs, slower weapon downgrade, balanced damages etc.).

Let us know if you get some crazy high survival times!

Check the [PostJam02] version on our itch.io page!

It is time for the final major update for this version of Danger Zone! It was fun while lasted, but don't think this was the last of the Danger Zone game, for I plan to expand the main game to another project, but I won't say much now.

For now, here are the patch notes for the final version of Danger Zone.

• *New UI for selecting prefered keyboard style. Be it WASD or IJKL.*
• *New UI for muting all sound of the game, in the title screen.*
• *High-Score is now saved after closing the game.*

• *All UI during gameplay in concentrated on the top of the screen.*

• *Reinforcement Units damage got decreased from 40% to 25% of the current Main Unit damage.*

• *New Upgrade for gaining more units. Player max units in the begining of the game reduced from 10 to 8. New max went from 10 to 12.*
• *Damage Upgrades got increased to a 0.25 damage increase.*
• *Cooldown Upgrades got increased to a 20% decrease of the current cooldown.*
• *Zones capture time got decreased from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds.*
• *Now if you have maxed units, Units Zones will be replaced by Upgrade or Tree Zones.*
• *Warning for the quota got remade to be more especific.*

I really hope that with these changes skilled and non-skilled players will be able to keep track of their evolution and go further into harder threat levels when playing the game. That's it and I'll see you in the other side.

Got some time to play / rate / provide feedback before the Jam officially ends, let me know if you'd like some feedback on your games!

Meanwhile, if you enjoy some horror-themed puzzles, do check out my entry here -> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/trapped

If you didn't test our game, go for it, we have only 30 reviews ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-first-of-the-end

At the end of a jam, it's always nice to see what you went through and how the game changed. The board in the miro helps a lot with this. It also gives you motivation every time. It's also a great task tracker.

Does anyone else do the same?

And then there's the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-arena

Hello everyone, as the end is nearing we are short of a few reviews. Our game is a card management game where you summon forest creatures using music instruments and birds, and feeds them other cards in order to generate energy for the tree. We didn't had time to make a proper tutorial so there's a lot of infos to take in, but I hope you will enjoy it if you give it a try !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/harmony-forest

Have you ever wanted to play as a catmancer? Try out our game and enjoy the chaos that you get from playing as a catmancer and try to unlock the legendary S-rank ;)

Enjoy and have fun! :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/rise-of-the-catmancer

I still need rating of the humor and mood category, so come to play and rate!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/cat-and-box

Play 'Bail Out!' (web browser version + stand-alone binaries available).

Play as a skateboarder who has been summoned to make an appearance at court before noon and pay a fine for the "crime" of skateboarding. Except you don’t have any money and noon is only 2 minutes away! Skateboard around the city gathering as much loose change as you can find and make it to the courthouse in time. Just don’t get caught by the cops!

Last days to rate. Would love to get as much feedback as possible in order to improve for the next gamejam. Also, feel free to leave some general feedback in this post. Here's our game!

:video_game:

https://ldj.am/$385986

Wow, what a great jam! I've seen and played so many phenomenal entries, it's inspiring to see all the jammers who come together for this :smile:

All the feedback We've gotten has only motivated me further to continue with my game, as such I decided to post a few thoughts on my game, and potentially solicit feedback for a further release.

I started the jam with wanting to take an existing board game, and add some kind of twist to it. When the theme of summoning was announced we gravitated towards chess and roguelike using cards as your "summons". I don't think it necessarily fit the theme the best, but I did think its a fun concept.

The first focus of the game was getting the board generating onto the tilemap, as well as having them placed properly with each new wave

The next big focus was being able to place pieces from the cards on the board. It was decided early on that there would be a fog of war to prevent you from seeing your opponent pieces while placing yours. There has been feedback from ratings that this isn't always intuitive, so it's now an option in the full game :smile:

After that the focus was on being able to "merge" the pieces to form the next one. This could be done either from card -> piece, or card -> card

Then was the overall game flow, including moves, simple (dumb) enemy AI

The last big focus of the core mechanic was getting the wave transitions working

The final day was spent largely on game polish, adding effects, and the AI. While the AI wasn't perfect it was a vast improvement from the initial version (pick a random available move). The final AI in the jam went something like this:

• if there is a move to kill the king, take it
• if there is a move to kill a piece, pick one at random
• else pick a random available move

It's not perfect and I've already thought of a few improvements, but this is definitely an area of focus for the full game. Unfortunately many chess engines like stockfish won't work because they depend on standard chess boards and rules. Also many of them are GPL which make it impossible to do a full release without releasing your source code. If someone knows of a chess engine that could work with non standard boards/rules I may consider adding an "interface" with it so players can download it separately and optionally.

The other cool thing (I thought) with the game was effect cards. Cards that would somehow change the board or pieces. Unfortunately we were only able to get two different types in (x gets y’s moves, increase move length) so there wasn't much variety and your pieces got VERY overpowered :sweat_smile: This is an area of focus for the full release. If you have a cool idea for an effect card (somehow changes the board, rules, or pieces) I'd be happy to hear and potentially incorporate them!

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! If you've played and rated the game thank you so much! If you have feedback, suggestions, or would like to get updates about this project, I'd love to hear from you in the comments :smile:

If you are interested you can play the jam version on itch here

Some wrap up thoughts:

• Godot is a solid engine that makes it VERY quick to get things implemented
• Getting a full nights sleep is very important for maximum productivity
• Leaving the final day to polish was a really smart thing we haven't achieved in many jams before :joy:
• Focusing on the core mechanics first meant more time for bugfixes and polish
• Wrapped up at 1556 lines of gdscript (754 being in the Game (main) file :joy:)

Hi! This is a list of games the fulfill at least one of these requirements: - Can be or must be played on hardware other than a basic computer e.g. PlayDate games, VR games - Require unusual setup like setting up a virtual machine or emulator - Are played best IRL, e.g. paper and pencil, physical games - Are multiplayer

These games are often harder to get people to play than most LD games, and it's hard to find them when you are looking for them. If you have the required hardware, or have the time and energy to do the setup, or have friends available for multiplayer games, here is a list where you can find them all in one place.

If you know of more games that fit the bill, let me know in a comment and I will add it.

PlayDate - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/i-am-a-wizard-and-my-shoulder-hurts by @monika (web player available, instructions in listing) - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/call-of-the-kraken by @punisherxa, @luisquid, and @aguahervida (emulator available, no instructions) :warning: ONLY HAS ~6 RATINGS

* Game Boy Advance* - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/doomsday-care by @notruche, @pekolio, @helicule, and @kyrio (Also has web player and 3DS instructions)

VR - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoney-vr-only by @shadowbrain :warning: ONLY HAS ~13 RATINGS

Microphone as controller - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoning-song by @paul-nadan :warning: ONLY HAS ~3 RATINGS - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-quacking-hour by @stanov

MIDI keyboard - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/exorcist-pianist by @aviv-levy (Regular computer keyboard also works)

Print and Play - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoning-detective by @hamsel (single player) - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-summoned-1 by @unbirthdayangel and @cataclysmicknight (single player, optional journaling) :grey_exclamation: ONLY HAS ~21 RATINGS (probably safe unless people skipped categories)

Twitch Plays - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/tiny-summons by @jeremy-ryan (multiplayer)

Misc. Multiplayer (normal setup except finding people) - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/salmoning-1 by @soves, @nestral, @badcop, @kuviman, and @rincs - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summons-of-the-sovereign by @langotriel and @hare-software, 2P turn-based couch competitive, with computer opponent available

If you bookmark one copy of this post, https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/i-am-a-wizard-and-my-shoulder-hurts/uncommon-hardware-unusual-setup-games-list is the master list that I will keep updating when I repost things.

Ludum dare is always a fun experience and an opportunity to learn. This time me and @nuanda79 tried our hand at the point and click genre, focusing and committing ourselves to creating a small story and not just a functioning gameplay. If you want to try something different from many others... https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/a-cake-from-beyond

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/protect-forest

Come one and all, play it on browser here!

Alrighty, here we are! One more day where I'll stream me playing some more entries. I wanna try and prioritize playing games that are still in the danger zone, but feel free to join in and submit your game if you feel like it!

https://www.twitch.tv/gabrimer

Hello everybody!

I tried to participate in this ludum dare and managed to publish my game, but I've been extremely busy these last few weeks and that's why I've played very few games.

Because of this, my game has very few reviews, if you could help me by playing and evaluating I would greatly appreciate it.

In this game you will control a wizard who was accidentally trapped after a great epidemic where magic turned against sorcerers.

Your objective will be to use your wand to control the infected and escape from prison.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/shadow-wizard

If you want my review, leave the link to your game here and I'll be happy to play it.

Since my participation in the Ludum Dare 54 Extra in October, @dindotdout and I had been talking about participating in a game jam together. I finished my year-long self-study of music theory in February and finished reading the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) in March, and thought that this would be a great opportunity to put all the acquired knowledge into practice. I got bored of making 2D pixel art for my games, and so in order to spice it up, I knew I wanted to do a 3D game this time around.

Preparation

Last time I participated with barely any knowledge of Godot (although I had used Unity and also implemented some of my own game engines before), so in order to be better prepared this time I did both the 2D and 3D tutorials, as well as reading the best practices page from the Godot documentation. @dindotdout had work experience with Godot, so that was really helpful. I also watched some videos on how to use Blender. The fact that Godot could easily import .glb files exported from Blender was really handy.

I set up a shared Google Drive folder and created three documents: Project Development Approach and Life Cycle, Project Team and Work Distribution, and Tools.

In the Project Development Approach and Life Cycle document I detailed the project development approach, the stages of the project, how the event works and how the stages fit in with the way the event works, and what will be done in each stage of the project. I decided on a hybrid project development approach, with up front planning to be completed before development so that everything is more or less clear and everyone is on the same page as to what game we are making, and then the development itself being agile. I decided on this approach because in my experience, planning on the go leads to team members being confused and not knowing what to do and wasting time idling and waiting on other team members to clarify things. This does not mean that changes or new ideas cannot be proposed later, but that having a clear game essence prototype as a basis early on is more efficient.

In the Project Team and Work Distribution document I listed the team members and what role is assigned to each team member. We tried to get another developer and composer on board but they decided to go their own way and make a game separately. We also tried to get a game designer on board but they had too busy a schedule to participate. So in the end it was only the two of us.

In the Tools document I listed the tools that would be used to make the game.

I also set up a Trello Kanban board and GitHub repository with a blank Godot project, and created a Links document in Google Drive so that team members can find the link to the Trello Kanban board at any time.

The Jam begins

The planning

On Saturday, April 13th at 3 AM CEST, the Summoning theme was revealed and we had an on-site meeting. We first knew that we were going to make a puzzle game with multiple levels, where in each level the player had to go from point A to point B, overcoming obstacles and hazards by using cards to summon creatures and objects. I had the Idea of making a hand of cards 3D UI to summon creatures and objects. @dindotdout proposed the idea of making a 2D platformer with a card effect that is something like a slingshot, where you can adjust the trajectory. We then had a debate between making the game in a first-person 3D view and a platformer game-like 2.5D view. We eventually settled for a 2.5D platformer game-like 2.5D view. The next topic of discussion was whether to make the game turn-based or real-time. Initially, we were working under the assumption that we would be making a turn-based game where each card use counted as a turn. Under this assumption, we had to split the cards into two categories: basic actions such as walking and jumping, and summons. We worked out some card ideas: a fire-breathing dragon that burns enemies and obstacles (and the player too, if they were not careful setting the position and orientation of the dragon), an air-breathing dragon that could be set and oriented either to blow upwards or forward, a catapult to propel either the player or a dragon, a block to be spawned mid-air, and a teleport, which I had the idea to make into a UFO.

So far we had the following clear: we were going to make a turn-based 2.5D physics-based puzzle platformer card game.

We planned for some hazards to appear in the game: death by friendly fire if the player made the fire dragon breathe in the player’s direction, enemies that shoot at you and spikes. Here we detected a problem with the turn-based aspect of the game: if one shot is all it takes for the player to die and the enemies have perfect aim, then how is it possible for the player to dodge and not die in one turn? Hence, to make things simpler, we dropped the turn-based aspect of the game and decided on having free player movement instead. This also simplified the card system, since we no longer had to split the cards into actions and summons, only summons remained.

In the end, out of the planned cards, the fire-breathing dragon was dropped, the wind-breathing dragon made it but without the ability to set its orientation, the catapult was dropped and so was the block that spawned in mid-air, although a similar unplanned card did make it: the Sticky Slime, which is a static object that can also be spawned mid-air. The teleporting UFO also made it into the final game. No hazard and no dynamic obstacle made it into the game, so in the end we made a purely map-based puzzle game with no way for the player to die. There was one more thing that was planned but we forgot to put it in the game: a counter of the remaining cards in the deck, besides the visible 3 cards in the hand. Also the hand of cards UI was implemented in 2D and not in 3D as originally envisioned.

In the middle of development I came up with an idea of cards passively affecting gameplay: pulling out a cursed card from the deck that kills the player if they move right while the card is in the hand and the only way of getting rid of it is to pull a scissors card that cuts another card in the hand. There are unused unedited illustrations left over that were intended to be used for these cards.

Something which we wanted to do but didn’t due to time constraints is adding decorations to the barren map. There is an unused grass texture and an unused rock model and texture.

The development

Due to personal commitments, we started development on Sunday, so we only had two days to develop the game. It is worth mentioning that we used Trello as a Kanban board to remember and distribute the tasks. What follows is a log of the order in which things were implemented.

@andriybyelikov: implement the 3D world scene using a GridMap and a player character scene with basic character movement and jumping physics using a CharacterBody3D.

@dindotdout with @andriybyelikov: implement the hand of cards UI and the UFO’s teleport card effect, using Camera3D’s project_position. Add “Contra musas privo boni” as placeholder BGM. We now have a working prototype with a level map, player movement and jumping, a hand of cards UI and the teleport card effect of the UFO.

@dindotdout: implement summoning range mechanic and click terrain collisions.

@andriybyelikov: create the player model, textures and animations.

@dindotdout with @andriybyelikov: attempt to implement the Wind Dragon effect using an attenuation with distance function. Does not work. Look up @andriybyelikov’s uplift force generator demo implementation and fix it by constraining a maximum distance around the dragon inside which the force is active. Add player character “levitate” animation. @dindotdout later removes the maximum distance constraint and re-adds attenuation with distance as a factor.

@andriybyelikov: create the Wind Dragon, UFO, Sticky Slime and the rock models and textures.

@dindotdout: implement Sticky Slime behavior. The player can’t jump when stuck in it, while the Wind Dragon is frozen in place.

@andriybyelikov: replace placeholders with actual models.

@dindotdout: add a stuck speed parameter to the player and increase player normal speed.

@dindotdout: fix the player character spawning on top of the next level goal.

@dindotdout: implement the ability to restart a level and design levels 1 and 2.

@dindotdout: add particles to the Wind Dragon card effect.

@andriybyelikov: draw and edit the card illustrations.

@dindotdout: design levels 3 and 4.

@dindotdout with @andriybyelikov: replace placeholder UI with edited card illustrations and use the UglyQua font.

@dindotdout: implement the ability to cancel summoning with right click.

@dindotdout: adjust level camera.

@andriybyelikov: fill card descriptions.

@dindotdout: update the reset level button font.

@dindotdout: update summoning range texture.

@dindotdout: add Sticky Slime idle animation.

@dindotdout: change level lighting from a directional light to an omni light.

@dindotdout: add the R key as a shortcut to restart a level.

@dindotdout: fix the player sticking to the ceiling.

@dindotdout: replace placeholder level background with a noise texture.

@andriybyelikov: record and edit sound effects. Add sound effects in the game except for the UFO.

@dindotdout: add UFO animation and sound effect.

@dindotdout: create post-processing shaders.

@dindotdout: create title screen scene.

@dindotdout: create credits AcceptDialog in title screen.

@andriybyelikov: compose original music for the game.

@dindotdout: removed random card order and set it to fixed by level.

@andriybyelikov: replace placeholder BGM with original composition and create tutorial billboard textures in GIMP.

@dindotdout: add tutorial billboards in level 1.

@andriybyelikov: create level 6 (5) as reference to the “Time it right!” map.

@dindotdout: fix player sticking to the ceiling (again).

@dindotdout: discard level 5 and add level 6 as the fifth level.

@dindotdout with @andriybyelikov: fix texture gaps in the GridMap by making the blocks in the mesh library slightly larger and adjust chromatic aberration intensity.

@dindotdout: fill credits AcceptDialog.

@andriybyelikov: build and submit the game.

Implementation details

I will now explain how the physics are implemented for the player and the Wind Dragon, as well as the implementation of the Sticky Slime and UFO card effects.

Player

The player character is a CharacterBody3D, which means that it is not affected by built-in physics, but is instead moved based on its velocity. Each physics frame we set a target velocity for this physics body. For moving left and right this is trivial, we just set the target X-axis aligned velocity to be a predefined constant with the sign of the direction pressed by the player. For jumping, we check if the player is on the floor using Godot’s helper is_on_floor function and if the player pressed the jump action, an upwards impulse is applied to the player. Applying an impulse usually involves dividing the value of the impulse by the object’s mass, but for this game we considered that the player character has a mass of 1, therefore it is simplified to simply adding the value of the impulse as-is directly to the target Y-axis aligned velocity accumulator.

Something I learned from reading books on game physics is that one must never apply a force for jumping, since jumping is instantaneous. Due to how game physics are implemented, if one were to apply a force for jumping, it would be like applying a certain amount of force for a certain amount of time delta: the time between physics frames. If this value delta is too large, then too large a force would be applied to the physics body, resulting in a huge leap instead of a jump. An impulse, on the other hand, is independent of this delta, therefore we are applying the same impulse only once in one physics frame, no matter the delta.

The fall acceleration also has to be implemented manually for the CharacterBody3D, and we also have a small fix that stops the player from gaining Y-axis aligned speed when on the ceiling to prevent the player character from sticking to the ceiling.

The player also has a force accumulator that is evaluated to a velocity component and cleared every physics frame. This was necessary for implementing the interaction with the Wind Dragon, which is a force generator.

Wind Dragon

The Wind Dragon is a force generator that has a cylindrical shaped collider. Each physics frame, if the player character is detected colliding with it, a force is applied or added to the player character’s force accumulator. The exact force to be applied is

normalized_dragon_up * force_strength * attenuation,

where force_strength is a constant parameter and where attenuation is

1.0 - clamp(dist(player_pos, dragon_pos) / max_distance, 0.0, 1.0).

The fact that the effect of the Wind Dragon is a force that is added to the player character’s force accumulator means that having multiple Wind Dragons affecting the player stacks their effects. Thus, a player could stack three Wind Dragons on top of each other and the player character would go higher than if there was only one Wind Dragon.

Sticky Slime

The Sticky Slime is simply an Area3D that interacts differently with the player character and a Wind Dragon. If it detects that the player character has entered it, then it sets a flag in the player character that changes the player character movement mechanics preventing jumping and adding the ability to move up and down the Sticky Slime volume. If it detects that a Wind Dragon has entered it, then it sets that Wind Dragon’s RigidBody3D’s freeze flag, so that gravity and forces are not applied to it anymore.

UFO

The UFO does not exist as an independent entity but is instead a model that is used in the player character animation and the teleportation effect is implemented as a special case of confirming a summon by left clicking.

Music

A single original piece was written for the game. I chose the E Double Harmonic Major scale for the main motif in order to achieve an exotic and magical feel. The instruments used are: viola with spiccato for the main melody, seven string electric guitar with amp for the accompaniment consisting of the main melody's structural tones, a string section (viola, cello, first contrabass, second contrabass) for the I-iv-V7b5-I chord progression (with the second contrabass doubling the voice of the first an octave lower), and a drum machine for the percussion (kick, hi-hat closed, mounted crash cymbal). As a fun fact, the funny whistling sound of the chords was not intentional, but added a nice gimmick to the overall sound. I managed to isolate the instruments that cause it: it is the consonance between the vibrations of the viola and the cello. Those who have Bitwig Studio and want to toy with it have the project in the music/ld55_1 folder of the source code. I will also embed the YouTube video with the music below. The video description also has a list of the learning sources that I used for studying music theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTPTDhJzwgg

Sound effects

The sound effects were created in the following manner. I recorded the sounds using my phone. The wind breath sound effect is me blowing into the mic. The UFO sound effect is a sped up recording of a friend of mine who is good at whistling (I am not). The slime sound effect is a fragment of me slushing some wax with my fingers as loudly as I could, although in retrospect it doesn’t really fit. The card shuffle sound effect is a fragment of me dealing poker cards.

Feedback analysis

I created a Google Sheets spreadsheet compiling, classifying, analyzing and summarizing the feedback received in order to identify areas where the game should be enhanced as is and areas where it should be improved.

We managed to get 73 feedback samples from 33 unique users. The users were split into two groups: commenters and streamers. We got 49 samples from 28 commenters, an average of 1.71 samples per commenter, and we got 24 samples from 5 streamers, an average of 5 samples per streamer. From this data we concluded that streamers give 2.92 times more feedback samples than commenters, aside from valuable recorded gameplay in the form of VODs, for which we created a document listing the links to the VODs and the timestamps of when our game is played.

The samples were then grouped by topic. For each topic there is a count of positive feedbacks, negative feedbacks, score balance between positive and negative feedbacks (p-n), a summary of pros, a summary of cons and conclusions. What follows is the summary of the results of the feedback in the 13 extracted topics.

Map predictability

Amount of feedback samples: 9

Amount of positive samples: 1

Amount of negative samples: 8

Balance: -7

Summary of pros: One player reported that they liked the last level, the one with less predictability.

Summary of cons: Most players reported experiencing frustration from not being able to see further in the map, as it made them waste cards and forced them to restart the level. Mostly in level 5 but also sometimes in level 4.

Conclusions: Unpredictability makes for slightly more interesting gameplay, perhaps also slightly more challenging. Maybe we need to single out what causes the players frustration.

Card system

Amount of feedback samples: 4

Amount of positive samples: 0

Amount of negative samples: 4

Balance: -4

Summary of pros: No data

Summary of cons: Most players reported experiencing frustration from not knowing what cards they would be getting beforehand, and didn't understand whether the cards were dealt in a random order. One player didn't know that more cards would be coming.

Conclusions: No randomness is involved in the dealing of the cards, just human short memory span and removing cards from the hand at random positions makes it feel random. Also we need to indicate that there are more cards coming from the deck.

Chromatic aberration

Amount of feedback samples: 3

Amount of positive samples: 1

Amount of negative samples: 2

Balance: -1

Summary of pros: One player reported that they liked the chromatic aberration.

Summary of cons: Most players reported having difficulties with reading text with the chromatic aberration and annoyance at the expansion pulse.

Conclusions: We need to remove the chromatic aberration from the text and decide what to do with the pulse. We think that this is most biased towards the title screen, for which we forgot to tone down the chromatic aberration.

Music

Amount of feedback samples: 9

Amount of positive samples: 9

Amount of negative samples: 0

Balance: 9

Summary of pros: All players reported liking the music.

Summary of cons: No data

Conclusions: 🤩

Game essence

Amount of feedback samples: 13

Amount of positive samples: 12

Amount of negative samples: 1

Balance: 11

Summary of pros: Almost all players reported liking the game essence.

Summary of cons: One player reported they didn't feel like they were doing what we intended, as in solving the level as intended.

Conclusions: Make puzzles more flexible in terms of intended sequence and add card reloading so that players don't have to reset levels. We think that having to reset a level is a game killer.

Graphical style

Amount of feedback samples: 7

Amount of positive samples: 6

Amount of negative samples: 1

Balance: 5

Summary of pros: All players reported liking the old-school, low-poly, noise-textured graphical style, as well as the design of the player character. One player reported liking the aspect of mixing 2D and 3D.

Summary of cons: One player reported feeling that the map lacks graphical detail.

Conclusions: There was a rock model and grass texture planned to be used as map detail, which weren't used due to time constraints.

Card effects

Amount of feedback samples: 9

Amount of positive samples: 2

Amount of negative samples: 7

Balance: -5

Summary of pros: Some players reported liking the combination of the Sticky Slime with the Wind Dragon and stacking Wind Dragons.

Summary of cons: Some players reported having trouble understanding the Sticky Slime, stating that the description is insufficient. One player reports disappointment at the fact that the UFO doesn't combine with the other two cards. One player experienced inconsistent momentum when using Wind Dragons. One player thought that the effect of the UFO was not what they expected.

Conclusions: It seems like players like to combine card effects most. Some card effect behaviors must be corrected and adjusted, such as the Sticky Slime stickiness and the Wind Dragon momentum consistency. The Sticky Slime needs to be properly described in all its aspects: that it sticks in mid-air and that you can't jump from it.

Technical

Amount of feedback samples: 5

Amount of positive samples: 1

Amount of negative samples: 4

Balance: -3

Summary of pros: One player reported that the bug of the Wind Dragon falling off screen was funny.

Summary of cons: Players playing on high resolution displays reported that the UI was too small.

Conclusions: We need a UI scale solution for large displays. We can keep the dragon falling out of the screen as an easter egg but not as a bug.

Content

Amount of feedback samples: 7

Amount of positive samples: 1

Amount of negative samples: 6

Balance: -5

Summary of pros: One player reported liking that it's a concise game and not a long game with repetitive little content.

Summary of cons: Players want more cards and more levels.

Conclusions: As expected. The concise game idea is opposed to the boring procedurally generated levels idea that so many players dislike. So we need to make hand-crafted levels.

Level design

Amount of feedback samples: 3

Amount of positive samples: 3

Amount of negative samples: 0

Balance: 3

Summary of pros: Players report liking the level design. One player reports liking the tutorial billboards and soft level tutorials.

Summary of cons: No data

Conclusions: Invest heavily in soft tutorial levels.

UI

Amount of feedback samples: 2

Amount of positive samples: 0

Amount of negative samples: 2

Balance: -2

Summary of pros: No data

Summary of cons: One player reported that the credits dialog is too cluttered and that the range indicator should display green when you can spawn the effect and red when you can't, as most games do, instead of red/black, which is not intuitive.

Conclusions: We agree with the observation.

Presentation

Amount of feedback samples: 1

Amount of positive samples: 1

Amount of negative samples: 0

Balance: 1

Summary of pros: One player reports liking the polished presentation of the game.

Summary of cons: No data

Conclusions: Invest heavily in good presentation.

Sound design

Amount of feedback samples: 1

Amount of positive samples: 0

Amount of negative samples: 1

Balance: -1

Summary of pros: No data

Summary of cons: One player reports not noticing the sound effects.

Conclusions: Change and balance volume levels for sound effects.

Mistakes

There was no plan to make a dedicated game cover. I believe we would have benefited from a more eye-catching game cover for our game to receive more ratings. I believe that we should have opted out of the humor category, as the game does not have any humor elements aside from a funny bug. Some players did not rate our game in the category and I believe that it will impact our overall score.

Thanks

We want to thank the Ludum Dare organizers and community for making this event possible, and to the users who rated and left feedback on our game. Special thanks to @saryah, @ategon, @digitaliliad, @justcamh and @stanov for playing our game live on Twitch.

Play Slaymore now ifyou havent already!

Come here stranger. Have you ever wondered what is hidden behind the trees in the deep dark woods??

Lead Dev of my team here, I hope you're all doing well!

I'd like to kindly ask for your help with something. Our game, "Apprentice Quest," could really use a few more ratings, especially in the Humour and Mood categories. Humour is something that I have been working on personally in my writing having sufficient ratings in this category will give me an idea of where I am at!

Your feedback means a lot to the squad, and it will helps us make future games even better. So if you've got a few minutes to spare, we'd really appreciate it if you could give our game a play and drop a rating or two.

I'll be back home from work in about 2-3 hours, and I'll be diving into playing and rating more games myself. So it's a win-win situation for all of us!

Thanks a bunch for your support, and happy gaming!

(Anyone got the trash can familiar yet?)

i thought i could write something useful here for beginners, and decided to talk about the right balance in the team. here are the tips!

manage possibilities

it’s been 3 years since we started participating in LD Jam, and since then we've gathered a lot of people around us. it was always a different experience: for some, everything went smoothly, others seemed quite anxious and annoyed, especially at the end of the jam.

it was never a team’s problem but a management's. lack of skills could also be a problem, we won't lie. that's why when you invite people to work with you, you need to evaluate the result and what you can do about it!

after all, it’s about work you do in a short amount of time with a lot of stress.

2 artist = 2 programmers

it might be obvious for some of you, but hear me out! we’ve tried different combinations of people and there were always problems for one or another part of the team. thus, the ideal 50/50 balancing system of your team should work just right!

but there may be exceptions! for example, we made a game in a company of 2 artists and 1 programmer, and it turned out to be a really solid and polished experience!

in general, just be confident in people and your ideas, and you will achieve your goals!

"shall we decide who’s gonna be a team lead?"

even in small projects, people tend to look for a responsible person to lead the project. sometimes i think the role of a leader on jams is kinda overrated, but with practice, i understand that you better have a person who will summarise all the ideas and see what can work best.

after all, you need someone who can tell you what you should do next when you finish another task, imma right?

try to collaborate!

if you have a person whom you have known for many years, but have never tried to work with, then you are the lucky one!

it’s always useful to communicate and work with new ones in a professional environment, especially if you know what they are good at. a fresh look at the project and innovations are always useful.

at the same time, you will find out if you will be able to work in the future and assemble a dream team with them!

and my personal tip: encourage and cheer everyone for their work!

maybe that's why you should have a team leader, but i'm a genial person myself, so despite everything i do, i try to cheer everyone up for their work and offer my help.

the team should be built on trust and support, so the main thing in stressful situations is not to lose your mind!

i'm not sure if this was useful enough, after all, each of us has our own way, but i hope that you guys will find a team that you will enjoy working with!

i’d like to express my special gratitude to the friends with whom i’ve been able to work over all these years! i hope that our future together will be bright <3

@kndratova @nomersol @rekkorize @oleg-bone @DurkaGames

thank your teammates as well! spread positivity and good vibes :3

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

Alright people - 24 hours left. Let's save some games!!

I know, I know, maybe if they'd rated more etc they could cross the line, and so on - but who knows, maybe they were too busy (it happens), maybe they're new and missed the boat, whatever. But they made a game, and that's awesome.

Looks like twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow is streaming some endangered stuff too.

Let's get around them and encourage people to keep making games.

Hi! if there is still anyone out there, I found a game that only needs 8 kind souls to test it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/spellbound-battlegrounds

It's a multiplayer game so at this point you won't find anybody playing but it's still an interesting project to check it out.

With 24 hours left of the jam we'd like to thank everyone who played and rated our game!

We are very thankful for all the feedback you've given us and we look forward to participating in the next jam!

If you haven't already played Untitled Witch Game, you can visit the jam page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/untitled-witch-game

I have a wheel to pick between submissions - Games below 20 ratings get 10 weight on start (have to prioritize with so little time left!) - Each teammate (present in chat) adds 0.2 to weight - Losing in a spin adds 0.2 to weight

https://www.twitch.tv/xpmonsterx

A bit later than I would've liked, but based on feedback I've received, I managed to make a revised version of my game, The Acolyte's Errand.

All of the changes are listed on the game page, but among them are more sound effects and some quality of life changes that make the game easier to beat or less of a slog.

Click Here to Reach the Game Page

It's still pretty rough around the edges (looking at you, zombies), but I'm still really proud how it all came out. I've already got 20 ratings, but I'd still really appreciate it if you gave it an old, college try, whatever that means.

Well after some fixes in the game and some new additions to the base version of the Jam, this is the last call to try the summoning of what could be your favorite god/demon!

It's intriguing to see how so far no one has been able to pass level 5, but more than 200 demons have been summoned!

Thank you very much to everyone who has tried and dedicated their valuable time to this game made with love and satanism. For those who have not yet tried it, I cordially invite you to try it and leave me your comments in passing, I will surely go through your game too!

Play the Game Here!

<3 Hail Cthulhin!

🚀 Don't miss out on your last chance to try our game! Become the master of the pack of a devoted army 🐑🌟

➡️ Let’s Kick a** ! https://shenoit.itch.io/sheep ⬅️

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/s-h-e-e-p-sheep-hell-emissaries-eradicate-purity

@z0rg @andy-link @nougato @shenoit @katanajellyfish

After my last post regarding game data from Turret Queen (from players that didn't opt-out), things changed a bit. The game had at least 10 more plays, and 4 of them beat the game!
Clearly mentioning only for out of 40 had completed it triggered some people! I deeply appreciate you all for that!! :heart:

The updated statistics now are Average deaths per session: 3.016 Average victories per session: 0.116 And who made this turret? :joy: :joy:

Thanks everyone, I had a blast this time around (as usual), lots of awesome games (and players).
I will finish with 2 more gifs, all the deaths and death screens this LD!

.

.
See you all again in October, and good luck!

As the voting period is almost over, we'd like to thank everyone who voted and played our game TAO! :trophy: :hugging: Your feedback really means a lot to us!

Took longer to get around to this than I thought!

The Theme

As part of rating themes during the final rounds I usually jot down ideas for each theme if I can so that I have some idea of what I can do right from the start. I was actually pretty excited when Summoning won since I had a pretty clear idea in my head of what I wanted to do. Plenty of other people went with other meanings of "summoning" which was great to see.

What Went Right

• I blitzed through most of the static art in one morning and in general I think the art turned out pretty well. The enemy popping effect and the cars are my favorites!
• Basic game-feel. It's was important to me that any challenge would come from decisions the player makes and the actions they take, not fighting against unresponsive controls or wonky collision. I might make a post with some tips since I do see some submissions neglect to do things like normalizing player input which are quick, easy fixes.
• Barebones risk-reward combo meter. It's enough that once there's some cop cars you need to start taking opportunities to smack carrots to refresh your meter. Nothing amazing but without it I think the baseline scoring would be pretty boring.
• Extra features. Was pretty easy to rework previous settings and controls rebinding stuff I had, which I think helps add a layer of polish.
• I already have a kinda-engine on top of SDL2 with a lot of convenience and features built in. (I even recently made a dialog system but not had chance to use it yet!) I'm extremely comfortable in it and feel very productive. It's a big help in being able to get something out in the timeframe. And the code is GPL3, although I've not bothered to make a public repository for it or anything - maybe I should at some point.

What Went Wrong

• I had been working on a different physics system using verlet integration before the jam and completely forgot I hadn't done frame-independent friction for it. So half way through I had to yank all that out and just go with simple euler and AABB collision, after I wasted time trying to rush and hack together a solution. Was really frustrating.
• My weekend ended up not being super productive after getting the art and basics in. I probably got 75% of the game done in a marathon session on Monday.
• The leafy-brain carrots were originally either going to psychically attack the player or levitate around to introduce either more risk or add some complexity to gathering and juggling carrots. I just didn't get time to do them. Without them I do think the game misses a layer of interesting gameplay.
• Some of the animations are kinda stiff or I had to reuse for time. I didn't get player dashing or hurt animations done for example. Simple trade offs of time versus getting other things done.
• Post-submission I've been distracted with other things and sickness, so I've been slacking on rating other games and really participating. Next time I think it would be good to dedicate a little bit more time for some interesting 'my game is up!' material, follow up posts for exposure and having time set aside to rate others. In generally I'm very bad at advertising my own things, but also I've been missing out on going through all the amazing submissions people have done.

Next Time

• The last two jams I've been pretty safe with gameplay. Next time I want to focus a bit more on coming up with something different and interesting as a starting point.
• I try to do as much as I can myself with art, programming, sound effects but I'm always relying on others for music. I'd love to try learning some music theory and make an attempt next jam to create at least one piece of music.

I don't think my account is trusted so I can't seem to post links in these (or at least they get gobbled up when I preview this), so if you'd like to check out Crimes Against Carrots please click on my name to view my submissions! Thank you for everyone that's commented and rated so far!

For this LD compo, I had a very distinct mindset going into it... it'll likely be my last for a long time as I'm going to become a father for the first time in just a few weeks, so I really wanted to sum up everything I've learned and done over the years making Ludum Dare entries. What I ended up with was a game I am immensely happy with, and based on the reactions so far, I'm not alone. This post acts as a post-mortem and also semi-promotion (even though results are a day and a half away).

There are big spoilers below - if you haven't played the game through to the end, I highly recommend doing so. It takes around 15 minutes.

What is the game?

The Wrong Book is a 2D strategy/idle game based around hiring cultists, summoning demons, and putting them all to work to contribute towards the summoning of The Great Old Things.

What did I focus on?

Knowing that humour and audio have been huge winners for me in the past (achieving 3rd place in each of those categories over two consecutive compos), I figured I would lean into my strengths. I did more voice acting than ever before, and spent a good chunk of time on audio design and music composition. In addition to this, a few days before the compo started I was having a conversation with a friend about how games (specifically Civ and Factorio) manage to achieve the "just one more turn" feeling and thought I should implement some of those philosophies into the game design.

What worked?

To be quite frank, a lot worked. The reaction from everyone (fellow entrants, family, friends) has been overwhelmingly positive. The humour landed very well with people, and the audio has impressed many, especially the wide variety of voices and voice lines I managed to put in the game.

The UI design is probably the best it's ever been for any of my games, which I can tell purely by the fact that nobody has commented on it at all. It's my first game with extensive tooltips and context menus, and I think it's worked in my favour to an incredible degree. Everyone I've seen play the game managed to figure out very quickly how to interact with everything and what the gameplay loop was, with no confusion or ambiguity (a first for me). Speaking of...

One of my favourite things about the game is how automation is not available right away. Everyone, by the time automation is researched, has become very much used to manually clicking on units to queue up resources. Taking some inspiration from Factorio, I decided early on that in order to make automation feel useful & fun, the player needs to spend at least some time doing things manually first. The feeling you get when automation is finally unlocked is one of relief, and it might be the best gameplay moment of the game. The whole game was designed with this feeling in mind. Give the player an obstacle first and then give them the tools to overcome it.

But, in my view, the crowning achievement moment comes right at the end (again, massive spoilers). I had so much fun putting that silly little polka song together, and my friends and family haven't stopped singing it at me since the game came out. Very rarely have I seen any of my entries cause people to laugh out loud, but this one managed it.

What didn't work, or needed more work?

In all honesty I feel this section is much more "nitpicky" than previous post-mortems because the game has been so well received there isn't anything huge here; certainly nothing on the game design or balance side.

There was an annoying bug with the Unity engine that caused UI text to disappear midway through the game in the WebGL version only, but I managed to put a fix in a few days later. I'm hoping this bug didn't affect anyone's enjoyment of the game too much - it was infuriating for me to see something so key to the game being ruined by something in the engine itself, unrelated to anything I'd done.

The other thing was also kind of a bug - UI scaling for high resolution monitors. The maths I put together to determine where the tooltip shows completely falls apart if the UI has any dynamic scaling on it. I only learned this right at the end of dev time, just before submission, so I had to turn off scaling and make the UI a fixed size instead. Unfortunately this meant that the text was tiny on very high-res screens.

Final thoughts

I'm so happy with The Wrong Book. I think it's my best Ludum Dare game yet, and if it's my last one (due to impending fatherhood), I'm very happy to go out on such a high. Thanks to everyone who's played it and left such wonderful comments.

If your still have not tried our game, this is your last chance to do so! Here's a video that shows what the game's all about!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck8wxWSrKyk

So hurry up the mothership is waiting for you. Try our game here

THANK YOU!

Thanks to all of your precious feedback and ofc the responses we received we're planning on fully releasing BloodRite <3 Ofc there will be A LOT of changes to make the gameplay more challenging and interesting turning it into a fully replayable game experiance! :heart:

If you wanna keep in touch and see how we're going to push our boundries even further make sure to check out our itch.io page for BloodRite:

https://dekisenpaitm.itch.io/bloodrite

Didn't had a chance to play it yet and you wanna help us by rating & commenting the last day:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/blood-rite

Again, we're really appreciating you peeps - Since this was our first LudumDare we're super exited for the next one as well. See you there :D

POV us grabbing your hearts:

bergs

Do you like bullet hells?

jam link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/fall-of-the-ritual

itch.io link: https://lucidfrontiers.itch.io/fall-of-the-ritual-ludumdare55

Hi friends we just posted a recap video (from my perspective) about the process!

https://youtu.be/hLLxE8S8maI

Play the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/sum-monsters

Spellbound Battlegrounds (5 Ratings left): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/spellbound-battlegrounds

Machine invasion (4 Ratings left): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/machine-invasion

Thank you to everyone who tested, rated and commented on my mouche(s)? game. You are great people. Thank you also for all this creativity and all these wonderful games... it was simply fantastic.

Peso

Do you like chicken?

Last chance to burn birds and play https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/$385508

Are you able to get out of the dungeon? Be careful, the dragon is protected!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBG_4yz1Ru8

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-seven-crystals

I would like to thank to everyone that tried my entry, and special thanks to those, that left comment. This time around it was far from perfect as I was working with new engine and have chosen type of game that I never did before.

But the learning was amazing and for those who would be interested I am re-working the whole idea and plan to release update of my entry quite soon after results are in. It will be something at least simillar to how idle-clicker game should look like. The gifs are a little sneak peak, but please!! DO NOT EXPECT to see anything like that in the current LD jam version of the game :D

Come hang out: http://twitch.tv/oddlyspecificgames

Play my game in browser and drop yours below for me to play!

There are still a lot of games in the danger area (They do not have enough votes to finish the jam), so I ask everyone to help these poor games. I am lucky enough to have my game just over 20 votes, so this cry is not for my sack.

Stay a while and listen...

the fate hangs in the balance, teetering on the edge of darkness.

Leap in the fight with new effects & animations

The time has come for one final stand against the encroaching evil that threatens to engulf our beloved Tristram.

Supervise your heroes with the new Group UI

So we've recently made a lot of fixes and new animations and also added a new Group Interface for the post jam version of our game.

No clothes got wet

Relax and rejuvenate from fighting in the the all-new spa, adorned with splashy water animations and soothing sounds that beckon you to unwind in style.

A last time before the rating phase ends the doors of the cathedral stand open, beckoning you to venture forth and confront the sinister triumvirate that lurks within.

Your adventure starts here

May the light guide you.

The Mayor of Tristram

Will try to keep short. As all of you, I have some reasons and targets in mind when participating in gamejams.

Competition. Dopamine. Coming up with some cool prototypes for future projects (and I think we'll follow this path with our current game).

But for me, one of the main targets is to go a bit outside of comfort zone: try something new, something more ambitious that I am comfortable with. Something that you look at day 1 and say "how the hell I'm gonna do this?", and after day 3 you say "...well, that was something" :smile:

This makes you feel either hopeless if you fail, or totally powerful if you manage to finish the project. But in any case, you feel that you are stronger than you were 3 days ago.

This time, I decided to do a deckbuilder. Never done anything like that, neve done any "balancing numbers in excel sheet" thing, and haven't even though about designing non-primitive systems.

I almost overscoped, I almost quit this LD on day 1 from frustration, not knowing if I can finish this in time and do a good job at designing a card game at all...

But oh boy am I happy that I didn't.

Now I know: I can. And I saw that the rest of the team also could, and delivered. And this is the most important aspect of gamejams.

Thank you all! Keep jamming, keep growing, and keep dreaming! :fist:

Hi, I'm Bo, and I'm an artist on our team! In this post, I explain how we optimized our pipeline, the challenges we encountered and the decisions we made to overcome them. For game Uncanny Inscriptions

Preparation and thoughts

We decided that the game will be in 3D, however creating characters in 3D takes much time. For instance, my model of a duck includes: sculpting, retopology, UV-layout, texturing, rigging, and finally animation. But I needed to figure out how to create several characters within a short timeframe. I decided to create 2.5D characters, which simplified my work. You'll understand why as we progress.

Creating Character in ZBrush

I'm skilled in 3D rather than drawing, starting with _ZBrush where I can rapidly refine the shape of my characters and add cost-effective details. I created a model for 2D rendering, so the most important part is the front. I don't focus on the other sides. Also, I used Polypaint(vertex paint) for texturing characters—an easy but effective method. I didn't need retopology and UVs, which are often the most frustrating parts of 3D work

Render and export the sprites in Unity

For rendering, I used _Marmoset Toolbag 4. I separated the model into several layers in ZBrush and exported it to Marmoset. Then, I set up the scene, adjusted the camera angle, and lighting. Additionally, I added an extra render pass for the Normal map. Furthermore, I used this scene for other characters. I organized and refine the render layers in Photoshop and then exported the PSB file to Unity. The "2D PSD Importer" automatically separated my layers into sprites

What's the issue, my friend?

Before this moment, I hadn't tried working with 2.5D. I realized that sprites don't interact well with a 3D environment and lights. This confused me, but our programmer figured out how to fix it and wrote the shader. Sprites began to behave as I wanted; I was able to use the Normal map, and the sprites responded to light.

Rig and Animation

I rigged the characters using the standard _'2D Animator' and 'IK Components' in Unity. During animation, I focused on my favorite principle of animation: 'Follow through and overlapping action'. We realized that we didn't need triggers for animation, as the animation starts automatically when we call the prefab. The programmer prepared prefabs before for characters that we planned, and I began to fill them with other characters.

I hope you found this post useful and interesting. It's my first time writing something like this. I've always wanted to share about my work on the Jam. Thank you for reading, and _don't forget to play and rate our game Uncanny Inscriptions

Give Grave Wrangler a shot and try to beat all 12 rounds!

You can play it directly in the LD page!