Come on the stream and !submit your games. I'd love to play yours.

https://www.twitch.tv/saryahm

Is today the Grand Finale of our grand challenge?

Submissions are still open. We are playing submissions, our favorite games, and games of people who played our game.

Come join us and chill with us :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

:arrow_right: https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis

Play Ribbit Craft

Summon drawings by combining different art elements to overcome platforming obstacles

Unlock different elements to create more drawings

And use them to overcome your Aphantasia!

Play it in your browser:

LDJam Link

(Firefox is crunchy sometimes on ldjam site, if so, play on itch instead)

Itch.io Link

We kept working on the game after the initial demo for the 55th Ludum Dare Jam and now we are proud to announce our first update that brings many improvements!

Timer?

Many playtesters wanted to have a timer in the game but we were hesitant to slap a boring stopwatch on the GUI and instead went with a more unconventional solution, see if you can spot the remaining time in-game!

If 6 was 9

The game's progression is now better designed to increase the difficulty as you progress through culls.
You can also enable Easy mode in the settings which gives you 9.99 seconds each round instead of the standard 6.66 seconds on Normal mode.

Souls and Bad Blood

The Bad Blood ending was a bit confusing for players so we revised this mechanic into a new system that gives you three Souls (shown as green flames at the bottom of the screen). * If you slash something that doesn't match your goal, you will lose one Soul. * Your Souls carry over to the next culls * If you run out of Souls, you will get the Bad Blood ending. * You can aquire new Souls by completing three Pure Evil rounds in a row * Slashing the wrong targets now also has chilling screams to make it easier to notice your errors

Throw Ability

While we retuned the spawning system to somewhat reduce overlapping targets around you, we also added an ability to throw creatures into the air to clear out the way for other targets behind them. You can use this ability with the Right Mouse Button. Look at our cool dude enjoying himself... for now.

Accessibility

To make our game more accessible to colorblind players we implemented toggles for each color in the game's palette. By disabling these colors you can exclude them from appearing as target goals. Targets will still be colored with the entire palette but you will never get an "ALL THE ORANGES" goal for example, if you disabled Orange.

Settings

The game now includes a Settings menu where you can adjust different aspect of the game

• Mode for selecting difficulty
• Fullscreen toggle for preventing the game from going fullscreen automatically
• Sensitivity for adjusting mouse look speed
• Volume for reducing the terror
• Colors for excluding colors from the goals

Rules & Stats

With this jam I think we somewhat improved upon our tendency to present hard to understand games with no explanation to players, our revised menu also includes a tutorial page.

The game now remembers your highscore and other statistics about your play. You can check them out in the new Stats menu.

That's about it for now!

Play The Culling

Have you ever watched The Animals of Farthing Wood?

It's time to stop running and start defending the forest!

Play it here

It's a print and play, but no actual printing or dice required! :smirk:

I'd love for you to play Summoning Detective here! It's a game about a magical PI that finds people's things by summoning them!

Here it is in all it's glory!

If you are interested in having a play, you can just markup the pdf on your device and use google for rolling dice.

Play my game Summoning Detective here!

I'd also love to play any other print and plays, so please let me know if you have seen any or made one yourself! Already looking forward to the next jam! :smile:

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

I hope this post will draw your attention to our game, because we still need some ratings :D This is why I put gif of gameplay right below this text

:joystick: PLAY (post jam version)

:star: RATE

And some patch note, because FnB really got a post jam update, which makes the game better!

• We added a list of cooked food at the top left corner, so you can see and analyze what you have and what you need
• Storage of food will be clearing every morning since this update. That's fair, isn't it?
• Rebalanced rent payment and income from customers
• Now you don't have to hit SPACEBAR to collect the cooked food. It will be automatically collected if you are nearby.
• Your employee are rebalanced, but you still have to figure out what the last one does.
• [fix] Upgrade of cooking stations didn't spend your money
• [fix] You earned less money than you saw in the order card
• [fix] There was a drinks station but nobody wanted drinks
• [fix] Cooking stations were placed in confusing order in building panel

Check out our making of for the game Autobahn to Hell!

https://youtu.be/Y7IJef_MvzE

We are kinda proud of the result, even though we had many obstacles and some setbacks along the way :slight_smile:

When ludum dare create new ocds

Our game is gettings more reviews than downloads (stats available on itch) and most of the comments dont make much sense. I get that people dont want to download a game with unusual installation process, but leaving a review without actually playing it just makes me angry...

Meaningful and costructive feedback would be highly appreciated!

As we keep playing and voting for your games, loving them as there are so many really good ones out there, we still need just a few votes for https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/The-Summoners-Apprentice

Helping us out is cute, we'll love ya!! <3

Game Description You are the apprentice of Aurelius​, a master summoner. He left you in his shop to practice your skills and will send you an assignment every day until he thinks you are ready to be a master summoner yourself.

Check the blackboard. Here you will find a few words from Aurelius himself, and the job he received from one of his clients that he trusts you to complete for him.

Find the correct props ​ and place them on the correct places in the summoning circle. Watch for what’s north. A compass is provided

Throw the correct runes on the ground in the circle. It doesn’t matter where in the circle, as long as it’s in it.

Use the spell book on the lectern to cast the correct spell .With your knowledge, bravoure and a bit of luck you will summon what was asked for. Or maybe not…

The Good

Generally, I'm really happy with how Hellevator turned out. Feels like one of my more well rounded jam entries personally. But some personal highlights would be having spent the last day resigned to the fact I probably wouldn't get time to do music and then in a moment of madness banging together a decent amount of tracks that I actually felt quite proud of. I also had a lot of fun recording and adding in the voice clips - which partly ended up being a bit of a patch job for the fact I wasn't sure anyone else would associate elevators with "being summoned", so an "Elevator Summoned" voice line seemed like quite a good way to work that in.

Also very pleased with my main character (particularly the wings and wing animations), I mean, look at this little guy:

The Bad

Communicating game mechanics has long been one of my weaker points. Before the jam I had vague intentions of trying to make a game where there was no text explaining anything and I'd just put everything across via in game action. This went out of the window immediately. A lot of the reviews have mentioned that the controls aren't always intuitive and I get the impression a lot of people don't realise you can fly. It also seems a bit unclear at what point opening elevator doors actually lets passengers in and out.

The Ugly

I made a major miscalculation with some of my naming of things and ended up with "Floors" being a concept that was used in 2 different ways. Where you've got the sort of floors in relation to how high up you are, like this:

Those ended up being "FloorLayers" in the code, where as each individual platform was also a "Floor":

Having 2 floors on the same layer was something that didn't really get added until part way through the process, and I think the levels would have had a bit less to them if I restricted myself to only having floors at different heights. But having those 2 concepts and not feeling I had the time to refactor the original "Floors" into "Platforms" or something lead to some deeply confusing code. Particularly around souls trying to pathfind their way to their next workstation on the more complex levels where you'd have to take 2 different lifts to get from one platform to another specific platform. This wasn't helped by me trying to do Dijkstra's algorithm from memory for the pathfinding - I really should've looked that one up! Please enjoy this image of the true hell behind Hellevator

I suppose you could say it was a bit of a flawed approach...a "floor"-ed approach..a...ah forget it

Anyway, in general, jazzed about how it's turned out - give it a play here if you fancy!

Although maybe prioritise danger zone games at this point!

Maybe you would like to play (and rate!) before reading, so you have more context? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unpacking-armageddon

"Unpacking Armageddon" is my entry for Ludum Dare 55, themed "SUMMONER". Given the theme's specificity, it's no wonder that many entries gravitated towards pentagrams and summoning demons. However, I've noticed a significant decrease in platformers and a broader diversity in game genres in this edition?

DAY 1

For some reason I felt like making an arcade puzzle game. Fortunately, knowing I wouldn't have much spare time that weekend, I came up with an idea much more quickly than in previous editions: Sokoban for someone who doesn't really enjoy Sokoban puzzles, pushing and pulling boxes that are just in the way, so you are forced to constantly shuffle them around in a shrinking space. This allowed me to start working early on Saturday morning.

And thus, the story emerged from the mechanics and the theme: Armageddon has begun, you are a hell-designated summoner, but it caught you in the middle of moving into a new home. All your belongings are in cardboard boxes lying around the invocation basement! Demons are eager to enter our realm, but can't do it if something is on top of the pentagram that serves as a gateway. You have to clear pentagrams free by pushing and pulling boxes in order to let demons enter our real and fullfill your summoning quota.

After the Unity Fee mess last year I also started looking for alternative game engines, and found that Defold is pretty interesting for pure 2D games. Early this year I entered the Global Game Jam with Defold, making a 'full' game for the first time with this engine, and the experience was superb. So I have switched from Pico8 to Defold. I still miss Pico8, but Defold makes some things just easier. At some point I might try Picotron...

I enjoy, however, working with really low resolutions, so I stuck to Pico8's 128x128 pixels and 16x16 sprites. It gives games a nice blocky look that reminds me of NAMCO games, which I love.

By 13:30 I had some final art (main character, boxes and the background), and the character could move and detect boxes.

A friend was visiting, so I left home to have lunch and didn't come back until 19:00 - totally worth it, though. I still managed to work two more hours at night and finished the main mechanic: pushing boxes around to set pentagrams free. If not done quick enough, pentagrams explode- Otherwise they glow and disappeared, scoring.

Not much for the first day, but pretty good for roughly 5-7 hours of work, considering art was final already. I expected a hard second day.

DAY 2

Woke up early on Sunday and went for the next basic mechanic, pulling boxes! And once that was working the whole thing started to actually feel like a game. Added some FX for pentagrams - when they are cleared, they glow, some arcane text floats up, a demon appears and flies upwards and a new pentagram is created. If too much time passes and a pentagram is not cleared, it explodes and a new one appears. With each pentagram a new box appears too (don't know, maybe someone is throwing them to the basement for you to organize?)

By lunch time I came up with the last game mechanic: while you have to clear pentagrams from boxes, you have to place the Ritual Candle on them to complete the summoning. Game felt quite fun! So all that remained was adding sound, UI and good/bad endings.

Freesound.org is great for sound effects, but one of the last things I added to the game wa the summoners' chant when the Ritual Candle is placed on a pentagram. Shouting KLAATU BARADA NICTO! to the mic at 11pm while the family was already sleeping was too fun.

Extra points if you get the RIGHT movie reference!

WHAT WENT GOOD

Almost too much, to be honest! The game idea was fun to play even when the game was barebones. I don't speacially enjoy trial-and-error Sokoban puzzles, but as you can move boxes around freely the game doesn't feel so restricted. Sprites were easy to make, and programming was not too complex thanks to how Defold enforces certain behaviours, like message passing. Things are compartimentalized by design, but you can always resort to LUA modules to share critical information if needed.

WHAT WENT BAD

With not much time to work on Saturday I couldn't animate the main character nor demons. I like my game jam entries to have smooth character animations, they make the game feel much more polished. But I just did not have more time to draw them - yes, I could have lost sleep time, but... it's a game jam, no need to stress things out!

There are some silly bugs around, like boxes falling on the character (although you can walk out from them) or pentagrams reappearing right where they just vanished from. But the most important issue is that most players DON'T READ INSTRUCTIONS (no surprise here), so they have no idea they can both push boxes - which is natural, just bump into them - AND PULL BOXES - which needs the player to press Z while moving. I should have made it clear in the first tutorial level by placing the candle by a wall, with an on-screen message or something like that.

Will probably add all that in a post-jam version at some point.

LAST THOUGHTS

I'm specially happy with how this game plays and would love to revisit it at some point. I think I can add some new mechanics - maybe imps that run around pushing boxes and being a pest, rocks you can't move, maybe larger pentagrams and more candles? Not too much, just a few things to make it last a bit longer.

Already looking forward to the next game jam!

Meanwhile, TRY THE GAME YOURSELF and don't forget to rate! :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unpacking-armageddon

We were talking with a professor of our university and reflecting about the deficiencies of our UI, since we couldnt give it much attention during the Jam.

While we talked I started a run to show the Gameplay and I kept playing and playing this run without dieing! Even though I had a great build it was insane luck to reach Round 120.

I wonder if anyone will ever beat that Score, but feel free to try :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/chimera-combat

Messing around with circles, got an almost nice looking fire , that I wish I'd have figured out how to do during the jam :scream_cat:

Made with Construct2 game engine.

I think I need to learn godot next , do some of this with shaders or something.

Play the Game that would have had fire here - Manafest

+ Dont forget to check out our game slaymore if you havent already, it was our first ever Ludum dare!

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