This mosaic is made from the thumbnails of all LD33 games:

Happy hunting 😀

You can also use the mosaic to filter by platform, e.g. to find all the games that are ‘web’ playable

Some stats:

• 1493 games claimed a “web” link
• but 472 of those “web” games were actually Unity games with web player, although they didn’t mention this in their blurb; my script doesn’t categorize them as ‘web playable’
• 7 games have no thumbnail

If you like this, you might be kind and rate my game?  http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=10313 Exogorth

(repost in case you missed it)

We decided to work a little more on our entry, and right now we are finishing new UI. Later we are going to add new music, and polish and/or replace old puzzles (we got a lot of feedback about how broken they are, so we are fixing this ).

You can play and rate old version with all the bugs here: Dude, Stop.

Hello! This is a post mortem of Hitogochi, a short dating sim for Ludum Dare 33. Thanks to everyone who played it, and if you haven’t yet, you can play it (and rate *wink wink*) over here. I also made a timelapse video of it, if you’re into those.

Before I start, some of my friends also submitted games! Here are theirs:

Project Box by klbrazil

Nomzilla: Munching Mayhem by PixlWalkr

You should check those out also. 😀 ..and now for the post mortem!

Before the jam:

While I was in school, I thought about game ideas for each of the themes in the final round. Some of them were good, some were okay; then there’s those where I just went: “Can’t think of anything creative with this, lets just hope it doesn’t get picked”. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to enter until a few days before the jam, so I didn’t practice. I planned on joining the compo. I did it before, maybe I can do it this time, too! Yeah, should be possible. (..or is it?)

Day One:

..one of the themes that I wasn’t prepared for got picked. Of course that would happen. I didn’t know what to do at the start, since the idea that I had for this theme was kind of boring, so I just continued on with my normal life and complained about it. After a few minutes of doing nothing, I started to think about things that relates to monsters.. giant monster that kills things? Nah, already did that before. Monster-raising simulator? Maybe, but I’m not feeling it. I wanted something that’s different.. something unique– then it occurred to me. Tamagotchi. Then the theme. Back to Tamagotchi. So… what if.. YOU ARE.. THE MONSTER..? Brilliant. Good job, me. Let’s do this.

I started to think about how the gameplay would work. I kept telling myself: “think about the mechanics, not the story.”, since I’m not confident with my story-making skills and it will probably turn out boring. But then, everything I thought about the game made it become something like a dating sim, and my mind kept thinking about a certain story… both of which I didn’t realize at the time. So anyways, I had the basics of it planned out and thought: “Yeah, good, this’ll work!”.

So then I started coding a dialogue system… for the whole day. “Looks like the game would just be all dialogues… Will this.. really work out? Maybe this jam’s not for me..”, I said. I thought about backing out, since I wasn’t really having much fun.. but then, I realized that it’s just the first day! There’s still hope! So I went through the day and finished most of the system. I also worked a little on the art and the story as the day ended.

Day Two:

I coded more of the dialogue system while I slightly panic, realizing that I still don’t have fleshed-out dialogues for my game and that I might not finish in time for the compo. It went well, albeit very slowly. I really should have warmed-up for this. Hours go by, making me more and more tensed.

As I finally got that done, I then worked on the art side of the game. I haven’t done any pixel art in a while, and, since I’m planning to have portraits, It might take me long if I went with that.. and I’m not sure if I could do it, either. I went for a kind of a low-res art style instead. I haven’t drawn anything in a while anyway; it might be fun, even though I’m bad at it. Somehow, it worked surprisingly well, I think. I might have been very slow and spent too much time on it though. I’ve been pretty slow at everything so far. Oh well. Once I finished, I started importing and implementing them in the game.

After a few hours of revisiting spaghetti code and adding things on them, I started writing the actual dialogues for the game… or at least I would’ve, but bugs on my dialogue system suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was already late at night; I tried squashing them fast, but no, they kept coming! I even stayed up late, which I usually don’t do when game jamming. Nope, it didn’t help either; there were still bugs, and I was getting really frustrated and very sleepy. I figured I won’t make it in time, so I just switched to the jam, bid my friends who’re joining the compo good luck, and slept with all my frustration. 😛

Day Three:

I was feeling a little down since I didn’t get to join in the compo, but oh well. I started fixing more bugs and wrote dialogues; Tons of them. I was panicking a little, thinking that I’ll feel really bad if I still didn’t get to finish this, even after switching to the jam. The dialogues got kind of rushed because of that. Even more bugs popped out as I wrote and tested the dialogues in the game. I had to cut a lot of the dialogues that I planned, since time was running short. “This might end up being boring after all, but I’ll just expand on it later. I want to at least be able to submit something.”, I thought.

After hours and hours of typing dialogue (some are.. cringe-worthy) and cutting some more content, It’s finally done! I was debating with myself whether to try adding music to it or not, since I had no practice and there’s only a few hours left. I decided to at least whip up a simple tune for it. It kinda worked well, I think. I also made some decent clicking sound, good good, slapped those into the game, nice, that’s it, yeah!

I started making builds for the game. After I made all those, I noticed bugs and mistakes, like the game UI not resizing on different resolutions. I kept switching from fixing those and rebuilding for a while. I was panicking, ahaha. Then after countless loops of doing those, I noticed the weird lag from the start. I wasn’t getting that in the editor, so why is that happening– nope, I’m tired, I had to rebuild too many times, let’s just submit! …and off to bed I go.

..and done! It went well for the most part. I made a thing! That’s cool. I’ll be adding tons more story on it in the future, as I had fun making the art for this..

*looks at pile of games waiting to be finished and/or made*

..maybe when I have the time. We’ll see.

Thank you for reading this far. For those who entered, hope you had fun! 😀

Since this was my first LD for the compo, it was quite a challenge for me, but I think, that what I did come up with was a good result.

What went right:

• I had plenty of time, came up with the idea really quick and had overall a ton of fun
• The amount of weapons I was able to add in the time was quite ok and the unique characteristics of each weapon seems to be quite fun for all
• The difficulty-settings seem to be q good thing to add, it was a last-4 hours idea. Since you unlock the last few weapons quite a bit into the game, it was good to have a Fun-mode with all weapons already unlocked so you can test and play around without the grind before.
• I went for a really simplistic art style since art is not really my major skill, but it works quite well for this game

What went wrong:

• I have some major performance problems in the compo-build, its not that bad, but due to a other bug, you received less points with the starting-weapon if you don’t reach the 60fps it is locked to (already fixed but not published yet, I not only fixed the bug but increased the performance by ~1000% :))
• The difficulty is not rising enough with the player getting more advanced weapons, I am working on that (new enemies, better enemy-AI)

What will come out of Drama in Space

I am already working on Drama in Space 1.1, which will include tons of new weapons, new enemies, new gamemodes and a huge chunk of weapon balancing and performance increase. I am also working on quite a bit of new mechanics and the artstyle, Drama in Space will be a full blown minigame in the future!

I received a ton of feedback and working on everything that was criticized. I would love to see your feedback as well, so please go over and try my game and leave me feedback with what you liked and what you disliked.

I am thinking about putting the game on Steam Greenlight once Drama in Space 1.1 is out, we will see.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55223

Today I made my HTML5 game Birdy Bridge works on my Android devices. Now you can try in Chrome for Android, but your device should have a large screen and good network connection to load MBs of data. I think it should also works in iOS devices. A short URL: http://goo.gl/Qvbzhf

There are some other updates for all browsers. Full screen and easy mode switches have been added. Since the game get harder in touch screen, easy mode is default.

My game is totally coded in HTML5. It was not hard to port this game. I just did some fixes for performance and touch screens.

Here is the latest cover.

I would do some other fixes next week. After that, I might build apk for android devices.

If you love it, rate for me

I don’t know if any of you are interested, but we’ve made a French version for ‘Internship Adventure’, our Jam entry.

Play the game here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39644

Of course, the original game is still available, so if you haven’t played it yet, there’s still time

@Maineiacs has a very nice Let’s Play of “Some Knights Left” on his YouTube channel

You can also check out the game RIGHT HERE .. Happy smashing

Dodge barrels, hay bails, carts, spears, and pitchforks, and eat as many pies and drink as much ale as you can to stay one step ahead of the angry mod. The longer your run, the faster he goes!

Our best score is 1857, can you beat it?

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56101

Uhm… Long time ago i started to learning game jolt api… But… I AM IDIOT! So, after years, when i learned almost everything, i decided to create scripts for other idiots. ! You can make almost averything just with ONE line of code!

This is not gex or asset package. Just source with gj api scripts + some things for easy implement. Just download source and use it as base for your project or export / import resources. My english pretty sucks, but i still tried to make some help documets. I hope you understad 😀 (Help file have 8 pages 😀 )

I decided to write here too, because i played lots of game maker games here, and some really needs achievements! 😀

Anyway… Enjoy!

http://gamejolt.com/games/game-maker-gj-api/90339

I always wanted to do a Banana Nababa type of game.

So what i will do for this miniLD if i have the time is a boss arena type of game.
Maybe 5 or so bosses with escalating difficulty.
Vertical attacking pattern.
Shoot in arches by default and hold up to shoot straight up.
Basic platforming with doublejump because its awesome.
And ofcourse challenging boss designs with an impossible endboss.

Artwise i will keep to some restrictions
2 colors per player, critter and tile (4 with black and transparency).
3 colors per boss (5 with black and transparency).
8×8 tiles and sprites, excluding the boss.

The game is set in space and you are at The Last Boss!

Updated with some early progress
The One Hour Game Jams have so much basecode collected i can just pick what i need!

Banana Nababa
It is an awesome and difficult game, definitly worth a download.

I wanted to share some projects I’ve been working on since Ludum Dare. I’ve learned so much from my experience with Ludum Dare on every aspect of a game, and audio. These projects, I could never had made if not for some of the revelation from the 48 hours of the last LD.

I used FL Studio Producer edition to create these tracks.

Strings

Strings is a very beautiful track that features a string-like synth I created, and also features a very heavy, chaotic, gritty bass wobble. The Beauty and Chaos mix perfectly together. This was largely a experiment of trying new ways to make soft synths, then it turned into so much more.

Pirate Pulse

Pirate Pulse is a very “different” song… I take pride of this one as being one of my most unusual song I’ve created. It has a very beautiful pattern that very much reminds me of Pirate’s! If it remind you of pirates, then it has to be good. This song started as a test of pulsating basses and string like chords synths that have a pirate-y feel to it, giving it its name. The chorus features aggressive bass wobbles, bass growls, and hard synths. This song is very different from anything I’ve heard, but I like it, and I hope you do too. Pirate Pirate Pirate!

MORE SHAMFUL ADVERTISING!

Check out my Game…

The Monster Inside

Play Here

And here…

Also here…

And don’t forget about here…

Oh, look at this, another link to the game!

And another

Oh, is this one special?

Another link!

PLAY!

Hello, all! We here at Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) are at it again! We’re playing and rating your games right now, and will be regularly doing so on Thursday and Saturday nights, from 7:00 PM EST to midnight, until the judging period ends! Check us out at Twitch.tv here:

http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Want to submit a game? Our submission form is available here:

http://goo.gl/forms/uqzjFQqK1p

If you haven’t already, check out our games, too:

• Moon Witch
• Fly On The Wall
• Huntingman Championship
• Lardum
• Can I Haz Monsters?

Hey again everybody! I don’t want to spam y’all with this, but I really want to post it again because I’m so incredibly excited!

Click the image to play the most recent version of Eye In The Sky!

Our game, Eye In The Sky, is up for Greenlight on Steam.  The majority of the work for it is already done (we’re apparently fast workers) and we have a lot of changes and improvements to what you played in the Ludum Dare version. Since we added rudimentary controller support (for the XBox gamepad on windows only) to the LD version, we’ve really like the idea of getting the game on consoles as well. Because doing that is something like super expensive, we also started a kickstarter. Any kind of help, whether it’s sharing it with friends or backing the project would be amazing!

Here are some links for you to check out if you’re at all interested!

• You have help us by voting yes on Greenlight by clicking here.
• You can help us by viewing/sharing/donating your coffee money to our kickstarter here.
• You can view our Ludum Dare entry by clicking here.

Jalu had a few collision problems this is the post jam version of the game.

Version of the level

Play it here
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49538<img src=”http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Game-300×224.jpg” alt=”Jalu Level screenshot”

After building a powerful village to deplete and kill the Trogg, turn the tables and fight back as the Trogg to eat all of your villagers to boost your score!

If you haven’t yet played Trogg please take a moment and see what score you can reach 😛

(If not only to feel the satisfaction of destroying your own village after defeating the Trogg)

Click Here to Play!

Hi, I wanted to thanks again everyone for your amazing comments. Here are some of them:

Hello! Eskil here, or better known as PixzleOne.
I’m a 14 year old boy from Sweden who loves making stuffs!

This was my third Ludum Dare, and I’m really happy about the results.
I’m still learning, and I don’t think I’ll ever reach a point where there is nothing more to learn.

My scores or my placings have never been amazing, most people would say they are pretty bad, and I really don’t expect anything crazy this time either. Still though, I’m always super happy about what I manage to create, and ratings doesnt mean that much to me.
Of course they can mean that I have gotten better at making games that people enjoy, or that are good in diffrent ways, but for me the biggest sucess is to feel like I’m getting forwards, learning new things and improving.

One of the rooms.

As always, I was really hyped about this Ludum Dare, so I went up 02:45 in the morning swedish time, so I could be in the IRC when the theme was revealed.

I had a couple of themes I really wanted, but this one was pretty good I think. Some people always have problems with the theme and think it’s crap, but honestly, for me a part of the whole jam is to get up with a good idea, even though you dont like the theme. It’s not the theme thats bad, It’s your imagination.

After the theme was released I took it pretty slow, not being really sure what I wanted to make. I took some time just listening to music, chilling in the IRC and enjoying the early hours.
After a while I had a intro completed in unity, but I was still not sure about what I was making yet.

first scene of the game

I started mixing around with diffrent ideas and soon I decided that I was making a first person game.

I first thought the first person stuff would take a lot of time and that it would be difficult, but when I thought about what I wanted to make; Something moody, I decided to go for it anyways.
It didn’t take long until I was done with that, I used a fps script that i had made earlier as a reference, because I didn’t really remember how to do it.
When I was done with that I just started modeling the first room and the objects in it.

First room

Somewhere around here, my friend called me and told me my other friend was sick, and he had a spare ticket to the LCS bronze games. (For all of you old people, LCS is the League of Legends Championship Series, and if that doesn’t say anything to you, google that shit.)
At first I didn’t feel like going, I was Ludum Daring after all, but after some thinking I chose to go after all, and I didn’t regret it.
As a League of Legends fan it was super fun, and it wasn’t a chance that would come again.

This took the rest of the day/evening/night, so I lost about 5 hours there.

Saturday morning I started working as soon as I woke up, and continued on the first room.
I continued to create the game in chronological order, and I soon realised that the game was gonna be very short.
I made a bad desicion here, making the player walk really slow, making the game longer, and increasing the mood factor, I thought.
I know I lied a bit to myself here, because I was aware that you walked VERY slow, but I kept it that way.
I can see in my comments thats one of the biggest problems with my game, so next time I need to think about those kinda things a bit more.

I continued creating the “gameplay” for a couple of hours, mostly modeling the rooms and objects.
When I was done with all that I made the menu, I actually had a menu very early, but I remade that to something OK, its far from the most beautiful thing though.

I think I started making music here, and even though most of the music in this game is pretty weird, It’s better than in most of my games. This was the first time I used REAPER for making music in a jam, I had only gotten it two days earlier.
Still though, I managed to get music for every part of the game, so I’m pretty happy about it.

I’m over all very happy about what I managed to create, and I think it’s 100 times better than my previous stuff.
I have gotten comments about “it not being a game”, because there is no way to loose, and given me bad overall for that, and that’s a good point, so I guess I can think about that next time.

I’m super excited about the ratings, I hope I have improved!

If anyone reads this whole post mortem, good job, and thanks for reading.

Now shameless plug:
If you havn’t checked my game out yet, please do!
I will try to play your games back, just comment down there.

See yall next LD!

I hope everyone is having a great weekend! I’ve been slacking in writing the post mortem to Team Round Fork’s first ever ludum dare 33 game Troopers’ Starship, so I decided I would make a quick video of me playing through the whole game talking about different design decisions that were made during the short 72 hours.

Hopefully some find this enjoyable to watch

If you haven’t yet please download and try Troopers’ Starship here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39524

Thanks to everyone with the awesome comments! I’ll make sure to try and rate everyone’s today!

Cheers,
Team Round Fork

Thanks very much for all the feedback on my entry, Groll’s Revenge. Please give it a try if you haven’t yet.

When making Groll’s Revenge, I wanted to create an old-school arcade experience, something with good replay value that encouraged players to chase high scores. The core design has players raiding medieval caravans transporting wagons between castles. Destroying a wagon earns points, but caravans are often guarded by foot soldiers and archers. Castles have their own arrow defenses, plus fast-moving knights will periodically chase the player all around the map.

It’s a similar concept to the game Hoard (which I only realized once I was halfway through coding…), but the crucial difference is how powerless the player character is. The monster has no way to harm any other character besides the wagons. Instead, players can hide in the forest, which makes them undetectable to all enemies. Then they can use a short lunge ability to dart out and steal a wagon before running back to safety.

Everything works reasonably well (aside from a few odd pathfinding bugs) and I was very pleased with the results of my efforts. It’s the first real-time game I’ve made on my own (my previous LD entry was turn-based), and even though I had to cut a number of features, mainly extra monster abilities, I think the game is pretty fun to play. There’s a nice cat-and-mouse element and some exciting moments from darting in and retreating to the forests with a line of soldiers on your tail.

Feedback has been positive, but a lot of players have commented on the game being very difficult. Some people say the enemies move too quickly, or that there’s no safe way to avoid being hit by archers. And although I only have a few data points from the comments/Kongregate stats, high scores have generally been quite low – sub 5,000, which is just the first difficulty-bump threshold!

So is the game too hard? In my opinion, yes and no. First, it is possible to do well in the game. I can consistently get over 10,000 points, and my high score is near 18,000. As the game’s creator I’d expect that, but it at least proves that it isn’t an impossible feat.

What it does suggest is that the game’s systems are not well communicated to new players. Furthermore, lack of understanding the systems is punishing. I believe the main issue is that enemies react instantly to the player entering their threat-detection zone, yet there is no indication of how big that zone is. A new player will be caught off-guard the first time a soldier chases them or an archer shoots at them and likely not react fast enough, nor will they learn the threat-zone size due to their surprise. This issue is compounded by the extremely fast speed enemies and bullets travel at, which is what causes a player’s lack of understanding to be harshly punished.

There are a few possible solutions, such as introducing an audio or visual cue when the player becomes spotted plus a slight hesitation in an enemy before they begin chasing. I wouldn’t want to reduce maximum speeds too much, since that would make the game trivial to experienced players, but a gradual acceleration might give new players more time to react.

The strongest lesson for me is to really think through the new-player experience and ensure that someone completely fresh to the game will not have a frustrating initial experience. Ideally get a friend to play test it at an early stage so that I can see what elements aren’t well-presented and what needs more highlighting. It’s somewhat the nature of a game jam to be totally invested in your idea for the duration, but I believe it’d benefit my future efforts immensely to take a step back and consider the game from a totally naive perspective.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this write-up and taken something from my mistakes. And if you do give Groll’s Revenge a try: be patient, stick to the forests, time your lunges, eat apples to regain health, grab wagons that have traveled a far distance, and try to break the 5,000 point barrier! Good luck, have fun!

Hi everybody,

first, for all who tested and rated my entry, thank you! If you haven´t until now, please do me the favor and do it

Now, to the real post-mortem:

That was the first ludumdare i ever joined. I did know only little bit of it thanks to a working collague, but was already so fascinated that i wanted to join. Well, i made the decision only hours before the LD33 startet with no real plan or anything else.

When the theme was announced i was a bit disappointet. It sounded so much like a monster-rpg or jump and run, which i wasn´t really eager to program. But after quite some time i had an different idea: What about a…monster creator tool? You know, like Spore back than, you have a basic body and can form it as you want. Until you have your dream monster. I pictured it really cool in my head. 3D- graphic, free movement of the body, different body part you can change as you want, background-images… Sound great, doesn´t it? Well, who ever already tried out my creator-tool know already the difference beetween the idea and the finished product…

So, how did my weekend run?

On saturday i lost much time to find the “right” idea for me. After that i needed even more time to figure out how to do it. I tried severals things with 3D-Canvas cause i am an junior-web developer (so other languages were out of questions for me), but realized soon that a real 3d tool is way to much which my low experience. So i changed back to 2d.  Then i tried to add a basic body and different body part. But i sucked at drawing so nothing really useable came out. So i reduced my idea even further: let the other create the part, just give them the right tool for it. Finally i did the basics, namely the drawing options.

Sunday was a short day, you could say. For one, there was the formula one race i had to watch. And i absoluty can´t watch and do something else at the same time. Secondly, i lost again much time, this time because i had to find the error which prevented succesful uploads of the images. Ah, yes, i didn´t mention it until now, but the users should have the options to upload there monster to compare them with the one from others. Eventually it was only a permission-error…. There was nothing really more on this day, i lost focus way to easy several times…

Originally i wanted to take part in the compo, because i had to work on monday. But my tool was still too imperfect and unfinished, so i changed it to the jam to have a bit more time on monday evening. Well…should i tell you, that i absoluty had to take the wrong subway on my way back home this day? And i left on the wrong station after that too….dont ask, i dont know myself what was wrong with me… Finally, i arrived around 10pm at home and immedietly start working on it. There were still a few bugs. And colors were missing too. Around 2:30am, the next morning basically, i submittet my work. Somehow disappointed of the leftover of my originally idea, somehow glad i joined the LD and finished something. And tired as hell. Of course i had work the next day too, argh…

From then to now i had only little time to rate other games, so i have not that much rates myself too. But i am glad that my idea seemed to be liked. Even if almost everyone say that controls are a bit difficult. It´s true and i asked myself afterwards to why i made it that way. But oh well, i´ve done it and it´s not really a bug, so no changing it. But i am really glad that people seem to like my idea There also some (really) cool monster in the gallery. I do wonder, who did “angry snail blob thing”, “E monster” or “Nisco”. I fucking love these 3. Should have added an input field for the name of the monster creator…

That how my first LD went. And i surely will join the next one again! Hopefully with a better entry than this one.

See you again!

PS: please rate my game^^ i will rate your´s too 😉

What went right

Playtesting.

I had the time to do two playtests. For the first one I recorded a nice animated GIF, and collected some useful about player experience, for example, my enemy sprite was seen as a child (but was not meant this way), so I replaced it with a neat soldier sprite.

Social media.

I started using Twitter, posted some warmup things. I had a good time there in development breaks, still not bothering too much. I also wrote some funny texts for my posts (“I hunger for playtesters!”).

Bosca Ceoil.

This easy to learn tool (with integrated tutorial!) made my first game music possible! I exercised with it for a couple months, so the music was good.

Unity.

I was familiar with the engine for quite a long, and for sure knew how to code for it.

Deadline.

I had to cut some corners but I was able to tweet and play others’ games while waiting for playtesters the second time. No one participated in that playtest, and I just submitted it 30 min before submission hour began and went to sleep 😛

What went wrong.

Playtesting (again).

In the first playtest some people said that they didn’t get what to do (even if it was shown in the animated GIF!). I didn’t listen to them, and realized it as a problem only post-compo… And the second playtest (some hours before deadline) was left unnoticed, zero comments.

Unity (again).

To be honest, making pixel-art games in the engine is pain! Considering to use Haxe(Flixel?) next time. I also failed to publish WebGL version of game because of the bug in Unity (confirmed by devs) which ruined the music completely.

No animations, few angles in sprites.

I had no experience in animation, and had no time to animate sprites. Also the main hero was exactly the same as I drawn him at the beginning (took about 10 minutes). And the enemy had only two sprites: alive and dead, with no angles.

Krita.

I didn’t update my tools not to break anything, but I regretted it with Krita. The version I used was a buggy one!

Few levels.

I began making levels 2-4 (total 4 in the game) at the second half of the second day. They only provide tutorials to mechanics, and not very much freedom to actually enjoy the game… I’ve returned from a business trip at last, so I think I’ll find the time to add 10+ more levels now.

Conclusion.

I had a great time participating in LD33, and playing what talented new-comers and old-timers done.

Take a risk! Survive!

Hello there! With this post we would finish the promotion of Kaiju Tycoon. We have had a great time but we must go back to work. We want to show you our tribute to the great Game Dev Tycoon:

We’ve learnt a lot. Thanks all for the feedback. See you soon!

Tags: Kaiju, Kaiju Tycoon

My game was Thursday the 12th, Lake Polygon. http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=41214

This is my second Ludum Dare, and my first Ludum Dare where I went Solo.  I tried to fit as much work in as I could between work and family during the weekend, overall though I think I did ok.

What went wrong.

This time around I had the theme ok, but 3/4ths the way through I realized I didn’t really have a win or lose scenario.  Basically I built a murder simulator with no way for the player to lose.   Though the first few kills were disturbingly satisfying, after a while it got boring as the game was missing “tension.”

To counter-act this I added the ability for the campers to pick up clubs and hit you back.  I also gave the player health.  This added tension back but now it went to far the other way.  You almost always ended up dying to the club wielding campers.

To counter-at that, I added a player power-up, a machete that you can throw.  I initially made it to where you could pick up you machete after you threw it. This swung the pendulum back again and made it way to easy to kill everyone quickly.  Finally, I modified the Machete one more time so it would randomly appear somewhere else on the map after the player used it.  This got me closer to where I wanted but currently the system still needs to be tweaked.

To recap, my biggest issue was I fell in love with my theme before thinking about what the game play should be like.

What went right.

Graphics.

Early on I decided to make everything out of layered basic shapes.  This let me generate most of the graphics in a couple of hours.  I really like how the graphics turned out, (with the exception of the player, I would like to go back and tweak those)

Some trickery withe some prebuilt shader effects let me add a gloomy viginette to the game, and to animate the water, fire etc.

Sound.

Though I didn’t create the sound effects, I think I got really lucky with some open source sounds/music I was able to find.  That more than anything completed the feel I was going for with the game.

Gameplay.

Overall I think it’s pretty fun!  It gets more frustrating as the kill count goes up, since you have to look harder for the remaining campers.  If I had had more time I would have added some sort of indicator to help you find the campers and maybe a couple more powerups to help you chase them down.  But overall I think the gameplay has a pretty decent base.

Anywho, I had a blast making it, and I hope you can all get a chance to try it out.

Thanks again fellow ludders.

I finally made it to improve my LD33. This patch is something I really feel to do as the game was a bit frustrating (due to bugs and not correct calibration of controls).

Now “You are the Star” has been patched and I am very pleased to present you this new version.

Things added:

-) Tutorial: this was needed otherwise the player is just been inserted into the game and he can spent some precious time just figuring out what to do. So now in the tutorial you will be presented with a little explanation of what you have to do and also some little video to show you how to do certain things.

-)Gameplay refactor: this also was necessary has we ended up to having a couple of bugs that just stuck the actors preventing  so the possibility of completing the level. Basically I had to rebuilt in a cleaner way the behavior of actors, but the advantage this time was that I already knew all the elements to consider. This is actually also a lesson of trying to have a better planning instead of just adding features to already existing structures.

Anyway I hope you could find some time to give a try and reward in this way my weekend efforts. Hope you enjoy!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57957

Lenakeiz

Hello everyone!

Just one week left before LD33 judging ends, I’m back from vacation and finally have a chance to play some games and look back at what I’ve made for my very first Ludum Dare (and the very first gamejam at all).

You can try my game here

The idea

I’ve never been good at original ideas or revolutionary gameplay mechanics. I really like simplicity in games but with good execution. So I decided to make something maybe ordinary, but make it as good as I can (taking into account my lack of gamedev experience).

Soo… You’re the monster. Okay, let it be a game about zombies. Why? Well, zombies are funny. Yes, I don’t think about them as about creepy scary monsters trying to eat your brains. They’re actually funny because of enormous amout of games/movies/etc made about them.

First hours

I was sitting with a pen and a pile of paper sheets trying to make something from a simple idea of “game about zombies” for about two hours. Or maybe more. The biggest problem was to not try to make something too complex. It’s only 48 hours and only me with no experience in commercial gamedev.

Finally the vision was formed. A game about running around with a horde of zombies, making more zombies, dying and playing as another zombie.

But I was so scared about “what if I just can’t do it?” so I was sitting with zero lines of code fore another couple of hours. I also didn’t knew how will I do art (I’m not good at it), would it be 3D (I know nothing about making 3D models) or 2D (I can draw something simple at least). But then suddenly the “programmer flow” started and I can remember only one thing – me sitting with a pile of code and art about 36 hours (or so) later. Exhausted but proud of myself. I did it – the game was finished =)

What went right

The art

It was very good decision to combine 3D with 2D. 3D for environment (simple and cubic without textures) and 2D for characters with super-simple art style. I’ve recently watched some Super Bros games letsplays and thought I could make something with the similar style.

Unity

I don’t have a lot of experience making games at all, but I was messing around with Unity for the past year, so it was enough for me to not suck with it completely.

AI

AI is super simple. And it fits the setting and game style completely. Zombies are stupid. Scared people are stupid. And military have guns – so no one will call them stupid even if they are =)

Horde mechanics

I didn’t expect this tiny little feature about playing as another zombie when your zombie dies will get so much impact on gameplay. It was really good idea and I’m glad I’ve come to it.

Dat cat

My girlfriend asked me to add a cat into the game. And I added it =) Some people found it pretty funny how the cats watching a zombie apocalypse without giving a f… =)

What went wrong

Unity + Pixelart = Pain

Everyone knows it =) Now I know it too. But my game not a completely pixel-artish, so I just decided I can sacrifice pixel-perfectness.

Goal

There is no goal except of getting score points for killing people. It’s kind of boring, I know. I wanted to make something like growing your horde -> breaking through military base. But I wasn’t sure if I can make it in time, so I decided to make it in post-compo version a couple months later.

Sound

The sound in game is awful, I know =) I messed with it, made some mistakes about tuning it properly in Unity. Sorry about that =)

In the end

I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got. I never thought I’m able to make a game in 48 hours, but I am. I’ve got a lot of positive feedback about my game, so it’s a perfect motivation for me to go on.

Thank you all!

You can try my game here

Hey all!

So we had a blast finally taking part in the Ludum Dare for the first time. I figured I should probably make a post-mortem, but since this is my first LD, that makes this my first one of these too. Sorry in advance. XD

What Went Right:

Keeping Resources in House:

Everything you see in the game, be it the pixelated alien that was initially developed for a 16-bit game or the villagers/tents clearly made in MS Paint, were made by us. The music (that is to say, the same chord progression over and over and over…) was made by us. The only thing we didn’t make was the engine itself.

Keeping the Game Simple:

You are an alien trying to get home after an electrical failure causes your spaceship to crash. To the villagers, you are a monster that attacked them with a giant fireball (your ship). You’re goal is to get your communicator, call for help, and try not to kill any villagers.

Whiteboard:

Thank. God. They. Exist. This tool, while it sounds trivial, was SOOOO useful during the whole process and helped us move along easily. We would have been lost without it.

Pow-Wows:

About every 3 hours, our group stopped working for 5 minutes to discuss what had been accomplished, what was needed, bugs that were discovered, and ideas to be pitched. It helped streamline the development process.

What Went Wrong:

Scratch:

While a really cool resource to use for some things (including game-jams), it did not help our team get this done as we thought it would. I (@Saphirako) made the mistake of not introducing my team to Unity soon enough. They weren’t comfortable with using something they did not know well. That being said, Scratch was discovered by one of our team members the night of the theme revelation and we scrambled to find ways to do things as we had no idea how to use it at first.

While it is rather simple to use and we got the hang of it, the nagging feeling of “what the heck is this thing I’m using?!” got to me multiple times during the Jam. It also did not have a way for us to simultaneously work on the same build. Each pow-wow inevitably included the process of attempting to sync up 3 different versions of the game. In at least 2 instances, there were implementations of game objects that were created with out-dated data. (ie. Old character movement scripts) And, though I can’t reference any pow-wow in particular, I know we definitely solved the same problem twice on at least one occasion.

Time:

For those of you that reached Level 2, you may have noted the Orange villagers had bows and arrows and yet, they did not fire at you. We made a decision to cut that feature so that we could release on time.

For those of you that noticed that the Alien had a walk cycle but none of the villagers had any type of animation. We made a decision to cut that feature so that we could release on time.

Noticing a pattern? The game had another level planned, 2 more enemy types, an HP bar, recharge for your attack, a fireball animation instead of a black ball. All of these things were cut when we realized we overextended ourselves. Even by the end of the jam, we realized after all the cutting, we weren’t merciless enough with the concepts that we came up with. But again, as it was our first time, we expected this to happen.

Venue:

I love my school. It excels at a lot of things. These things include fantastic internet speeds during the Summer. However, I made the mistake of not reserving a room until Wednesday evening. That was NOT enough time to get all the kinks out of the process. Let me clarify:

My plan – Reserve a room at the college with a whiteboard, internet access, and climate control. It wasn’t going to be too large, but it would be able to fit a team of 3 or 4 people plus some filming equipment.

What actually was the case – I reserved a room that required key access. I did not have the credentials to access said key access and had to call campus police each morning to get into the area I reserved. The room itself was a pretty comfortable for our team of 3 with some equipment, but it wouldn’t have done so with a team of 4. I also did not contact our network admin and, as such, the ethernet port for the room was switched off. We had to resort to Wi-Fi the whole time. Which would have been fine but it ended up pretty bad for streaming. Which brings me to my next point…

Streaming:

Multiple times the stream went dead and after 3 attempts, we had to give up the streaming video of the white-board. (The bandwidth just couldn’t handle it…) I would say a good hour of my development time was troubleshooting the stream.

 Conclusion:

Ultimately, we at Open Skies Games Studio are pretty pleased with our first-ever game jam product. It gave us a good idea for what to do next time around and brought us to meet a whole bunch of cool people. We had a blast and look forward to our next game jam, but first we look forward to seeing all you budding Indie Devs in MA at Boston Festival of Independent Games this Saturday, September 12. It’s gonna be a blast!

Special Thanks to:

Scratch, by MIT  –  Our Game Engine

Stonehill College  –  Our Venue

The team at OSGS which happened to be my family for this Jam. You guys rock!

Feel free to give our game a try. We’d love to play yours too! Just comment your game on this post with a link and we’ll play and vote! Want to ask us a question? Either post a comment and we’ll reply OR send us a tweet at @OpenSkiesGames.

Tags: ld33 postmortem, postmortem

Howdy everyone!

I had some spare time this fine morning, so I decided to get around to making that post jam version of The Banana Eater that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. Which you can find here: http://gamejolt.com/games/the-banana-eater/87926

Here’s a list of what I’ve accomplished.

Bug Fixes:

-Sent one desk back a layer to prevent weird graphical clipping issues.

-Stretched out a hallway to prevent accidental level completion.

Features:

-Added an animation to Gold Banana which will occur when you jump on top of him.

Those who have played this game probably don’t have much reason to come back, but for those of you who haven’t give it a shot yet this is a good version to play.

Have a nice day. 😀

Howdy! This was my third attempt at a Ludum Dare event, and my first submission. Thus, my first post-mortem.

Dominion is the fruit of my labour. It was built in Java using the Slick2D and JBox2D libraries.

Dominion (noun) – rule; control; domination.

Preparation

I went and bought a load of orange juice, soup, pasta, and a little celebratory chocolate. I already had the tea, so my body was ready.

I spent a short while writing a very basic generic-sidescroller codebase, which I wasn’t even sure I would use. I did, after pruning a large chunk of it away.

The compo started at 2AM local time (I’m British you see, pip-pip, etc.), I didn’t bother waiting up – I simply got up at 6AM and contemplated ideas over breakfast.

What Went Well

Ideas are nice: Unlike the last few attempts, I had an idea that I actually liked relatively quickly. It was born from an idea I’d had for another theme that I’d seen in the slaughter (and then the voting) – “Death Is Not the End”. You play as a spirit, and are able to possess people. When your body is killed, your spirit is released.
I tried thinking of alternative ideas for ‘You Are the Monster’ for a short while, and didn’t come up with anything better. My whole brain went ‘hey, what the hell’ – ghosts are regarded as monsters, in the supernatural sense of the word – and I began elaborating on the idea, ‘scribbling’ whatever cool stuff came to mind into a Word doc. In the end, I probably only got about 60% of what I originally envisioned, but I guess that’s how it goes!
To quote the first line in my ideas document – “Dominion is a game about controlling the bad guys and doing your dirty work via them.”
It didn’t turn out exactly like this, but the general concept stuck.

Hold your breath: I CREATED ART. Holy hell, stop the presses. I managed to create art that isn’t good, but isn’t necessarily eye-wateringly bad, as I expected it to be. I used a lot of noise in my art – I like how it adds a kind of discount texture. It also provided a theme to the artwork, so I stuck with it for consistency. Without the noise, everything is solid colours and would look rather bland. Most of it is made with basic geometries mangled and/or smashed together.
I went for a dark colour scheme – given that you play as a ghost, it seemed appropriate. The game takes place at night. A mountain range can be seen in the background. It’s a little nonsensical given that what little story there is puts you in a ‘town’… nothing looks even remotely town-y, but let’s roll with it.

Alone: I was left alone all weekend. No distractions, no nonsense – just me and my PC, ‘Susan’. Bliss.

Basically everything not mentioned below: For the most part, development went pretty smoothly.

What Went Wrong

Newton’s downfall: The physics. Oh man, the physics. I wasted a load of time trying to get the movement/jumping mechanics working well; the standard I managed to attain in the end is far from great – jumping/falling is way too slow, and makes the platforming aspect no fun at all. A lot of the reviews on my entry have mentioned this – believe me guys, I know! It’s like platforming under water.
As mentioned previously, I used JBox2D – this is a Java port of the Box2D physics library (C++). I had very little experience with it, and some Googling told me that it was not a good idea to use it for a platformer – I kept with it to ensure I’d finish on time. I like JBox2D, I’ll try and get a better configuration going – if that fails, I’ll explore other options or write my own system.

Level ‘design’: There are three levels in Dominion – the third and final one was rather rushed, I created it about an hour before submission. That sounds like a long time, but I still had numerous bugs to patch, audio to add, and a menu screen to create – the latter never even made it. Submission hour was 2AM local time, so here I was creating a level at around 1AM having slept about eight hours over the entire weekend. The level is harder than I intended it to be – you need to be very conservative of your ectoplasm. If you are, you can complete it with around a minute to spare – if not, you’ll barely make it or you’ll run out of time. If you are not careful and run out of ectoplasm, you will have to wait for it to regenerate which is no fun at all.
The second level is probably my favourite. It’s the one that looks most like some thought went into it.
Fun fact: the names of each level are based on cemeteries near my home town.

World: In the corners of tiles there are gaps in the gravel-y stuff. It’s not a big deal, but the game would have looked much nicer if I had gotten around to fixing that.

Oops: Morning II, I wasted an hour or so trying to squash a bug in NPC movement where the NPC would not register a clipped tile in front of it and would continue walking into a wall / object indefinitely. Due to a monumental balls-up, I was accidentally adding its move direction to its position twice during a loop, so it was checking the tile in front of the tile in front of it. *sigh*
See, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Bugs: Just after submission, I noticed a horrific game-breaking bug that I had managed to completely miss while play-testing in my sleep-deprived state, as well as a several other more minor (but still pretty nasty) ones. Embarrassingly enough, the game did not reset properly. Seriously. Once you died or changed level, the last level would continue happening – countdown, NPCs, and all. Duh. You would inevitably lose.
The next day, I patched that along with the other nasty ones and an oversight or two, and updated it. These were very minor changes, as permitted by the compo rules. They are included in a changelog in the download.

Missed the cut: As mentioned previously, there were a lot of things that didn’t make it into the game. Most notably:

• NPCs being able to fight off the possession: The unused ‘durability’ personality category was devised for this use – the more ‘durable’ the person, the more they can endure, the harder they are to possess. This would have been cool.
• Ability to shoot: I wanted the player able to shoot while possessing a criminal (notice that they have guns). There are no projectiles in the game, but your host is technically ‘shot’ if you are found out to be possessing someone. Perhaps it would have made the game too easy.
• Cosmetics: Some sexy particle effects would have been nice, as would some sort of transition from spirit to body and vice versa.

Conclusion

What Next?

On with my current personal project – “The Temple of Light” (hopefully I can douse the flames as it crashes and burns) – and back to university for the second year on my Computer Science degree. I’d love to participate in MiniLD 62 if I have time!

I had fun participating and genuinely look forward to LD34 – hopefully I won’t be too busy to join in.

–

This was not very techy / in-depth. I’ve seen some really interesting post-mortems from other developers detailing exactly how they went about working their magic, and this is not that – mainly because there’s nothing innovative or particularly complex in the game. However, if you’re curious about how I went about doing something, do feel free to take a look at the source code, leave a comment, or get in touch with me. Thanks for reading!

With little over a week left in the voting period, here’s a quick recap of my thoughts on this LD.

I, like many others, used reverse Pac-Man as the core idea, with the added change that while you’re technically the baddy, in this game you are role-reversed once more and Pac-Man is the hunter. It’s like role-reversal Inception, that guy Nolan’s got nothing on me.

Play it now!

You’re Pinky the ghost and you need to find keys in the Pac maze to open up the door to the ghost base while avoiding the mindless Pac-Abominations who can kill at but a touch. That’s really kind of it, concept wise. Navigate maze, find keys, avoid walking spheres, win.

Last time I used the 2D canvas implementation but since I’ve been busy with 3D and OpenGL 4 in my C++ library, this time I wanted to experiment with WebGL. So far, I have ignored the “Don’t learn new things during a Jam” mantra as I am a stubborn fool, but it has been in my favour, if not always in the game’s. So in PN, you move around a 3D extruded version of the pac maze.

First, I went for 1st person view, but I wanted a 3rd person camera, because 1st person would have just been _too easy_. Sigh. Since I wanted to keep it low profile and compatible, I couldn’t use the Pointer Lock APIs and keyboard controls are more like directional pads than sticks so I went with 3D of the late 1990s, in the glory days of the PSX. Fixed cameras. This was a major gamble as I had never done anything like this before. The decision was both good and bad.

✅ The good parts were that I put the cameras up high on the wall, so to speak, to give an oppressive feel of you being watched in the darkness.
? The bad was that switching between camera points becomes disorienting quickly when there are no landmarks or distinguishing features to help your mind orient.
? Additionally, I had to spend a _lot_ of time tweaking both the exact positions of the cameras to be far enough but not too far and in code rejecting cameras that can’t see you or are too far away. It’s very easy to end up with quickly oscillating camera viewpoints and the only reason that is not the case here is because I put in all the time to avoid it, which I should have been using for things like sound or other things.

✅ Coming from desktop GL 4, learning WebGL was surprisingly easy and fun. The feature set is so limited that if you are familiar with the core concepts of 3D programming, you’re up and running very quickly. That was fun.
? I didn’t have time for any audio, which would have helped immersion and atmosphere immensely. It was on my list but even with 72 hours I just did not get to it.

✅ I was able to quickly prototype the level by having it be a simple image. Using a PNG with the color channels having specific meanings I had the full Pac maze available for both level mesh generation, collision testing, camera placement and AI path placement. This was essential to dev speed.

<– Black = wall, blue = AI path, Green = camera

? I was so busy with cameras and getting it done, I never really acted on the fact that the Pac maze is too just not a good fit for this 3rd person camera view. Everything looks the same. I applied a colour gradient over the whole maze for basic guidance, but it was not nearly enough. I should have customised the playing field and/or added distinguishing features/marks.

In the end though, I had a start and end screen and a working game, I had a lot of fun and I learned new things. All good stuff.

And I’m continuing this vibe and will make one game a week for a while. I’ll post updates on my Twitter if you’re interested.

Hi everyone,

I could finally take some time and revisit my LD33 entry: Brainless Attack. It’s a reverse tower defense game. Thankfully, a lot of people have left their feedback, even though I couldn’t play as many games as I would like (thus, my coolness is not very high ). As some have pointed out, the game often felt like you can’t do much, besides spawning as many monsters as you can. I wanted to improve on this. It took me quite some time to find an acceptable solution.

You see, when I started the competition, I thought of making the towers quite slow. They would lose time turning and could be overwhelmed by sending hordes of monsters from different vectors on them:

It is a lot of fun to see hordes of little monsters, but it turned out to be quite chaotic, leading to some not seeing a strategy at all. The compo version utilizes a global launch cool-off (visualized via a green circle around your monster-cursor). In the end, I decided this was not a good idea to start with. I switched to having a cool-off for every individual launch-pad:

The cool-off is visualized by a “clock”-like bright area inside, which starts filling the launch-pad as soon as you’ve used one. This leads to a new possibility: overwhelming a tower by sending multiple monsters at it at the same time. Luckily, this allowed for some quite intricate levels, which can be solved by proper timing and the correct order of monster-launches:

I spent some time on exploring possibilities of additional elements on the map. Since the game is called Brainless Attack, I wanted to keep the monsters dumb. All they do is running brainlessly towards the castle. But the environment can be as clever as it needs to, creating a challenge for the player. The first additional element I tried and liked is sand:

OK, this might not look like sand too much, but you have to believe me here 😉 Sand slows down the monster, allowing for new situations and a bigger challenge. Hopefully, I will be able to explore many more possibilities, like moving platforms, catapults, water (don’t know what it would do, yet) and other tower types, like area-damage-tower or freezing-tower. I wish I had much more time for this!

Here are 3 games that I selected both because I liked them but also because they deserve more votes.

Fright Night : you play has a serial killer. You need to be discreet to approach your victims and fast to kill them before they run away. This game has a really original gameplay.

Damned : You play as a monster trying to get its prey. The search mode is purely amazing. The art of the game is unbelievable. You should really try it.

Starvin’ Sasquatch : This is an original take on the stealth genre. This is a very fun game with nice graphics.

And if you still have some time you could also check mine 😉

Since i had so much fun on my last LD‘s music, i decided to polish it. So here it is : a take on the gouls and ghost theme.

Hope you like don’t hate it ;p

Is this possible? Just wanted to crunch my own numbers

Well, two weeks past the submission, I guess it’s time to finally write my post-mortem! If you want to checkout the game here’s the link!

Preparations

So, this was my 2nd entry on LD! I’m still learning how to develop games, and LD is where I see how my skills developed and what are the next steps (aside from the challenge itself).

My last entry was really fun to make, but I was really frustrated in two aspects: graphics and audio. I have a programmer background and although I love drawing and playing music, I know I suck at them ^^; So in the last three months I trained both of them…at least tried to xp These last months had been really tiresome and since those are skills that I’m not very good at it was really hard to get progress. My drawing and pixelart training demanded a lot of time, but it was worth it, while my music training is still on progress~. Since I was so focused on them I barely developed programming skills though, and it reflected on the game.

So as LD33 came, I really didn’t feel confident, but well, that’s just life, and I wouldn’t miss it by any chance!

Planning the game

So came the theme announcement, and I was pretty lost. I wrote a bunch of ideas in my whiteboard, couldn’t decide on anything… all of them seemed so… trivial… So I went to take a shower, and there I had the idea of the game xp

The player would be a little elven girl named Anya, but now the humans see elves as monsters, so they began a slaughter. And so Anya had to make a choice to escape the city avoiding all humans or become the monster they feared and kill them.

The monster the humans feared.

The mood was clear, it had to be dark, the player should feel the city burning. It would be hard to kill humans, Anya is just a girl after all. Escape without killing would be even harder. Too many humans watching the road, so Anya would have to use the shadows and be as quiet as possible to get past the guards.

But of course, there wasn’t enough time to do everything I wanted ^^; Let’s see then what went right and what went wrong!

What went right

The art

The long time I spent training my pixelart skill was really worth it! I was finally able to make decent animation that I was satisfied with. Of course I wasn’t sure if people would like it, but I had a lot of great feedback on the style!

Finally she was fully animated!

On my training I learned a lot of important concepts that I applied when making the art. The most important one I think was coherence. Even though I can’t make better things than pixelart, since everything is in the same style it just feels right.

The music

Although I really like to play music, I never really composed anything. I did learn music theory but I was never able to apply it to anything really. And since I didn’t had time to make any serious composition before the LD I was pretty scared to make something. But I knew it was crucial to give the right feeling to the game.

At first I was going to use LMMS to make my music, but when I started composing I decided to use BoscaCeoil instead, and that was a great decision! It was way easier to make something fast in BoscaCeoil, and I was able to use their built-in midi and the Chinese scale, so composing was much more smooth. I wasn’t entirely with what I composed, but I received positive feedback on the mood, so I’m still happy for accomplishing it!

The mood

The mood had to be just right. It didn’t really matter if I ended up with poor mechanics. For this entry the most important thing for me was how players perceived my interpretation on the theme. It wouldn’t make sense for me making a great stealth game but without any meaning nor impact. I spent a lot of time choosing the elements, the colors and so on to give the players the right atmosphere of the game, and I think I managed to do it ^^

The city on fire, the blood graffiti. What a pleasant sight!

What went wrong

The art

Yeah… So I was able to make fine pixelart, but at the cost of my first 24 hours. Since I’m not really use to making art and I still didn’t master GIMP, it was really time consuming and tiresome. I almost gave up while I still didn’t finished it >_<. I also still don’t know very well how to place or animate sprites, so my program was really inefficient. I had some problems with the light shader too, something that I still didn’t learn properly.

The mechanics

As I said before, I didn’t have much progress in my programming skills. So when I made the game it was my first platformer. Had several bugs, I had to program the stage manually, placing every element, and I didn’t really know how to use Box2D T_T. I didn’t have time to implement all features that I wanted too, such as hiding in shadows, noise mechanics, more light mechanics, but you can only do much in 48 hours ^^;

The big mistake

And so, after much testing, making sure everything was in their correct place I submitted the entry with less than 15 minutes to deadline… And I didn’t playtest with anyone else beside me >_<. I had a lot of complaints about the controller that I didn’t realize since I tested it so much and got used to it. Of course the controls were suppose to be hard, but I didn’t want to frustrate people… Some more things such as font color, some simple stuff like skipping intro, and some bugs could have been solved if I had playtested in other computers and other people…

What’s next

And thus I finished a very challenging LD for me. I got a lot of things right, and I’m very glad for it! But also many things that I still need to learn! My next steps will be learn more about music composition, rewrite my engine, studying more thoroughly  OpenGL and shading, and practice more pixelart! As for my game, I really think I should continue developing it, but I still have much to learn… Maybe after my new engine is made I will try to publish it ^^~

Great job everybody!!

Below is duplicated from my own site: Twoplus Games. Not-yet-postmortem because I need to see the score before calling a postmortem 😛

TL;DR: Had an amazing Ludum Dare, one week to go for rating LD33 games, so go play my game (available as web, windows, osx, linux):

Play PokEscape now!

Interpretive Dance

Last Ludum Dare, I went in with pre-conceived notions of what I was going to make, and I felt it would have been better if I didn’t. This time, I went in with a blank canvas. Hell, I didn’t even look at the theme list to prepare myself.

The theme was You Are the Monster – a theme quite a few jammers bemoaned because it’s quite close to a theme a few LDs back – You Are the Villain. I wasn’t around back then (darn kids, right?), but I vaguely had the feeling it was done before. I didn’t care though, brainstorm commenced, there were a few decent ones, but when our chatter made me laugh out loud, I knew I had to do it;

You’re a monster. You’re a pocket monster (pokemon). You’re the lamest pokemon ever. You’re Magikarp. No, you’re so lame, you’re Magicrap. But you want to be the best you can be. Which is Gyrados. No, Gyradeuce. The crap puns flowed. I laughed, and off I went.

A stealth game where you have to eat your cover

That was the final destination of the core mechanic brainstorm, and that turned out to be super important. There were many interpretations of that core mechanic alone – Initially the game was not going to be on a grid, and physics-based, so you would dash around the place and slide and roll, etc. A turn-based version was also considered. But eventually a real-time, grid-based system was decided upon because it was actually the most predictable in terms of building and balancing.

Art priorities: 1. Fast, 2. Acceptable

The process was fairly straightforward, I made placeholder art because I didn’t want to spend too much time on art in the beginning, and just like the previous LD, I didn’t really get a chance to update them later. I think this is pretty much going to be the norm rather than the exception. Make okay placeholder art, but don’t waste time on them initially.

I’m privileged in this regard because I’m an artist/designer primarily. But don’t worry, what advantage I have on art I make up in shortcomings on my coding side.

Three dee two dee

The one interesting thing that I feel like is worth talking about technically and art wise is the 3D/2D effect that I have, where the sprites order correctly. Anyone who knows about z-sorting knows it’s a chore, and I didn’t feel like making the game constantly read y values and re-assigning them to different layers at runtime. So I tinkered and came up with this:

By tilting all the sprites at an angle, they overlapped correctly without having to programmatically set each sprite’s layer at runtime. The camera is a perspective camera with a limited field of vision, so it looks 2D, but is set in 3D.

I really liked how the effect came out – there’s a little 3Dness to it but still has the 2D charm that I love. And I didn’t need to make polygons 😛

In action

First of all, thanks very much for all you who played and rated and talked about it! 😀

Initial feedback on the game was super cool  It’s currently sitting on 110 ratings, which I think is the highest I’ve had (though I can’t confirm this, don’t know how to look up past rating counts).

There’s also been a bit of coverage by some really awesome people 😀

By Indiegames.com

By Jupi

By AmyNapkins

By LarryChupacabra

Thanks for reading! If you have a moment, try it out for yourself?

Play PokEscape

After two weeks of hard work, I’m proud to present the post compo version of my chiptune rhythm game, Melody Muncher Deluxe!

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=7285

Please please please try it, especially if you were experiencing input lag issues with the 48hr version, as that should all be fixed now!

I’ve implemented a slew of extra features, including better timing code, animated backgrounds for every level, configuration options, high score saving and loading, a new scoring system, particle effects, more stages (and more music!), a brand new mechanic, and of course, EXPERT MODE!

I’ll let these pretty screenshots speak for themselves:

Underwater stage

Pretty backgrounds.  Also, a new enemy type — hold notes!

One of the hardest songs in the game on expert mode.  You have been warned.

Particle effects!

Full soundtrack – TWENTY THREE (23) SONGS!

By the way, all 23 songs are included in the new extended soundtrack.

Download the extended soundtrack here!

I’ll be writing up a full post-mortem on Melody Muncher sometime soon, so look out for that, too!

Hey! Did you like The Trial of Tyrone Rex? Did you dig those sweet melodies humming modestly in the background?  Well now you can listen them loudly right up in yours ears!  That’s right, the soundtrack for Tyrone Rex is now available on Soundcloud!  Download it! Show it off to your friends!  Bang your head violently to the smooth piano verses riddled about this game’s score!

Go check it out, yo.

Tags: ludum dare #33, music, OST, the trial of tyrone rex

I’m only 2 weeks late, that’s not that bad.

Our game for Ludum Dare 33, Dis-or-der, turned out pretty well.

What went well:

• Story
• Music
• Narration
• Tossing USB drives across the room
• Programming was done quickly

Most of the gameplay was finished on Friday night. The story came out interesting, but dark. Very dark. It’s amazing how fun it is to play catch with large USB drives at midnight.

What didn’t go well:

• Graphics could be better
• Occasional background noise in narration
• Not getting many ratings

I’m not happy with the graphics this time, even though they’re about equivalent to last year’s. Maybe I’m harder to impress now. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, but in terms of shear amount of ratings, we had more last year. I blame the fact that this is late, and my ratings shall now zoom to the hundreds!

Enjoy this animation of Detective Pocket.

Play and rate here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=50639

I finally had some time to do a quick update on the game.

• Better invisibility (shadow stays visible)
• Minor AI fixes
• Quicker player attacks
• Bosses properly colored to match their classes
• All enemy types introduced in the first 4 levels
• Random dungeon direction

Try the game here! The web version is updated, the downloads are the old ones.

My time has been split between working on Greetings, Human, and some other, less digital game projects, but I wanted to share some of the aesthetic progress I’ve made since the compo.

Sketches of possible alien heads/features.

Heads designed in Illustrator and rendered in Unity.

Updated UI implemented in Unity.

I’ve also been doing deeper research into cultural dissonance and what makes cultures different. There’s obviously a lot more than just saying hello and goodbye, including things like:

• Rites of passage
• High-context vs. low-context
• Class systems
• Values (personal, material and societal)

Tags: board to bits, gamedev, greetings human, LD33

Being my first Ludum Dare entry, this experience was really exciting. I was nervous at first, especially when the theme was announced and I had ideas for pretty much every theme except for ‘you are the monster’.

I am not a programmer and only started learning programming a couple of months ago so I knew that my game had to have simple mechanics. I really wanted to submit something that felt finished and I knew that once I had a working mechanic I would leave it at that, created the art, sound and music and submit something that seemed fairly polished. And thus a sphere was created in my unity scene.

I played around with movement, using forces instead of straight translation and if felt like pushing a ball around similarly to monkey ball or other similar games. How could this be a monster though? Add a squishy pink texture, some gross looking pustules, and random pieces of hair and the blob was born! Drawing inspiration from Katamari, I knew that the simple act of running into objects and collecting them to make yourself bigger was already a satisfying mechanic. Add the fact that the objects are running away and screaming and I knew I had some gameplay that was at least a little fun. Using some capsules and cubes I created my first mock up of running away capsules that made the sphere bigger when they were hit and it actually felt pretty good.

Now that the gameplay was sorted I focused on art. I knew that I wouldn’t have time to animate 3D humans running away so I decided on having sprites instead of 3D models. I’m a huge fan of early 3D games made in the 90’s – early 2000’s and one game in particular I drew inspiration from was Carmageddon. There was something so satisfying in that game about spotting a human sprite ahead, lining them up and running them down. The goofy sound effects and billboard sprites in a 3D world created a really arcade style, stupid action feeling that I wanted to recreate in Daylight Blobbery.

Below is a screenshot of all the sprites used in the game, minus some UI elements. Feel free to use them in your own games if you want your games to look like out-dated poo:

Sound Effects

Next I needed sound. This was extremely fun and embarrassing at the same time. The sound effects for the blob squishing around and eating the humans was fun and not too difficult but the humans screaming was definitely out of my comfort zone. It just doesn’t sound quite right unless the screaming is loud enough and I’m glad that I was working in an empty office space where no one could hear me because even though I had to do a pitch adjust for the female screams… It wasn’t as much of an adjustment as I would like to admit. It was also amazing how certain sounds with slight manipulation could be made to sound like something else completely. The car noise is simply me humming a couple of times and adjusting pitch and the explosion when you exit the level is again with my mouth and also just flicking a piece of paper and slowing that sound down a lot and adding an echo.

Music

Music was probably my least favourite part of the game. I’m not really a musician and I knew if I tried to make a really nice track I would waste all my time trying to make it perfect and sacrifice time in other areas so I opened up Fruity Loops, made a simple drums, keys, guitar and bass loop and exported them out ready for the game. I’ve always wanted to create a dynamic soundtrack where different instruments are introduced into the music depending on what the player does and was able to do this by linking each instrument track to the different upgrades the player can get, based on which humans they consume.

PIZZA!

I had pretty much finished making the one level and found it relatively fun to play but something was missing… something cheesy, something delicious. One of my favourite games of the 90’s was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and one of my favourite things about that game and it’s sequels were the hidden collectible objects. I already had movement and jumping and code for collisions so it wasn’t too hard to scatter some hidden objects, add the UI required and the final pizza the puzzle was created. Has anyone found all 8 slices yet?

Wrapping things up

In order to have a polished feel I created a menu screen. This wasn’t hard but it did take quite a bit of time and I’m glad I put it in because I feel that main menus really make a game feel like a finished experience.

I had been warned by previous entrants to not neglect the time required for packaging up the project and submitting it and they weren’t wrong. I submitted multiple times only to test the game out and find something wrong or that my link was incorrect and I found that the way I had created my UI did not work on any resolution but 1920 by 1080 (big mistake). In order to fix this I had to move the UI elements closer to the centre of the screen, ugly I know, but it was the only way in the time I had left to ensure people playing on smaller screens could still see the UI. I had numerous issues with the web player too and I know it doesn’t work great, which I apologise for but I will keep it in mind for the next compo.

Thanks for reading this if you did, and well done to all the entrants for submitting their games. I wish I had more time to rate more of them but with almost 3000 games I will never get to see them all. If you really would like me to play your game, leave a comment and I’ll give it a look.

If you haven’t played Daylight Blobbery yet, please do by clicking here and a rating would be greatly appreciated.

We got a nice big group of people ready to play your games on Twitch. Come along and play with us here http://www.twitch.tv/onlyslightly

Thank you so much guys!

Is there a monster in us? Is there someone who can fix your mental health? Dr. Ann a psychiatrist that found a guy that killed his parents. She puts him under hypnosis and found a shocking discovery. Everything plays of in his memories so it is not real world physics. Join in on the fun in this psychological horror platformer. Find out who is really the monster?

PLAY HERE

Hi all,

A couple of weeks ago I participated to Ludum Dare for the first time. It was a great experience and I learned so much from it. I’ve received encouraging and very valuable feedback. Ludum Dare has a great community behind it. I wrote a post about Ludum Dare on my company’s blog where I try to summarise the lessons that I’ve learned: http://blog.zuehlke.com/en/lessons-from-making-a-game-in-48h/

Thanks for everyone for the feedback.

Jaksa

The only regret I have about this LD is I never found the inner strength and time to finish the game into what my vision of it was, and to be honest I don’t think I ever will, but I did an update to make it a bit more interesting to look at (more varieties of better drawn evil spirits and randomized children drawn instead of being represented with textual smileys).

What the current release is missing the most are cut scenes between game days, in which our gargoyle hero has dialogs with his neighboring gargoyle, which were supposed to reflect on the ungrateful nature of their existance, to do such noble deed yet to be considered monsters, or even worse, stone statues. These were supposed to give the game some soul. In my vision of the finished game, I would rename it The Heart Of Stone.  Touchy, eh? 😛

There were no significant improvements to gameplay, but be sure it is not an easy game and there actually is a gameplay strategy to be discovered. Please don’t judge it to be too easy unless you reached day 4 with all the children alive.

Anyway, if you want to try updated, more colorful version of the game, with more graphics, here it is.

Web (if you can make unity to work in browser):   http://psihooo.com/simgargoyle/webplayer.html

Windows, Mac, Linux standalone (.RAR):   http://psihooo.com/simgargoyle/webplayer.html/standalone/GargoyleSim.rar

Windows, Mac, Linux standalone (.ZIP):   http://psihooo.com/simgargoyle/webplayer.html/standalone/GargoyleSim.zip

Android (though android version is most confusing as I didn’t manage to make dynamic text fields show up, so you won’t see current day or score):  http://psihooo.com/simgargoyle/webplayer.html/standalone/gargoyleSim.apk

Also this QR code should lead to Android version download (you’ll have to enable “install apps from untrusted publishers”):

Hello everyone!

As this was my first jam ever, this is of course, my first post mortem too

The good stuff

• I had a really good time participating in the Jam! Great experience, and theme and time constrains really helped me a lot in focusing. Family was also very supportive, drawing, playtesting and composing sound effects!
• I think I was able to express the gameplay idea I had in mind in a good way. The final product is a complete game, even if it is unpolished in some ways. I think it is challenging and enjoyable! Of course this is not a neutral opinion
• The mood achieved was good. It was a hard decision to make a game that only shows an small portion of the screen but I think it worked. Sound effects worked great and fitted well (even if they are very cheap quality)
• The AI worked fine. They are mostly simple algorithms but I think they are challenging enough. Most of it was based on the pathfinding capabilities of the engine used.
• Godot Engine was great for this type of game. I had little experience using it but I was able to learn it fast. It is easy to use and performed very well. Also exporting to Windows,  Linux and OSX worked great. I develop on Linux and I think Godot has great promise to become THE best open-source engine for game development. And it is open source! You can check it out here: Godot Engine
• Time management was well done. I did not killed myself, was able to sleep well and had a walk outside with my family. I think the jam is a good balance for me. Compo would have been way to stressful.

The bad stuff

• I think the maze turned out a bit hard to solve. I would love to make random mazes and or different ones with scaling difficulty but did not had time.
• Music fits well the game, but the loop I generated was a bit short and some people found it repetitive. I agree.
• Graphics! I opt-out of this category because i did not had time to make my own characters. Maze tiles are made by us, but I think we needed a more coherent and polished style. Some graphics also turned out low res and did not looked very good. I had some good designs made by my family but did not had time to put them in the game!
• Bugs! A bug passed that prevented the game over dialog to show when you loose. Also the switching between warrior and monster not always was smooth and the fog of war code was a bit buggy too. Nothing to prevent players to play it anyway.

I think I will perhaps expand this game to something more complete with different types of mazes and ideas I had. Also I would like to tell a story with it.

I would like to thank all people that had voted so far and also commented. Feedback is very valuable to me.  If you have not yet, you can play my game A-maze-ing Monster here.

BlackQuiltro

Hello, dear developers!

So, I have one last chance to advertise my small platformer with interesting plot,
`The Truth`.

Try it HERE if you want.

One gif intead of a thousand words:

After the Jam, we thought our game would work pretty well on mobile devices, so we did a little more work and have an Android version now. An IOS version will be coming soon too! There’s a link to all the versions of Stay Angry here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54903

Let us know what you think!

Play it here

A bit of gameplay this time. Didn’t rebalance the tank power or spawning unfortunately, I sort of forgot and can’t be bothered to rebuild and reupload all the versions again.

The next update will be the last and the biggest. 6 Days to go, might even make it.

Do try and rate the jam build as well will ya? It doesn’t have missiles though…

Be a shit monster against another shit monster in this 2 player game

Make shit together is way better!!!

Yay!! Grab the shit in the neigbohood!!

Excremonsters!!!
Excremonsters!!!
Excremonsters!!!

Hi everybody,

We wanted to thank you for all your nice comments and support about our little entry for the LD33 : Free Hugs Kraken. We really hadn’t thought to have so much nice words from all the community, and that gives our kraken some love!

We heard that a lot of you guys liked the music, so we wanted to actually show you the links where to listen to them without playing the game.

We will start by the music used for the map. It is from “Skullbeatz” and is called: You Heart 8-bit
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/550799

The one used in combat is from “EaguleGuard” and is called: Captain’s march
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/640152

The flying Hugman theme is from “Holyyeah” and it is called: Pirate Manners
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/503096

The game over theme is from “Yahtzei” and it is called…surprise: End Credits/Game Over
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/608681

And the last one for beating the game is from “EliteFerrex” and is called: 8-Bit Victory
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/253096

Thanks for all the love !

– The happy kraken team

Let players join/leave as they please!

When we were initially brainstorming for the jam, we were all tickled by the idea of controlling laser eye-beams with the analog sticks: each stick would independently control one laser blasting eye. Once the sticks are involved, it’s easy to add more players: just add more eyes! At some point we started talking about leaving all the eyes on screen, but closed, and allowing players to join the game whenever they want. On top of this, we made the number of enemies that spawn in each wave increase proportional to the number of active players so that the game remains challenging with more players (in truth, it is probably a little too challenging).

I really like this concept! I’ve taken to calling it “fluid local multiplayer” and have been thinking about it quite a lot since. I’m not convinced that it really does anything for our game, but I think there are some situations in which fluid local multiplayer might be really really cool.

It doesn’t really work for our game

The reason I suspect this system doesn’t add anything to our game is because a sessions of It Came from the Rift is short and discrete. The round has a clear beginning and end, and there isn’t really enough time for players to need to pick up or put down controllers. It is a fun little trick that I find aesthetically pleasing, but it is a little out of place. One thing it does is eliminate the need for a “join” screen, where players do something inane like choosing a colour or pressing ‘A’, but I much prefer the way Samurai Gunn solved this.

It could enhance long running games

I think fluid local multiplayer might make a big difference in longer running games, like Crawl, Risk, Game of Thrones (the board game), or the upcoming Moon Hunters by kitfox. These sorts of games often require players to join together, play through the entire session, and then end the game together. In some cases, like Risk, players can be eliminated during the game and then must spend the rest of the afternoon eating Cheetos (this is the worst). How many times have you been playing a long running board game and been like “ugh, I have to go for dinner”. If those games were built with concessions for fluid local multiplayer, someone leaving early (or arriving late) wouldn’t be a problem. I kind of look forward to trying to make a game like this: it seems like it would be an interesting design challenge.

Another situation where I can see fluid local multiplayer being cool would be when you show a game at a convention, festival, or meet-up. At events like this, you have players wandering in and out of your magic circle, and they won’t always want to wait for the next round to begin. If a 3-player round has already started, and that 4th arrives, they might not stick around to wait for the current game to finish. This is kind of a special case of the long running game problem: all games are “long-running” when there is a line-up.

What might a fluid local multiplayer game look like?

I don’t doubt that this already exists in some form in some games. I can’t imagine an example just now, but I’m sure they are out there. It would be cool to see a game tailored around the fluid local multiplayer dynamic. Right now I’m hacking on something like a match-3 puzzle: players guide blocks down a puzzle column and match chains of the same colour to earn points. Since fluid local multiplayer has been on my mind, I started imagining a tournament game mode in which players try to “dethrone” the current player. Something like,

• One player starts with the crown, and can earn points by breaking blocks
• There are as many puzzle columns as there are active players
• Players who join can try to steal the crown by dropping blocks on the leading player
• When you eliminate an opponent, you steal their crown and can start earning points

This rule-set has problems, but something similar might be a really fun party game. In my imagination, new puzzle columns come smashing onto the screen, pushing existing columns aside. I can imagine a couch of six players, with the controllers being passed around as each player in turn tries to dethrone the current king of blocks before they earn too many points.

YEP.

And how is that a monster? Is it enough to be an aberration? Or should it slice, burn and impale little birds? (Or not even that, maybe I forced the theme too much, as usual)

Check those bird-impaling skillz

Play Monstreeum

A little post-mortem

Since this is the first game I made since my daughter was born, she is 4 months old now, I planned for a 15-20 hour/work game instead of the usual 30-40 so I focused in the fun part (I love little lander games, always make prototypes but never full games) and thought of a simple art style that I could do myself.

Keeping it short:

What went right:

-I wanted to try pixel art, it was hard to make it look good, but it was perfect to do with only a mouse.

-I also liked how the particles ended, they are my second favorite part of this game.

-Love this kind of game, so I really liked the gameplay

-The multiple ways to kill birds, not as rewarding as I wanted it to be, but I liked the result.

What went wrong:

-The original idea required the birds to nest the trees instead of destroying them (it was a big part of the monstrosity of the tree). Completely forgot about that until the last moments (50 minutes before the deadline the trees weren’t even colliding with the birds). So, no time to add new graphics, just added some ugly ass green particles and called it a day.

-There are a number of bugs (birds that kill themselves count points, forgot to actually destroy the monster-tree when it dies, and the pine-cones).

-The trees are way to blended with the background..

-Sound of some bird deaths turned out weird.

Thats it, if you’ve got a chance to play it, I hope you have fun!

Play Monstreeum

This is a little late post mortem of our game Dragon Defense

Roberto:
In this project I think we really appreciated that we should embrace the KISS mentality, we are learning to stop thinking of fancy ways of doing things most of the time since there is always a simpler and clearer way. I look forward to participate again in a game jam with my wife and my friends.

Sergio:
We learned a lot from LD32 keep everything simpler is the better way to finish a game on a jam, make this game was a fun experience I want to participate on the next jam with the same team they are awesome.

Special Thanks to Ana, she support us with the art on this project.

You can play here.

First off, I want to thank everyone that has played and rated my game. This was my second ludum dare and I feel like I did much better this time and some of the comments make me feel that I didn’t waste my time on it. I look forward to the next one and even have some plans for MiniLD 62, which may include a return of Turrios but that all depends on if I can learn what I need to before then.

If you haven’t checked out my game yet, please do as it is short and worth a quick laugh.

PLAY NOW!

Hi,

Here is a small post-mortem of my LD entry.

What is the game about ?

It’s a frantic game in which you can only fly and hit walls to change direction while avoiding deadly traps.

What went right:

– Constraints: Since I knew I would only have around 1 day to make the game, I put some constraints on gameplay and art. I wanted the gameplay to be really, really simple. What could be more simple than pressing any key to fly ? As far as we were going to fly a lot I made the velocity better if we keep on flying. I soon realised that this simple mechanic could be highly enhanced by bumping on the walls.

I was working on a NES-inspired game when the contest started so I kept the same limitations for my entry: 3-4 colors per sprite and use my personal NES palette. I also tried to limit the sprite size to 16×16. These are very relaxed NES constrained but they work for me.

– CharacterController2D: This is an amazing class to start with animating a character. It saved me a lot of work and allowed me to have pixel precise controls.

– Looking at the classics: I had no idea about the look I wanted to give to the game so I went to Spriters Resource to search for art style. For the backgrounds and platforms, I’ve been heavily inspired by the Castlevania serie. And for the character I took a mix of several old games styles I liked.

– Reusing: Both code(less than 1%) and derived my own art from the project  I was working on. It really helped me to get it on time. I just took the basic character controller of the game I was working on and adapted it to be able to fly. As for the art: I derived a secondary character to create the vampire.

– Testing: I tested each levels a lot, I mean A LOT. It allowed me to create some pixel precise nightmare. So my advice would be: test, test, … test and test again.

What went wrong:

– Time: As far as I’m dad of 3 wonderful children, I don’t have a lot of time to participate to LD. This time I knew I had less than 24h to work on it. Well, I could have had more time but I prefered to play with the kids .

I started by looking at the theme when I woke up and then…  worked on the art from 8 PM till midnight. On sunday I had something like 9-10 hours to work on the code and levels. Not much time.

– Diversity: I wanted to have 10 levels. That sounded like a good number. I ended up with only 2 trap types: pikes and saws. I should probably had better targeting less levels but add more traps and enemies diversity. Everything is a matter of time vs feature.

– Sound: I mostly play games without sound. That’s probably why I didn’t took time to add it to the game. It would have added a lot.

– Jam or Compo: As far I reused some code and art, I entered the Jam. But to be really honest I used around 20 lines of code and just derived personal art. Does it worth not entering the compo ? I don’t know. I worked alone. I strictly applied the rules but I felt like participating to the compo without being able to join it. What do you think ?

– The name: I still don’t know if I like it… I always find it hard to find name for the thing I do. I don’t know if it a good or bad name… what about Super Fly Drake ?… Does the name really matters?

Lil’ Drake : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=18768

Team: just me

Development time: +- 14h

Number of levels: 10

Development tools: Unity, Pixel Maker PRO, Aseprite, Pinta

Useful websites: spriters-resource.com, dafont.com

HiVE interactive, sharing Aliensche! Bovine Metagenomics Expedition

So voting is drawing to a close, and I would like to take this chance to shamelessly invite you to play and rate my entry for LD33.

I have been hard at work on a new post-jam version of the game, as this weekend I’ll be taking the game to my local city to participate in a public play testing event.

I am currently putting together a post mortem, and will be putting that up along with the new version of the game.

This new version will feature many improvements and fixes based on the comments I have already received, so I am looking for more feedback!

So please, if you haven’t already – Play / Rate Aliensche!

Don’t forget to leave a comment so I can work from feedback for my new version!

Thankyou! <3 from HiVE

I had once again, the greatest fun in Ludum Dare. Thanks for everyone who looked at my progress, and thanks to all who rated. 5 More Days. . ..

Hello! You are now reading the post-mortem post for Monstre de Coiffure. I will try to explain what happened during those 3 crazy days, and how we actually got shit done considering time limits.

This Ludum Dare was very messy in terms of work time. Itamar had to work 50% of the time, and both Mati & Itamar got tickets to see the Alt-J concert they have been waiting months for. On different days. Time was of the essence, and we had to find ways to work around the pressure.

Day 0

I got to Mati & Itamar’s house as always. Itamar wasn’t around (he works as a barista) so me and Mati enjoyed some oriental food and mayonnaise. We set up our battle stations and hit the bed. Itamar came later in the night.

Day 1

We woke up and found out about the theme. We all went “meh” simultaneously, because we had really been hoping for some of the other themes to win. The Ernst’s dad made us some delicious hot cheese burekas, and we started cracking on game ideas. Mati thought of a game about working at a monster beauty salon. We immediately loved the idea and started playing around with it, but soon Itamar had to leave for work

A few hours later, Mati had some pretty sprites ready, while I started to have doubts about the game. I didn’t find what would make it fun or addicting.

I seriously started thinking about dropping the idea but Mati convinced me to continue working on it to at least get something playable going, and then decide if we wanted to keep it. I drew a disgusting placeholder and coded some basic stuff like buttons and basic effects. Fast forward a few hours and we had a basic engine ready.

At the time you could only interact with the eyes that would follow a base monster sprite around, making it seem like they were part of it. I took a second look at what we had so far, and actually began to like. I’m really glad Mati convinced me into working on the game. I continued to spew code while Mati continued to design some stuff, and like 4 hours later we had all of the basic tools just about ready gameplay-wise.

I’m actually really proud of how loop-able this gif is.

We were all blown away by the amount of love this gif has gotten, so that gave us a lot of motivation to keep working on the game.

At this point Itamar came back from work and immediately started the monster bases, but we soon had to go to sleep.

Day 2

We all woke up to some delicious cereal. We decided we’d work mostly on the monsters, a background, and the random traits engine.

Itamar spent all day working on the monster bases, which later became our trusty customers:

Longhead

Blobas

Zombdatner

Ogtarine Core

Each monster base has a bunch of unique parts that belong to it (eyes and mouths) while we also had some generic parts that would fit on most monsters.

For example, this mouth and eye are exclusive to Longhead:

While these look good on anyone:

The way the randomization works is by picking a base body, and dictating some parameters that would decide the number of eyes and mouths the monster had, and where everything would be positioned on its’ face. This beauty AI was very time consuming to write, but I think the monstrosities it can create are worth it in the end:

After we had a good old-fashioned Lonebot Pizza Party™, Mati worked hard on a nice barbershop background while I worked on some cheesy * * * particle effects * * * and soon we had something real nice going:

Itamar and I spent literally hours optimizing the monster randomization to make sure almost all combinations looked horrifyingly tasty, while Mati churned hours on finalizing the background. Soon Itamar had to leave for the concert and it was just me and Mati, left listening to Mario Paint covers of Shrek songs. (also Monsters Inc. music and French cafe music because reasons)

Suezo had started working on music and sound effects and we hit the bed.

Day 3

We all woke up to hear Suezo’s work. He made us some awesome sound effects for spraying and painting stuff, however, the music he made us wasn’t really what we wanted.

We were really hoping to have some layed-back-sorta-ironic French musette music in the background, but instead Jason took it in a more of a stressed French pizzeria shop working around the clock theme. It was really good, but it wasn’t what we were looking for, so unfortunately we had to drop it. You can still listen to it here:

Itamar had to work again and Mati and I were left together again to finish up the game. Mati finished up any missing sprites, while also finally finishing the background (which is made of two parts – a background and a foreground)

I started cracking on the actual gameplay-y part of the game. I wrote an accuracy algorithm which would produce a number between 0 – 1 that would represent the accuracy of any beautification done on the monster to the requested features on the mannequin. I added some progression, such as requests becoming more absurd as you would play, or small things like needing to be more accurate when applying lipstick.

I won’t bore you too much with how the game evaluates your score and increases in difficulty as you play, while also preventing repetition in generated monsters.

We churned work hours but soon Mati had to go to the same concert Itamar went to yesterday. I went home and continued working from there.

I still had to implement a Game Over screen, a tutorial, sound effects and music. I created a simple app-esque screen with some stats about your accuracy and how many rounds you finished, and a credits scene. It actually was a lot of work and time was running out, and I couldn’t stay up late because I had to go back to the army in the morning. The game was pretty much done at this point, but it had no sound.

I added two (hopefully) unlicensed musette tracks from YouTube and recorded sounds (such as my Ukulele’s strings for applying mascara or those monster moans you hear when you finish a round).

I was really under pressure, but I had made in time. Then I thought about a funny idea. I got some generic screams and yells from findsounds and implemented into the game without Mati & Itamar’s knowledge. I think they actually add a lot 😀

And that’s it! I was done, just on time. My head was on fire and I went to sleep only to wake up to another lengthy army day.

What went right

• Fun. This isn’t something I usually say, but I think the game is really fun to play. It’s easy to pick up and learn.
• Polish. Despite the many constraints we had to work with, we still managed to push a shiny monstrosity.
• Graphics. I really want to give the bros some mad props here. I think the monsters look amazing, and everything just clicks together when you look at it.
• Variety. The gameplay isn’t repetitive and you’ll get a bunch of crazy monster combinations when playing, which is something really important a small game like this should have.
• Humor. It’s pretty funny, right? Right?

What went wrong

• Time. Real life really decided to interfere with the development of this game, and we had to work under a ton of pressure to push it out.
• Tutorial. I didn’t have too much time to implement a proper tutorial, so what we have now is admittedly kind of a mess, in terms of a tutorial.
• Feedback. We originally wanted to implement a visual feedback on how you did each round. Itamar even drew some cool score sprites that would pop from under the bell when you’d finish a stage, but I was just too exhausted to implement it. I’m really sad it had to be that way.
  

That’s it. We had a ton of fun working on this disgusting abomination, and we really hope the world likes it. I think this might’ve been one of our best Ludum Dares to date.

Play/Rate Monstre de Coiffure here

– Lonebot ♥♥

P.S: Happy birthday Mati, you magnificient Afro baring hero.

I wanted to have finished this long ago but time wasn’t on my side. Anyway, here it is!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=36237

This was the first time I wasn’t working alone for a jam. I thought that would allow us to make something a bit more elaborated but boy was I wrong! First times are always difficult. For the first time I felt like I needed to make a post jam version just to make up for how broken the original was!

The main problem arrived before the jam even started. I had some ideas that could potentially be fit for some of the most voted themes… Except the one that got selected, ha! So instead of ditching them altoghether and try to come up with a new one, I made the mistake of trying to salvage one of the ideas and adapt it around the theme. Only that for it to make sense, it would lose some of the simplicity that made it feasible.

I had told my friend @musivara about it, he liked it and offered his help making the graphical part. And I have to thank him for that, because it was the best part of it. But as we worked, the idea kept changing, and that’s a bad thing. We had to cut features like crazy because we had spent half of the time and the game couldn’t even be tested! I also wanted to experiment a bit writing some dialogue and some other things, but we needed to finish something first.

So, as you can see, we had a bit of an overscoping problem. The good news is that as broken as it was at first, this was quite a learning experience and that’s the most valuable thing you can get from a failure.

Let’s hope next time we do better!

And please let us know what you think of the new version in the comments!

Hey, so is the 2nd time i tried 

At LD32 i had the goal to get into rank 100 in any category, maybe it was to high of a gold, but i got

so i wasn’t disappointed 

So i figured i could do a bit better this time. So i tried my best again. I had a few more problems then last time, i planed too much and had too less time do to anything i had planed. So i got no music, and there are some other minor thing i would have changed with more time.

But in the end i am happy with my game and hope you can enjoy it. I did draw some (not so) pretty pictures with my mouse this time, please have a look

->To the game entry<-

Hello fellow indie developers!

First of all thanks to all of you who tried our game and all who will try it in the future, this has been our first Ludum Dare and the first finished game for all of us. A few weeks ago one of our programmers had to insist a lot on participating, we finally did and we couldn’t be happier with the decision.

How did it go?

So, after a long working day, all of us got together, setting up the room for the upcoming 72hours, the closer the countdown was to 0, the more nervous we felt. After the topic was announced we spent about two hours deciding what to do, good and bad ideas, in or out of the topic, they all seemed too hard for us. It was already 4am and we headed home feeling our own defeat. Next morning (9:30am) we came out with a rough idea, spent about an hour figuring out the mechanics and what had to be done… but not deeply enough.

The first few hours of coding went well (we have 2 programmers in the team), the so called “pair-programming” was working wonders as they both connected as a true hive mind, at least while it lasted. Everything started to rumble after a few hours, as everyone worked from their computer, we then realized that the preproduction on the programming side wasn’t enough, so the “spaghetti” became the true monster of our game. No version control was used, and so, as soon as both codes were put together half of it had to be reorganized to fit the other half.

When it comes to graphics, we really messed up on the aspect ratio. It was all designed keeping in mind that it should be usable on mobile devices (for the future) and computers, so we ended up making it 1:1. Obviously this isn’t the answer for any of both platforms, provably the solution would be to draw everything separately and to put it all together with a relatively large background (wouldn’t it be?). Also, with better managing of time, we would have done more animations and a better hit reaction for the “victim”.

The sound design went alright, everything but the alarm noise and the “tic-tac” on the song was made by us. The main song came out quite quickly, which is nice. But we lacked on testing the sounds straight in the game, we waited until a whole bunch of them were ready and polished only to realize that they didn’t fit.

GOOD:

– Ludum dare in general, we had fun, we all survived, it’s something yeeeey!

– General idea of the game, simple, easy to make (+1for preproduction).

– The fun factor and sense of humour turned to be the main factor.

– There’s not much on the game, but what’s there, is solid and works fine (at least for what we have seen)

– We are very happy with the result, even with all the bad stuff I’m about to write below…

BAD:

– No version control was used for programming.

– Tutorial needs to be more comprehensive as some testers ends up spamming the mouse button as well as the space bar to raise the bar (the space bar can be spammed, but only has an effect once the bar gets to the target zone).

– Preproduction for programming was far from enough (-1 for preproduction)

– The drawn scene screen (canvas) ratio was horrible (-1 for preproduction)

– Ended up making more music and sounds that what we finally implemented (-1 for preproduction)

– We should have prepared all our food the day before… ehem… les pizza next time ehem…

– Well skill and speed will improve eventually, won’t they? :C

…

Preproduction result: -3     ->HORRIBLU!

NEW VERSION 1.1.0 comme 14.9.2015

http://gamejolt.com/games/monsters-card-game/88439

• 20 NEW cards
• 4 NEW cards functions
• 1 NEW card (Artifacts)
• SHOP
• 12 repainted cards
• SLIZZIGNOT (new currency)
• 1 NEW oponent
• displaying ATTACK and DEFENCE
• SAVE/LOAD

Tags: card games, monsters

Hey,

my game is nearly at 50 votes and I would love it if it could reach that milestone.

You can play it here!

Thank you!

Hello to everyone reading this!
This was a fun contest and my first time participating ( I heard of it 1 Month ago and instantly decided to take part in it!).
This also is one of my first finished games and the first one someone really played!

Unnecessary Informations

So I decided to take part in it, but I didn’t want to try it alone because I wasn’t sure if I could finish something in time
so I asked a friend of mine if he wanted to participate with me in the jam
But he had a power cut so he wasn’t able to take part.
After being hyped so much I thought , why not take part in the contest but alone 😀

The contest happened 3am saturday in the holidays for me so I waited till that time with someone else.
After seeing the theme and being confused I decided to play a Counter Strike match and brainstorm while doing so
I thought about one word: CHICKENS!

And while watching a stream I finished the last of it.
The only thing worth meaning was the fact that I almost forgot to add a boss and added it in the last 1h

The Game itself

The idea of the game was basic: You play a fox who is hunting chickens and later gets the ability to steal the enemy’s skills.
I already had a basic engine written so I decided to go with it which lead to a rather slow paced fighting.
I don’t think it was too bad but at least on some points plain boring. Adding dialogs was rather hard for me because I never did that before but I guess it went ok.
While making the art for the game I followed the design of another game assets I made so picking colors and so on wasn’t too hard and I was able to get quick results.
Music was the hardest part for me. I just copied another thing I made earlier and altered it and changing the speed of it in different levels.
Sounds were made with a generator so it didn’t take too much time. Programming was the easiest part on my side because I’m quite fast at writing such stuff but
because a game isn’t just some complicated features I had quite a hard time making something “fun”.
Porting was something new to me. I never had a need to be able to run my Programms/Games on Linux/MacOS so making it compatible was a complete new thing for me but having it work on
almost every system is something nice to say about a java application 😀

Conclusion

What went right:
– Finishing a game
– Making Graphics for my game
– Having enough levels
– Having fun making it

What went wrong:
– Too slow paced fighting
– Not enough instructions and explanations
– Linux and Mac OS compatible (fixed later)

Well I don’t think I did too good but I had a real good time making this!
Also I never had so much feedback for something I made!
And I had much fun playing games others made 😀

I hope I’ll get time to participate next time as well! 😀

So thanks to everyone who read this post, played my games ( especially everyone who commented) and everyone who made a game I played 😀
Oh and I hope you don’t mind my bad english ^^

If someone wants to play it:

Click here

New forum – Game Dev Team Finder – Find teams and people for your teams. http://gamedevteamfinder.haymanquarterly.com 

It’s a brand new forum, so there are no listings yet.  Just trying to spread the word and provide a helpful service to the game dev community.

Alright, it’s about time I wrote a post mortem. It’s my second (successful) ludum dare, and although I had to skip the compo and go for the jam, I’m really happy with the results.

‘Artifacts Of Monstrosity’ is a top down zelda style action-rpg / shoot em up (I guess), with a big world to explore and a stupid boss to defeat after collecting 4 mostly useless items.

SOME THINGS THAT WENT RIGHT

Code Reuse:

I had already been messing around porting my LD28 game from C++ to Javascript, so I just borrowed code from that as needed. It was pretty tightly coupled to the other game, and I ended up needing to rewrite a lot of stuff, but it still saved me a ton of time.

Graphics And Animation:

I’m kind of surprised with how well the animation came out for the main character. I guess all those pixel art tutorials I read sunk in somehow. As nice as everything looks though, I’m thinking of adopting a simpler style for future dares, to have more time to spend on gameplay.

Level Design:

I used Tiled for my level editing, which has its annoyances but overall was infinitely nicer than what I did for my last LD game, which was png images with colors keyed to tiles and objects.

With the extra time from choosing to go for the jam, I went nuts making whole bunch of interesting areas to explore, helping create a sense of adventure.

Simple Gameplay:

My original ideas were over-ambitious: I wanted inventory menus, equippable gear, shops, minibosses, etc. and I had to cut it all. The end game is really simple, but still fun, I think.

Ludum dare helps you realize games don’t need a lot of ‘stuff’ as long as the fundamentals are right

THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO RIGHT

Motivation:

I was way more motivated for my first LD, which was good because I did all the engine code from scratch on that one. This time I used an existing codebase, but I ended up losing most of the time gained due to a lazier pace and procrastination.  On the other hand rushing the whole time sucks, so maybe it’s better to be prepared and avoid the need to work frantically.

Tedious Code Writing:

Even drawing from an existing codebase, I still ended up needing to write collision handlers and resources management scripts, etc. I need to put this stuff together into a complete, flexible engine.

Too Much Unfinished Stuff:

I didn’t prioritize well enough, so a lot of things were missed — no sound for one, but I also left a lot of signs and npc’s around that don’t do anything when clicked on and that bugs the crap out of me.

THINGS THAT IM NOT SURE ABOUT

Tiled:

Tiled is a pretty fantastic editor in a lot of ways, and lets you build maps fast, but it also has some annoying aspects. I had kind of a weird workflow and ended up writing a bunch of ruby scripts to process Tiled’s output.

Javascript:

Javascript is really awesome despite it’s quirks, and I love that the programs I write can run anywhere. But I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with dynamic typing. Every time I spend 20 minutes debugging some stupid typo that would have been caught at compile time in a static language I die a little inside.

POST JAM EDITION?

I’m planning on making a post jam edition when I get time.

Some things I’m planning (besides fixing stuff): music (I got some from open game art picked out), sound effects, new areas, bigger dungeons, enemy variations, a better final boss, more signs and monsters to talk to, and maybe even shops of some kind. I’ll make a post when I finish it.

In the meantime, Click here to Play ‘Artifacts Of Monstrosity’.  It runs in the browser!

When the theme was announced for this Ludum Dare, Britt and I were less than impressed.  It seemed generic and not to really allow for interesting theme-based gameplay, only narrative and setting.

A lot of people have been commenting that they didn’t get how our game, Wayward, fit into the theme–either because they didn’t complete the game, or that it was intentionally pretty subtle.  Our sighs of despair at the announcement of the theme were that of understanding what would come of it: a list for which I took the time to write on a whiteboard with a caption “DON’T DO THESE, THEY’RE TOO OBVIOUS.”

The list of obvious choices and what not to do (for us!) for this jam:

1. Pull the rug out from under the player at the end and shout in their faces “YOU WERE THE MONSTER ALL ALONG!!!”
2. “Goomba Simulator”, or, adopting the opposite role of the typical protagonist.
3. Kaiju

What this meant for us was that we had to come up with an interesting and virtually impossible narrative and setting for a hard as nails theme.  We didn’t want to be obvious, we wanted to be clever.  The first idea, in this regard, was a monster truck arena game called You are the Monster(truck).  More and more ideas that seemed more punny than anything (including, I fuck you not, playing as Monster Energy drink pouring into somebodies body), but we couldn’t resolve on anything.

We landed on the idea that we would make the player, not the main character, the monster.

Ethics and moral questioning aside, Wayward is a game about finding and killing the monster that stole the babies from your village.  A trail of what we can assume are said babies’ blood leads the way, and you explore the Wintery wonderland we set up, fighting other monsters along the way.

One thing I did to push the theme along the course of the adventure (before the climax) was to make fighting the monsters completely optional if you were to study your surroundings.  The minor monsters in the game are territorial and only spawn if you get very close to a checkpoint-campfire.  Some players have realized this, but naturally, in a game where you have a bow, you feel inclined to aggro the enemy anyway and take them out.

After a few encounters, skipped or not, you finally reach the end of the blood trail.  Here is where I wanted to avoid the “HAHA GOTCHA, YOU WERE THE MONSTER!”  Instead of killing the mother and having a bunch of babies pop out from the brush and wimper and make you feel bad about what you just unknowingly did, I have the mother and the cubs shown in plain site around a pool of blood.  No more baby.  The aggro range is very small for this, and you cannot aggro simply by shooting the mother.  At this point, a player wary of the theme will or will not come to understand.

A moral side note on monsters:

The entire story and question of “Who is the Monster?” can be realized at this point.  The Beast is the monster in the main character’s eyes for eating the babies.  From the beast’s perspective, there are no other animals in the game, so it was killing out of the necessity to feed its young.  The main character is the Monster from the perspective of the Beast, and depending on her moral standing, also the Player.

Which leads to the actualization of the theme.  Objectively, if the Player of the game finishes the deed, she is the Monster.  My favorite comment on the game yet was “It was very beautiful, but I’m sad you made me kill the mother at the end.”

I didn’t make you do anything.  The only way to not be the Monster is to not finish the game and just turn it off.

-C

In the midst of the jam, our fearless artist Harris Nakajima composed 8 incredible tracks. Using Musescore, Harris put together some sound that our graphics can only hope to compare to.

Bright Darkness

Aside from providing a rough sketch of the last level, Harris wrote music for the entire jam.

Sky without Stars

Resulting from the staggering 273 MB of .wav files was an addition to Tenebrous Expanse that helped solidify our mood, and thus overall feel. There is no doubt that Harris’s efforts will sway the final scores of our entry.

Droplet of Light

After some “polishing” (although personally I found very few flaws in the original music), the updated tracks were uploaded in our post-jam version as well as soundcloud.

If you have time, go check out Tenebrous Expanse (ten·e·brous ex·panse) and let us know what you think of the audio. We hope the visual effects mesh nicely with the tone, and ultimately result in a more coherent mood. You can also read more about the development of TE here.

Our group is going to make a final push towards 100% coolness this weekend, if you leave a comment we might just have to return the favor!

– WubAlliance

Greetings! I hope by now you have all had the pleasure (or misfortune) to play my LD33 entry: “Trump 3016“. The game stars Donald David Trump as he strives to reach Saturn in time after losing the Pluto debate to the cyborg-enhanced Hillary…. you know what, let’s try this again:

It’s a Trump-themed RPG Roguelike! (Dare I say… the only Trump-themed RPG Roguelike!)

The Good

• I started with a simple Ruby script I had written to generate random dungeons. This was a helpful jump-start (which relegated me to the Jam, but that’s fine).
• I really love the feel of exploring the random floors. This is what I’m most proud of.
• Comments from my last 2 entries indicated people liked my humor and storytelling best (graphics and audio least). So I focused on that.
• There is an absolute abundance of Trump out there. The story basically wrote itself.

The Bad

• The battle system is woefully unbalanced. The game is unplayable past level 10.
• I didn’t count on having pacing issues; 72 hours is a lot harder than 48! Props to all you Jammers.
• RPG Maker has its own host of problems. I totally understand if you are allergic to RTP (but at least watch the intro!)

The Ugly

• I lost a lot of time tracking down assets. It’s easier when I can just draw something (terrible) and be done with it.
• This game might become a whole lot less funny in 2016. Sorry in advance!

Some other cool things about the game:

• If you talk to the suited NPC near the doors, you can get a “Fabric of Reality” early  —this lets you enter the random seed for the next level, which will consistently generate the same level each time. Try entering your name, or any random information. Maybe you’ll spawn a cool layout.
• It is cross-platform, which is no small feat for RPG Maker games.
• It exists! We now live in a world where a Trump-themed RPG Roguelike exists! Huzzah, and you’re welcome!

If I were to do this again, I’d enlist someone else to do the battle balancing, or I’d streamline combat to focus on HP, Attack, and Defense (and Ikari).

I had a lot of fun making this game, although my next LD probably won’t use RPG Maker.

The game I worked is called Corruption and was submitted under a group account we made called MapleQuest (an inside joke). I’m a bit late in writing this but did want to get it out before the LD came to a close. The delay away has given me some time to reflect on it as well. We met on Reddit just a few days before the jam with the intention of entering something into LD33. It was everyone’s first jam and we were all pretty motivated to make something.

It started well, but in my opinion quickly fell apart.

We had some ideas which looking back on now may have been a bit overly ambitious. Our original intention was to take the theme of “You are the Monster” and make a game based on the concept of “Are you the Monster?”, a platformer where you would go through the game and be given the moral choice of destroying stuff around you to gain power, or ‘doing the right thing’ by leaving it be. The idea didn’t turn out to work as expected and we started re-iterating on the idea… and re-iterating… and re-iterating… throughout the whole jam. As a group we had a hard time coming to any sort of agreement on what mechanics worked, what didn’t, and what it takes to make a fun game.

The end result is something that uses the art and sound assets from our previous ideas and tries to put some new game around them. The conclusion to go with the mechanics in the final game were chosen within the last 6 hours before the deadline and the end result is an idea that isn’t really fleshed out as well as it could be. If this game has one fatal flaw, it’s that the mechanics aren’t clearly demonstrated to the player early on. There’s also a lot of new stuff happening you don’t really see happening in a platformer which means it’s not as instantly intuitive and can cause confusion:

• the aggro range of the shadow expands over time
• the shadow corrupts creatures into enemies
• killing enemies ups your corruption meter in the top right and lowers the shadow’s aggression
• if your corruption meter fills completely you get hurt

The end result is something that technically works but doesn’t really add any additional fun or strategy to the game. The systems feel more like an arbitrary constraint than something new you can use to your advantage.

I’m still quite new to game development and it’s the first platformer I made that wasn’t a quick (made in less than an hour) prototype. Something I didn’t realize before being in the designer seat (as opposed to the player seat) is how hard it is add the subtleties to a platformer that make it “feel good”. As a few of the comments mentioned, having the player move whenever they attack can be very frustrating and adds a lot of difficulty (as opposed to challenge). Having a stationary attack in addition to the dashing attack could have helped a lot. Making the attack feel a bit weightier, like slowing down the player when they collide with an enemy, and not having the enemy instantly vanish and instead recoil from the attack, would have helped a lot to make the dash not feel as wild.

The Good:

• The quantity of art assets and animations our single artist was able to put out in the small time frame was impressive.
• The sound is great. The way the sound can add so much life to a world is something I always seem to underestimate until I hear it.
• I’m happy with the particle and WebGL effects on the shadow creature and checkpoints. They’re not something I’d really implemented much before and worked out better than expected.
• The incredibly amount of work the three of us did in the last 6 hours before the deadline. Once the mechanics were set in stone and we had all committed to them, it seemed like everyone got into this hyper-productive zen like state and just started pumping out work fast.
• The level’s flow. There wasn’t a lot of time to get others to playtest the level. For a first go at things I think it flows well and does a good job of making the direction you need to go clear without too many markers. I think the checkpoints are spaced out well between the action (for the most part) to make a decent rhythm, with high and low points.

The Bad:

• Too complicated an idea to start, and too much wasted time on new ideas that didn’t work.
• Inability to come to an agreement on what would be “good” (a bit of analysis paralysis).
• Failure to demonstrate or show the player the new mechanics in a clear, intuitive way.
• The level’s design (tying in to the last point, where it doesn’t utilize the mechanics well).
• The lack of a good “platformer feel” for the game.
• Having art assets that were really specific made adding new things to correct the game’s flaws near the end more difficult (this isn’t in any way a fault of the artist, so much as the overall planning for the game).

A lot of the bad comes down to just not having a fun idea and having too much conflict on what would work. When I look at the body of work for the three of us have done individually I’m confident we could have made something better than this in a different situation. Everyone in our group was really critical of their own pieces near the end; Larissa was making comments about how the perspective of certain assets were off (I didn’t notice, but I don’t have an eye for that stuff); Mat was sending updated and improved sounds even a bit into the submission hour (while the new ones were better, the old ones were certainly adequate); I was pretty pessimistic about most of the design choices by the end, and trying my best to fix what I could into something playable.

I suppose it’s natural for everyone to be hyper-critical of their own work. On the one hand it feels like a failure; the game isn’t very fun and doesn’t come close to meeting the potential the group had to make a good game. On the other hand, with all the issues we faced in it’s creation we did still did come out with a finished game which does feel at least a little satisfying. If nothing else I learned a lot more about game design and have a few new tricks in my game-making toolbelt.

The high score board is filling up for MiniGolf Endless MMO so I thought I’d share 3 tips to help you come in under par!

1. Understand the power meter
When you swipe your finger back (angry-birds style) the line extending from your ball indicates how hard the ball will be hit. The maximum power available depends on where your ball is laying on the ground. At the top end you have the first tee-shot, here the power bar is red-coloured to indicate maximum power – let it fly! On the other hand, if your ball is in the rough or worse, a bunker, you’ll only be able to hit a short shot. Keep on the fairway to keep your score down!

2. Read the greens
First things first, the ball will only drop in the hole once it has landed and is rolling! The second thing to realise is that it must be going below a certain speed to drop in the hole (just like real golf – I speak from bitter experience!). So you can’t just blast your ball across the green at full power and hope for the best, you have to observe the gradients indicated by the long arrows (steep slope) and short arrows (shallow slope) to judge where your ball will come to rest. Then give it a little “tap-tap-eroo” as Chubbs would say 😉

3. Keep an eye on the wind
The wind is shown by the rotating arrow upper left on screen and the mph display. A speed above 5 will really affect all shots, though the longer the shot the bigger the deviation. Balls are only affected while in the air so after the bounce it’ll run on in a straight line from there. Something else to bear in mind is the wind changes randomly between shots, but it’s the same for all players so it’s “fair” in that sense.

I hope you found these tips useful and fun! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game! Cheers 😀

PLAY AND RATE HERE

Howdy Gamers!
This may not be the best time whilst LD #33 is finishing up but I would like to announce an early release of my game. This is my first popular title Mine Upgrade! Spend cash on equipment and upgrades to build up your mine as you power through precious minerals. Stack up cash and head up to the highscores!

You may also like to try out the first release of Beta here. Thankyou and enjoy
Edit: Many updates later..

Infinity dash was a project from a couple of years ago for a mini LD, which I never got round to posting due to the excessive amount of glitches, however now I have finally decided to remake the game for a mobile platform.

The aim is to run for as long as possible and pick up bonuses along the way. Unfortunately at the moment it is only available on the Google play store, but with more support I could release to windows and possibly IOS (it is already available on the Amazon app store as well).

Here is the link to the app and some screenshots(ratings and reviews would be greatly appreciated):https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JosephGilesCooper.InfinityDash

http://joseaper.itch.io/infinity-dash

if(worst comes to worst just search for it on the store and look for this image)

{

}

Also check out my LD33 Game “You are a Zombie?”

Hey, we just finished the post-Jam version of our LD33 entry.

Link to the Post-Jam :

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5143153/LD33PostCompo1-0/index.html

We added a proper menu and a in-game tutorial. Polished some arts and added sound effects. There is just three levels, but we are happy with the results.

Link to our entry:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=15108

The future

We hope to make something of this game, more levels, story, and other stuff. For now we will just wait to see what to do next. See you until the next Ludum Dare!

Heroes better know what’s coming when they get you down to low HP – complete annihilation!

Click Here to play Player Rush!

Oh, and don’t forget to tweet us your game if you’re still looking for people to play + rate!

Just remember. If you fire the entire United States, be sure you have a sure fire escape plan. -> [Escape from Twump Tower] by 01010111

Tags: by 01010111, Donald Trump Parody, Escape from Twump Tower, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, LD33

Hi!

As an wannabe artist/animator :s i think games can be a very powerfull form of art and i am really interested in creating strong moods and graphics  for those universes .
I think graphics a long with the sound can create a really powerfull environment for a story to evolve and  create a strong and visually appealing gameplay experience for the player. Despite all that, i only focused on visual graphics to do my Top 5  not on the congregating of the graphics,  sound and strotytelling.

Hope you like them and fell free to play them and see this awesome games 

5- Mobs, Inc.

   4- Nimble

3- The Mammoth: A Cave Painting

2- Adula

1- The Old One

We are the creators of the game called Me . Feel free to check it out

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56160

Here is our selection of the best entries we could try during theses last weeks.
So, have fun !

Great gameplays

Gh4st
A great puzzle-game with excellent mechanics ! Unfortunately a little to short.

Mobs, inc.
Almost everything is perfect in this game !

Orange
Really nice mechanics but where is the theme ?

Who cares the M%rtgage
Simple but with a really addictive gameplay !

Delicious Cortex
Very impressive new kind of gameplay !

Takodemon
100% Innovation !

RGBlob
Great puzzle game with blobs and colors.

Funniest games

Monstre de Coiffure
Non-stop funny ambiance. A great LOL game !

Internship adventure
Ok, it’s our game, but, yes, it’s really funny ^^.

Monster Academy
Do you like Warioware ? So be a good monster !

Goomba Simulator 2015
Great story around a goomba. What will happed to him?

Artistic games

DAMNED
Great ambiance and artistic direction

Melody Muncher
Tis is a rythme game, so, of course, the music is great !

Hop’s Hope
Really nice ambiance with a day/night cycle.

The Bear Hunter
Do you like Zelda 3 ? You’ll love graphics of this game !

Meet the Monsta
Graphics design is so great !

Me
Great ambiance with interesting graphics.

Anxiety : Last Night
Maybe the most scary game of this LD33 !

Tags: best games, favorite games, selection

Hi! 😀

This is Drunkteam, the development team behind Drunkula, which is our first project for a LD ever.

If you are curious, you can play it here right now.

Although we had never worked together, development came about smoothly. In many ways, you could even say we were relaxed, the most difficult part of the process being to choose the kind of game to work on. We discussed for more than 3 hours, unable to reach an agreement until Antonio, one of our  artists, who had been pretty much silent during the debate, jumped into the ring with the idea of using a drunk vampire as the protagonist. From that point on, the idea of making a point-and-click adventure out of it came pretty much naturally and we all begun working on our parts and expanding the concept.

What went great:

• First, and most obviously, we all learned a lot from this experience: for our programmers it was the first time building a game from the ground up, working with the Love2d framework and Lua language; us artists learned a lot about photoshop and the basics of animation… In general, this was a very good experience to enhance teamwork.
• The aesthetics, music and sfx were spot-on and established very well the kind of dark, yet wacky and confusing atmosphere you would want in a game about a drunk vampire.

OST-Drunkula by Oliver Moya Bueno

• The difficulty curve was also well established with 3 levels, the first of which was to get people to realise the basic point-and-click mechanic of the game, and a more challenging final level.

What didn’t go so right:

• For us artists this was our first time animating. It was really fun and we learned a lot from it, but we would have liked a little more time to experiment with the basics.
• As prety much all of us were new to this, we prefered to keep the game short and simple but as many people acknowleged it ended up being way too short.
• As much as the music and sfx were great, some people reckon they get jarring the longer the game lasts.
• The ideal situation would have been having a playable demo on the first day, but due to the fact that all of us were learning our part on the spot, we couldn’t see how the game played until the last minute, which made for a bit of a buggy experience.

Anyway, this was a great experience and we are really glad of the result and the learning process and would me most thankful if you took 5 minutes of your time to try our game out and rate it, which you can do right here.

Thanks! 😉

Hello, all! We here at Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) are at it again! We’re playing and rating your games right now! Also remember that our last stream will be on Saturday, from 7:00 PM EST to midnight! Check us out at Twitch.tv here (those on the chat will get priority):

http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Want to submit a game? Our submission form is available here:

http://goo.gl/forms/uqzjFQqK1p

If you haven’t already, check out our games, too:

• Moon Witch
• Fly On The Wall
• Huntingman Championship
• Lardum
• Can I Haz Monsters?

Tags: Tech Valley Game Space, TVGS, twitch

Is anyone else having problems making a new account? I’d assume it’s a result of us changing websites soon, but I want to make sure it’s not something on my end.

The theme this time was “You are the monster”. This is an interesting theme as it’s open to many interpretations. We decided to avoid a typical monster scenario and went with an idea about someone having a monstrous personality instead, a real jerk. This lead to an idea of a speed dating sim with the twist being the player character is cursed with this monstrous personality and has to somehow “Win” a date.

Before entering the Ludum Dare we both agreed that we would only take part if we could come up with an idea that could also be implemented into our real game (we’ll talk about that later). With the speed dating idea we knew we could do it with a simple dialogue tree system. Our real game needed a dialogue tree system. We could kill two birds with one code! We agreed to subject ourselves to a weekend of torture.

You know what? It was a pleasure! It couldn’t have gone any smoother. Our last LD entry was pretty stressful. We completed a playable game but we could have done so much more. We worked really hard but in hindsight I wish we had worked that hard on our real game instead. Creating a system for this LD that benefits our real game meant that if we didn’t finish the Jam or made something truly awful (verdict is still out) then at least we’ve made some serious progress on our dialogue system. Which we have!

We needed some simple characters first. We came up with cardboard box characters. I had literally just woken up and it was the first thing that popped into my head. We needed something simple and quick to draw, a box is easy to draw so we went with it not stopping to think if it was stupid.

Then we thought we could call the player character Carl Boardbox. We didn’t need to stop to think if it was stupid, we knew it was yet we kept going anyway. Why didn’t we stop…?

Then we needed the dialogue and the dialogue system. The dialogue system came together nicely with features such as camera and animation control within the UI so the idiot writer can help the programmer. We wrote the dialogue and slapped it in the game and for the most part the whole thing worked!

We added the Win/Lose conditions and a final cutscene and we were golden. Tweaks and polish later and we have a silly, simple game that’s left us with tools to continue making our real game. All in all a very rewarding Ludum Dare this time around. I look forward to #34!

Please give our game a try if you haven’t already!

Play
Talkit Dialog Editor

Visit our Website: http://pointbleepstudios.xyz

Hello everyone!

I’d like to share with you a bit about the character design of my first compo entry “15”. Approaching the theme from a minimalist perspective was a design restriction that enabled me to focus heavily on the dynamics of what are the easily overlooked character identities.

(ooh fancy, my original “sketches” of the character design)

In keeping the scope of the game small, I was happy to be able to subtly and purposefully tune more detail-oriented aspects like the monster design. As you can my “scribbled” concept art, I went into it with plans for a large player to contrast against smaller objects– creating a player character that takes up larger-than-normal amount of screen real-estate was an idea I’d been wanting to explore for a while.

The way I wanted the square to express monstrosity was through inescapable aggression and destruction which creates impactful feedback. I weighed both the objective and termination condition in a feedback loop that and rewards and even requires destruction.

Having the feedback loop be so directly linked to user actions is how I hope a perceptive player can pick up on a more sinister presence; because the deaths of the neutral creatures are necessary only under pressure from only decreasing number. So really, the decreasing number “15” is what I intended to be actual monster in this game; the square was a false flag.

While identifying this hidden monster isn’t core to the gameplay experience, it’s just one of the few little things I was able to add in my game to reward a deeply invested player awareness. To see what other subtleties you can pick up on, check out out the convenient link right here!

Monster Academy

Almost Heroic

Underworld Siege

Monster Disco

The Monster Files

Don’t Crawl

(The last title is our game and it’s not in the list. But you still don’t want to miss it, right?)

(You can play and rate my entry HERE)

I’ve succesfully integrated rot.js map generation with my game… only to discover that those tiny (19*15 tiles) generated maps are not fun at all to play. So I’m sticking to premade maps. I’ll add some more later.

For my next attempt at programming a rogelike the map will be BIGGER than the viewport.

New features implemented to the post-jam version (will be updated shortly):

• Different tilesets based on depth. I have recolored the base tileset to act as a placeholder (for now).
• Each main character has a unique special ability that is automatically triggered on each turn.
• Three new potions.
• First and last floors are fixed now (The Lair & The Town).
• Floors won’t repeat anymore.
• Foes now have an alert radius. They won’t chase you unless they are aware of your presence. Each foe has a different alert radius: that means you won’t be chased by all foes at the same time when entering a floor!

Not that exciting.

No room to maneuver.

While our top of Best Games is in the making, we decided to show a couple of games that have some really innovative ideas, but somehow lack user votes. You should definitely check them.

Asshole Transit Bureaucrat 2015

Planet Licker

Devil’s Avocado

And don’t forget to check our own game, that is also (kind of) (maybe?) innovative (right?)! Just click here: Dude, Stop

I update my game You Must Not, you can play it here

-Proper final!!
-Checkpoints!!
-New assets
-One easter egg
-Windows version

This has been a hard week and I had almost no time to work on my entry. Anyway I’ve been able to add a couple of new features for the post-jam version. You can rate the original jam version HERE and the updated post-jam version HERE.

Who doesn’t love new features?

So far this is the complete changelog:

• First and last maps have a fixed layout now
• Levels won’t repeat anymore in a single game (bugfix)
• Different tilesets depending on depth (I recolored the base tileset as a placeholder for now)
• Music is streamed instead of preloaded
• Text appears when picking potions or leveling up. More informative
• Text is animated now
• More enemy types
• Some enemy types are tied to certain depths
• Touch controls
• Combat is speed based now. Foes faster than you will atack first
• Reduced amount of potions appearing
• Special abilities for players. Troll (regeneration) and Cacodemon (See enemies and ladder) are already implemented
• Diagonal movement enabled, both for players and enemies
• Added Field of View for players
• Foes have an alert radius. They won’t chase you unless they notice your presence
• Ability to skip turns
• Many more potion types. Some more useful than others. Also tweaked generation rate for the most powerful ones
• Ascending will heal you 10HP
• Changed starting stats for players. Troll is stronger but near-sighted, lizard is fast but weak. Try it yourself!

Still to-do:

• Finish drawing the tiles
• Add more songs
• Poison and burn states
• Ability for Demon, Imp and Lizard
• Fix bugs (player appearing over ladders or items on map generation)
• Adding super rare and difficult special maps

Tags: ldjam, roguelike, SSTP

Our Colossus powers may be faded. But we can still smash the faces of a few humans before we go! -> [The Old One] by Chris Olsen

Tags: Chris Olsen, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum 33, LD33, The Old One, Youtube Video

I bought Mario maker today. Mario maker taught me that some people just want to make you suffer. Like impossibly exact level hard. Anyways, I made a level if any of you cool people want to check it out, here’s the id:

Also, if you haven’t had a chance, check out our point click adventure game in a dystopian sci-fi setting:

Abominable – Click Here to play it!

BTW, mario maker is good.

This time we have decided to make a top with a best audio! Games are good on there own, but we also enjoyed how they sound, so here they are!

Delicious Cortex

Almost Heroic

Monstre de Coiffure

And just so you know, we have our own game! There is no music and only one sound, but you still can enjoy it right here: Dude, Stop

Hey guys! Its me again, Tanner Daniels. I’m a 16, and am a Dubstep producer. Enough about me. I want to share with you guys by newest project!

So Much Bass Growl

So Much Bass Growl is the most insane track I have ever worked on! It is non-stop boss growl through-out the chorus. This is also the most complex track I’ve ever made. The bass growls were not easy to make, and even harder to get them to sound well together. This is defiantly the most intense song I’ve ever made, and possibly the most intense I’ve ever heard. The name fits the theme.

I am really proud of this project, and I feel this is a major mile-stone, not only because I created bass growls few people know how to make… I created a totally new type of bass!!!!!!! I call it a Bass Bark… The Bass Bark originally started out as a bass growl created by vo-coding a audio sample of my voice, and I just kept messing with it, trying to get it growly, but I ended with something I didn’t expect, or even thought existed. The bass growl BARKS!!! Like a dog… The Bass Bark is sound in the second half of the chorus, in a beat-down section.

I really enjoyed making this song, and I really hope you enjoy listening to it.

MORE SHAMFUL ADVERTISING!

Check out my Game…

The Monster Inside

Play Here

And here…

Also here…

And don’t forget about here…

Oh, look at this, another link to the game!

And another

Oh, is this one special?

Another link!

PLAY!

Well, this LD went fantastic. Considering that it was my first Ludum Dare and my first Game Programming Competition all together I think it went pretty well for me. My game is basically a Hotline Miami-esque clone where your objective is to break out of prison. Play it here!

Due to time limitations I wasn’t able to add some fancy features, but this game definitely taught me some valuable lessons that I will apply to my bigger project which is similar to this entry.

Please enjoy and see you next LD! Play the game!

Hi there!
I participated in the Jam and created ‘Office Hours’ which is a fun, upbeat shoot’em-up style game!

I’ll be discussing the up’s and down’s throughout the weekend and how I felt about it all. I’ll also show some pictures i took throughout the weekend.

Day 1:

I had originally planned to make a moody, atmospheric game but once the theme was announced and i spent a few hours drawing up some things i decided to scrap it!
I wanted to create a game like hotline miami but still have its own charm. The theme was quite good for a pysological game, and so Office Hours was born!
The first night mostly consisted of some art and a creation of a small codebase.

Beta testing Level ( First Night )

I pushed out a very basic level design and added a player that could shoot some bullets! Not very much was done art-wise besides placeholder.

Day 2:

I knew I had to work fairly hard on the second day because i felt like i could have done more the first day, but it was okay! Having fun was key! The morning of the second day i worked on more art and came up with the player and some NPC’s!

Players spritesheet

I created an entire spritesheet but forgot that the players rotation changes so i only needed to use the down position and the up! The animation looked good and i was fine with it! Surprisingly i spent only 45 minutes on the entire character which felt great! I also went ahead and planned out some basic scenery to make the game feel a bit more alive!

Test of the props!

The second day was also where i went ahead and did a ton of Camera work! The camera shakes quite violently and pulses to the beat of the music ( day 3 ). The camera shake had to be a tricky one because i had simply coded it for a stationary Camera, which obviously , wouldnt work for this game! I ended up redoing the entire Camera and made the movement of the camera on the players position be ‘stabilized’ and then added in the shake as after effects. By stabilizing the camera, i was able to move it freely while shaking it and having no affect on the position of the camera in relation to the player! I also added basic prep work for the camera pulse to the beat and simply made it beat based off of a function i wrote in desmos..
That leads me into the growth of speed!

-13(log(-x+15))+16

The entire game speeds up the more kills you acquire in ‘rage’ mode! Its all based on this graph which is capped at different levels for different things. This has to be one of the coolest things i went ahead and implemented as it made the game feel so much more fast paced as it went on!

Day 3:

Day three had to be a music day! I wanted to really make a heavy beat that had a 4×4 kick which could simulate a heartbeat. I also wanted the pulsing to give off the feeling of a heartbeat with the song. Not only that, but I wanted the other office song to really contrast the heavy electro beat! I sampled a song titled ‘Willow Weep For Me’ and it came out great! Of course its a little repetitive, but what office isn’t? The music is always an afterthought in terms of my programming implementation so i didn’t actually put the music in until monday morning! I spent hte majority of day three on music but I also implemented the different maps within the game so that was a day well spent if you ask me!

Second Floor

Day 4:

I spent a majority of monday working on audio and some enemy AI placement and things of the sorts. I had to turn in school related things which took about an hour or two out of my work time! Curse you High School! Other than that, Monday was a day full of scrambling and trying to piece together the game I had!

What I enjoyed:

I enjoy my game greatly! This is probably one of the best things ive made in terms of gameplay but boy is the code ugly . I think the camera effects were awesome and so was the gameplay. Of course there are bugs throughout but I’m not very worried becuase its a jam game and I don’t intend to take it any farther than it is. I am proud of what was created and will can’t wait for the next one!

What I learned:

I learned that webGL in Unity has quite a few problems with the sound engine and the game ran quite poorly in webGL so i opted out of the web build . I had quite a few issues with Unity’s inspector simply because I am still not 100% comfortable with the engine, but it gets better day by day. The game was tons of fun to play but i recognize that the balance is trash. Next time around, i will definitely have to work on balance of the game that still makes it fun!

Want to play?

Click me to play! Please click me!

Tags: jam, unity

Sneak into houses, find the right bed, roar near pillow and scare the sleeping resident!

The game was created entirely (music, sound effects, graphics) in the jam days, no prework were done.

As game engine we used godot.

You like to create games more visually (like me) than you need to try it out perhaps it fits your workflow.

When you like to play and rate our game you can find it here Scream Hunter

or listen to the game music https://soundcloud.com/andydnet/sets/ludum-dare-33-game-compo-music .

Thanks from the whole team for voting and commenting.

Tags: game, godot, self promotion

Once again the Ludum Dare season is coming to a stop. This time around I had a lot of fun competing and loved almost every game that I played. I was surprised to see the sheer number of quality games that came out of this Ludum Dare. It was hard to narrow them down to just a couple favorites of mine, and even harder when I took into consideration that I shouldn’t be mentioning the bigger games that surely everyone has played by now. Without further ado, my top 3 favorite games this time around!

No Credit, No Problem!

No Credit, No Problem! is an atmospheric Papers Please esque game where you play a Title Loan agent and must either sign off on peoples loans, or deny them. This game won atmosphere by far in my opinion. It features an interesting dynamic that’ll have you questioning your own actions. Oh, and a naked guy.

Goomba Simulator 2015

Goomba Simulator 2015 was exactly what I expected to come out of this theme. The idea can tip you off a bit at first, but this is one of the best games to come out of the entire competition this time around. Great gameplay and mechanics, and a grasping narrative. What more could you ask for?

Around The Waterfall

I don’t even know what to say about this game. It’s about a slime village in a JRPG like game facing an undefeatable enemy together. That’s all that can really be said about it. There was a few bugs, and a bit of confusion along the way on what I was supposed to do, but the fact that I was able to look past these and still can say that this is my favorite game I’ve played out of all so far really is a testament to how good it is.

Not Enough Souls (My Game)

Of course I have to include a shameless plug to my own entry! Not Enough Souls is a wave based survival game with a quirky combat system. It was made with ??? (the artist I worked with last time) for the jam. I think it could use a lot of improvement in a more expanded game, but overall for the Ludum Dare version I was very happy with the final result.

Thanks to everyone for making this Ludum Dare one of the best ever! I’ll be eagerly waiting for results alongside all of you.

Don’t waste your chance to play & enjoy Murderers, my mini action game. Feedback is appreciated!!

Thanks for your time!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57016

Hello, all! We here at Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) are at it one last time! We’re playing and rating your games in 10 minutes! We’ll be streaming from 7:00 PM EST to midnight! Check us out at Twitch.tv here (those on the chat will get priority):

http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Want to submit a game? Our submission form is available here:

http://goo.gl/forms/uqzjFQqK1p

If you haven’t already, check out our games, too:

• Moon Witch
• Fly On The Wall
• Huntingman Championship
• Lardum
• Can I Haz Monsters?

We export our videos on Youtube, too: