Hiya!

First of all thank you for another Ludum Dare. This was my 5th and its been a blast like every other in the past. My entry for LD34 is Drone Racer.

I think we can all agree to some extent that the theme for LD34 was a little bit weird. On top of that having two themes makes it even more confusing. Sometime I brainstorm about theme one and other times theme two. I even tried to mix the two themes together hoping that I will come up with an idea that somehow involve both themes. I can assure you now it was a very bad idea. But for some mysterious reason my brain just wants to combine the two themes together. I lost couple of hours in the beginning arguing with myself which theme should I focus on. In the end, as you may have probably noticed in my compo entry none of the two themes were clearly reflected. Oh well…

In every Ludum Dare I participate, I try to experiment with new mechanics and gameplay ideas. My first idea was to fly a drone in a high security facility and steal vital intel without getting detected. The drone is equipped with smart technology that can hack into any remote device. For the sake of theme/simplicity, one button allows you to hack open the doors and the other button allows you to hack into the security cameras and pause them off for limited amount of time. Every time you perform one of those two hacking actions the global threat level grows, guards become more and more vigilant and it takes slightly more time to hack into successive devices. There you go both themes are covered, my brain wins. Yayy. Now its time to write code.

Before calling off my first night, I was able to fly a drone in an empty space. It was a decent progress. I prepared a big list of all the tasks I had to do the next day before saying good night to my computer. I kept pondering in my sleep if the game is still doable or not, both asset and code wise. In any case I have to re-evaluate it again the next morning. As I was going through the list of tasks I have to accomplish in the next 36 hours, I felt that the scope of this idea is way bigger than I originally expected. Producing all the assets that could deliver the right mood and compelling gameplay will be a challenge. Since I suck at art anyway, it’ll be harder and more time consuming for me to create all the assets within such a short period of time. I steered away from it for a while and thought what else I could do that involve minimum art. Lately I have developed an obsession about owning a drone and hoping to take part in some sort of drone racing (just for fun) in the near future. Thats when Drone Racer came to life. Although I was tempted to make a two player split screen drone racing game but my previous game jam experiences reminded me that if you want people to play and enjoy your jam game it has to be single player. Racing with bots is not much fun so I turned myself towards making it a challenge based game. And voila, here is Drone Racer equipped with six unique challenges, each grows in difficulty than the previous one. Every challenge focusses on various aspects on drone maneuvering capabilities.

This looked more achievable compared to my original idea and equally fun. I sat down to work and the next thing I know “its time to submit”. The compo was over and I didnt even realize where all that 36 hours went. I was feeling proud and accomplished. Once again I did not failed. Things turned out great and I had a game. One more fun filled weekend came to an end. Now its time to get away from my computer and see if the world around me still exist :D.

If you haven’t played and rated Drone Racer yet, please do it before the rating period is over :D. Thanks for playing!!!

Till Next Time!

Anshul

Tags: #LD34 #LDJAM #LudumDare #GameDev #IndieDev

If you haven’t already checked it out, go play our game Grow Your Hoard! and give us some feedback! We’ve found an artist that is interested in helping us make a full game out of it, and we want to know everyone’s thoughts!

I’m glad that I took part in another Ludum Dare. This being the second one, I was hoping for a nice challenge to present itself. The first Dare was not too hard, but this one took a toll on me. How? It had me questioning the very existence of what I was even doing. It took me about half the time of the Compo to think of a proper idea, and I just barely finished in time for it. Instead, I submitted to the Jam since it’s only my second time around. So here’s the good and bad.

Also if you haven’t played this yet, head on over here

Mobile port screenshot

The Good

So basically there was a lot of fun involved in making this game. I did not put a huge amount of effort, yet I still got some nice positive reviews from various individuals. The game evolved rather quickly from a simple idea of possibly anti-gravitation snake to what it is now: a bouncy fun time of anti-gravity stuff and you dodge spikes while trying to collect coins. Overall, I’d say that not just the idea was the best I could think of at the time, but I had numerous friends who kept me going. As mentioned, it took me 1.5 days to figure out what I actually wanted to do. The original idea was terrible, and my friend xkaype who also entered kept giving me the best optimism I’ve ever heard. They didn’t give up on me, and neither did any of my other friends. To that, I am very thankful towards all of you guys!

The bad

Alright so this is the part where I will tell a story of a guy who entered this Jam and basically had no clue what they were doing. Seriously the original concept was alright, but due to numerous logical flaws in the code, the idea wasn’t going anywhere. You were supposed to be some kind of square shape hopping on platforms to reach either a sun or moon tile which would be the two ‘buttons’. They’d change the time of day and plants would grow and the player would have to traverse the level using this idea. Once I introduced a dual-layer mechanic for more interesting ways to lay out the puzzles or whatever one may call them, it got flawed. I lost interest in it due to this, and on top of it all, the game didn’t feel right to me. I had to start all over which was the best idea, but I hated having to do that.

Overall

I’ve looked into all the comments given to me so far which most notably is the complaint that spikes spawn right below you. Yeah that was a bad design choice. To be honest, I couldn’t think of another way to do it. Fear no more! I’ve actually fixed this for the Android port or any future ports. I’ll continue to look at the comments for anything that people may suggest for the future, but right now I think the way the post-jam version has been redone is fine. Anyhow, I hope everyone enjoyed Ludum Dare! Good night!

I have seem many entries still using Web Player only and not providing a Web GL version as well. Is there any particular reason people do this? I personally like the idea of having both there. Since I use Chrome and Web Player isn’t supported having a Web GL version is a necessity as I really can’t be bothered switching over to Firefox.

Thoughts?

You can now lose at Litterlings – yay!
I also added some stats to the Game Over Screen.

Play it here!

Ludum Dare 34 has ended and it’s time to present our game and think about what went right and what went wrong. This was our fourth Ludum Dare, but second with a bigger team. As always it was an amazing experience for us and we had a lot of fun and a little time to sleep. 😀 We are really happy with the amount of work done and how polished the game turned out to be. The themes for this edition weren’t bad and we came up with an idea pretty fast. We’ve created a game called SAAAM.

SAAAM

In our game you play as a Crewmember 341. He wakes up in his cryo-stasis pod on a vessel called Trieste. He’s a mechanic and his job is to maintain the vessel assisted by S.A.A.A.M. which stands for System Automation, Assistance, and Analysis Matrix. The player is faced with a series of choices whether to listen to S.A.A.A.M. or to disobey. The game features three different endings based on the choices you make. Will you be obedient? Will you do what S.A.A.A.M. wants you too?

What went right?

SAAAM – Final Room

SAAAM – The Vessel

• Art – The game turned out to be a visual feast. We’ve really tried to focus on consistency of art in the game and it turned out great for us.
• Script – Funny and creepy at the same time. It created a very unique, comedy-horror atmosphere. A lot of players were expecting a jump scare somewhere along the way. 😀
• Polish – We’ve finished the level design pretty soon and that gave us a lot of time to polish the game. Make sure every little thing makes sound, every light is tweaked properly, every corridor is interesting and unique etc.
• Voice Acting – Once again we’ve cooperated with Elijah and he did an awesome job as always.

What went wrong?

SAAAM – Starting Room

• Slow pacing – A lot of players mentioned the game’s slow pacing. It would be good, if we had more narration and choices.
• Lack of option to skip dialogues – If you want to discover all of the three endings, you’ll have to listen to S.A.A.A.M’s initial talk three times. And this is a lot. We had an option to skip dialogues in the dev menu, but it didn’t make to the full game because it wasn’t release ready.

What’s next for S.A.A.A.M.?

We’re now working on a Post Jam version. It will include all of the things that you, the players, suggested and much more! The Post Jam version will feature one additional ending, bug and glitch fixes, faster doors, skipping dialogues and many more. You can expect it to come out in the last week of voting. And what we do after that, will be based on the results.

In conclusion, we think that this game has a lot of potential. We strongly feel that this is an interesting concept and turned into a full game it would be a lot of fun. But for now, we have to focus on a Post Jam version of S.A.A.A.M.

Go play the game here

If you liked the game please leave feedback in the comments for us. We really appreciate this.

Fireline Games

Tags: fireline, fireline games, ld34, post-mortem, saaam

First time I ran it just worked, figured it would need some optimisation because ludum dare. Thanks to the default mapping of the ‘touch’ part of the apple tv remote to the dpad it worked out of the box, literally just switching targets and hitting build.

After that I took the time to try and figure out controls that made more sense, still want to try auto gyro steering as well but that isn’t easy to ‘just implement’.

If you haven’t played crooked town yet click the gif below to our game page!

Or here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=23493

Hello everyone,

It’s been a week already since we made BoltStorm, hectic snake-like dungeon shooter. If you haven’t tried it yet, we recommend you do:

PLAY HERE!

Bolt Storm indeed!

We did some major bug fixes right after the jam and now we’re working on gameplay and visual fixes for problems reported by the players. As for any other jam game, BoltStorm still needs a lot of work. If you have any feedback that you’d like to give, please do so as it will help us improve the game.

So How did we start with BoltStorm? To keep it short, our goal initially was to come up with a small concept and polish it well. Three main points of focus were: Simplicity, Juiciness, Progression. We managed to focus on first 2 points, but the progression part was lacking as the time ran out. We had more plans regarding progression but we ended up with something very simple, where player grows in size and as they level up, game becomes gradually more difficult by throwing a lot of enemies at them. Maybe we will expand on that later on.

Kickback, Screenshake, Damage feedback, Permanence.. just a bit of juiciness.

What needs to be noted is that we took examples from Vlambeer’s Art of Screenshake. If you are an indie dev and haven’t heard of it, go watch it HERE! (by Jan Willem Nijman) You will be surprised to learn that simple visual feedback in your game can make a huge difference.

There’s more to write about, but that’s it for now. If you’re interested in our projects or how we make games, find us on Facebook or Twitter and ask anything you like! Meanwhile we’ll be playing and rating your games(maybe Stream too?). Send us your games!

Cheers.

Tags: BoltStorm, dungeon, juice, Knights, screenshake, shooter, simplicity, snake, vlambeer

Hey there! We’ve made a trailer for our game! Check it out here:

Also we uploaded our game to itch.io, so now you can play it from there!

Play our game!

This is the post mortem of Box ‘N Bash, as told by Budaniel (me), the programmer an artist for AAGH Games. Box ‘N Bash is the first Ludum Dare we did not livestream, which was a little unusual feeling but it was a conscious decision because were trying something new this time.

We had been aiming to start on 3D game development using Unity and decided that making a working game in 72 hours was the perfect time to figure it out. Aside from some tinkering around, I didn’t have any experience in C# or 3D graphics, which is a bad start seeing as both of those fall under my jurisdiction. My concerns were alleviated when a working prototype came together early on, and we finished on time, despite some last-minute bug fixing.

The evolution of Box ‘N Bash

The good:

• Learning a new (to us) engine in 72 hours
• Finishing our game on time is always a good thing
• We got a little bit of our trademark humor into the game

The bad:

• We left a number of incidental elements on the cutting room floor, such as the doors opening when the Box Goblins came out, as well as already-recorded sound effects and voiceovers
• The balance might be off, but everybody testing it had different opinions on its difficulty level so we just had to wing it and hope for the best

The WTF:

• The voiceovers didn’t come out as clear as they probably should have

The Future:

• We plan on producing a WebGL version this for the AAGH Game Center, our game portal site.

Well that’s all for this post mortem. If you haven’t yet, give Box ‘N Bash a look.

We’ll see everyone again next LD!

Tags: 2.5d, post-mortem, unity

Hey!

We wanted to thank you for all the feedback on Blobitronica! We were so excited that it motivated us to continue to work on our project! We added a post-jam version of our game, so do not hesitate to give it a try to see the differences! Of course, the old version is still available.

Have fun!

Play here!

PS: more to come 😉

Hi, thought I’d post here the gameplay from my little game (PLAY HERE) for those who don’t use Twitter.

As always, any feedback is appreciated, you mean everything to me! 😉

I made a short gameplay video of my LD34 entry, ‘Hoarder’.

Vote for it here!

So far two developers have been awarded with the Stuffed Beetle trophy (feldaar and Drury).

Can you eat a hundred berries in Tubutten Beetle too?

Last weekend was a particularly busy one for me. I ran two kids programming clubs on the Saturday so I really couldn’t get any enthusiasm to start until Sunday.

Unusually, I hit on an idea for the theme quickly. I’ve been doing a lot of physics simulation work recently and I thought this would be a good chance to try modelling buoyancy in a game.

Link to my entry: Bloon

Most of my effort at the beginning went in to creating the physics model. If you look inside the project, you’ll see a lot of the variables required to get this working such as the mass of the helium, the balloon itself, and the displaced volume of air. Of course all this only served to produce the final upward force which gets bigger as the balloon inflates.

The results were unexpected (to me at least.) It seems that far from giving the balloon a gentle lift, inflating by only the tiniest amount caused it to shoot up like a rocket. To make it controllable at all, I had the reduce the inflation speed to about 1/10th of a millimetre radius per second.

This tiny change meant no real visible difference between a buoyant balloon and a sinking one. So to exaggerate the effect, I actually scale the visible representation of the difference in radius of the balloon by 10,000 times. Other than that it does represent relatively realistic physics. But I did make a number of simplifications:

• I assume a sphere rather than a balloon’s actual shape;
• the mass of helium doesn’t account for the raised pressure inside the balloon;
• there is no consideration of air resistance or air pressure related effects.

Time was getting on, so I moved on to modelling the bird animations. The individual frames of animation are all hand drawn using Scratch’s built in drawing tools. These tools are crude, but they do the job. As reference I found a sequence of photographs online showing the various frames of a crow in flight. I was pleased with the final animation.

Creating the crow animation frames

I later added the highlight to the beak to help with collision. (The balloon only collides with the beak, you don’t have to avoid them entirely.)

I was particularly pleased with the generation of the sound effects. My first thought was to get hold of some balloons and record some samples. It turned out to be difficult finding anywhere selling packs of balloons on a Sunday afternoon. But although I did eventually find and buy a packet, when it came to making the sound effects, I decided to give JFXR a try to see if I could synthesize the sounds I wanted. It turned out I could. More or less. But then… disaster! I had been working on a MacBook in Safari and there is a long term problem exporting audio. I soaked up several hours trying desperately to find a work around. In the end, I downloaded Firefox, remade the sounds, and then exported them from there.

By then, time was running short. I quickly put together a small audio loop for stage introduction in Otomata and rushed to get everything together before the deadline.

In summary, I wish I’d spent more time on creating and tweaking assets and less time dealing with technical issues and balloon shopping, but such is life in game development. I am pleased with the results.

Hi!

I’ve just made 2 videos of my game – walkthrough and timelapse. Go check them out, I found the timelapse pretty cool! And if you are interested in the Space Pilot game, go play it & rate it!

I’m here! 

Check out the new and improved post-Ludum Spirit-uality!

I wanted to make the game somewhat more polished as the first submission was very raw. The sounds didn’t get replaced like I wanted. Hopefully I’ll have a better idea on how to get more video-game-sounding effects for next time. It’s still lacking in gameplay, but I’m proud of how it fits the themes of Growing and Two Button Controls.

PATCH NOTES

Bug Fixes:

• Controls can no longer be set to the same key
• Spirit now regrows normally after reducing to smallest size

Gameplay:

• Revamped the final Boss. Will no shoot you until you or it are dead
• DOWN: hold to prep attack, release to launch bolt
• UP: spam to raise shields to block the boss’ projectiles
• Lengthened the world by ten times for those that need it
• Pressing ‘esc’ now exits the game
• Game over when the spirit is hit when it’s already the smallest size
• Six more good deed encounters
• Tutorial now displays what happens in-game when the user presses UP and DOWN

Graphics

• Jerry fist pumps on six successes in a row
• Jerry will have a fit if he misses a good deed when he’s on a streak
• Sky: changed the texture, and now fades in and out to go from night to day more clearly
• Added screenshake
• Spirit hovers slightly in place
• Replaced default window logo
• Many textures were retouched

So it’s almost been a week since I finished All Ways Down, and seeing as everyone else is doing one :-), I figured I’d do a bit of a post mortem of the game/experience, looking at what went right and what went wrong. Like many who entered, this was my first Ludum Dare, and whilst at times it was stressful( especially the last two hours), in the end it was an amazing 3 days and I had a lot of fun taking part. Overall, I’m very happy with how the game turned out, though there are plenty of things that I think could be improved (more on that at the end). The jam also meant I got to learn a bit about Unity webGL exporter, which up to now I had not really been following.

What went right:

• The mechanic: The basic concept started quite simple, ‘a rolling ball that has to be a certain mass to finish a level, it does this by consuming objects and growing. Player can spin the world?’. From this I sketched out what I thought a level would look like with a simple storyboard for play and put some ideas for level hazards underneath. Thankfully I was able to implement this mechanic and it worked.

• Thankfully most of the core development went quite smoothly(unless you count Unity crashing twice), with no major issues or bugs. 

• Sound: This is an area I generally find the hardest, but I’m quite happy with the end result, and have got some positive feedback on it.

•   Unity webGL, a day before the jam I decided to update unity. In hindsight this could have ended up going very wrong but, in the end it meant I learnt more about unity’s WebGL exporter, deciding from the start that I would use WebGL as my target platform.

What went wrong:

• Whilst not wrong per se, based on feedback the ball could be a bit heavier at the start of levels, so that it moves around the level a bit quicker.

• Deciding to make 5 more levels 4 hours before the end of the jam, resulting in no playtesting of these levels.

• The size of the web player. I would have liked the actual game screen to be the max size allowed on this site, but unfortunately as this was the first time I had used the WebGL exporter I didn’t realise that the export size set in Unity doesn’t include the custom Unity bottom bar, thus cutting off bits of the game screen when its embed size is set at the same size as export. Meanwhile exporting without the Unity bar means you need to provided the functionality that makes it go fullscreen. I really wish I had known all this before the jam, and not learnt it in the last two hours when I was trying to submit 😀

Whats next:

I think I’ll be developing this game further post comp. I’d like to make more levels, add in a couple of hazards and puzzle that didn’t make it due to time, along with polishing the graphics and adding more effects, maybe even a camera shake . I’d also quite like to port it to mobile as I think its control mechanism is very well suited for the platform.

Overall I’m very happy with end result, and looking forward to working on it a bit more and making it even better 😀

You can check out All Ways Down jam page here.

Here I am!