Hi everyone! We love Ludum Dare with all of our bodies, and love the developers even more! We’re on a big comfy couch-bed streaming your games. Come on in and show us your game!
http://www.twitch.tv/onlyslightly
Seeing as it’s the last week of judging, my entry (Rolla Grolla Arena) could do with some more votes (At the moment I’ve reached just over 60 and I’m aiming to get 100 by the end of the week). You can click here to give it a try (It’s a local multiplayer game so grab a friend or two and don’t forget to leave a comment so I can play/rate your entries as well) and you can also click here to read the game’s postmortem on my blog.
As it’s the last week of judging, I still have my Google Form up so if you would like me to play/rate your entry, click here and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.
How many votes are necessary to get the results? So far, I have 24. I thought you needed 25 votes, so I only need one more, right?
BOOM! POST COMPO Version of my entry, Arc, is out! Different Colors, New Power Ups/Power Downs, More Music, and MULTIPLAYER!
Make sure to check it out! (All Instructions are in Game) c:
Also, check out the new track I made:
It looks like its nearly the end of this ludum dare, so it only makes sense to put this here
You should go play it
These are some post-mortem thoughts on my game We used to Be Neighbours – a game about growing walls.
This time I wanted to create something that would maybe make people think for a while after playing the game…
For me Ludum Dare starts at 3am on Saturday so I prefered starting in the morning after breakfast 😉
This time I have actually spent some time on Friday, brainstorming some of the 20 final themes. Nothing too detailed, just sketching the main game concept and judging it’s feasability in 48h period. I had an idea for Growing and I didn’t have any for Two button Control so I sticked with my initial concept for Growing theme.
On Saturday morning I have detailed my game design, I didn’t want the game to be too complex as I had practically no code base (just the main menu, sound control, image loading etc) so I had to do everything from scratch.
But it turns out in the end that the fact that the game isn’t too complex is probably it’s major flaw…
Yet, there are still several strategies to tackle the game, so it should get the player entertained for a while as the real objective of the game is not to get the maximum points but to unlock the alternative ending.
I am really happy about the music in this game. Even though I have spent a few hours composing a song in MuseScore on sax and piano only to realize in the end that it didn’t suit the mood of the game too much. So I had to rapidly compose something diffrent (using LMMS) which turned out quite all right considering the scarce time I had.
In the end as I really liked the sax and piano song I decided to play it when the player unlocks the alternative ending.
You can find both songs here:
We used to be Neighbours Theme
Theme in F for sax and piano
(I tried to embed these in my post but it doesn’t seem to work..)
Overall it was a good Ludum Dare, except for debugging which took longer than expected I managed to do everything as planned which is a plus.
Why don’t you give the game a try?
Hello, fellow Ludum Darers!
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Hey,
I wasn’t able to do much since christmas was so near, but I managed to polished my tutorial level. It would give the “general vibe” on what the full game will be, so if you did not try it yet, please visit my entry !
Now, for those interested by the story, it is indeed about Light and Darkness, and a psychological tale about finding one self true meaning in life. I didn’t wanted to let the player lose interest from the main puzzle path of my level, so I made a clear tutorial and a fairly simple level to complete, but for those who wants to know more about the lore and the universe, I hid a secret room with more some story development, where I treated it like “a reward”. This secret room will flesh the character’s backstory and constitute a “truth”, where it is completely possible for one player to miss it if he doesn’t search enough and will receive a different ending if he succeeds. But, the main story/path is a whole story in itself, so the “truths” are backstory, where it’s still completely optional story wise.
The good
It was the first Ludum dare where I used actual dialogues and cutscenes in order to tell a story. Of course, the player has to solve puzzle and make actions to survive, but I had fun to include some dialogues when the player was triggering some objects in the environnement.
I also prepared myself a lot before the LD, so I could set myself a limit for the amount of things I had to do. For example, I knew that I wanted to work with dynamic Lights and Dialogues, so I prepared in advances some plugins so it could be ready when the theme would be revealed.
The Bad
I still have some difficulty with my scene management and how to structure my game. I had to do external research in order to make a game state and a scene manager and how to mix both of them together in Unity. It was really a good learning experience, but I wish I just had more time to learn how to do so. Now, I will save those research as external plugings, so if I want to use them again, I will just need to export them 😉
I had also time management problems, where personal life had to take over LD time, so that didn’t went well for a time. Next time I will try to reserve myself more time, and will probably do something simpler.
Unity Unity Unity…why do you make my life so hard sometime… sometime, I wonder if the engine is made for short LD projects. I had a lot of technical problems this time around, so I wonder if I should use next time something more simple, like Construct 2 or another game making engine.
Managing Dynamic Light has been difficult, since I was dealing with a third party plugin and had to learn how to make it work last minute. I was placing a light between 2 obstacles, so the light would collide with those. Sometime, when moving out from this light with the camera, it didn’t took into account the collision and the light was going through the walls. So I’ve made a little research and found the problem and fixed it, but it cost me a lot of production time… now that I know how it works, I won’t have this issue next time around 😉
To Conclude
It was a very good LD that gave me a good perspective of what type of game I could do next time. I wanted to add more levels in the end, but that will be for the full game. So have a good time searching for the “truth” and completing this short experience I made for this LD.
Thank you for playing !
Please try it out!
Play as a plant and defend your self from your enemy with chemical defenses that all exist in real life!
Like a Tower Defense game!
Inspired by the Wild Coyote Tobacco Plant and its chemical weapons!
Remember if you have trouble check out the How to Play menu on the first level!
I havn’t found the time to add something to my entry. But if you didn’t tested it yet, don’t be afraid to, it’s a puzzle, pretty simple to play (and, well, not (so) long to solve).
Whatever you decide, I wish you an happy new year !
Square Exit
Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!
Happy New Year! Hope you all have a wonderful and safe evening!
Today is the 2nd to last LUDUM DARE TO BELIEVE!
So that means it’s time to roll out our handy dandy – FEEDBACK FORM!
This is your opprotunity to tell us what we can do to make the show better. Every season we carefully consider all requests… GET YOUR VOICE HEARD! If you love us, let’s us know! If you hate us… well here is your chance to tell us off!
Anything goes. We will listen.
Lastlt… HURRY AND VOTE!
It’s Ludum Dare to Believe Ep. 11!
(May contain strong language)
With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.
Special thanks to our friends on twitter and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are AWESOME!
If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out on Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!
Today we will be highlighting:
——–
Title: The Uncertainty Principle
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: RadMars
——-
Title: Reap
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Managore
——–
Title: Harvest
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: RXI
——–
Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:
@ButtonMasherBro – Show account
@MathBlasterRitz – Chris
@SuddenlyZach – Zach
or @jwowBMB – Josh
Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!
Since our LD project “Klangwelt“, in which you grow a musical world, was done, we’ve been getting fantastic feedback. However there are still some small issues in the usability, so here’s what we are planning to do in the next weeks:
Thanks for playing and giving such good feedback. Remember, you can still rate & play Klangwelt here.
One day I will be the best bomb disposal expert / janitor / secret agent!
Play Let’s Play Simulator 2016 Here
It’s not too late to submit your game or a game your pals have made. You can send it to Larry in this fancy form thingy -> over here.
Check out the full LD34 showcase playlist so far here -> Larry Does Ludum 34
Tags: Defuser 4000, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, Let's Play Simulator 2016, Ludum Dare Showcase
After a hellish week of my daughter teething several teeth at once XD finally I can release a new post compo version with sound fixes and due to that also more sounds.
And then I also added some more balancing, so it’s a little bit easier and screentransitions from normal to frost or heated are now smooth.
The original version is unchanged but I have added a WebGL, linux and OSX build 
Happy new year! and I would love it if you would give my game a try:
All through this Ludum Dare I’ve been taking snapshots of the current voting status to get some idea why the competition runs for 3 weeks (and not 4, or 2, or 1). Mostly things have been going pretty much as predicted – The first week is super hectic, and then the final two weeks are mostly just a steady trickle.
With 3 and a half days of voting remaining, we’ve FINALLY reached 70% of games with enough ratings to get a final score.
We actually had 60% after the first week. It’s taken another 11 days to get another 10%. Which is interesting. I felt like I still didn’t really understand what was actually going on though, so I came up with a new metric: How many individuals actually played and rated games per day (I did this by comparing their ‘votes given’ today to their ‘votes given’ the day before). It produced Interesting Facts
From what I can tell, while it’s not very many people, there are a surprising number of people quite happy to spread their voting out over the full three weeks. There you go!
Happy New Year! 😀 Are you ready for some old-days planting? (I really dont know what I just said), play my game: Trees : 60 lines of code – 60 minutes!
HERE is the link 😀 😀
I am currently working on improving gamemechanics and graphics by a huge part in my LD34 entry.
Here you can see how much graphics improved, it will be even more!
Before (state in the LD):
After (current state):
I am planning to put this game on Greenlight in the beginning of may 2016, lets see if I can make it into a full game until then
If you did not tried it until now: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=55223
We’re starting another year. 2015 was my (brupibo) first year as a real game developer, and with my best friend (kakinak) we started our humble “indie studio” called Bee Tracks. After much study and training we achieved a good game to close the year nicely: Snowman’s Christmas. We’re happy to get here, no matter the results of LD34. It was quite an accomplishment for us and we really thank you all the feedback (we’re happy we had a lot of positive feedback too). We’re doing our best too, to give valuable feedback for the games we play. We believe this is how we improve. I read some Ludum Dare posts and saw many developers sharing much good information about game development. I feel I don’t have enough knowledge to teach something new, so I decided to share our experiences with the development of our game.
For start, these were our tools:
Now to the creative process.
BRAINSTORMING
It was near to the theme final selection. The last list was online. We printed it and we went to the mall for some ideas. We walked between stores while talking about every theme. Lots of ideas, few of them actually good. But then we saw something that caught our attention.
This ornament was nicely put in a corner. Kakinak said “what if something jumped around in these bulbs?”, we enjoyed the idea instantly and we decided to implement it if the “two button controls” were the theme. Coincidence? Maybe, but it worked. 😀
Now we have the theme. We will create somebody jumping in balls on a Christmas’ tree, but what will be our character? Brupibo’s sister has a snowman toy called Kevin (because nothing, just the fact she think the name fits). Our character would be a dwarf, or elf, but we decided to name him after brupibo’s sister snowman. Kakinak started to study some poses with internet references, but it would be a lot of work and we couldn’t figure out a good motivation for the dwarf doing it. We would complicate what it was supposed to be simple.
Then brupibo’s tree revealed a good character. What if the happy snowman’s in the bottom of the tree decided to get more attention? He indeed would have a lot of work to get to the top. Now we have our character. Let’s make it jump! Kakinak started to draw lots of faces and expressions and in the end we got the simplest one. And this time wasn’t related to the time we would spend on it. Sometimes the simple works better. Now we are ready to make our game!
MUSIC
Here it is the full version of the song from the game. We aimed for something fun and “christmas feeling”, of course.
GAME MECHANICS AND PROGRAMMING
Our original idea was to make Kevin need to turn on the lights too, but we knew we wouldn’t have time for it, so we kept it simple. We have two different color for the bulbs, yellow and red. Each one have a different impulse in our character. But when I was designing the level I thought it would be boring to only keep going up. So I created some rules that you character need to jump on lower bulbs too, sometimes, to get to the right way.
I used Spine to create the animation for the character. This was simple. Just a jumping animation, but I wanted to be smooth as possible. I didn’t achieved that, but it was my first time using Spine. In Game Maker I used image_xscale=1 and -1 to flip the character. That isn’t reliable in its HTML5 exporter, so, for the web version, the sprites are used the conventional way. There is another problem too: Spine sprites doesn’t work very good with precise collisions in GMS, so I created an object specifically to be the “collision guy”. To this object I attached Kevin, and that made easy to port to HTML5. It was just a matter of attach another object with the conventional sprite animations, then make the algorithm to use one or another depending if it is a browser or not.
For the tree I created different object for the leaf rows and designed the stages as the usual. But this impacted a lot when porting to Android. Actually, I was unable to do that yet. Bad planning of my part. The performance was terrible. We intend to port it when we improve it (maybe Nov, 2016) but for now, just the windows/linux/web versions are fine.
Another GMS specific issue: fonts. I’m using bitmap fonts, of course, but when you are going to map it for non-english languages, the problems start to appear (we’re Brazilians, our native language have a lot of special characters). The font_add_sprite_ext works differently in HTML5. For Windows/Linux, I needed to use font_add_sprite_ext to use special characters, but for HTML5 it needs to be the font_add_sprite. So, the solution is to create a ASCII image table and create a font map with the same sequence . Then, put a condition to detect if the game is in browser or not to switch between that. Luckly, GML uses variable to keep the fonts, so, this is not much of a trouble after you figure it out (I spent a considerable amount of time until I’ve figured that out).
The cutscenes are simple objects movements. I’m using GMS native draw functions to create the rectangles behind the text. The pause event is controlled in each object with a global variable.
I hope there is something useful for you in this text. I’m not an experienced developer, but if you want to know something specific in this game, feel free to contact me on Twitter or by e-mail.
Thanks for reading and we wish you an awesome 2016, full of happiness, accomplishments, art and games!