I added and improved quite a bit in this new version. Previously I already made it work with Virtual Reality: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/12/22/forklift-man-in-virtual-reality/ which is now also improved.

You might have wondered before why Forklift Man can grow his limbs at will yet his head is bald as if he can’t grow something as simple as hair. As you can see that is now finally fixed in the new version. Just hold H to grow your hair as long as you like.

You might have also wondered why Forklift Man can’t just grow his brain so he can easier solve the puzzles, well he can now grow his whole head (X)! Also new is the seflie camera (Y):

They appear to be rather useless new growing abilities but I made a simple puzzle around it in the last room.

Also new added is music and some more sounds. The walking is not anymore always straight forward, he actually strafe walks now by turning his pelvis 90 degress to the side just like every human does it, sorta:

I also improved the physics for carrying boxes quite a bit. Before that I gave another physics grab option of UE4 a try but it only turned out worse with arms literally getting broken and knotted and boxes spinning around. But it is  now significantly better anyway, you don’t have to be as gentle to the boxes anymore.

I also made a few tweaks to the cameras and the rooms. It turned out a lot of people thought putting a box on a pillar solves the 2nd room. Because video game logic I guess. Well, no more of that, that pillar is now gone and it hopefully is more clear now that you need to build a bridge (or anything that gets you up on the other side).

Also added now are simple graphics quality settings that you can cycle through by pressing O, here are all the controls:

Just press ESC ingame to get to this controls screen.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=44878%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%8B

Hello LD’ers! ~

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was a learning experience for me and my channel. I’ve met a lot of great, promising devs, got many (so many) requests. It was awesome! Although next time I’ll probably do things way differently, haha.

This is my last compilation video post for this LD. Here you go!

Games covered:

• Radical Revolver Recoil Rampage ~ AndreasL
• Laser Jump FTW ~ Crashmore Studios
• Breathe ~ Galvesmash

Hopefully this video has brought some attention to games you haven’t seen yet.

Go play and rate!

~

Liked the video? Come hang out with us (Tilde & Backslash) at Twitter @BackslashYT & make sure we can continue to make content in the future. We’ll be around for the next LDJam to help you devs getting the word out. 😀 That’s what we do with our channel and we love it.

~

Latest single game video, FRUITWOLF by Claw:

Tags: compilation, ld34, Ludum Dare, review, tilde, video, youtube

Hello everyone! This is Jacob, and I’m one of four developers that worked on our latest game RollingFlames. Last time I was involved in LD33 with a game called P-Type, where I also did a post-mortem high level analysis of what went right and wrong.  I was mainly involved in scripting and design this project. Logan was involved in scripting and spritework, Alex primarily worked on growth and conceptual design and Brandon worked on scripting related to the music.

One of the biggest issues we ran into right off the bat is that we had trouble coming up with a game that we all agreed that would be both fun to develop and fun to play. We spent most of the first day going through various ideas, ways to fit to the theme and so forth. The end result was that by the second day we came up with RollingFlames, a simple Katamari-like game where you would grow by burning various objects and eventually take over the world!

Simplistic Design: We ran into a few cases while brainstorming that, while interesting would lead to a lot of time setting up background mechanics. The result is that by the end of LD we likely would’ve had various systems not in place or not working. This game was much simpler to work with and as a result we could easily add new concepts on top without worrying that we might miss a major part of it by the end.

Simplistic Gameplay: You run around and bump into things to absorb them, and by doing so you grow larger. This gives immediate feedback to the player that they’re doing something right, and it’s hard to do something wrong. This makes the flow of the game easy to track and ensures everyone can see the whole game.

What didn’t?

…Perhaps too simplistic: The game being so simple meant that there wasn’t much challenging ourselves in terms of what to create or how to create it. This made this project a bit more of a chore than our previous, which segues into my next point.

Motivation: This time all of us snagged into motivational problems at one point or another. Part of it was the discussions we had on the first day, part of it was the above and more of it was just real life circumstances. While I’m very happy with what we got done, I think the next game will turn out even better.

Conclusion

Because we spent so long discussing what we should do as well as the motivational stuff, we ended up not spending as much time working on this project as we did in P-Type (just compare the amount of commits between the two!). Despite that, I still feel it was fun and a great experience. Bring on the next Ludum Dare!

If you would like to play our current game RollingFlames, click here, or click here to play our LD33 entry P-Type.

Hey, guys!

There are less than 3 days left until the results of LD 34, and we really want to collect all the possible feedback to improve our game before the time runs out.

For you it would be just about 5 minutes of your time, but it will be really important for us to hear your thoughts about our game, especially:

1. What do you like about it
2. What you do not like about it
3. What do you think would be cool to add to the game
4. Your idea about improving the mechanics

That’s it, we really hope you will help us to make our game better!

Link to our game: Glow&Grow

And the trailer, we are a bit proud of:

For most of my LD games I go with procedural level generation, rather than hand-crafted levels.

Why Proc-Gen?

I’m always shooting for the “Fun” category, and I’m aiming for a cocktail like this:

• A core physics-based action that’s fun to just do on its own.
• Obstacles with some variation, that can be procedurally mixed up in varied combinations
• A quick retry loop so the “you lose” moment gets the “one more try” response rather than the player quitting
• A score mechanism that lets the player be challenged but doesn’t overly punish someone just having a good time

I don’t always succeed in getting the balance right – for example my LD29 game about navigating a ship between icebergs was far too difficult to be accessible.  LD31 was much too confusing.  LD32 was a total failure because the core action simply wasn’t sufficiently controllable.  So there are many pitfalls,  but when it works I feel like this is a good approach, at least for me.

The procedural generation is a key piece because it keeps the game fresh, even for myself, and facilitates that “one more try” feeling upon failure.  LD games are played in a quick sitting to evaluate, so I hate to ask the player to repeat anything.  I don’t even send them back to the start of the difficulty curve when I’m doing generated levels… I want them to push one button and immediately be back in the flow but seeing something new.

How I Approach Proc-Gen

I have developed a bit of a system…  here is a screenshot of me mapping out the difficulty curve and then adding elements to my level generator in Unity:

On the left in the spreadsheet I have mapped out what I want to achieve in a sort of visual way.  In Psychotennis the player is on the left, bouncing  a ball to break bricks, like this:

The different bricks have different behaviors, some taking more shots to break and others hitting the ball back to you with various amounts of speed-boosting.  So it’s important to make sure they’re placed in some meaningful way.

Designing the Generation

You can read the spreadsheet (which is the design doc) like this:  Each row is a “match” aka a level, and each column is a possible placement of bricks.  In the early matches 1-5, the player should face bricks relatively far away, consisting of fluff and a bit of “light structure” which is a term I use to describe bricks that take more than one shot to remove, and thus create a durable shape to each match.

By the midgame we have threats in the back portion, covered with some structure, and a bit of easy-to-clear fluff nearer the player.  By the endgame there’s a complex sandwich with a few threats close to the player, which are especially hard to deal with.

You can also see that although there are three big “zones” of 1-5, 6-12, and >12, I do some additional minor transitions, such as levels 6 and 7 lacking the “fluff” nearest to the player.

So creating that spreadsheet is how I design the difficulty curve and overall shape I want from the procedural generation.

Implementing the Generation

Looking back at the screenshot, in the Unity editor on the right you can see how I enter this design into the game’s level generator that I wrote.  This is a critical bit – although there is a lot of custom logic in the generator, it is even more driven by the data that I enter, which allows me to more rapidly input/edit the design.

I create a series of entries, each of which defines a range of “layers” (the horizontal position) at which this entry can be spawned, as well as a level range at which it occurs.  Then there are a set of four prefabs, one brick each, representing what will be placed if this entry is instantiated.  It’s four bricks rather than one because I somewhat arbitrarily decided that I’d do the generation in “quads” of 2×2 bricks.  So I kind of generate by the molecule instead of the atom, if you will.

The weight is usually one, but can be adjusted to make certain entries more rare or common.  I put all eligible entries into a “Weighted Random Grab-Bag” and then pull from that bag to select the item to be instantiated.  A rather high “skip placement” chance is then applied, first at the quad level and then again at each brick level, which creates the empty spaces and makes the “shape” of each level different.  Early on it was a giant wall of bricks like atari breakout, but that was a lot more repetitive and thus less fun.

“Concrete” – the unbreakable bricks seen in the clip above – required a lot of care since they can create impossible-to-win levels and even get the ball completely stuck.  The game creates a “budget” for concrete that will not be exceeded, and has a lot of restrictions on where and how closely concrete can be placed.

A Flaw in the Approach

In general there is a problem with this pattern:  The player plays for a while, gets past the easy stuff and to their skill level.  If they lose, I make them restart but from the current level… so I generate a new level but don’t send them backward in the difficulty curve.  This works well for a while, keeping the player challenged.  But if they play for a very long time, they will get some lucky easy levels and push further into the difficulty curve.  Then they will be playing in an incredibly hard level and be stuck there, losing and losing.  Hopefully the game is still fun then, but it’s not a very nice way to leave them.  In post-compo work on pychotennis, this is the primary thing I’m trying to address.  The game just gets too hard and then strands you there.

There are other flaws in that a player can be served a bad level that is either too hard or too easy.  But with short levels and fresh generation each time, I don’t worry too much about this.  As long as the game is not generating totally game-breaking levels then I think it’s okay if the player has the occasional silly experience.

My Games Using This Approach

To see this in action, you can check out my current entry, Psychotennis.

If you’re even more interested than that, you can check out my games list page for past entries.  The ones that use this approach most clearly are Hammer Control and Splash Europa.

Hope you’ll enjoy Let’s Play Simulator 2016

I finally found the time to fix the difficulty settings of my ludlum dare entry.

I got several comments that the learning curve was to steep and that it was not clear how to play the game, so i added ten new levels which become more difficult very gradually.

No game mechanics has been changed, i merely added new entry levels to make it more accessible.

Try it for yourself here

Panball was a game that I really was surprised by both the difficulty I had to understand how the pinball worked and the feedback from all about the theme, I’m not very good at interpreting themes, so it was amazing (credits go to a programmer friend named Rafael Hrasko, who gave me the idea of pinball using some method to grow when ball eat something) 😀

Those who haven’t played, I’m sure you will not spend more than 5 minutes

Jam ———–Version
Post jam —-Version

First of all, if you haven’t tried the game, take a look at it!

The idea of making a team first appeared on the discord gamedev group. We all got hyped and a gigantic team was assembled. Of course, on the day before LD a lot of the members left.

The final team was composed of soso (the LD account we used), mahham (meee), odyssey and muddmaker. Yoohooyuzu (the artist) had some internet connection problems so we had to go with programmer art.

So it begins…

A few hours in we had the idea of making an RTS in which you, the immune system, fight a virus which wants to grow. The hex grid was in our minds all along. I (mahham) chose to make the hex grid work, since i fell in love with them a few years ago after reading this beautifully written article. I think i made it work in about an hour.

In the meantime, the others were working on entities. That code was horrible and we scratched it.

We later decided to refactor the hex code. After refactoring around 1/2 of the code, muddmaker left.

Soso and I worked on a hexagonal map and buildings. When muddmaker came online after a few hours, he got mad at us for not making a tower defense game. Wait a second… tower defense? We were making an RTS, right? Yeah, he misunderstood it. He left the team. So now we’re only 3 out of the original 8.

I’m not sure when, but around this time we changed the game from immune system vs biological virus to antivirus vs computer virus.

A very, very early demo of the troop AI

After that we finished the building base code (still no textures) and some basic troop AI:

Now we only needed more buildings, the virus AI and A LOT of tweaking. The buildings were slowly but steadily made.

I chose to make the virus AI. The first AI draft looked like this:

After a few hours of trying to make it work I realised it’s too hard, so I went for another AI idea, in which the virus will place buildings in order to get to a certain predefined configuration (always the same). That worked out pretty well, but it needed some tweaking. While I was working on the AI, soso made the shop work.

At the beginning of the third day, we had the basic game almost finished and I had to fake a disease in order to not go to school. After I finished the AI, soso said that we have no time for our own music so we instead went with using NCS music. He started working on the main menu and a popup that showed when a song started playing while I searched for some fitting music. I did a horrible job. The music was way too distracting for anyone to concentrate on the game, but I didn’t realise that until the jam was over.

Another problem that occured at the beginning was git. We weren’t familiar with it and the conflicts were hell, breaking the code EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME.

And that’s all. Hope you liked the game 😉

Tags: ld34 Postmortem

Play QwertyBee Now! It’s simple! It’s fun! It’s a Bee! He’s drunk!

Thank you.

Ludum dare 34 is a very special ludum dare, because it started last year and ends this one! 😛

I’m very grateful, so thank you for all your comments and I desire you a very happy new year!! ^_^

I developed Memory Jump for this ludum dare, and I have special affection with this game, so if you have not played it yet, this last chance to play and rate it is a gift to you and me.

The goal of all my games is to make someone happy, so if you like my game and let me know, you make me happy too.

If you like my games, cou can take a look at my website: sunsetgamescorp.com

PLAY MEMORY JUMP

When the horn sounds, Ragnarök starts! No Wand Studios wish you a happy new year! Do you know a better way to celebrate it than to play Gjallarhorn?

We want announce that we’re working in mobile version. We want add more enemies like this wolf:

And our graphic artist is making more polite graphics.

PLAY IT HERE

I hope this year will bring so many good games, as we get in 2015!

Also, that’s the first time I participate in Ludum Dare and I’m really happy with the final result of my game, which you can play here.

In 2015 I started making games seriously and finally made something to the end. Currently I’m working on Fast West Postjam version with new little features and Android port. And I’m just getting started…

I’ll be streaming and playing your games. Because why not. Let’s get at least one viewer other than me.

http://www.twitch.tv/rodzos

If you suggest a game, I will play it. Unless I’m too busy.

You can play my game in return.

Hi, I have a channel over here

I know it’s not big but I realised that the best thing about having someone play your game is that you can find out how to improve it.

Send me a message on my channel or reply to this if you want me to play your game!

I’ll also say what my favourites are in a video after.

So this was my very first game jam, and while I really enjoyed the accelerated development period, there was a lot I wanted to clean up or add to the game “Safe or Sorry” ( http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62158 ). So now that it’s over I’ve decided to do just that. It was nice to watch “let’s plays” of my game and streams. It showed me a lot of areas where there were things I needed to fix. So far my fix list includes:

• A redesign of the games monster
• Smoothed monster’s movement
• Fixed bug with monster’s vision not being consistent
• Fixed scoring issues so hiding is not beneficial
• Cleaned up levels, added some details like skirting boards
• Fixed game end screens
• Fixed hit box for the buttons so they are easier to hit.

Below are screens showing the games monster before and after the redesign. On the left is the original on the right is the new one.

Front View

Side View

Rear View

If you are interested in following my development as I turn this into a real game you can follow me @JimmothySanchez. Thanks for reading!

Tags: compo, game, ld34, post-mortem, progress, unreal 4, unreal engine

Hello! Welcome to the post mortem post thing for Enliven. I will try my best to briefly explain what happened during those 3 packed days, and why we couldn’t get the game finished in time.

Day 0

So, this Ludum Dare was pretty unique – instead of our standard battle station in the Ernst residence, we got to work in a studio apartment! On top of that, we’ve had a newcomer to the team – Rom Haviv! Rom is an awesome game dev and friend who also makes games in his free time. He has made some stuff for Ludum Dare in the past, and he’s an awesome artist and programmer.

This was the first time we worked with someone new, and it proved to be an awesome experience. 😀

We spent the first day figuring out how to set up a git repository and installing Windows on a newly-formatted computer. Everyone went to sleep on his own couch, all hyped up for tomorrow.

Day 1

Everyone was a bit surprised about the entire two themes fiasco. It left us all a bit confused, so we went to get some breakfast to clear the confusion. We started thinking and sketching game ideas that involved one or both of the themes.

We settled on a simple tower defense game, where the towers actually branch from a central seed you need to defend, and you build more towers and branch even further by killing enemies.

We worked on a simple engine and some graphics while churning out concept art, but eventually we slowed down to a grinding halt when we realized the idea was kind of… eh.

This is where shit hit the fan.

We started breaking our heads over what to make, unable to think of an idea. We sat dormant and just waited for the right idea to appear, but nobody came.

We thought of a bunch of interesting game ideas, such as a puzzle game where you play a robot who can only move on one axis, and can switch to the other axis by pressing the two directional keys at the same time. Each switch would cost some power to execute, and you’re limited to a certain number of switches every level.

Still, we couldn’t collectively agree on a good idea that everyone wanted to make, and it started getting late. Eventually we were getting tired, and even considered giving up, but we agreed to give it one more shot tomorrow morning. We went to sleep as sad gamedevs with nothing to show.

Day 2

We woke up fresh with some new ideas, and after some brainstorming, we all agreed we liked the concept of planting seeds to navigate around levels and solve puzzles. Filled with determination, we quickly started working.

Rom & I worked on the engine. Let me tell you this: working with another programmer in Game Maker and Git is utter hell. Constant crashes, errors, missing files and unsynced projects made this experience an absolute mess. I cringe when I think of the hours that went to waste because of fiddling with this crap. After wrestling a few hours with Git, we decided to just screw it and use SVN and instead. And it actually made things simpler (but Game Maker still has shit support for that kind of stuff).

A few hours down the line and we created the basic game mechanics (platforming, vine collision, seeds) and the smart camera.

Meanwhile, Itamar and Mati were hard at work on some sprites, and made some pretty pretty stuff.

Most of the animations you see in the game were created by Itamar.

More and more hours went into work and soon we had some basic gameplay and tiles to make pretty gifs:

We finally had something going our way, and we hit the bed satisfied, but unsure if we were going to be able to pull this off with just one day left.

Day 3

Cue pressure. We woke up extra early and just got straight to work without wasting any time.

Jason sent us some cool sound effects and music he worked on while we were asleep. I think he did a great job with the sound design this time around, as good ambiance and mood was something we were hoping to achieve.

We knew we had to work fast if we wanted to accomplish anything, and there wasn’t much of it left. First thing I did was to add the springy flower and explosive plum, while Rom worked on the underground tunnel seed.

You can already see here that most of the art assets were complete. We still needed to iron out some bugs and flesh out a few mechanics, but the main thing we were missing were levels.

Mati sat down and started designing some levels that teach you the basic mechanics of the game, while Itamar finished any remaining assets.

Everyone worked tirelessly under pressure to put in as much as we could, but time was running out and we figured we wouldn’t have enough of it to make a proper game with levels. After consulting with some comments, we decided to just finish the game abruptly and put in a sandbox level that lets you mess around with the existing content of the game.

There’s not much to say about what went behind the scenes here, as we simply just churned work while time ticked away. Eventually we had to stop to upload the game.

What went right?

• Teamwork. Even though we almost caved and gave up, we stuck together and made something even though we almost lost hope.
• Graphics. I’m always amazed at the stuff Mati & Itamar manage to put out in  such a small amount of time, and they’ve done it again this time.
• More programmers. For the first time ever, I didn’t work on the code alone, which was a pretty weird experience, but made things that would otherwise be impossible in this time frame happen.
• Ambiance. It was something we were aiming to accomplish here, and I think Suezo managed to pull it off nicely.
• Workspace. Working at the apartment was awesome, and it felt extra indie, too!

What went wrong?

• Time. Because we started actually making something an entire day late, we couldn’t make the game we really wanted to make, and had to submit an unfinished product.
• Repositories. I cannot stress enough how bad Game Maker’s support for team projects are. I didn’t really suffer from it until now, because I was the only one who tinkered with the project file, but now that I see how bad it is, it makes me want to run away to Unity asap. (which will happen, eventually!)
• Ideas are hard. It’s always hard to find someone everyone likes and wants to make, and this time around the process actually took up an entire day worth of work, which is pretty sad.
• Literally everything aaahhhh

So yeah, we submitted an unfinished game, but in the end it was absolutely worth it. We proved to ourselves that we can stick together and make something even if things look grim, and it was all worth it for the lovely comments you guys have left on the game so far. We’ve seen people streaming the game and playing it on YouTube, and some people have actually created carefully planned speedruns of the game, which is absolutely awesome!

I’d like to thank Rom who actually managed to endure our shenanigans and memes, and worked like an absolute pro. And as always, Jason, or Suezo, for kicking so much ass.

Lastly, I’d like to thank you, Ludum Dare. You guys filled us with motivation to actually submit the game and make it into what it is today. You guys are absolutely awesome, and this community is something special. <3

Play/Rate Enliven here

– Lonebot ♥♥♥

ps. Mati & Itamar need to finish Undertale

I’m working on a post-jam version for iOS, adding a bunch of new mechanics, changing the existing ones a bit, and kind of making it a metroidvania

Play and rate the compo entry here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=27074

Don’t use pure system colours like I did initially.

It looks horrible.

This episode covers the following games: Gjallarhorn by NoWandStudios (got it working this time), The Tie Game by Dejvo, Sanctuary Station by Joror, and SHRiNK by qkerguelen! Check them all out in the video!

If you’d like your own game to be played on my channel, just let me know via this form and I’ll get to you as soon as possible. Be sure to include an alternate means to notify you if you don’t have Twitter! People who’ve commented on my game (which I’ve updated since the jam!), and people who posted first get priority. Follow me on Twitter to find out which games I’ll be covering next (if I remember to post about it).

I’d recommend submitting soon if you haven’t already, as my schedule is going to be tight with my work on the #towerjam. As I go down my list I’ll have to make shorter segments for each game (as much as I don’t want to) or postpone them until after the jam. Once the voting period ends on LD34, I will close the form. I may still accept requests to LP your game, but there’s no telling when I’ll get to it.

That aside, this has been a blast! It’s inspiring seeing everyone’s different takes on the themes and how they each tackled the Ludum Dare challenge. I’m even more determined than ever to hone my developer skills and make an outstanding game for #towerjam! Hope to see you all there!

You can follow my progress on my #towerjam game on Twitter. I’ll make a website for it once I have more to show as well.

Tags: Dejvo, gameplay, Gjallarhorn, jam, Joror, ld34, Let's Play, NoWandStudios, qkerguelen, Sanctuary Station, SHRiNK, The Tie Game, video