Can you find the True Snowman title?

Here it is, the final shoutout to play SBExtreme. To also pass along the love here are 3 games from the 177 (~6.2%) games I rated that I found interesting or fun.

Octov by Taldius

Interesting take on command sequences and you are a Shyguy!

Darkness by Sineglitch

A sound-centric experience with visuals to aid it instead of the other way around.

Conservation of Ninjutsu by kuhnerdm

Ridiculous, fast-paced, simple and funny. A great compo entry.

I wish you all a happy and creative 2016!

Hi folks. I did a little platform game for this 34th LudumDare session with a cute aesthetic and a quiet mood. For this project I used Unity (code C#), Gimp, SFXR for the sounds and SoundTrap for the music. I am very proud because I think that I did something (more or less) interesting with funny physics – even if this game is really hard. Now I am working on a post jam version with enemies and more features. Use right mouse button to attract cubes or the seed – use left button to freeze objects in the air. Jump on them so as to reach the next island. If you dare, try it. I wish you the best and see you later friends ++

The Seed

Also you can visit my itch.io page which hosts other little projects ++

We’re still interested in more feedback, especially on the post-comp version, so if you haven’t already, and have some time over, we cordially ask you to check out Interstellar Cruise.

A cruise in interstellar space

I made a lot of improvements to my entry for post-jam updates and am relatively happy with how it turned out for being my first Unity game that I made from scratch. I started out on the Friday of the theme announcement with next to no experience in Unity and spent 90% of my development scratching my head and researching how to get my ideas into code form.

A few improvements I never got around to are improving the audio and sound effects, made a new song but it was just slightly better. The next one that got skipped was fixing the zero G collision that causes the player to spin out. The main complaints on my game were the controls and the lack of direction, and I fixed one of them.

I hope to make something impressive in LD35, but for now here is the final version of Stardust.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on my game page and I’ll try to play your game before the time is up.

Implemented the gameplay code and pushed to Itch.io. Pardon the blurry Gif:

The new flight model is easier to handle, trust me. It even has a controls help panel!

Give it a spin

Tags: finished, gif, itch.io, post-jam, release

I know 8 seems like an odd number, but it’s not, it’s even (Heheh). I could only find 8 entries that I thought were really good. I know that there are still great entries out there but I just haven’t played them all, wish I did. I’ve only rated 50 games, so these are just my favorite 8 of the 50.

I need to rate more games before the results come in, so if I haven’t rated your game yet, DROP A LINK IN THE COMMENTS! But before you do that, please look at my Top 8 Games (in no particular order).

Double Kick Heroes (Jam) by blackmagic

Conga Master (Jam) by BubsyPoochies

Pistil Pistol (Compo) by HacksawUnit

2 Button Metroidvania (Compo) by JaJ

Concrete Jungle (Compo) by Miltage

Agent Hooker (Jam) by Phoenix849

Left-Leaning (Compo) by tayl1r

Deseeder (Compo) by Zanzlanz

Thanks for reading, but have you checked out my entry yet? Check out my game, Arc! I’m currently at 180 votes, let’s get to 200! If you’ve already checked it out, then check out the POST COMPO Version! Includes Different Colors, New Power Ups/Power Downs, More Music, and MULTIPLAYER! Check it out!

And if you don’t want to check my game out, at least check out the new track I made for the Post Compo Version:

Since my LD34 game Super 2-Button Growdown took some inspiration from TowerFall, I decided to go all the way and replicate my game inside it. This custom level includes all five maps from my original game, custom tiles and music, and an optional ruleset that tries to mimic Growdown’s gameplay.

The TowerFall stage is available here, and if you haven’t played Super 2-Button Growdown yet, grab a few friends and rate the game here. Leave a comment and I’ll rate your game back!

This is my first time entering the Jam instead of the Compo, and I did it with Tifu, a friend of mine that usually enters LD by himself as well.  Together, we made our entry, “Nightlight“:

I handled the programming, sound and music, while Tifu handled the characters, graphics and level design.

Things that went well:

• I loved the theme Tifu and I came up with while brainstorming ideas at the beginning.  Focusing on the “Growing” aspect, we implemented it three different ways: the growing fear, the doll growing in power, and the overall theme of the child growing up.  I feel that anyone who makes it to the ending will be able to fully appreciate the theme.  Also, though we didn’t specifically use the “Two Button Controls” theme, we did make a reference to it by naming the doll “Two Buttons”.
• I really like how the visuals came out.  Tifu had enough time to create separate animations for the main character for both normal and scared states, and I think little touches like that help add some additional charm to the game.
• Everything came together well for the sound, from the constant sound of rain outdoors to the intermittent flashes of lightning, and even very subtle things like the main character’s footsteps becoming louder with faster movement.  Anyone familiar with my previous entries knows that I like putting in dynamic music, so of course I had it increase and decrease the intensity of the music based on the fear level.
• I’ve never coded a dialogue system before, and while it wasn’t perfect, I’m glad I was able to get it working.  Using different fonts and colors for the text made it easy to tell who was speaking when multiple characters were talking.
• We were just barely able to get both the intro and outro completed before time elapsed, and I’m glad we did, as it would have felt very incomplete without it.
• The four photos that the player has to find are adorable; Tifu did a great job with them.

Things that needed improvement:

• While doing the movement coding, I had the semi-brilliant idea of making it so that as the player got more afraid, the main character’s movement speed would become gradually faster when moving towards light sources (or outlets while carrying the nightlight) and slower when moving away from them.  It made sense in a realistic sort of way, but in practice, I realized too late that no slowdown at all should have occurred.  As a result, some of the runs in the game ended up being more difficult than expecting, and the very first room of the game unfortunately ended up being difficult to pass (not a good first impression to make).  Unfortunately, I’m worried that some people may not have successfully passed it due to the difficulty, and this may have had an impact on the ratings they gave.
• As most LD entrants know, running out of time is the greatest problem.  While I’m glad we finished a complete experience, there were some things that were cut for time.  Most specifically, the doll (Two Buttons) was originally going to show up throughout the house to hound the player at random and not-so-random points, but we felt that this was secondary to the rest of the game, and focused on getting the core gameplay done first.  As a result, there aren’t any scares as we had originally planned.  In a way though, it kind of still works: there’s a constant fear of something scary happening that never comes, which fits in with the realization that it’s all in the main character’s head.  (I kind of wish we at least had time to implement the TV scare.  Tifu had animations ready for it, but I just couldn’t get it programmed in.)
• Originally I had set up a system by which light sources would cast shadows and consequently produce unlit areas that the player would still end up being in the dark and afraid.  In practice though, it didn’t look good with the perspective we chose, so I ended up cutting it out.  The only way it would have worked was if the perspective was directly top down, and I think I prefer the RPG-style top down we went with instead, since it allowed for more expression on the characters.
• I’d like to have put in a dialogue system that typed out what was being said, like most RPGs do (instead of having the text just appear), but this feature was very low on the priority list, so I cut it very early in development.
• With how much time everything else took, I didn’t have time to make a proper opening and closing theme to the game.  This is the first time I’ve ever had to cut music from an LD entry.

Anyway, there’s still time to play it if you haven’t yet.  We hope everyone likes it!

I think my game Psychotennis works pretty well as a quick LD game, where you can expect a player to sit and play for a bit.  It’s quick and fun with a very short game loop, so there’s a minimum of fluff and just straight gameplay.

But for a post-compo expansion I would want to reward a longer play session.  To that end I’ve already changed the game from a one-game Match, to a “Best of 5” format, where you advance to new Matches by winning 3 games, and the fail/retry loop is at the level of this larger Match.

This also invites the idea of an “Adversary” who can apply some character to the procedural generation of levels and make a few taunting comments for some flavor.

Of course, expanding in this way can be at odds with a tight game loop, and mapping out the new expanded game flow in advance helps me to know what I’ll need to build before jumping into coding.

So here’s a map of the game flow before and after:

I made this map pretty easily on draw.io and it helps me to minimize the button presses required from the player to move between states (Red) and know what I’ll have to implement in terms of UI (Blue) for the various states.

Game Description

A puzzle game focusing on level discovery through the use of illumination. Use multiple perspectives to find the path that leads to the goal. While viewing your character from above you can navigate the world and switching to a first person view you can shoot light emitting arrows to light the world around you.

Before the 3 days

Planning:

• Leading up to the final day our team shared our voting results on our Slack message board. We would talk about what we enjoyed and disliked about each theme. Once the final vote was open our team gathered on Skype and discussed the final themes that we enjoyed and disliked. Together we created a list of game ideas for each theme. We stacked up some of the game ideas to cover multiple themes, this allowed us to have fewer game ideas so we could focus on making them more developed.

Once our team had decided that most of our games would be created in 3D, we began researching 3D game development in Unity. During the few hours before the Ludum Dare our team watched videos such as:

• Treehouse: Unity Basics & How to Make a Video Game
• Roll a Ball Tutorial
• Unity: Graphics Tutorials
• Unity: Tanks Tutorial: Camera Controls

Things we had before the start:

• Used the Unity Standard Assets as a base for third person and first person movement controls.
• Also used Unity Game Jam Menu Template as a base for the main menu and level select.

Challenges

• Timing of Ludum Dare wasn’t ideal:
  • Leading up to the event we communicated by Slack instead of having in person meetings. We tried to maximize time we did have available by having agendas for discussions before Ludum Dare, and using Skype to communicate throughout the weekend. We also prioritize letting team members sleep/break when they needed.
  • An example of our timing problems was: our artist had other responsibilities that weekend and had to split their focus on Ludum Dare and their own responsibilities. This was mitigated with the help of coffee, coffee, more coffee, and dogged determination.
• One of level designers did not always have things to work on:
  • Periodic check-ins about what could be done to help teammates were conducted hourly by the team member.
• Time:
  • 3 days is never enough! Comparing to previous projects we found this game was more polished and complete compared to games we had 6 months to work on. Overall we have found that the more games we work on the better we become.
• Theme:
  • The team struggled for inspiration on the selected themes, but with a quick reconstruction of previously created themes we developed an idea that we were both satisfied with and was scoped well for the Ludum Dare. Although the game we wanted to make that was out of scope was: a game in which the player discovers new lands and makes a map of their discoveries everyday. When night approaches the player would sell their maps to gain money to buy upgrades on their explorer gear. We had plans for this game being procedurally generated with a vast amount of places to explore, unfortunately this was out of scope and we decided to go with plan B.
• Unity Scene merging problems:
  • While working on the project our Unity scenes would not merge correctly and required each team member to reimplement anything done in a scene by another member. This was fixed by unignoring meta files and correctly setting the mercurial configuration file on all developer machines. This fix was unable to merge scenes created before the fix, but worked for all scenes created after the fact.

What went right during this Ludum Dare:

• Found free open-source music online to fit the theme, and contacted artist about inclusion into our game. He was excited and posted about the game on Facebook. The music and ambience added to the atmosphere game.
• Several compliments about Mood and Scream in game.
• Visuals reflected a minimalistic style that we enjoyed.
• No one died, everyone ate, we were able to attend to life responsibilities during the weekend as well.
• Camera controls in third person turned out great.
• Modeling a 3D character, rigging and animating in just 5 hours.  We are very proud of the amount of 3D environment props that were created as well.
• Streaming people’s games on Twitch and watching Ludum Dare streamers play our game was very enjoyable for the whole team.
• Lots of great feedback on the game (People loved the scream)
• Female main character.
• The team completed their first 3D game! (Yay artist!)

Things we would like to do differently next Ludum Dare:

• Build a level editor.
• Sleep the night before/take a nap before the theme reveal.
• Request vacation for all three days.
• Not have finals directly prior to the jam.
• Zip files. No installer.
• Release for all platforms upon completion.
• Test levels with someone not on the team.
• Leave more time for visual polish at the end of development.
• Post progress to Ludum Dare during the 3 days we are developing.
• Optimize the game to be smaller than 50MB

Future Plans for “A Shot In The Dark”

• Implement an engaging story
• Create a more open world design similar to Zelda games, where parts of the game are block off based on what powers/upgrades you have unlocked.
• Make levels which use all the implemented features.
• Either remove one of the perspectives, or sync rotation between them.
• Fix the falling bug that allows people to get stuck on the corners
• Add Cat’s Pajama Logo
• Create a compelling UI
• Polish the visual style and the Character animations.
• Reduce the load time when launching game by removing some of the larger sound files.

Credits

• Designers:
  • Paul Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith
• Programmers:
  • Paul Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith
• Artist:
  • Lynne Startup
• Level Designers:
  • Jami Schwarzwalder
  • Phoenix Smith

Data Box

​Developer: The Cat’s Pajamas

Publisher: Ludum Dare/Itch.io

Release Date: December 14, 2015

Platforms: Windows and Mac

Game Link: http://thecatspajamas.itch.io/a-shot-in-the-dark

Ludum Dare: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=66266

Twitter: @TheCatsPJSGames

Team Size: 4

Length of Development: 3 days

Lines of Code: 1403

Development Tools: Unity 5.2, Visual Studio 2013, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Audacity

Asset Resources: Free Music Archive, AudioMicro, freesound.org, YouTube Audio Library

This is going to be a pretty dull post mortem because very little went wrong. Nonetheless, I did learn some stuff and I’ve not done a self-promo post that actually contributed anything yet so here goes!

Play Slum Runner here

I’ll rate you back and provide delicious feedback btw, so make sure to leave a comment!

Now, onto the post-mortem…

What was my mission?

I’ve had a pretty tough year in 2015 for LD. The last game I felt that was reasonably successful was Silian Rail for the Entire Game on One Screen theme (last December). I really felt I did a good job on that game, and it was easily the most complete and polished product I’ve made myself from start to finish. With that setting my standards much higher, I had raised the stakes impossibly high for the next few LDs. I was all like “I need to break the top 100!” and “I need to get a 4-star rating for fun!”.

For Unconventional Weapon and You Are The Monster I was too ambitious, poor at planning, and making some pretty bad conceptual decisions that resulted in so much wasted time. Unconventional Weapon I didn’t submit. It wasn’t done. You Are The Monster I submitted, but it was critically buggy and I didn’t bother promoting it.

This time my mission was to finish the core gameplay programming in 8 hours. Of course, as a solo dev I wanted to enter the Compo, but these were my only two missions.

What went poorly?

I’ll start with the bad stuff because I think it’s clear that I failed my two mission requirements!

My 8-hour programming limit was more around 12 hours. Those 4 hours really mattered, as I could have probably made the Compo deadline using that time to craft all the levels I needed (I have 8 missions at the moment) or build the music. There aren’t really many lessons to learn here though. I worked flat out with no breaks at a breakneck pace (for me) and it just took longer than expected… so c’est la vie!

I wanted to submit to the Compo but I needed an extra 72 hours for the Jam. Technically I could have released a much worse game for the Compo,  especially if I had those 4 extra hours, but I really enjoyed the concept and felt I had to do it justice and polish it up. The compo version would have had placeholder art, no music, and only 5 levels (with the first 2 basically being an easy tutorial). You can see it below as I made a ‘I failed’ video about an hour before the Compo deadline.

My hacky game jam code was really pushed to the limits in this one. Each level took about an hour to build rather than the 10 minutes it should have.

How I usually build levels is by using Adobe Fireworks (sort of like Photoshop) to place all the buildings, characters, and UI with a lovely drag and drop experience. Then I can go to GameMaker and use the X/Y coordinates from Fireworks to accurately place objects in the room using instance_create and all the draw calls. This was my first game using view ports and I just fucked something up. I’m not sure what it was, but basically there was a small, seemingly random, offset between the Fireworks XY locations and the GameMaker XY locations. This meant that every level I had to input the data for, then play through multiple times and manually adjust +/- xy values one at a time to get things to line up. ARGH!

What went well?

What I found really interesting about this project was that I had zero hurdles. For the first time ever there were no critical bugs that wasted hours of my time, there was nothing I had to really learn to do during the jam, so I had zero resistance to content with.

Using the extra 24 hours from the Jam was also surprisingly satisfying. I was bitterly disappointed that I couldn’t submit to the compo.. I mean, that’s the REAL Ludum Dare and I’m still a solo guy making all the assets so I feel I’m at a big disadvantage compared to jamming teams without all the rule limitations. Nonetheless, the final product is so much better because of that extra 24 hours. Those 24 hours were pure polish and content creation. They were relaxing, they were stress free, and therefore I could be much more creative. The quality of my final levels, the quality of the writing, as well as the quality of the music, is much higher because I wasn’t super stressed about hitting the deadline. Also I don’t hate my own game, which is what always happens to me when I try to power out a compo submission!

I can’t be very creative under massive pressure, so this was probably the key to Slum Runner’s success.

What did I learn?

For the hacky jam code level creation, I feel that if I’d have been a bit bolder and had taken a risk refactoring the way the level content was input, I could have saved a ton of time creating levels. This might have allowed me to polish up the art and add some sound to submit for the compo. However, I think it might have been a make-or-break decision. If I spent an hour or two trying to figure out the problem I might have lost all motivation to finish the game at all. This leads to my next lesson…

Avoiding all possible stress was really nice. I’ve never had a jam go so smoothly. I think because I was rushing as fast as I could, with crappy hacky code, and a relatively simple game… I never hit a hurdle that would typically demotivate me and reduce my productivity. Playing it safe was probably a very productive idea, despite each level taking me 6x as long to input.

I’m really finding out what my limits are for Ludum Dare, which is great. I know I’m a terrible programmer and artist, I worked as hard as I could for the entire 72 hour period. I know that for this particular concept, there’s nothing more I could have done personally to make it better. Any improvements 100% required more time or more skill. I think that’s a really nice thing to think about. For the next Ludum Dare I can now focus on one of two things; improving my skill level, or finding a concept with more potential.

I suppose the high level behaviour I’ve learned from the final LD of 2015 is that I really shouldn’t care so much. I put way too much pressure on myself and the final result. It’s a competition with no prize that’s supposed to be about a final product you can be proud of. I learnt this time that when I just give up caring about where I place in the rankings, whether I hit the compo deadline over the jam, and whether I create something super revolutionary… I can work much better, much faster, and have a much higher quality end result.

The Future

What I like about Slum Runner is that it feels pretty much complete. I have a feature already built that I just didn’t have time to build levels for, so I could go back and do that… but overall it does what it says on the tin and it’s a nice little holistic experience. I usually feel super guilty about not going back to Game Jam games and improving/building on them, but I’m ok with that here.

If I get a ton of good feedback then maybe I’ll reconsider, but for now I’ll see what the results are tomorrow (or is it the day after?) and probably work on my larger side-project that I’ve been putting off for the whole holiday period 😉

Thanks for reading and lemme know what you think about the game!

 
snow eater has almost passed number of ratings!

not played it yet? PLAY IT HERE

Hello Friends,

First I want to desire a HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone!
I hope in 2016 we can make many games and obtain much success in our projects!

Also I want to make a last invitation to play my game Armageddungeon:

I launched a post compo (beta) version with a lot of enhancements and will be pleased if you play it here!

Kind Regards,
Diel Mormac

I made an Android build of my open world racing game Unintended Acceleration.

There are some differences from the desktop version (seen below). I moved the HUD elements so you wouldn’t obscure them with your fingers and added the visible arrows for steering. I also tweaked the lighting a bit for performance.

Aside from some shameless advertising for our LD34 game entry: Spinning Around, we will be describing some of the more interesting aspects of making this game.

For this jam, we focused on the ‘two-button-controls’ theme. We wanted to make a puzzle platformer where can only go left and right, but with a ‘twist’: You go around in circles.

Our first idea was to model and pre-bend all our assets in our modeling tool. It quickly became clear that this would make it very hard to align the models correctly in Unity and even harder to build levels.

Our solution was to create a script that automatically converts a flat 2D platformer level built in Unity to a circular, bent version. In short, the script moves and rotates all level components so that they map on the cylindrical level shape, and also ‘bends’ all meshes so that they correctly fit in a circle. This script took some precious jam time, but it made levelbuilding so easy and fun!

The bending, combined with some nice detail/variation textures on the props and some custom a composed groovy music track  really made the game world come alive!

Overall, we are very pleased with the result. If you haven’t played our entry yet, don’t hesitate and visit our entry page. We hope you enjoy the game as much as we did making the game over the weekend.

PS: if you get stuck, Little-Burrito made an awesome review of our entry on Youtube.

I’ve made a gif of my game, The Gardener.

Hey everyone!

Thank you to all who have played my game! I’ve enjoyed playing all your entries, but the rating period is almost over! I’d appreciate any final ratings and feedback before judging ends, I hope to get a few more votes in. Play Edo Arena.

New animation stances

Sometime after the deadline (I’m not sure when, it’s not done yet) I will release Edo Arena’s post compo version. I didn’t have time to add much to this yet but my main goal is to tidy up the animations and item store. I hope to tweak the gameplay as well. However, I’m putting together an update for my bigger project so I can’t devote all I can to this post compo version. There will also be Mac and Linux standalone downloads.

Read my Post-Mortem here. If you haven’t seen the timelapse, take a quick look!

Thanks for reading and I hope you all get great results! ☺

Tags: compo, ld34, unity3d

Hello all! I turned my Ludum Dare entry into a kickstarter! I really enjoyed making “The Journey East,” and I think with better art and sound it can become a fantastic game!

You can check out the Kickstarter here!

And if the game seems interesting, you can try it here first!

Just posting to announce that our game where you’re a hovership thing dodging stuff coming at you faster and faster still indeed exists, and you can play it here.

We’re looking at doing an Android version. That might be cool!

We have made game Star Warrior mixing cheesy 80s and Star Wars styles.

Star Warrior

PLAY & RATE IT

Game was done in Unity and we aimed for smooth and joyful gliding mechanics. My friend kozun took care of steering, camera movement and whole logic behind space shuttle. Later on programmed nearly whole gameplay. It was inspired by mario and we wanted to take advantage of terrain. Yeah, based on your feedback we are aware now, it’s not so perfect but we couldn’t came up with anything better at that time. I’ve figured out wireframe shaders and experimented with shading effects. I’ve parametrized every detail of dunes and lava look, the world is endless. Then I made space fighter model and painted skybox. At the end I had to rewrite all wireframe shaders since WebGL does not support geometry shaders and update some screen effects since WebGL does not support MovieTexture as well. We had quite busy week and tons of fun working on it. Hope you like it!

Tags: 80s, ld34, starwars, synthwave, tkgames, unity