Before this post, link http://ludumdare.com/compo/author/japtar/ is not working, but apparently posting on this account once should fix it.
Edit: in reality, though, I’m using the Omiya Games account, and occasionally use this one as backup if I have more than one game to submit.
Lots of game dev work done. Time for some more public stuff!
All future progress regarding this game will be over here.
But I will also blurb about it on twitter.
A link to the current playable web version is at the bottom of the post.
Integrated tutorial
I had already tried to make the beginning of the game easier one week after the jam, by making an edible berry always appear second while below a score threshold. But that’s not enough. You could still boost past that range, completely oppressing the spawn, or ignore/avoid it like an obstacle. Not to mention possibly getting there and past it without learning how to jump (although this berry would spawn in the center, so there was intention to teach jumping with it).
Now the very first berry will always be a spiked one, spawning on the left or right side and forcing the player to jump. There is no getting past it without learning this. The second berry is again a red one. However this time it will stay floating on screen until you either eat it or manage to ignite on your own by tapping rapidly. This way players cannot continue without reaching ignition speeds at least once. Additionally, by floating up and down in relation to the players speed it also serves as another visual indicator to how inputs affect speed. A tap towards or landing high on a wall will make it inch downwards, indicating that you are slowly overtaking it, while loosing speed will make it float back up.
There is still more I want to teach like that, both before and after these (jumping, accelerating, boosting).
Speed perception
This is another aspect I immediately expanded on after the first week by adding a speed meter below the score. Still you cannot really have too many feedback sources (only too prominent/over stimulating ones), so I finally added some parallax scrolling. These two extra wall layers only really cover the sub ignition speed though, so I will likely add at least one much slower layer (clouds or berries in the background perhaps).
This goes on top of squishing the character, camera shake and audio pitching.
Game play depth
This section may seem a bit weird for such a simple game, but I really like simple games that contain some hidden depth. Some of it should better be taught, such as being able to control your direction and entirely stop movement mid jump (most players I watched discovered this on their own, but a lot of them took quite some time), while other features may be a fun detail to discover without directed guidance. Since the initial prototype you could for example always unfold the beetle during a jump by holding both directions. This increases the hit box, which is good for reaching berries and bad for squeezing past spikes. A new feature adding a lot of depth is being able to remove spikes from edible berries by kicking another spiked berry into them.
Future features and inspiration
There is quite a long list of games that are inspiring this on some level. I’ve had the most prominent ones occupy the new local high score list (which auto saves on the standalone build as well as viewing the web iframe content directly). Can you guess how each of them will influence my work?
I will be posting about it once I get to work on those features.
So long …
here is the “secret” itch.io page
Once I got that polished enough to be published to the store the web build will stick around as a demo, while the downloadable versions will get more features over time.
Follow the development on Twitter at Otiose Entertainment !
Upgraded visuals of the levels and walls, implemented 2D dynamic lighting, tweaked controls a bit and working on adding some new features to make for more interesting and intuitive puzzles.
Also trying to make the gameplay more relaxing and not stressed because of narrow corridors, but keeping it challenging… Performance optimization to make for a smooth experience on Android, better UI still to go…
Our fifth Ludum Dare was our first attempt at making a simple online multiplayer games. How did we do?
hack.source.net (Ludum Dare 34)
Above average. Fun, innovation, and overall stands above the 20% standing. Innovation in particular stands at the 5% mark, and we certainly ranked within the top 100 in that category, so we’re very proud of that. Our score stands smack in-between 3 and 4 stars out of 5, so it could have been improved. Still, considering what a mess it was trying to develop this game, we’d say it’s pretty good.
How does this compare to our other Ludum Dare games? Let’s check them out in reverse order.
Can I Haz Monsters? (Ludum Dare 33)
Can I Haz Monsters? did do better than hack.source.net in comparison. Seeing that development went much more smoothly for this game, this isn’t a major surprise. A lot of players commended the dialog system in the game, explaining the rather high mood rating.
Star Driller Ultra (Ludum Dare 32)
Star Driller Ultra is easily the highest ranking game we’ve developed. The graphics above should make that pretty obvious. This is also the second Compo game (solo-only), so perhaps the ratings are more reflective of the impressiveness of that accomplishment.
Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator (Ludum Dare 32)
Joke entry Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator is naturally the lowest ranking game. No surprises here: it’s made within 12 hours, with a portion of that time devoted in light-baking.
Our attempt to make fun of free-to-play games with Laundry Day is…well, reflective of exactly what we expected people would react to the game. It’s not surprising a deliberately badly made game would get some mild scores.
The Sentient Cube (Ludum Dare 26)
And the first Ludum Dare game has…no ratings, so there’s not much to talk about here.
Removing The Sentient Cube and Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator, score progression for each game looks like this:
Overall has been dropping since Star Driller Ultra, since we admit being more interested in experimenting in Ludum Dare than making a polished experiment. Still, innovation and fun remains very high, which is fantastic. The rest…well, hasn’t been our focus, really. The same trends can be found in the rankings progression as well:
The next ludum dare is the week before my GCSEs start. So I will not be doing the upcoming Ludum Dare.
However I will almost certainly be doing the one after the next 
(seems like such a long time).
I am wondering whether I should do a mini ludum dare to make up for it. However I don’t know how
much feedback you get for a mini ludum dare game??
Thanks for being the best community ever 😀
Ned
Both are thanks to the new custom programmed level editor, which looks like this: (albeit a bit wonky on LD’s website)
Would love to hear what you think!
I wrote a post-mortem/discussion/results/favorites blog post over on my own site, feel free to check it out! My game is Need For Seed: Undergrowth, here’s a GIF from the post-compo version:
*Fixed a little bug. Window doesn’t scroll when moving up or down now. c:
Made some Major changes to my Ludum Dare-Inspired Game, Arc, this weekend. Probably got more done this weekend than the LD 34 Weekend itself!
Bigger Game Window, New Colors, No More Shadows (keeping it simple), New Power Ups/Power Downs– Basically everything just looks much, much better! Be sure to check it out!
I still want to change the Game Over Screens, Add Progression throughout Classic Mode so it gets harder as you go on, add More/New Music, Leaderboards, and I actually want to add a whole new mode to the game. I will constantly be updating it, so stay tuned.
And this is probably the most fun I’ve ever had working on a game, so I’m very excited. c:
Thank you all who played/rated my game, you all left wonderful comments and feedback. I love that, and you, thank you very much!
And I don’t really like hogging the home page of Ludum Dare, so make posts about your games! I don’t want to be the only one. I would also like to see what the awesome people in this gamedev community are doing! c:
Hey there! Since you liked our game so much in this jam, we wrote a little postmortem about how we worked on it and what mistakes we thought we made during the development. Hope you like it and, once again, thank you so much for voting Mobsferatu.
It’s been a week and we still can’t believe we ranked 5th in the Overall in our first LudumDare.
Tags: CremaGames, Mobsferatu, postmortem
I just released a major post-jam update for my Compo entry CentiSnake. I addressed many of the issues brought up to me by people who played it, and it’s complete enough that I consider this a 1.0 release.
Changes:
The game is available for download and/or purchase on Itch.io: CentiSnake 1.0. There may be more updates in the future, but for now it’s time to go back to focussing on my long term project, an ambitious rogue-like spaceship game, inspired by Escape Velocity.
I’d love to hear any feedback you have on my game after my updates, especially if you played the earlier version. If you want to try the earlier version, it is still linked from my Compo page, so you’re welcome to try it out.
I hope people enjoy the game, and I can’t wait for LD35!
With that neat scrape from Liam I could finally get to see my placing among all rated entries (compo and jam):
Obviously my scores aren’t the interesting part though. It’s interesting to see that the theme was done very well on the majority of entries (having two easy to implement options is likely the reason?). Graphics have the highest cap and largest score spread. And a lot of entrants opted out of audio and humor. With good reason apparently because these categories generally scored lowest. The wildcard categories fun/innovation/mood seem to mirror overall rather well, just a bit lower.
Apart from the theme category I guess it always looks something like this (this is my first time)?
Hey Everyone,
I’ve entered Ludum Dare a few times in the past but it’s been ages and I can’t remember my login details, but it’s okay because a fresh start is nice.
In the past I’ve used Game Maker: Studio Pro and made my games for browser then submitted them to a website (can’t remember which one precisely) and submitted them in to Ludum Dare. But this time I want to try something a little different.
Lately I’ve been very interested in iOS app and game design and I’m wanting to start making some very basic games. I thought that doing Ludum Dare would help me improve my skills and give me some publicity. But because of a few things like licensing, I won’t be publishing my games on to the app store just yet, instead I’m going to have my own website which you can visit and install the app on your iOS device straight from the browser.
The only problem with this is if people would actually test my games. I understand that the recommended game type (and probably most used) is browser games because it’s easy for people to test out, by that logic I’m not sure if people would test out my games because they’d need to get out their iOS device (if they have one), then go to my website and install the app.
Please give me some advice on whether people would actually test out my games or what I could do to make it easier for people to test out my game.
So, I am planning on joining the 35th Ludum Dare Game Jam, and because of this, I have been hard at work flushing out and polishing up my own personal Java game library, called QUIXEL. As far as I know, I would be allowed to use it in my game, as long as I make it publicly available before hand. However, I don’t know the specifics behind it. Does the entirety of the source code need to be publicly available, or would the library jar file with attached source suffice? Also what type licence should/can I have on it?
My name is Fletcher (Listrix) and I’ve been making games for the past few years using Game Maker: Studio Pro. For the past few years I’ve been trying to either make my own sprites or find sprites on the internet to use but now I’m looking for a partner to make games with, someone who is willing to provide free and animated pixel art.
I like making arcade style games, I don’t tend to make fully fleshed-out games because it takes too long and I often lose motivation, so making quick, but enjoyable, little games works best for me, hence my interest in Ludum Dare. I haven’t released any games because of the lack of graphics and due to this I have lost the majority of my projects. But I feel like working with someone else will give me more motivation to improve my game making skills and be able to get some games out there.
As stated above, I like to make smaller arcade style games meaning I don’t use many, or complex, graphics. I tend to stick to 16×16 sprites due to my lack of drawing skills and but I’m willing to expand to 32×32 or even 64×64. The size of the sprites isn’t an issue, I’m mainly looking for someone who is able to create animations.
Things to note: I do not currently sell my games, I don’t even have any games released, but your name will be in the credits of every game you have made sprites for. If I do eventually decide to sell my games then I am open to discussing how the revenue will be split.
One final thing to note is that I am not the greatest game programmer in the world so please don’t expect me to produce professional quality games, this is only a hobby of mine. I am looking for someone who does pixel art as a hobby and is willing to provide free pixel art, not someone who is looking to sell their pixel art.
Hey everyone!
Mioti Games is still accepting beta testers and early developers to submit their games FREE OF CHARGE The first people to populate the store with games and use the website regularly will be entitled to free development membership for life! That means post as many games as you want with no monthly fee when that system does roll out.
The indie community needs a place to go where the developers get recognition and full profits for their creations, So come sign up and post your games right now! We need people like you who are willing to find tiny bugs in the system and help get them fixed.
For a short time only, all games posted will be promoted on the front page and on twitter and facebook.
-Jake
http://www.miotigames.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/miotigames
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mioti-Games-523063844518598/
Hey all,
I just published on Youtube a time lapse from my game making process from the LD34 (Java game). If you are interested you can check it out and try the game. And I know that it is a little bit after the end of Ludum Dare 34, but I’m quite lazy person so it took me a bit longer to edit and release these videos. Also sorry for the little bit worse quality it is because this is recording from my stream and also saving 30hrs long video in full HD takes a lot of space and longer time to render. Thank you all for playing and watching.
PS: On my channel is time lapse form Ludum Dare 33 as well.
Video from day 1: Link
Video from day 2: Link
Game link: Slimevasion
Tags: compo
After half a year our “Sola Mors” game which has been developed for the Ludum Dare #33 has been greenlit on the Steam GreenLight!
I would like to remind that we have initiated a program “Road to the Steam Greenlight in 3 days” which means that the game has been posted on the Greenlight right after the deadline of the Ludum Dare!
If you want to receive the news about our game (including development tricks and etc.) follow us on Twitter, Facebook or VK
Thank you for supporting us, dear friends!
Best regards,
Tima Zhum.
Tags: greenlight, LD33, Ludumdare, steam
Someone requested a purple version idk if I like how it looks but maybe you do so there ya go.
