Control characters and shapeshift

Don’t be this guy     

 

If you’re interested, give it a go! Leave your feedback if you want. PLAY HERE

Thanks and have fun!

i said trying, cuz it does not fit with the game haha will have to keep working !!!

if u havent played please do! Its Black heart

 

Hi, I am Bruce Guo. And I have been rating a few games so far. I’d like to share some nice or interesting entries I found.

 

LD35 Picked by GB vol-1

 

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No Turning Back

by tgrehawi

 

The theme is shape-shift and many jammers take the shape as the shape of environment.

No Turning Back is a nice exploration-puzzle under a orthographic camera.

 

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Space Pole And Monkey

by kronosfere

 

What will shift in the game? The pole, of course.

You play as the monkey who got a pole that can extend at will.

Well, I thought the game was about Monkey King…

 

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SandShifter

by nesis

 

You shift the size of objects to wander in this desert full of puzzles.

The mechanic is potential, levels are well designed.

 

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motion: a

by sepharoth213

 

Not sure what it is, but there is shape and it’s shifting and it looks nice…

 

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Shifting Worlds

by ichbinkeinreh

 

The light create shapes. And the shapes will certainly shift if light were switched.

It is a very interesting plat former puzzle

 

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Line Square Tower

by dalbinblue

 

Imagine that shape-shift is the super ability for a hero!

Well, that’s common. But this game is very funny to allow you to shift between flat state and thin state.

Well, a few games use that concept, too. But the best part of the game is how you move up and down stairs in thin state.

Also, you can expect a polished/smoothed levels.

 

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Signed Distance Shift

by netgrind

 

The jammer created a stunning visual animation and somehow design a puzzle on top of it.

 

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Robot Snake

by eduardogacn

 

Well, you certainly saw that snake/worm many times in games.

This time, the game uses a very unique and intuitive and fun way to move.

This is really great job！

 

 

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windowframe

by managore

 

Daniel Linssen is one of the best jammers in Ludum Dare.

And this time, he came up with the idea of shifting the shape of window.

It is a very nice entry to enjoy in LD.

 

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Thank you for reading this far.

I will try to share more games I found.

And if you don’t mind, you can check our game:

LD35 Mountain By Bruce and Mizou

 

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Again, everything is done personally, leave me a comment for anything.

PLAY NOW: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=86837

So, it’s something quite important for me. I’ve actually FINISHED a game. It’s not huge, it’s not perfect, but it’s done. It’s been roughly tow years since I first started tinkering with Game Maker, but to this day every project I started is either abandoned, unfinished, or currently in development. It’s a pretty nice feeling, and all of this was possible because of the Jam.

Fly with your own wings little game. Fly!

It’s my second LD, but I failed at finishing the post compo version of my previous entry, because of dramatic performance issues with my dig game. This time the ambition was lower, and it pays! So here is the post compo version of WILD RUN, my running morphing game of this year.

 

Try the compo version Here

Try the Post compo version  on game jolt

 

I will now have time to test all the games the community made (well not ALL), starting with the games of people who took time to try mine. Here we go!

 

– Skaz

 

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

We’ve seen some fantastic games so far! KEEP THEM COMING! It’s Ludum Dare to Believe! It’s S:7 Ep. 4!

(May contain strong language)

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!

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 Maitre D
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: SeaDads

______

Title: A Slimy Fellow
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Ourson

______

Title: Shape Shifters Inc.
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Roxflame

________

Have a game you want us to check out? [SUBMIT HERE]

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!

 

Hey guys!

We are planning to stream some LD games with voting and commentary stuff.
So, here is a link

Best,
Team BSOD

Here are some GIFs showing each class gameplay:

Warrior Class

Wizard Class

Viking Class

PLAY IT HERE! – FORGE RAMPAGE

Hey, all! I’ll be giving a tutorial on how I created the cut-out effects in Hidden in Plain Sight at twitch.tv/japtar10101 on 3:00 PM EDT today. I’ll actually be re-creating the effect from scratch, so you get to see how little programming I used to create this neat effect. So hop in, and feel free to ask me any questions in the chat!

Edit: if anyone wants to follow along, I’ve created an open-source Mercurial repository here that you can clone/export:

bitbucket.org/OmiyaGames/cut-out-unity-graphics-tutorial

For those who will miss it, I will be exporting the same video and posting it on Youtube in the near-future. So stay tuned!

P.S. I’m also streaming tomorrow, 7:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace, this time playing your games!

Hey fellow developers and players,
I just uploaded a time lapse from my game making process of my card game “Bloodshifter“. I built the whole game from scratch in Java, so if you are interested in seeing that then here it is:

You can try out the game for yourself here. Thanks a lot.

Tags: card-game, Custom engine, java, video

Play SHAPE☆SHIFT here!

Ludum Dare 35 was a huge learning experience for me, so I thought I’d write up a postmortem or whatever!

 

1. Making a puzzle-platformer for a game jam, and you

The first thing I did was write down a bunch of ideas that came to mind with the theme, and settled on this one. I immediately came up with a few good ideas for puzzles I could do with the gimmick, but I wish I came up with more as the last puzzle in the game is embarrassingly easy! I had this big puzzle involving moving from the one side of the screen to the other planned out, but ran out of time and submitted it as-is.

Using polymorphism for the blocks saved me a TON of time. The player and the blocks all inherit from the same class, and the “floaty thing” object has a variable for which one it’s currently controlling. I’m very glad I happened to brush up on this before the jam.

By the last day of the jam, I more or less had everything implemented coding-wise, and ran into a level design panic. Many things that I wrote down on paper didn’t get put in the game, despite the code being there. One puzzle desperately needed a ceiling, another needed a door that closes behind you, a conveyer belt needed to be just a bit longer, a certain flagpole didn’t have to be there. The “unpossessable” enemies also needed some kind of indicator on the overworld that they couldn’t be possessed, besides not having a “core” when you try to take control. All of these things I actually had written down, but just never got around to doing them!

At first I thought that the solution to this would be coming up with 100% of the game within the first 8 hours and spending the rest of the jam making that game. I soon realized that this would make the game just feel… stale, and drew connections between this and the lesson on keyframing in “The Animator’s Survival Kit”. What I just described is similar to the “pose-to-pose” method of animating, drawing out each keyframe, and then adding inbetweens until it’s smooth enough. This gets an animation done on time, but where’s the fun in it? Another method of animating is the “straight-ahead” method, which is the way that you would animate in a flipbook. The problem with this animation method is that it might not stay consistent throughout, so you might not end up with something nice at the end. Finally, the “combination of pose-to-pose and straight ahead” method is usually the best way to animate. You draw out your keyframes, then animate straight-ahead between them. You know what needs to go between these keyframes, but have the freedom to do them however you want.

The same lesson can be applied to making jam games, just replace “keyframes” with “game systems”! That said, any method is fine for doing a game jam, just know what you’re getting into with each one. I mostly planned out my systems, but just wasn’t very good at coming up with additional puzzles under pressure, tbh.

 

2. Take 5 minutes to give yourself cheat codes

Honestly I must have lost hours to this. Every time I wanted to test out a later puzzle, I’d have to manually drag the player character there, collecting the “floaty thing” along the way. It would have taken me 5 minutes to write code that disables collision, lets me fly, and increases my speed by 10. So… do this, especially if you’re making a puzzle game where everything is in one scene!

On this note, I soon after found a plugin for unity that keeps objects locked to the grid, without holding down command. This would have saved me a lot of time if I had it. Editor cheat codes!

 

3. Polish is important, but playability is more important.

Some polish can be needed to make a game playable, as I cover below when I talk about floaty controls. What I’m talking about here is that if you’re running out of time and you still need levels designed and tested, mayyybe you shouldn’t spend 2 hours trying to get particles working?

I desperately wanted the player to have dust particles when they walked and landed, but ran into some problems with shuriken, Unity’s particle system, that I’ve never had before. I’m not sure what caused it, but hopefully I can get that working in a post-jam version.

This was my first time using Unity’s surface effectors, and they’re really weird! I lost an hour or two trying to get those conveyor belts feeling good, and discovered it’s /kinda/ impossible.

 

4. What makes controls, “floaty”?

This was something I spent a lot of time after the jam thinking about, and asked some friends for their opinions on this. (Thanks, Managore!) It’s sort of a weird topic, since even in the post-jam build I’m working on right now, I /still/ haven’t gotten the player feeling exactly like I want, but the problem seems to be more about horizontal movement, rather than vertical.

Increasing the gravity actually didn’t do too much, just shortened the amount of time the player stays in the air. Having a jump last from 0.3s to 1s seems to be a good range, but in my game, the jump already lasted 0.8s!

Faster acceleration and higher max speed so far seem to be the biggest contribution factor to removing that “floaty” feeling. Acceleration especially helped, making the player come to a quick stop after walking made it feel much snappier. That said, I think giving the player /less/ control of their velocity midair might also help! In Super Mario Bros, if you make a jump at full speed, then try to reverse that mid-air, it’s possible but takes a lot to do it! In my game you could just glide wherever, and it feels bad.

Another big contributor are things that one might consider polish, but turned out to be essential for making a jump be more satisfying:

Jump cancelling. At first, I had this implemented, but removed it due to a bug with the “jump on enemy multiple times” puzzle. After the jam, I was able to fix this in about 10 minutes, and it made the jumping feel much snappier.

Dust upon landing. As I mentioned above, I just couldn’t get shuriken working in time for the jam. But adding a small effect like this to a jump can make it feel way better! You want it to feel like the player slammed into the ground, not like they decided to stop falling for some reason.

Audio! Adding walking sounds would have made the character feel more like they were really there, and absolutely not gliding. The player also had a jump sound, but no landing sound. This stacks with what I said with dust upon landing.

Different jump sprite for going up & coming down. This could have been as little as moving the character’s pupils, but it would have “sold” the jump more if the player looked up while jumping up, and looked down only when falling.

Toss in some cheap sprite scaling. I could go on even more about animation, but pretty much just look up “squash & stretch” and “anticipation”. (Those are just the first two principles of animation, but brushing up on all of them will be helpful!) You can mess around with sprite scaling during jump animations, which can usually get the job done in selling a jump.

 

5. Be nice to your artists

Without Rev, my game wouldn’t look anything like it currently does, and I would have surely ran out of time. My main character was still just a hexagon at the start of day 3! I’d like to take this time to promo him:

https://twitter.com/IMPLODINGORACLE

https://twitter.com/IMPLODINGORACLE

https://twitter.com/IMPLODINGORACLE

When you’re getting assets from an artist, come up with a list of exactly what you need to be done, and what kind of feeling you’re going for. And let them know early! And be nice to them!! Jeez!!! Also, the conveyor belt graphic in the game was still my temp-art, and we ran out of time to swap it out with something better.

 

Conclusion

Making games is cool, you learn a lot!! Make sure to write down what you learn, so you can… learn from it.

The game needed more ways to explore the main mechanic, and better ways to introduce it to the player.

I’ll probably post an updated version of the game after judging. I’ve already done some control tweaks, mechanics tweaks, fixed problems with puzzles, and worked on fixing the floatiness mentioned above. Updating that right now wouldn’t be fair, so I’ll be waiting til after to consider posting that.

Thanks for reading!

 

Play SHAPE☆SHIFT here!

Tags: LD #35 PostMortem, post-mortem, postmortem

Thank you so much guys… we go for the 100!!

Play “Breaking Fat”

Tags: 2D, breaking fat, game, html5, jam, LD35, ldjam, Ludum Dare, unity, unity3d

Hey people, The Creatures of Pflaumotopia got a Post Compo version!
Since my original submission felt like only half a game to me, but had lots of potential, I worked a lot on it since LD35.

The biggest new features are a) a DNA & Mutation system, where you need to mate with other creatures to get new bodyparts and b) the possibility to collect other creatures and view them in a gallery. The best thing about this is that you can collect any creature anybody created, and they may encounter yours as well.

This, as well as many other improvements gives a lot more long-term motivation to play.
I’m looking forward to your creations and feedback on the new features

You can play TCoP here!

 

Hey, all! The Unity tutorial on how I created the cut-out effects in Hidden in Plain Sight starts now (3:00 PM EDT)! Check it out at twitch.tv/japtar10101! Edit: Stream is over, but you can see the recording of it here: www.twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/63371555

I’ll be re-creating the effect from scratch, so you get to see how little programming I used to create this neat effect. If anyone wants to follow along, I’ve created an open-source Mercurial repository here that you can clone/export:

bitbucket.org/OmiyaGames/cut-out-unity-graphics-tutorial

So hop in, and feel free to ask me any questions in the chat!

I’ll also re-post again once the export to Youtube succeeds.

P.S. As usual, I’m also streaming tomorrow, 7:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace, this time playing your games!

In Ogla you manipulate … ogla

Its a strange creature who can do only one thing   eat !

By exciting them with a beam you obtain 4 level of ogla  shapeshift who permit to eat and move more easly

Remember after few second the shapeshift decrease and ogla will stay like a rock

 

 

Try the ogla style  ?

 

 

thanks everyone for your feedback, i really want to try a post mortem version

 

Here’s an awesome video of @gamingarchaeo streaming the post-jam version of SHAPE.SHIFT:

Thanks for playing our game, @gamingarchaeo!

Click here to play SHAPE.SHIFT!

Well, more precisely, with a half-hearted attempt at it. It seems I’ve opened quite a can of worms when starting all that tutorial stuff. I’m afraid it’s necessary, though, since many people seemed rather confused by the gameplay. Dunno if, with the way I’ve set it up, there will be some improvement, or perhaps even more confusion? Won’t know without trying, anyway.

Also, I hope people won’t just skip through the dialogue…

You can check the game here. If you do so, please rate the Jam version, but comment on the post-Jam version. The feedback on the Jam version might very well be outdated, and maybe even downright confusing. If you comment, please say if it’s for the Jam version or the post-Jam version! That way I’ll be able to tell if some parts mentioned in feedback have been addressed already (especially helpful if a piece of feedback could technically work in both versions). Thank you. ^^

Greetings, I wanted to continue playing peoples games but I tend to be picky when given choices and it is easy to miss some gems when there are so many entries. I’ve made a form that takes less than a minute to fill out. I’ll work my way down the list and try to play them all.

Entry Form

Also, if you haven’t tried Fylgjur yet please give it a look. I’ve made two post compo updates and I have some ideas on further updates, feel free to leave a comment even if you don’t play it and let me know what you think would be cool to add in!

> Play IT Ninja, Now! <

IT Ninja was the smoothest ride I’ve ever had on LDJAM! Within moments of the theme announcement, the idea for a simple ninja stealth game just popped into my brain. The idea was to have the player complete a set of easy tasks while navigating a maze filled with sentinels, hide in plain sight by transforming into random objects, and go 100% undetected or fail the stage. By the end Friday night I had settled on a top-down view with click to move NavMeshAgents; Unity has a great tutorial set on this, so I used that as the basis of my player and AI. The vast majority of the game was made Saturday, with some cleanup and packaging on Sunday. I honestly don’t know how I settled in on a modern office as the backdrop, but it works well and it’s really easy to make props! Fun fact, the file cabinets, walls, and flooring are just unity Cubes and Planes stretched and squashed into position.

In my first LDJAM (28), sound was a crucial element, and it was perhaps where most of my time was spent during the polishing phase. I knew that the scope of this project would too large, so I elected to use more time working on lights, VFX, and Camera Shakes instead. I think this paid off in the end, as these elements add so much to the look and feel overall.

 

Diegetic UI:I really wanted my entire UI to be Diegetic (visualized spatiality as part of the game world ala Deadspace), but I simply ran out of time to do it 100%. You can see that the Level number, tutorial text, and the computer hacking elements along with the Exit signs are all Diegetic. However, the pause menu and next level screens are not. I’m especially proud of the computer screens, which use a simple UI slider, hovering just enough out in front.

 

Physics and randomness plays a small part in this game, and based on the feedback this needs to be cranked up to 11 for the humor factor alone. Local feedback shows that players love it when the AI pushes you around and interacts with your transformation, perhaps one day the AI will “use” you, such as pouring a glass of water from the water cooler. Updated version will also have more ambient objects that can be kicked around and manipulated just for grins.

 

My biggest regret for this Jam was not having more levels. It wasn’t until after Level 1 was made that I found just how poorly I designed the main game state logic. Everything was joined up at the hip by hand, rather than with a graceful state manager. It was going to take too long to redesign, so Level 2 was just as messy and I stopped while I was ahead to polish it up. I’ve since gone back in and made the beginnings of a game state machine, which will simply look for a set of conditions, rather than force-feeding it into multiple scripts and UI buttons. Hopefully the game manager will be completely modular, so that all a level designer has to do is drop it in as a prefab as they make new levels. Reception and feedback has been beyond my wildest dreams; a shameless self-plug on R/Low_Poly yielded an astonishing amount of votes and comments. The notes left here have been overwhelmingly positive and constructive, enough so that I’ll be making this a fleshed out full title under the Steamburger banner!

 

Thank you for playing, thank you for voting, and thank you for your creations! Can’t wait till next time!

 

> Play IT Ninja, Now! <

Tags: #gamedev #ludumdare #gamejam #ld35, ldjam