you can check out my GAME :smiley:

Thanks for all the feedback! I will work on an post-Ludum Dare version, polishing all the things you recommend me (It's a lot)! This was my second LD and I am happy to participate in this magnificent event, I learn with every comment you gave me, and with all the games that you make!!

If you haven played Shapeshifter yet! and you have time, give it a try! and deposit all your wisdom in a comment!

Shapeshifter:TKSW!

Thanks you all! See you in LD39! (or sooner)

All the wordclouds I've seen look amazing and it's surprisingly nice to have all comments on your game visualized like that...

Anyway, this is 57 comments on my game page in a cloud.

A big thank you to @occultone who was the one who came up with this idea :smiley: His original post is here.

And of course if you are wondering right now: "What game could possibly have yielded a wordcloud like this?" Wonder no further! You can play "Throw" here!

I'm digging these word clouds so I thought I'd have to do one myself, sorry for shamelessly copying the ones below :P!

As an update on my game, I've been working on a mobile port for 'FUEL' which has been fun: adding in a virtual joystick for controls and I've already got it up and running on my iPhone to test functionality and working on an Android version too - since this is my first game jam (and first game!) it's so exciting to see my game actually playable on a phone! A whole bunch of new levels and a total re-skin is up next, but I'll be sure to post EVERYWHERE if I can get this to the App/Play Store someday!

As a sidenote, I've been loving everyone's games, this has been such an amazing experience for me to be a part of and to see what everyone else is doing, feel free to comment with your game below and I'll make sure and give it a play/comment/rating

Quick link to 'FUEL' if you want to check it out - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/fuel

Have a game-filled day everyone!

Click the image below to play Routine. ;)

I got bored and drew my character from my game. Definitely not shameless self promotion. No. Never. (Shrunken image because I have awful internet) (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/hopper)

I can't believe that I've only played (or attempted to play) 4% of all the games so far!

I know what you're wondering: what are some of your favourites so far? I'm glad you asked...

The Colour of Height

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-colour-of-height

My idea of a small world

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/my-idea-of-a-small-world

The Deep

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-deep

Space Travel 15

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-travel-15

Factions

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/factions

Super Collapse Guy

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/super-collapse-guy

Do you think your game belongs on that list? If so, leave a comment and I will play it!

Shameless self promotion....here's my game:

Globe Trot

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/globe-trot

Try it out !!!

It´s a story based adventure on a giant Space-Station.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-ship-andromeda

I've uploaded timelapse of creating my game, Petit Adventure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hnric2f-Gg

Hi all !

I work on a post-jam version of my LD38 game with more stages, a character selection, and lot of new items and enemies ! Also, I will implement a local multiplayer mode :)

A work in progress of a new stage :

You can play and rate my LD38 compo entry : >>> One Push Man ! <<<

Abaddon - my entry for this LudumDare session - has been patched. Some minor bugs have been fixed. Bunny jump is no longer allowed. I noticed yesterday that the leaderboard is now full and so only the best scores will be displayed. If you haven't rated my project, please take a look at it, then leave a comment - undoubtedly I will rate yours. Also share it with friends. I assume that it is my last post so as to promote my entry. Now I wait the results. Have a nice day - my fellows. Bye ++

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/abaddon

After working exclusively on a post-jam version of our game One Small Step we've finally released it! For now it's only accessible via dropbox download but we will have it be the exclusive download on our itch.io page after judging!

Post Jame Notes: - Various bug fixes - Changed terraforming values - Added ship takeoff speech bubbles - Added planet names - Changed GUI interface - Adjusted randomness of variables

If you haven't played One Small Step yet then I'd love a play through and rating and if you would like to keep the game afterwards I recommend this new version!

Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/one-small-step-1

Continued from part 5.

While we coded the simulation @Flaterectomy spent his time drawing loads of pretty cards. We’ll have to code mechanics so the user can pick a card, and have that card act upon the world.

To save some time for coding we’ll want to enable @Flaterectomy to work on card metadata by creating an external library of cards, a CardSystem will be responsible for loading the metadata+scripts from a JSON file into our library.

The CardSystem will also keep track of the cards in the player's hand, and spawning those cards as clickable entities in our ECS.

A second system could execute the scripts on each card (CardSystem) and interact with other systems to apply desired effects.

This is where earlier choices start to pay off. Our toolkit of components and simulation systems can be easily expanded with scripted effects like clouds, steam, evaporation, aliens that live inside a hollow earth and fall away from gravity, raining coffee shops, heat, etc.

We create stencils of magma chutes, hollow earth, that we can rotate and apply onto the simulation whenever certain cards are drawn using the same logic we used to load the planet, just ignoring certain preexisting blocks.

There we go! Since the sandbox aspect is where we had the most fun, we reward the player with achievements that can be used to edit the world directly.

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed the series. You can play around with the source, return to part 1 of this breakdown, or blow up your own planet!

People seem to enjoy these posts. And I've gotten tips of several cool games by posting them, so here is another list. Ten (10) more games, all playable in browser (verified with the latest Firefox).

SUPER Space Barrel by aamatniekss (@aamatniekss)

Additively short game loop. May therefore be illegal in parts of Europe.

A Couple of Questions, Volume II: Small Business, Small World by stoogebag (@stoogebag)

Murder mystery nr 2, can you solve it?

lonegalaxy by tehphen (@tehphen), and Parker (@parker)

Two player games are a rare bread in LD.

littleBLASTplanet by gamepopper (@gamepopper)

Getting your head around the practicalities of living on a sphere can be confusing. It's not hard to see why some people insist on the earth being flat. It's so much simpler that way!

Miniscule Frenzy by Mieeh (@mieeh), and Theihe (@theihe)

No LD is complete without at least one hard-as-nails minimalistic plattformer.

Monolith by samlo (@samlo), and David Carney (@david-carney)

This one has been sitting at the top spot at the itch.io search for web games from Ludum Dare38 for quite a while now so chances are you've already played it. But if you haven't then you should.

Small Planet by ZebraInFlames (@zebrainflames)

Seriously old school dog fights. Reminds me of several games I had on my first computer.

The Flip Lands by SalamiChild (@salamichild)

A both tricky and forgiving puzzle game.

SurviBall by Selbryn (@selbryn), Raysangar (@raysangar), lowride (@lowride), josemorval (@josemorval), and kukiri (@kukiri)

Work, Eat, sleep and build a ..(you'll see). Puzzle-oriented Speed runners should may want to check this out a bit extra.

Protolife by icxon (@icxon), a333 (@a333), and GRaAL (@graal)

A 'game of life' like game that is actually a game.

Shameless plug (my game, also Jam)

Aaaand.. since you've red this far. Might I interest you in some browers based textadventure/CYOA?

The world is (a) flat

A university student who oversleeps must hurry to get ready for class in an apartment where every room manifests a continent and the door is on the other side of the Atlantic.

Pro tip

If your entry works in a browser, put a comment below with a link to it.

Introduction

I always wanted to attend a game jam, be full-on creative and productive and in the end satisfied with me and what I have achieved. But, I am a big time procrastinator and can easily come up with hundreds of reason why not to do something.

I became fond of LD38 around start of Febuary, so two months prior of the event and back I told myself: Yes dude, this time you will participate.

So I got myself a bit familiar with Love2d. I wrote a parser for a Tiled Map, rendererd that map and let a small player walk around it. The animation consisted of 3 phases where on each step the next phase would be shown. Pretty cheap, but it looked okay. This took me like a few hours over the period of a few days, while beeing on vaccation with my girlfriend. Actually this was a nice experience, because the Wifi only worked inside the hotel lobby, so I actually could not sneak on stackoverflow. I actually needed to think about the problem myself and just come up with a solution by myself.

Anyway, when I came back I added the Ludum Dare date to my calendar and then mostly forgot about the little map project and thought: "This will be a good starting point for whatever will come up in Ludum Dare to start with." Man was I wrong.

Day I or God damn it, how and where to start ?!?

LD38 day came, and it starts at 3 am, on a Saturday morning. I started at 3pm, 12 hours later, cause I slept at my girls house and was not sure if I will even participate. As a professional procrastinator it is easy to find whatever reason to let things slide. I told my girlfriend: "Hey there is this thing I always wanted to do, but I am a lazy ass...". She then alsmot kicked me out of the house and pushed me thru the door. Yeah guys, get someone who belives in your dreams and wishes more then you do!

So I jumped on my bike, rode to the other side of the town to my place, rushed into a nearby supermarket, bought a bag full of Volt cola, which is pretty delicious btw, some minced meat for spaghetti bolognese, fruit, yoghurt and some sweets. After unpacking the groceries at home I sat down to see what the theme is for LD is, so that I can develop some ideas.

"A small World"

-was the theme name.

"Okay, hmmm, what?, really?!, why not... well, that could be like anything!", I taught to myself. While cooking my pasta and sipping my cola, I tried to come up with a game idea for the next 2 days. The plan was to cook something bigger upfront, so that I just need to heat it up later on, and that food and cooking will not distract me too much. As a side note: A little distraction is absolutley needed even in those 2 days of limited time, to get way from the computer, clear your thoughts, etc...Also I did not want to rely myself on delivery services for Pizza etc., because if I get hungry at night, I would be doomed, cause in my hometown they deliver till midnight max and start at noon...

I had a few ideas, like: Paperboy! You ride your bike thru the neighbourhood which is only like a block wide or a street long with some obstacles, like fences, dogs or rival paper boys who would chase you to steal your route. The Ludum Dare rules are, if I remember correct, everything must be done by yourself! So the question to myself was: can I draw a guy on a bike in diffrent phases(meaning animation)? Nope... I googled a bit and found some pretty sweet graphics, but then I thought:No, man. You have to do everything on your own, from code to grahics and sound, so I abandoned it.

Most of the ideas I forgot. The one that sticked and become a thing was: "a fish in bowl". He would swim around and one day a bigger fish was added to his small world, making his life miserable, cuz this guy would try to eat him, and you would need to hide in an shipwreck or water plants... In my thougths this was a 3d game where you the player would look from above the fishs head and swim thru the fish tank. Yay, cool! I had an idea. But hold your horses. Have I masterd some 3d engine like Unity, Unreal or whatever to pull this one off. At a weekend? With 3d models and physics? Hell no! I had fired up Blender a few times to construct some models, but a complete 3d game with logic etc, was simply unrealistic.

At this point I almost gave it all up, cause all ideas I had were simply too complicated. I talked to my girlfriend and I said I was unsure about what is going to happen this weekend and with my plans for it. She said that everthing is fine. "Do not put too much pressure on yourself. If it works, it is great. If not ... guess what? The world will still be the same on Monday". True, true, but I really need this. I do not know for what: But a nerd's gotta do what a nerd's gotta do!

I liked the idea of the fish in the tank very much. Can I transform the idea to a simpler one. Maybe 2d! Swim left to right and hide somewhere? Hell yeah! Can I scribble some dumb fish and let it swim around and then there is a bigger fish and you have to run (actually swim) for your life. Sure, let's do this! Something clicked inside of me, and I just started with that. I fired up Zerobrane Studio, tuned in some focusing sound from noisli.com and off it goes!

I attached my graphics tablet to the computer, which I bought for 60 or 70 bucks 2 years ago, for exactly something like this event and which remained untouched ever since then. I fired up Gimp and started to skribble. "Oh god, this is going to be horrible". It just looked rediculous. Even graphics tablets are just a waste of money or I am to clumsy. I bet on the clumsiness. Same happened when I tried to do it with the mouse freehand. Pathetic! Graphic tablets exist for more then 10 years now, or even longer, it simply has to be me! I absolutley wasn't prepared neither for the graphics tablet nor Gimp, and both are a pain in the ass if you need to pull something off quickly with almost no knowledge. Time was ticking away. Valuable time, which will be missing at the end for... For what exactly? I only had a mediocre idea and this all was JUST FOR FUN! So put the pressure away and make this fun, for gods sake.

I took a sheet of paper and a pen and started drawing some fish. Not a beauty...But way better than with the graphics tablet or mouse. And now? I needed it digitally. I took my Android phone, took a picture, synced it with Google Fotos, copied and pasted it into to Gimp. Inside Gimp I used the path setting tool. You would place dots statring at some arbitrary point and you add a next point which is automagically connected to the previous point, and so on and so on. This I used to draw the outline of the fish. I filled it witch some greyish color, exported it to PNG and loaded it in to Love2d.

90% of the code I had copied from the tiled map project I did 2 months before I throwed away and just used the strcuture to start the main loop and draw the fish. I had defined a player object back then which had the position of the center of the screen and on the keypress of left, right, up or down the player position would change into that direction. My fish started to move around. It was a start...

I needed some animation, so that it looks cool. A fish does not move much, it has no legs, it wags it's tail and fins to swim forward. So I needed more images to create the illusion of a living fish.

When you, the player, would press a button, e.g. like right arrow then I would draw the 2nd image and then the 3rd and after that the first again and so on... Inside Gimp I created a new image with 3 times the width of the fish for the swimming to the right and beneath that the mirrored images for the swiming to the left. In Gimp it does not look like much when 3 static images lay next to each other until you let the animation play inside your game and I was happy to sea "Sushi", which was his name from then on, "alive".

I drawed a simple blueish background with walls, a table on which the fish tank would reside, some sand in it and let it swim around. Booyaka!

I was not much pleased of my graphics at the time, because I consider myself more a programmer than an artist and just needed something to work with. In my imagination I would create super duper code from now on and create a small but nifty 2d action game. Man was I wrong again....

I drawed some seagrass too, and with my stupid method of animating it, it was wiggling way too fast. But I wanted to fix this later...

The width of the fishtank was twice the width of the resoltions width, so I needed a camera moving around, which was a cool effect. The small world of my game had some boundaries like the sandfloor, the waster-surface and some left and right bounds. I needed to determine if I would hit the boundaries so that I can add reactions to those collisions. I could have simply checked that if the players boundaries would overlap with some other boundaries, but NO, Mister Smartass decided to uses Löve2d's physics engine, Box2d, to add objects which would interact with each other. Because here, the engine would tell me that I had hit something, by hooking myself into some callback. I never had done this before and it took me a lot of valubale hours to define all boundaries as static objects. The player, or Sushi is a dynamic object, which would interact with the environment and move around at some speed. If objects collide with each other, callbacks are triggered. So, in the beginning, the callback that Sushi hit something, for example the grass would be triggered always because I screwed up the boundaries, as Box2d uses the middle of the objects rectangle boundaries as it anchor point. At some point I realized that Love2d has a line drawing function which takes points as input. So I could draw the hit box of my object. This helped me lot to understand what was going wrong and how to fix it then.

It was somewhere around 4 o'clock in the morning when I had Sushi swimming around inside his world bouandaried, animated and seagrass wiggling. I liked what I have achived so far. Time to get some rest.

Day II or Let's add more content and make it fun

4 hours later I woke up, brew some coffee, and started again. I needed and wanted to make the game fun. Again, this was a very productive day, with no distractions besides a short walk in the park and lunch.

I recorded a short video sent it over to my girlfriend and she replied: hey sweat, now add a shark.

A SHARK?!?!?! This is a fishtank! How and why on earth would I add a shark?!?!? How could she know. It didn't look like a fishtank. It actually looked like the sea. So after a couple of minutes, the idea sank in. How awesome! A shark is big, and hungry and needs food.

Sooo, lets draw a shark then.... Again I drawed a fish, but bigger, with the same procedure and tools as before. Again it was painfull. Here and there I was really furious because Gimp wouldn't do as I wanted to. This isn't about Gimp. Gimp is awesome, an unbelievable good piece of software! You simply have to understand and be proficient with the tools you intend to use to survive this endeavour sanley.

I needed more physics for the game. The plan was now that Sushi must hide in the seagrass cause he stand no chance against a shark! The seagrass is a static object and does not move but you cannot fly/walk/run thru a static object in Box2d, so you need to filter that out. If the seagrass would be an dynamic object, then the shark and Sushi would move or accelearte it upon collision, which you do not want. The grass would fly around, which would simply be rediculous. So a few hours later I could swim inside my boundaries of Sushis small ocean world, which still had the boundaries of a fish tank -> DANG! The shark would swim left to right and back and upon a hit with Sushi, you would die by displaying a fishbone, which I needed to draw too. Both, you and the shark would have 100 energy, and each second you both loose one point. Sushi could stop that by hiding in the seagrass. Also Sushi was invincible inside the sea grass. So for now, you could starve hime to death.

Later on I added sound. I installed Audacity, Rosegarden and some Midi-Tracker but realized after a few minutes that this is not going to happen: I have no time to learn a new tool.

I found an online sequencer and imitated the piano sound from the movie "Jaws" when the great white attacks. The output from the online sequencer was a midi file and I needed to convert that to mp3, which is pretty simple when using Linux. Also I added a failig sound when the shark would get you.

I started to upload my product 2 minutes before deadline and went to bed after that. I wasn't that satisfied with the end product as I hoped for, but I tought and still think, that at some point you have to pull the plug and just call it a day. This was it: I had produced something from zero till the end.

Conclusion

What a blast! What a great productive weekend. An truly awesome experience. I learned a lot about myself that weekend and I am very thankful for getting and taking the time to participate in LD38.

I am still amazed that to my contrary thinking I made some nice graphics. Sushi looks kinda sweet and the Shark looks cool. I would have imagined that I could have used more from the little map demo 2 months prior, but I did not come up with an idea around that. I guess I should have brainstormed more....

I need to master my tools, like Gimp, my Wacom Pen & Touch graphics tablet, some music tool, even that Online Sequencer rocks! Lua and Love2d, but also, I need to be more structurized. At some points it felt a bit chaotic, maybe it was the pressure of geeting it done, and working 100% alone.

I liked that once I came up with an idea that I could rate it as realistic and go with it, or ditch it and postpone for next time or next life :-p.

I did not managed to make the game really fun, it was something like Flappy bird in the ocean, I realized. Two hours before deadline I started to work on the shark AI. This was definetly too late. The shark is dumb. He will turn around when Sushi is near and swim towards you. But it does not create a real tension. Sometimes he swims backwards, accelerates to infinity, and what not... This is the most buggy and underdeveloped part. I had wasted a lot of time on graphics and physics. If I had started 12 hours earlier this could have been done, theoratically. But would I have come up with an idea or the will to do anything 12 hours before? I guess not. I would have found some good reason to cancel it all. So everything is cool.

In those 2 days, from Saturday 3pm to Monday 3am I haven't browsed the internet besides online docs for Gimp and Love2d, read news or watched TV. I simply did my job. I slept for 4 hours the first night, which to my astounding was sufficient. Something else gives you the energy to go on.

I still have no clue where the motivation, inspiration and discipline came from in those 32 hours. For a hardcore procrastinator like me, this was a big thing, and I really hope that it wasn't unique.

Was it stressing ? Hell yeah! But good stress.

Was it fun? Mostly, but not everything to be honest, but that is my problem to figure out, get better at graphics e.g. and be better prepared with my tools like engines/api's etc....

Would I do it gain. Absolutley! Hopefully soon.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks to Irene, my friend, my love, who always encourages and belives in me. xo xo xo

This week I will try to value and give feedback on more games. You can leave yours commenting here and I promise to play them :D

You can play mine here http://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/limited-space

Shoot me a link and I'll give your game a go! I'll provide feedback and I'll be more than fair on the ratings as well!

Don't worry about all of the entries! I will get to each and every one of your games! :) I can't get to them all in one day as I'd like to take my time to play everyones, but rest assured, I will play your game. Cheers!

I had a great time making a game and working in a team for Ludum Dare 38. Whilst we wait for the results (and Ludum Dare 39), why not do another one? :thinking:

I'm looking for Unity (C#) programmers for a game jam this weekend. Key requirement is that you're free for the large majority of the jam, which only goes for 48 hours. It even has a prize if we win, but either way it'll be a good experience. :)

If interested just leave a comment below with some contact info / message me on Twitter https://twitter.com/XAVIER_GAMEDEV

(Cross-posted from scripta.co/articles/pity-about-earth/)

Play Pity About Earth

The weekend before Ludum Dare, I wrote a post about preparing for Ludum Dare 38. It began as follows.

Ludum Dare 38 is currently hurtling through space on a direct trajectory with next weekend. Impact is estimated at 9PM on Friday, and the result will be a chaotic, harebrained, and fun-filled weekend.

Those words must have put us under some kind of spell, because over the weekend Jared and I built a chaotic, harebrained game about protecting the Earth from asteroids on a direct trajectory with Earth.

Weekend Retro

On Friday night, we planned out a 1v1 multiplyer game where one player defends Earth at the other played as a cruel Universe intent on destroying Earth with asteroids. It wasn't until Saturday evening that we decided to drop the multiplayer component, due to the some incompatible opinions Lance server imposes on the game client's build system.

After dropping multiplayer, our velocity shot up and we implemented most of the game mechanics, gameplay, and difficulty tuning on Sunday. Here's a series of clips showing the progression of the game starting Saturday morning and ending Monday night.

Click to view progress timelapse

We finished about 20 minutes before the submission deadline.

Ear Candy

The most exciting part of LD38 for us was working with a Veuskemini. Audio has always been our weakest point, so working with a composer was a huge thrill. This guy is seriously talented! We sent him a description of the game plan on Friday night, and the next morning he had already laid down two amazing, intense, evocative tracks. If we score well in any category, I'm confident it will be Audio. Check out this studio!

You can listen to the Pity About Earth OST directly. You can also find more of Veuskemini's work at: YouTube, Facebook, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Loudr, Reverbnation, and Instagram.

Reception

Some kind streamers have already played Pity About Earth for their audiences. Here are links to the VODs:

• TogisLp plays Pity About Earth...
• drazil100 plays Pity About Earth...
• JenniNexus plays Pity About Earth...

Judging is ongoing and we've gotten some good suggestions so far, mostly centering around the fact that the game is too hard. We'll certainly tune that post-jam, but the game at its core is an arcade survival game, so the difficulty will eventually kill you.

Out of the games I've rated, my favorite so far is Crater Creator, an impressive compo (hard mode) game about smashing asteroids into a planetoid to make it large enough to become habitable. It's a pleasing counterpart to our game about deflecting asteroids to keep a planet habitable. Great fun!

Post-Jam improvements

We fixed a few bugs post-jam, like a barrier-lockup bug that caused the barrier to become unmovable. We've also been brainstorming ideas that we couldn't fit into the jam weekend, like improving the missile ability, making the viewport a square instead of a portrait rectangle, and granting bonus score for blocking full asteroid barrages. We plan to implement these changes after judging has concluded.

As you can probably tell from the screen orientation, the game was designed with mobile in mind. Mobile wasn't a big priority for the jam, but we plan to post the game to app stores after jam judging is complete. Some tweaks will be necessary, like lessening the already-punishing difficulty.

Thanks to our families, the players, the streamers who've played the game, and all othe other LDJAM participants!

Since I've seen a bunch of cool ones on the feed, I had to jump onto the bandwagon with the comments on our own game. I have to assume that people really like Little Fortune Planet, based on the biggest words in there. :alien:

I just uploaded post-compo builds for Windows, Mac and Linux with most of the complaints fixed...

So please come by and tell me what you think is still missing. Also if you haven't rated the game, please do so using the old version :smiley:

Play here!

LD38 Entry : RoboLand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE-Jd01zDgs

It aint easy being a cute little green slime monster.

Game Links

Bureaucratic Deity SIM http://bit.ly/BureaucrafticDeitySIM

Rashlander http://bit.ly/RashlanderLD

Solitary Freedom http://bit.ly/SolitaryFreedomLD

If you’d like to submit your game you can submit it to this handy dandy form! Also let me know if you have any feedback for the series or if you have some type of request!

Larry Does Ludum Games Submission Form

Wow, this is sooo cool:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-perfectly-lovely-adventure

I have to ask though: Is there a simpler way than just copying your comments and removing your own and all the filler text like "x days ago"?

So I'm going to join in and post a word cloud of my feedback as well.

Hoping to get back into the feedback posting game as soon as I can -- things came up and I've been away. Anyone wanting to give Destruction Zone a try, it'd be greatly appreciated!

As soon as I saw the Small World topic I thought I always have wanted to make a game with the character moving around a planet as had seen in previous ludum dares... so this time we decided very fast on Saturday morning to try something as a remake of the old spectrum game Jetpack (from ultimate) but with a round planet mechanic. Let's say a tribute as this was one of authors' first owned computer game :-) (yeah we are getting old)

Timeline

So I spend most of the Saturday doing the round world physics and mechanic on unity and my brother had mostly all the art done by Saturday night. I was able to resist and not integrate graphics till the basic gameplay was working. We felt this was the LD edition that we arrived to Saturday night with more work done.

On Sunday we spared some time with family and got distracted and at the end not have too much time for the game but at least managed to put all graphics and animation... and even put some fast sounds. We were running for the jam anyway...

On Monday the plan was to tune gameplay and that but as usual got a bit distracted with some not-so-esential things like making the ship fly at the end and introduction scenes and playing with unity UI classes... so again finished letting the gameplay and enemies generators with no so much work...

But we enjoyed very much this LD. And an important indicator this time I ended with less chaotic code because of last-minute changes until is fixed than previous editions... so maybe this time we won't discard the game and try to make a mobile version with levels

What went good

• I am beginning to get accustomed to unity... and like it
• Iñigo draws really nice sprites very fast and in large quantities
• We counted with a remote musician who send just in time loops
• We decided fast on a topic and started implementing mechanics early
• I kept the game with programmers art for a full day and concentrated on gameplay
• I think this is the first LD that I got web, mac, linux and win builds

What went not so good

• If your little nephews came to visit, your programming performance degrades and you don't mind too much :-)
• Towards the end of LD I always give preference to having a game with start and end screens. And not too much to the game being fun to play...
• We always do very short play games... that can be finished in 1min or less.
• At the end the sounds that were added fast just to have something were never changed, the sound of the ship going up is an explosion repeating and is a bit tiring

Overall

Anyway we enjoyed very much this LD but after it had not too much time to review or promote our game... so let's work a bit and write this post-mortem...

So... if you read all that, you may have a look at the game here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-world-too-small-and-no-jetpack

Thank you and enjoy

Try "The NedLudd Club"! Thank you! :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-nedludd-club

Help me fill out some more words by playing, rating and handing out the constructive criticism on my game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/working-title-ld38

Feedback will be returned.

Keep up the good work everyone!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ruler-of-survival

Joining the word fever as well. Here's our little ball of words...

Feel free to check out our submission Godspeed Mankind if you haven't already. We're always looking for some constructive criticism and thoughts on it :smile:

I'm thrilled to be doing a 4th Feedback-R-Us, where @morrilet and I play your wonderful games if you leave us a link in the comments. If you're interested, give our entry a go (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/rovr).

Let's play some games! :)

I find it really strange that really comes second :sweat_smile:

Little Sky Farm

play and rate mah game guys :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-dwarf-planet

Den den den den den ?

Den den den !!

DEN

PS : Im not a marketer
PSS : Im Developer
PSSS : So I am bad at writing
PSSSS : Everybody can see that
PSSSSS : Have you tried Den ?
PSSSSSS : A lot of games are awesome on this jam
PSSSSSSS : DEN
PSSSSSSSS : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/den

Here it is :

I was making a pixel art game (again) for LDJAM and this time I wanted it to make my game pixel perfect with dicrete movements of mouse cursor and character by exact pixel values.

Turned out it was much more difficult than expected and not at all documented on the Internet, so I literally spent hours on making it work fine. I wanted to share my experience to help others not waste time like I did. I would also very much appreciate if we could discuss other ways of achieving pixel perfect animation.

I personally think, that these little details add a lot to the game but I'd really like to know what you think. If you'd like to take a look, it's here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/six-degrees-of-separation-between-me-and-the-party. It's an adventure of two kids trying to crash a party.

Anyway there is already a great article that describes how to render pixel perfect static scenes: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/19/pixel-perfect-2d/

Making a pixel perfect movement animation is a whole different story. In perfect walking animation the foot that is on the ground stays on the ground through several animation frames until it is replaced by another foot when it touches the ground. The feet on the ground need to stay in the same position every animation frame even though the character moves, the image below illustrates this. The animation is a bit quirky, but with the music it hopefully feels dancefully energetic. :sweat_smile:

In order to make pixel perfect animation in Unity, you need to fulfill two requirements.

The first concerns the animation sprites itself and more specifically the position of the foot that is on the ground. Let's say we would like to move our character by 3 pixels at every animation frame. It means that the foot that gives the impression of being immobilized on the ground needs to move backwards in the animation frames exactly the number of pixels we want the character to move forward (here 3 pixels). This is illustrated by the image below.

_ animation sprite frames _

_ with annotations added _

The second requirement concerns the way movement is triggered in Unity. To achieve any movement animation in Unity we need to synchronize 2 elements: - animation speed, which controls the speed at which the animation frames are played - sprite movement speed, which controls the speed at which the sprite is moved in the chosen direction

The problem is that the framerate of the Update function (which is typically used for movement) is not the same as the framerate of the animation. And apparently it can also change depending on the workload.

I tried synchronizing both with a common denominator value but always ended up with some bizarre jerking. So I ended up with using the send event on every frame of animation, to move sprite in the right direction when animation frame changed. The speed of walking is controlled with animation speed.

This way of doing is very time consuming and not efficient at all but it works. :sweat_smile:

In the time frame I haven't found any better solution. I'm thinking now of making a tool to make it automatically at import to Unity. But I'd really like to hear from anyone who might have already worked out this problem in a different and more efficient way.

Anyway, if you have any other comments feel free to post them! I'll write about pixel perfect cursor in next post.

Just a reminder, A Relatively Small World is now Windows portable! No more installers!

Hi all, just wanted to point you in the direction of our Post-Mortem. We've done it a little differently this time, so a quick explanation on that first...

At the end of last year we decided to make a change to how we do post-mortems, as we found that we never did a proper one on-time. We think the main reason was our tendency to always write them as very long dry documents that everybody hated doing, so we decided we were going about it all wrong. We were trying to write something for other people, almost like an article, but in reality there are very few people who actually care :smile:

So we went back to basics... a post-mortem is designed to help us analyse what went right and wrong with the game, and although it could potentially be interesting to others, its primary purpose is to help us understand how we can get better. Our solution was to do it as an informal chat, through an instant messaging app, and just talk to each other honestly about the game. We've done this for the last 3 games and published the results on our blog. It has worked really well for us, it's easier and more enjoyable to do, and we get some good feedback from each other.

We did one for Star Traveller earlier in the week, so if you're interested you can check it out here:
http://www.seconddimension.co.uk/blog/2017/star-traveller-review.html

Game itself is here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/star-traveller

Jumping on that Word Cloud bandwagon! Here is your feedback for Murder Mitosis thus far:

If you haven't played our game yet, please do. If you have, please do so again!

Thank you for all the great feedback!

Rate Murder Mitosis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-mitosis

Follow us on Twitter and on YouTube

50 done, 2933 remain. :smiley:

I see some people have 200+ comments given and these are my personal heroes. But for me to rate and comment 50 games was some sort of a challenge; since 1 review takes 10-30 mins (don't know why, just playing games).

And now I'd like to present my TOP-3 charts:

• GardenGarden by @matlab
• Bullet Wrap by @chao
• It's a Small World by @aviv871

Games above will just blow your mind (but not at once) especially if you ignore the description and comments before playing.

• eiland by @rubna
• Water Bear World by @aviland
• Haven - The Small World by @iluvatar

You think you can into atmosphere, huh?

• Global Disaster by @jamesy012 and @vince
• Space Snake by @hunter-loftis
• Echoes by @ghostbomb

These three will raise some questions about your gamedesign skills.

When you are leaving comments directed at a specific user, please use the @ mention technique.
What is that, you ask?
@ mentioning is kind of like hash tagging on social media. For example, in reply to a user named starboot76:
@starboot76 thanks for the feedback! I like starboots too! This will give them notifications on Feedback Friends, and eventually the main site as well.
So @ mention everyone!

Play Snake on a Plane

Thanks to Ludum Dare I made 3 games! It's insane since in the past 10 years I made tons of prototypes but never a finished product.

The first one (LD36 - ancient technology) was On Fire!

It's a short and goofy platformer about bringing fire to your family and friends by burning yourself to death and everything on the way.

LD36 didn't have ratings but I got really good feedback on this and I'm really happy with it. https://dietzribi.itch.io/on-fire

Second was (LD37 - one room) was levelone.

It's around 5 minutes of game, and you can't really die. This one is a bit weird, it has some more text and more "story" than I ever did.

It got some pretty good ratings! 8th place overall, 1st place in theme, 2nd place humour and also in the top 20 in fun, innovation, and mood. https://dietzribi.itch.io/levelone

And last but not least, for the current LD (LD38 - a small world) Space Hummus!

It's a space platformer with weird physics.

It has it's issues (the other 2 games also), but I'm quite happy with it.

From what I've seen, most people go into one of two groups: 1. They don't get the mechanics- it's not like most 360 gravity platformers where every planet has it's own gravity field. Once you're off the planet the gravity stays in the same direction. This usually results in frustration and/or rage quitting. :P I tried to improve a hint in the third level but I'm not sure if it worked. 2. They get the mechanics and abuse them to finish the game and they feel it's really easy. Most levels can be "cheated"- If you jump sideways you can just skip most of the challenge. This is my fault, I knew it was possible (actually it's possible to beat every level in one jump) but I decided to leave it because I didn't think so many people would realize that. Also I think it's kind of funny.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-hummus

I'll be really happy if you play any of them!

If you like what I do and want to support me- the best thing you can do is follow me on twitter! https://twitter.com/dietzribi

Thanks!

Do you enjoy watching people churn butter by hand or hammer out horse shoes? Then you'll love watching me make my My Very Own World in Flash.

But first Play It so as not to ruin the lovely story. I promise it's SHORT, FUN, and EASY TO PLAY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlXZM1Vwc3U

I thought last time was a great way to discover some really cool games to play since there isn't too much in the way of sorting at the moment, so here I go playin' again! Comment with your web games (or OSX, yes I know I'm in the minority here) and I'll get to playing and rating them!

A little self-promotion never hurt anyone either, so here's my game too :O

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/glop-plots

Since a lot of people don't get to see the world progressing a lot, here's a timelapse of the world changing over about a fifteen minute period in Entropy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrdRUXRyqS0

(Don't worry the video is much better quality than the thumbnail!)

Entropy is our Ludum Dare entry (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/entropy) where you try to overgrow the world or burn it all down online with other players.

The world persists even when other players aren't online and eventually can reset itself if the entire world burns down. Check it out and leave us some feedback!

hey guys! sorta late, but anyway, I'm gonna start posting some things here from now on.

I've been repeating this even to strangers since then, but here it goes again: my computer got damaged beyond repair just after this LD's theme was out, so it wasn't a tons-of-fun weekend for me... but things could be done after all. I was able to work on some pixel art portraits and icons for this game we made, and it was only today that I got a new computer and was able to play Ascension.

and you know what? I really enjoyed it! I guess the other members of the team won't read this, but I wish they know that I'm proud of what they did. those days were really stressful for me. at some point I sorta stepped away from the group discussions so I would not hurt my feelings or anyone else's. but it's done. and it's a beautiful game.

I don't know what will the future bring, but I'm glad that I was a part of this.

if you're reading this and didn't play our game, I strongly suggest that you give it a try: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ascencion

in other news: ANT DETECTIVE is AwEsOMe <_< check it out! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ant-detective

Hello LudumDare crowd,

I'm writing this to break down my experience in LD38 and better analyze what things went well and poorly for me. I'll start by going through the phases of my project - in terms of how I was approaching it without judging my actions, and then afterwards discuss time use and what went well and didn't. I have a number of ideas about what to do better next time, summarized in the last section.

For reference, here's a link to my game (Something Something)

Phase 1 - Getting started (+0h)

Frankly, "A Small World" was among my least favorite themes in the judging, it definitely didn't inspire anything that could be crazy and fun, like some of the other mechanic-related themes could have. After thinking about it for a long while, I came up with two general ideas - both pretty ambitious, but I felt like I had a good shot at completing either of them. * A minecraft-like game on a small spherical world. * An RTS on a very small world map with serious space constraints.

I felt like I had a better chance of completing the RTS approach, and estimated that the minecraft-like game would be considerably more complex to implement. I drew up a pretty simple list of requirements, planned out some goals, and prepared to start work.

I didn't particularly choose a specific platform to target before LudumDare began, but this did not end up being a problem; Someone I know just happened to mention MonoGame right when I was thinking about where to start, and since I've had a lot of experience developing with XNA, I picked it up and ran with it. Despite a few initial technical problems, I quickly was able to get rendering working and started moving forward with my plan.

Phase 2 - Rendering the world (+3h)

My first priority was to build a representation for my world, and to display that representation to the user. Since I had decided to build a game involving map depth as a gameplay element I had decided that a 3D representation was the best approach. I quickly produced a usable world representation in code, and also quickly was able to display this flat representation. I decided to improve this world to use textures, and spent some time implementing textured rendering and building some simple textures. I continued to add some largely cosmetic features like correctly rendering the "cliffs" seperating vertical gaps, and a few buildings. I continued to implement another rendering mode for the billboard sprites which I'm using for the "forest" tile and ultimately the unit sprites. At this point I felt the rendering was effectively complete and spent a short amount of time building a UI editor for maps in order to build the kind of terrain I envisioned for the completed project.

Phase 3 - Building the game engine (+26h)

I thought for a while about the structure I wanted to build to enable the minimal set of features I needed as well as the future expansion I expected to do, and settled on a design. I have a core game engine class which manages all of the details of the map, actions, and units. Public methods allow for querying information and requesting action. In the future I expect to add a layer between the requests and the engine to allow for replay functionality, and this slightly constrained the design. I decided to build a set of data structures to provide properties of the different resources / buildings / units / construction tasks in the game, and I created that array of data and functions to lookup the reference structure for the different types. I built a game engine tick system and hooked it up to the game update, so every frame it may tick the game state forward, making progress on active tasks and updating any active units. At this point the game was mostly functionally there, but needed UI to be able to do anything.

Phase 4 - Building UI (+39h)

I realized that the deadline was starting to get pretty close... But some sort of UI was pretty important. I built a few more icons for game resources, and various rendering code for the variety of panels that are needed to show what a tile is, what things you can build/research, what tasks are in the queue and their progress level. And of course some time was spent polishing obvious errors I saw as I was throwing things together.

Phase 5 - The mad dash to the finish (+43h)

I was sufficiently satisified with the UI to proceed, and pathfinding was the last major obstacle to getting the game to a point where it was playable. I built some map support code to tell me which transitions between edges were passible, and an A* system to produce a path through the tiles. Then I produced sub-paths within each tile to lead the unit to its final destination. Implementing unit spawning and rendering went pretty quickly but after fixing a few last bugs with the system, I encountered the +48 hour deadline, and was unable to get to work on the gameplay features

Post-LD

Since LudumDare ended, I have spent (so far) 3 hours more working on my game, and so far have already implemented resource harvesting, attacking and destroying buildings, and building new structures. So, things were pretty close, if I had just a bit more time I could potentialy have produced a winnable game, though still far short from my original vision.

Time management

I have built some tools to monitor where my time goes, and below is some data from the the LudumDare 38 compo time range Full Size Image

Report for time range 4/21/2017 6:00:00 PM - 4/23/2017 6:00:00 PM
Time on record: 48.00h
Screen On Time: 48.00h (100.0%)
Active Time: 28.49h (59.4%)

Visual Studio: 19.70h (69.12%)
LD38.exe: 1.72h (6.04%)
Chrome: 1.27h (4.45%)
Photoshop: 1.25h (4.39%)
Edge: 0.97h (3.42%)
OneNote: 0.67h (2.34%)
mIRC: 0.61h (2.13%)

Overall, I think I did pretty well with time management. I have approximately 24 hours of interactive time with visual studio / the game / photoshop / onenote (Interactive time is actively using the mouse or keyboard within ~5 seconds). I did manage to oversleep on Friday night, should have set an alarm. Yeah, I can probably do better, but I'm pretty happy with this.

Conclusions

It's been about 8 years since the last time I participated in a Ludum dare... My biggest mistake was overconfidence and thinking that I had the right mental state and discipline to build a game supremely fast. I would have got much further if I had focused less on graphics and polish and charged ahead with the game engine and gameplay as soon as possible. Funnily enough some of my friends even told me this but I didn't beleive them at the time, I felt that there was sufficient time to engineer and polish the things in the order that I was doing them. So next time my goal will be to have something playable by +24h in, and to prioritize that above all else.

One other thing I'd like to do is try to think about the game differently, rather than trying to form a full game concept and then charge forward towards it - While that's fun and can work pretty well for longer duration projects, it really doesn't work well in an LD competition. The thing I hope I remember for next time is, don't do that. Instead try to pick out game mechanics that relate to the theme (or just arbitrarily, if the theme is no help), and try to find an interesting concept by merging some mechanics.

Anyway, it was great fun - Hope this write-up was interesting, and I will certainly be back in 4 months for the next LD :)

Marbleverse! That's all.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/marbleverse

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-growing-adventure

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-38

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/food-fight

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/soleil

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planet-desumaton-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/lottery-you-judge-them-i-judge-you

I've released an update to my Ludum Dare game, Gnome Town Dating Simulator!

I added some more graphics and sound effects, improved the GUI, and remade the opening sequence. There is a lot more I could do with this, but I think I'm going to call it complete here. Time to move on to bigger and better projects.

Play the update (browser):

https://campbellrossmccarthy.itch.io/gnome-town-dating-simulator-2

If you would like to vote on my game, you can still play the original from my LD game page:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/gnome-town-dating-sim

Just checking out my game then I find out that I have 2 games.

I saw all the word clouds people were uploading, and it seemed pretty cool. Let's give it a shot!

These are based on the comments about my entry, Strangeness

Joining the Word Cloud party with feedback from our game.

* Destructo Island*: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/destructo-island

play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-small-world-cup

LD38 Entry : RoboLand

Fixed a lot of game breaking bugs! And more updates on the way.

We don't have enough words to make cool shapes but here's a ball of our words. The number one word is game, cause our game is a game. Add more words by commenting on our game! - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/murder-38

I used http://www.wordclouds.com/ which was the first google result for wordcloud. Then I copied and pasted the text of the comments one by one and converted everything to lower case.

Play the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-hummus

Though I might jump on the bandwagon (psst, my games here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/hopper)

I said beep beep i'ma sheep!

I usually don't join memes like that, but I really like this one, so. Here is mine :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/my-little-planet

Wait..why is "llama" so small? Let's add some llama love! :D Play Spermicorn Game here!

We want to thank the organizers for this contest, and all the participants! Thanks for ratings and comments, (write more!) Good luck to all!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ant-clicker

Many thanks to all of you that have played, rated and left feedback for my game. Hopefully I have returned the favour.

For any of you that haven't seen it yet, here's my entry:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/globe-trot

After reading all the feedback, I have created a list of what I will do as soon as the judging ends:

• Fix the camera - this is my biggest problem. During the jam I should have fired up Geometry Wars 3 again and paid more attention to how they move the camera. I should NOT have allowed the camera to rotate with the player. Big mistake!
• Fix the audio - when there are lots of enemies on screen and they are all firing at you, each one starts a new sample. I should have kept track of how many sounds I was playing and put a sensible limit of the rate at which new sounds could be played.
• Allow restart immediately at Game Over - like some of the most addictive games out there, being able to restart immediately is very important. I regret not including this and it's probably one of the biggest lessons I have learned from this jam.
• Show the player's score at Game Over - an oversight - but funnily enough, people want to know how they did when they die!
• Make the player's death BIGGER! - Feedback from @hegemege suggests that the player's death should be more "spectacular" and I like that idea!
• Support PS4 controller - When @occultone played Globe Trot in his live feed (1hr 17min in the video below) he was playing with a PS4 controller...and it did NOT work at all! So I need to sort that out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr-ZBj_dJa4

Thanks for reading and happy gaming!

Hey all!

I know this might sound unreliable from someone who promised to continue working on most of their games and yet haven't delivered much, but this time i'm not alone and post-ld is going better than usual.

Power Department "First Proper Post-LD Release" (i just invented that codename since we haven't came up with some proper versioning yet) is a pretty modest incremental upgrade, with improvements in:

• balance (the game was (in)famous for possible "instadeath" even on easy mode; now it might've become too easy - we have a long road to fix balance properly)
• video (sound volume tweaks, full-sized render, a short scene added)
• ui & map display (power area highlight, removed unused action, ability to toggle tiled layer with M and perhaps something more that i forgot)

The bigger improvements are on the way - they're in fact already present in development branch, but it isn't playable yet (@cameron-seebach did some nice rewriting from LD rush code to a better architecture). There probably won't be much changes from me (i.e. story bits) quite soon yet, because making proper animation will take some time and i'm even not making it yet - i'm busy creating a tool to make it.

Play here

LD entry

I'm just doing what everyone else currently do.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/statera

Hey look, a bandwagon for me to jump on! ;) PixelWorld is here if you want to see why some of the most common words are "good" and "fun"...

its why's waldoo

its completely unrelated to where's waldo

build an empire selling waldoo flakes, made from the meat of waldoos

build your waldoo finding empire.

its fun

its educational

its a blast

you will have fun playing it

its like cookie clicker

but better

because its more tedious

also the music is high quality

with crystal clear audio

with no distortion whatsoever

have fun

download it here

btw i also made a ludum dare game if it interestes you whatsoever to be chased around a tiny planet by missiles. play that thing here

Play Me Here

Word cloud with comments on our game so far.

This game was meant to be longer but then we somehow got caught up in doing things we've never done before mainly voice acting. We've had so much fun that we didn't even realize until a few hours to the end of a jam that our game does not have any playable ending of sorts. But we somehow managed to do it in time. Making this game was fun from the beginning to the end and we hope it'll make you laugh at least half it made us. Now go, play and leave us your feedback :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/rock-e

Until Tomorrow is an interesting (read: weird) game. I've been having trouble putting a label on what kind of game it is.

Try it for yourself!

No word cloud; Not a huge fan :smile:

Word cloud so far. Thanks for all the feedback!

only one week left of judging! thanks all for your wonderful feedback. please comment below or in your review of my game (here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/ragdoll-wars ) your game and i'll take a look!

Hey! I drew my game on paper and made it a thing. Give it a whirl, there's a prize at the end! :D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/paper-jam

Made a rad game? Comment with it and I'll plays yo's!

Here is the link to Miniverse

If your game is - like mine - too deep under the stack of games, it's not a simple task to look for it in the list.

So I slapped together a quick query that check a game's position in the coolness list. Check it out for yourself :smile_cat:

Also ratings show. It's glorious.

To get your game ID, go to your game's page on Feedback Friends, then look in the address bar for the uid= tag, as shown below.

That's your game ID.
If you haven't played my game yet, you can check it out here.

Hey! Frankly speaking I'm the person who hates keyboards, and I hope someone here is crazy as I am and added a gamepad control to his game. In that case give me a link to it in the comments - I'll play and rate it! For example my game supports gamepad even better than keyboard - I wish to get some feedback about how it plays on gamepad https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/last-day-of-the-woods

Is it out of 50? 100? Is there a way to know what the ratings mean? Are lower numbers better or higher?

So I don't know if it's the new website or not... but I have played and rated tons of games. Usually more people would see your game if you rate others. I have only 4 ratings on my game. I don't think I'll be making it to the 20 ratings to be on the leaderboards if I don't do something... so here is this! Play and rate my game please! Just a humble request.... that is all...

There is a video I did with Florian Himsl where he playtested the game as well if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0NGW5pusXk&t=185s

The game is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planetary-assault-self-defense

This is very disturbing.

Yes you! Have you played "Leucos" yet? If not, maybe some screenshots will convince you! :D You can join the action by checking out "Leucos" here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/leucos Have fun and destroy malicious microorganisms responsibly!

Hey, it would make me happy if a few more of you would try out my game :)

We're one week away from the end of Ludum Dare 38's judging period and we've been feeling overwhelmed with all the great feedback and reception that Petty Puny Planet 38 has been getting over the last few weeks. As other members of the site have been posting as part of the Ludum Dare tradition, we too, wanted to share the tales and conclusions we've made during our development process and aftermath, through our very own Planet Sized Post-Mortem!

Petty Puny Planet 38 is a pick-your-own-adventure roguelike-ish simulator style game where, as a bigger-than-life entity, it's the player's job to take care of their small pet-planet - and the tiny people on it. This is done by picking between presented choices that are randomly chosen from a pool actions every round.

Every round, however, a random event will happen that can cause different outcomes to the player's planet depending on their choices. Most of the choices made by the player, as well as the random events, have visual impact on the planet, which, together with some random visual elements and colors, makes it so each player will have their very own unique planet at the end of each playthrough.

Certain choices also branch out into others, allowing for even newer choices, while others increase or decrease the population's happiness and wealth. As the player progresses through the game, and depending on their planet's status, certain choices will start appearing which lead to different endings.

Our development team was composed of the same three members that had also participated together last-time during Ludum Dare 37, where we developed Hyper Holomayhem 37. This team is composed of @JorgeGameDev who works with everything Unity-related and handles gameplay programming, @Moski once again being in charge of the game's artistic direction and responsible for all graphical assets, and finally, @ZakBlystone which once again composed unique tracks for the game's soundtrack, as well as all the jingle sound effects that are played in game.

We once again stuck with the tools we've known and have worked on, similar to how we have during all previous Ludum Dares. The game's development was made using the Unity as the game engine with C# as the chosen programming language. In fact, you can even see the whole Unity and programming part in a timelapse we posted earlier when judging started. The art was designed and created on Krita which @Moski has written a blog-post about how the program can be used for developing art for games, and finally, the music and sound effects were composed on FL-Studio.

In order to avoid a similar situation to Ludum Dare 37 where we constantly cross-questioned our design decisions in regards to the game, we decided that for this edition of the jam we would start development once we had an exactly clear idea of what we wanted to go with, and that we needed to decide the idea early on during the first hours of the event.

Once the jam's theme was announced (Small World) each of us brainstormed several ideas that we're then pitched to the remaining of the team members. Eventually, the idea of a decision-making planet simulation game, inspired by the likes of Sort the Court and Civilization was picked, with more brainstorming eventually leading the idea of the planet continuously getting new cosmetics as the player made their choices in order to add extra charm and humour to the established concept.

The decision making around the planet eventually was given extra depth, as making decisions regarding a planet struck similar to somebody taking care of a pet rock, which lead us to start focusing the game - and all the descriptions of it - around the concept of the player owning a pet planet, which eventually lead to the game's name of Petty Puny Planet.

What went right?

Being a game designed around allowing the player to make decisions at will meant we could progressively add more and more actions and events to the game as development progressed, extending it's gameplay and replayability. This system was designed with Object Oriented Programming in mind, which meant we could easily add new choices and random events to the game without having to do alterations to existing code once their base was programmed.

Towards the end of the jam, we could easily add choices in a matter of a few minutes, requiring only the art assets to be paired with the text scripts which allowed us to quickly multiply the number of actions, events and endings by the final hours of the event.

A great strength of making a pick-your-own-adventure styled game focused around random choice picks meant that we could reuse the random pool system we had previously developed for Colossorama and Hyper Holomayhem, our previous Ludum Dare games, and expand it by adding new functionality to fit the unique design characteristics of this project.

These changes made to a pool system we already had experience on, made it more versatile, allowing new choices to be added and compared the ones present in the pool when another choice was picked, as well as to give unique conditions to specific actions where, even if an action had already been unlocked, there could still be some requirements that, when not meet, meant the pool system would re-roll the actions. We believe we will continue using this pool system for future projects as well, as it can be easily repurposed to create a roguelike-ish experience.

Similarly to our previous Ludum Dare entries, we put a great deal of focus and attention into making sure that the game's design and game loop was satisfying and polished enough for every player to get absorbed into the game and feel encouraged to keep playing. Deciding on a simple idea, together with the points presented above meant we could focus on adding smaller details as other team members wrote and designed new actions or fulfilled their respective tasks.

This, together with the lessons we learned from our previous experiences, such as having an audio composer on the team, focusing on making design ideas early on the first day in order to avoid delays, in addition to having a web and mobile version available from the moment the game was published on the site, meant that we had a much more accessible and enjoyable game for a wider audience of players and developers alike from the moment the game was released.

It is also to note that a great Samurai Jack episode aired during the jam, which gave extra ~~thicc~~ motivation to the team.

What has feedback told us, and what could we have done better?

Although we normally name this section as 'What could have gone better?' we legitimately think that this was one of our best game jams to date, and definitely one of our projects which had the smoothest development. Therefore, we instead want to re-focus this section to what feedback has told us regarding some game design problems we didn't realize in the game's design during the actual event.

Although there's an extensive and varied collection of choices that the player can make throughout the game, most of these need to be unlocked first before they are added to the action pool. This means that, during the early phases of game, there are several actions and random events that are too common, and even intuitive for players starting out. The lack of unique actions in the first choices of the game also make the first parts of the game look the same because of the reduced number of options available during this section of the game.

Some choices were also added for the sake of diversity, in attempt to make the game look more unique on each different run, but a small portion of these ended up not adding any significative branching or changes to the planet's variables, which makes them feel irrelevant.

As an extension of the previous point, there are several random events which reduce happiness and wealth very early in the game. One such example is the Ice Age event, which is drawn multiple times during the first rounds of the game and which constantly reduce the planet's happiness unless the player chooses to Discover Fire almost early on. However, also choosing to Discover Fire results in yet another event which also results in happiness drops when pooled.

With reduced happiness and wealth the player can easily get most of the 'bummer' endings early in the game, feeling almost like a punishment to the player, especially during their first playthroughs of the game, especially before they even have an idea of the actual length a game session can take up to. In fact, we've already witnessed some comments and even an video producer, who believed some of the 'bummer' endings were actually full-fledged endings.

Closing Remarks and what could we improve on?

As mentioned above, we really believe that this has been the smoothest Ludum Dare we've participated in, and as such, we're really proud of our effort and of how the game's been performing. The game has quickly beat the amount of total views of our previous project in a much smaller time-frame.

Before closing this post-mortem, of course, we still want to leave some closing remarks summarizing the points above, as well as lessons to take present as we move forward:

• Focus on an idea right from the start and and focused on replayability can give enough of a time-frame to focus on expanding and adding content to the original idea of the course of the jam.
• Build a system which allows for easily adding new content, so if you have time to spare by the end of the jam, you can use it to keep adding additional content into the game. Remember, one thing is new content and another thing is whole new features. For the latter, it's preferable you save them for post-jam versions if you're closing in on time.
• Check out previous technologies you might have developed (especially if you're participating in the Jam instead of the Compo) and check if there's something you can re-use from them that can help you save time on your newest project.
• Even if gameplay is important, try to leave a small time-frame to give some extra polish to the game. Some small polish here and there can really improve the first impression the player gets when they play your game! :smile:
• Try to spread tasks around if you're participating as a team. Assuming the previous points have been taken care off, have team members help out in other sections (such as writing, planning or preparing descriptions for submission hours), or have them make extra content. It's better to have left over content, than missing content.
• Make sure your player gets an intuitive experience. The player should understand the impact of their choices or the reason why a specific mechanic is in-game. Give them space to experiment without them thinking "That's it?".
• If you're game could be easily and quickly adapted for other platforms, such as Web or Android then try to support them. It will allow your game to be experienced for another great number of players which might have different preferences when it comes to the platform they play games in.
• Samurai Jack will end in two weeks. It's sad we know, but it's was well worth the ride. Watch Rick and Morty while you're at it too.

Some of the improvements we've got planned for possible future iterations of the game, and which we look forward to getting feedback on the upcoming weeks include:

• Make it clear which type of actions is which and explain if an action is a repeatable action (which means the tasks can be repeated multiple times) or unique (tasks that can only be picked once, branching out into new choices).
• Consider adding the effect of an action when it is selected, giving the player some insight regarding the consequences or unlocks of picking their action. This can allow the player to better plan for the next round or playthroughs.
• Add more variables and encourage players to tailor their playthroughs towards a very specific planet proficiency.
• Add more replayability incentives, like obtaining an ending on a specific playthrough leading to more actions being unlocked on the next playthroughs.

Again, most of these things and improvements we came to realize regarding the game was only possible thanks to the feedback everyone has been posting in regards to the game and what they believed were the strong and weak points of the game. We seriously take all the feedback into consideration, and we try to reply to everyone who comments on the game in order to strengthen discuss about what could be improved. You're the reason we keep going forward and improving, so thank's a lot for everyone who has given us feedback so far, and we look forward to playing more of your games soon. :heart:

Thanks a lot for reading! We know that's quite the extensive post-mortem, but once again, we hope that there are some lessons that can be of use for you and your team, or that you've at least enjoyed reading it and know more about the highs and lows of our development process during this edition of the event.

Experimenting with this new game in specific has been a blast for us, and we really like the direction the game has been going, and the overall reception of it as we explained. Now that this post-mortem has been finally posted, one of the thing we got in mind next is having the community (either developers and players) get involved with future developments of the game in case we go through with it. We hope you look forward to it! :whale:

Once again, thanks a lot. If you haven't already, and wish to keep up with our future development, give us a follow at our team's twitter at Whales And Games and if you still haven't already, give Petty Puny Planet 38 a try of your own! We're curious to see how your pet planet will look in the end!

In my game, you are ADA, an agile but powerless robot...for now!

Collect modules such as a grappling hook or a magnet and use them to escape Scraps Island!

Come play my game here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-robots-trial

We are pleased to present our Ludum Dare 38 project : Bubblenaut !

Come play and vote here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/bubblenaut

Bubblenaut is a slow-paced adventure game set in a dreamy world. Born inside a small planet, you will explore several realms to find the Heartfruit, and witness the might of its taste ! We hope you enjoy our work :)

I'm just doing what everyone else currently do.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/statera

Hello everyone!

We would appreciate a lot if you could come and play our game, Cubic Explorer, and also comment on our concept and toolset named MaruGen! Any kind of feedback would be immensely appreciated (n_n)b. You can download the game, and also play it online as well on WebGL. And we'll also primes that any one who reviews our game will receive a review by us from theirs. Pinky promise :D !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cubic-explorer

If you are still undecided. Maybe these screenshots might pique your interest?

The Idea behind MaruGen

Part of the idea that Cubic Explorer is for my Master's Thesis project about game design. We've created a special toolset called MaruGen, created inside Unity3D. We want to know how the results feel around this tool, and any review and score is greatly appreciated.

The idea of the MaruGen tool is about using basic rules in order to generate a complete game design.

The basic grammar is based on the Micro-Machinations and Mission-Space design by Joris Dormans. In principle you design the basic rule system, then you appropriate those rules into a generator, and then finally you will let the system generate worlds and mechanics by its own.

And the great thing about it is that aims to be agnostic, that is, the steps for generating worlds should not interfere with the initial rulesets, according to your definitions of worlds and mechanics, you ca interpret these diagrams as you see fit.

We also want to let you now that the whole source code for the game and the tool is available for you on the link to check it out!

Then again, any kind of review or vote helps us greatly on how to improve our craft and also tells us what you think of the tool.

Thanks a lot!

I would be so happy if you could check out my game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/a-rats-story

If you want me to play your game please leave a link to your game in the comments of this post!

Haven't had much time recently to play more games, but here are some of my favorites so far!

* 1. Den * by @la-mecanique-du-plastique

Click here to play

* 2. Glass Houses * by @diptoman & @pranjalbisht

Click here to play

* 3. Bubbletoy * by @jorjordandan

Click here to play

* My game: Our Little Island *

Click here to play

Hey everyone, judging is going well and I hope everybody is having a great time and fun playing games. It is finals week in my state so I'm unable to play much but as soon as the exams are over which is this friday I'll spend the weekend playing games.

SO I'd like to ask everyone who can to spare few minutes to check out my game please and leave a comment, i'll be sure to check your your game after the exams.

Thanks, here's the link. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/trindle-tabletop-experiment

p.s. leave a comment about your favorite level of the game and least favorite, that helps me know what I did wrong and right the most. Thanks

Taken from the comments of Polyorbis: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/polyorbis

I'm also looking to give feedback on some other games, comment and I'll try play them tonight

I heard word clouds are the hot stuff right now!

Play Membrum. Did i mention that there is no tutorial?

...what's the range? These numbers do not seem to match the 5-star system, unless "50" means "5 stars."

Also, LOL @ Rogue Basement getting a higher rating in graphics than in audio.

I thought I'd join in on the wordcloud-from-comments trend :) It's really an interesting way to get an idea of the general impression people have of your game!
People seem to think my game is cute, short & atmospheric and like the audio & graphics.

Click here to play it

(and leave me a comment please :))

Play Bacteria colony! (Web, windows, android)

Hi everyone! I decided to make a more polished version of my LD38 entry (which you can see Here) based on your feedback. You can see the game on GameJolt. It's currently only a devlog, but i'm working on it!

(Screenshot is from the entry, not the recreation)