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So here is what we were waiting for! The update is here! In this update, i have added a new 3rd map and the hitboxes are now a little bit smaller than before! (You can play my game in you browser!)

If you haven’t played our game yet, try it out now! - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/prison-escape

(Play my game in your browser!)

POST MORTEM:

Well, it's been a while since I last took part in Ludum Dare. I have previously submitted three games to the Compo; Fartboy (LD32 - An Unconventional Weapon), Square Peg Round Hole (LD35 - Shapeshift) & Space Aliens Are Coming! (LD38 - A Small World). Apart from those, I have tried and failed numerous times. I don't know if I'm trying to do too much sometimes, or if I'm just too critical of myself. A couple of those failed attempts were ideas that I really liked at the time, but was unable to finish.

Because of this - being unable to submit a game when I enter Ludum Dare has become a great fear of mine. I was determined to not let that happen this time - but things got hairy indeed! I nearly did give up.

Read my LD45 Post Mortem below!

BEFORE THE COMPO:

After not having programmed much for the past year because of time restrictions I was in need of refreshing my memory of coding. I did this by making a little random game idea generator based off one I found on the internet at Boardgamizer. - I always enjoy me some randomness. This was a fairly simple thing to do, but I also wanted to make it to randomize a few ideas to use for my own personal "Game Jam" scenarios. I also had plans of doing a platformer, because I've never tried that. Never got around to practicing any of that, which was probably the main reason this Ludum Dare almost went down the drain... again.

THE THEME:

I certainly had no complaints. What I did experience, though, when the theme was released was a bit of anxiety! Why? Well, that was my suggestion that won the votes - thank you to all for voting.

It was an interesting experience for many reasons. I've been submitting that theme for many Ludum Dares before. Originally I had an idea that I wanted to make for it, but over time I had come to the conclusion that that idea would never be done in 48hrs. So, really I had no idea at all what to make.

I also found it interesting to read up some on the expected This theme sucks! comments. Some, I could sympathize with, but mostly it just goes to show how differently we all interpret and understand things. In the end - the theme is just there to inspire you to make a game, and for that I feel Start With Nothing was a good one. It doesn't tell you of any game mechanics you need to use. It does not force a specific genre. And, most importantly (to me), it is not specific enough that the majority of games will be too similar to one another.

The other thing that happens when ones own suggestion becomes the theme is pressure. I could not fail this time!

WHAT WENT WELL?

Well... not much.

I mean - I did submit a game. I did get the game to work surprisingly well and found that it was actually quite fun to play.

The other thing I would say went well is that I stuck to it. I had pretty much given up on this Ludum Dare after 20hrs or so of work - but I didn't quit. That was important to me. The last 24+ hours of work I stayed very disciplined and focused and was able to put together a game against all odds (more on that in the What Went To Hell? section below). An idea just popped into my head from out of nowhere when I was about to give up. I have been playing a lot of board games lately, and I thought I could quite quickly put something like that together.

The idea was to make an eco system game. You would start with a completely empty world (Start With Nothing), and have a hand of cards that would represent terrain and animals. Placing these on your grid, while trying to maintain a balanced eco system. There would be carnivores and herbivores and they would all have a natural habitat where they could live. They would need access to water or they would die. I liked it, and I believe I put together something that is rather fun to play and watch unfold.

For a game made in just over 24 hours - I am pleased with what I accomplished.

WHAT WENT TO HELL?

Did I mention above that I had wanted to try make a platformer? That I never got around to practicing doing that, and that I have never ever attempted something like that? Dumbass me still decided to make a platformer for the jam. The idea was that you would start with a character in a totally black space. There would be nothing there and your player character would talk to you - the player. He would tell you that "there is no game here", and then he would sort of suggest ideas to you - through this you would build a level from scratch based on random suggestions from the PC and what you choose to put together from that.

Well, boy did I overscope that idea. First of all, I never even got a player controller that felt smooth. I am definitely looking to make a platformer before the next LD to learn a few things. Second - for the game to be fun I would need a ton of different types of weapons, platforms and NPCs - there was absolutely no way I would finish the game when I barely had anything after 20 hours of work.

That's when I went to bed. Dejected and close to tears, deciding that I would not make a game this Ludum Dare.

WHAT WENT SO-SO?

Well, under the circumstances I pretty much decided to not care about the graphics side of the project. I am a terrible graphics artist and even the most simple of things take me a very long time to make. The game does suffer quite a bit from the very basic art that I put together to make the game. I did hope to make them slightly more pleasing to the eye - but of course time ran out.

I also never got time to do any sounds. I did throw in a randomly generated cgMusic track to keep you company while playing the game at the very last second (I believe I put that in the game with less than 5 minutes to go).

The other thing that could have improved the game was if I had play tested a bit more during creation. One thing that has become apparent from the comments I've received is that the map is too big and you have too many cards to play. I would agree - especially for the state of the game at that time. There is also no real way of knowing how to keep your creatures alive. And, terrain changes were way too frequent - meaning sometimes when you play a particular type of terrain, it would change to something else right away. Dryland had a tendency to take over the entire map.

AFTER THE COMPO:

I am currently working on a Post Ludum Dare version of the game. I actually find the game quite fun to play, and so I wanted to give it some more love to put it into a playable state.

Originally I intended to give it 'til the end of October and then call it finished. I'm not sure that I'll stick to that, as I feel there are more things I want to do to make it feel more polished. I do not aim to make this a game for profit - it will be free. So, I am also not looking to put too much time into completing it.

So, what have I done and what do I plan to do?

I have already replaced the tiles and made them look pretty. I have also done a good bit of balancing and bug-squashing. While I haven't yet added any new features I have made some significant changes to the existing ones.

I removed the ability to discard cards, forcing every card to be played (this required a system to ensure the player will always have playable cards in hand). I added pathfinding for the animals to help them make better decisions (previously they would just wander aimlessly and hope to find what they need to survive). I have also done some other quality of life improvements like faster World Simulation, fancier text displays and some animated UI. I also made the animals have different attributes for a bit more variety in their behavior.

Here is a sneak preview of the new tiles I made for the game:

Many more things are in the pipeline for the Post LD version. I want the highscore that I never got done for the Compo, and I am doing a complete overhaul of the points system. I'm looking to add some particle effects and a few more bells and whistles to make the game look prettier.

Of course, sounds for all events need to be done. I'm adding different map sizes for quicker games, and I hope to add some new cards as well as specific goals for the player to try to achieve for some bonus points. One of the main challenges that I have left to do is to make a new logo for the game... that should test my graphics skills.

The Post LD version will be released on itch.io, and I do hope you decide to check it out when released.

In the meantime - check out the Compo version. Rate and give feedback to help me improve the game.

Find the game here: A Brand New World.

In the initial planning phase we knew we wanted to create something simple that we could pull off. The aim wasn't really to make a good game. It was to make something that tested the limits of our tools and current skill set.

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/slave-unchained

The Beginning:

Slave: Unchained is written entirely in a custom engine. As you can imagine that makes everything a pain in the butt. At the start of the 48 hours I had a barebones, skeleton of a tool. There was no infrastructure to save or load scenes. There was very limited support for sprites and sprite animations, and tilemap functionality was... limited.

This all had to be written on top of the development of the game.

A lot of these problems were sleeper problems. I.e. they don't rear their head until later on in development. For example, how do you know what features you need until you need them?

Luckily, I knew this was going to happen, so from the outset I knew compromises had to be made in order to account for the extended time required to implement features.

The theme was the first to go. The theme made the scope too big and the scope needed to be very very small. I've been burned by scope creep too many times. Establish your scope and then half it. You'll get half of that done in double the time. You will crash and burn if you dream too big.

Another compromise was sound. I am not a sound designer, and as much I know the importance of good sound design and good music it was something I knew I could not learn, implement and then polish in time before the deadline.

The Target:

There were a few things I definitely wanted to do. The major one was tight movement. Collision response is difficult to get right. I think we did a good job here. You know when collision is an issue when the players start to notice it. If you never notice it, it means it's behaving like you expect and the suspension of disbelief is maintained. We did well in this regard.

Another goal was to implement something visceral and impactful. The gameplay had to be punchy and weighty and there had to be some consequence to your actions (not moral consequences). The permanent blood had been something I'd been thinking about for awhile. It adds an extra dimension that sells the illusion that you exist in a world. It's also astonishingly violent which actually wasn't my intention. But it felt good to play, so I made it more bombastic and extreme.

The Gripes:

OpenGL sucks. What works on some cards will not work on others. Sometimes it's your own fault. You didn't read the specification. Sometimes it's entirely openGL's fault. What is a fatal crash on one system is not on another. This will often be accompanied without a warning or error code. What is expected behaviour on one card will not be expected on others. This was a headache and soaked up the majority of the post-development and update stages.

Conclusion:

A custom engine grants you one thing and one thing only. Adaptability. The only problem is that it comes with a substantial cost. Time. What will take you N days in one engine will take you exponentially longer in your own. But in another engine you are always constrained by someone elses implementation. Rolling your own means the constraint is only yourself. Sometimes you don't want that. But for a small scope project, without real world demands it can be a rewarding experience.

A post-jam update for my game Sluggish Grind has been released! It has been published for Windows, Linux and MacOS, but not for Web (the web version is the initial release)

You can find these releases on the itch.io page.

It's built from the latest commit in the GitHub repository and has a few gameplay tweaks and new features. It's by no means a finished game (It's still devoid of any music, the only sounds are the usual SFX.) but this is a version I can actually actively update.

This release addresses lots of issues with the original jam version, so try it out even if, or rather, especially if you already played the initial release!

It has been published for Windows, Linux and MacOS, but not for Web (the web version is the initial release)

One of the new features is a scoring system. Make sure you post your score when you're done. ;P

Thanks for your time!

Jared needs YOUR help ! The barricade must come down ! It's time for Jared to face the music !! Help him find the C4 and blow up the cars blocking his way to the rest of the town ! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/jareds-fresh-start

Hello Ludum Dare!

Ghosts and Bombs is a game that I created for LD #45.

Three weeks later, it was finalized and posted in Google Play.

Enjoy!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.VladimirYashin.GhostsAndBombs

http://bit.ly/OUTSIDERMEDIA

from any jam.

Link to the form: https://forms.gle/CWpHa39mQXkzGoDG6

Answer to every question should be in the form itself. You can still ask if something isn't clear. This will be a weird project of mine. If you want to make a game with 10+ people, then this is the place. I don't know if a group like this will be productive, or will it just create another digital garbage can. It will be a weird experience, that I will be making a video on. If you are interested, join.

Hey, folks. Thought I'd write down various thoughts and musings related to the making of "Oh, It's Nothing", our jam entry for LD45.

How it all began

As a preface, I've been vaguely aware of the jam's existence for a long while, but the idea of actually taking part never came close to crossing my mind. Without @ein grabbing me along for the ride out of the blue, I suspect it never would have.

It all began with brainstorming, of course, and this is where we encountered our very first issue: LD45 started well past midnight for both of us on the account of accursed time zones, and while ultimately we managed to push drowsiness aside, I can't help but look back and think that the whole thing could've gone smoother and been more fruitful overall.

On top of this, we were affected by tunnel vision: right off the bat we established that the word "nothing" can be treated in a literal, abstract sense... and that's what we stuck with. We tried to move away from this take a few times, but it was definitely a "too little, too late" kind of situation. One concept I'm still fond of did pop up as a result, though, one of a game based on the Straw Millionaire tale. Alas, it was not to be.

Tentative prototyping

The very first draft of the game featured nothing but randomly generated text strings appearing on the screen, and frankly, at this point I don't even remember what was the exact idea this "sketch" was based on. That's assuming there was one to begin with.

For a while we kept pursuing the following idea: "nothing" is both what you start with and the desired state of things, and yet certain external forces keep tainting the pristine void, something the player has to prevent. This is where we came up with the gameplay: you begin with a black screen containing a single word, you click on it in order to banish it, yet more words emerge, and so it goes. However, while this concept may sound intriguing enough, we weren't sure what sort of conclusion would be the most sensible here.

If it was possible to win, would preserving the nothingness feel satisfying? I'm not convinced. And if defeat was inevitable, wouldn't it be unpleasant to discover you were doomed from the start? Not saying something like this can't be pulled off, and conceptually the inevitable victory of matter over nothingness is at the very least workable, but the idea of going down this path strongly felt like shooting ourselves in our collective feet for no good reason.

Thus it was written, thus it shall be

Eventually the final concept of the game emerged: we decided to go for an interactive tale of creation of sorts. To accommodate this shift, the gameplay had to be changed as well: while you still could remove words, it also became possible to preserve them, and that became the point.

So, "nothing" stopped being both the destination and the starting point of the journey, and getting rid of this duality vastly simplified things for me, the writer. I can't say everything became crystal clear at once, but I've finally found myself able to move forward without having to keep migrating from one semi-coherent, woefully incomplete draft to another. A welcome change, as you can imagine.

And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void EXISTS, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent" (Accompanies discovery of the "Advanced Spaceflight" tech)

With the concept set in stone, we had to figure out the structure of the game. We had some narrative followed by one "dose" of gameplay... and that was it. As if that wasn't bad enough, the gameplay bit in question was the one that's currently used for the finale. We were going from 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye, and I guess in some way this was cool, but also incoherent. This had to change, and it did: we inserted a couple of extra "levels" in front of the finale, each with slightly different mechanics, and that filled the void nicely, I'd say.

The narrative and the gameplay weren't quite enough on their own, though. Something else was needed in order to cultivate a proper mood for the game. This is where Sleeping Dragon Forever Radio came in, a piece of music-generating software. We didn't have to spend lots of time "fishing" for the right tracks, luckily: the very first two that we got felt like a perfect fit after some minor editing. This is probably the most unusual thing about the way this game was made, and, surprisingly, the end result turned out to be fantastic.

Some ideas on how to make the game beefier didn't make it, sadly. For instance, we were thinking of implementing a "bonus stage", something that's detached from the main game to some degree and only becomes available after beating it. If you know how the game ends, it should be easy enough to guess that this hypothetical extra level would be featuring something... different, whatever that means. In the end we chose to spend more time polishing what was there instead of hastily trying to add something new, and personally I'm pleased with the outcome.

When the music's over

And that's all I have to say about the development process. Being rather cautious with the game's scope and culling overly ambitious and grand designs on sight certainly helped with avoiding any major issues during the jam. Playing it safe is rarely an exciting approach, I suppose, but hey, it gets the job done.

LD45 has definitely been a positive experience for us. I don't know for sure whether we'll be back for more or not, but the idea of taking part in LD46 is agreeable, this much I can tell without a shadow of a doubt.

Thanks for ~~all the fish~~ reading! Feel free to ask any questions if you have any.

(Link to the game in question: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/oh-its-nothing. Playable in browser and works on mobile platforms, shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to beat.)

Create your own little world!
ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/futhark

The time has come! Almost three days before we get the results and Dave still does not care a bit about any of your games...

Well we do! And we are going to prove it!

We are live now on Twitch and we'll be playing your games!

Join us here https://www.twitch.tv/envysoftworks and let's make some noise!

We are going to play games that are not doing so well in terms of ratings volume! If we've already played and rated a game we will not be playing it live on stream. Finally if you are in the chat your game is getting priority!

And of course don't forget to play and rate Dave's own game: "The Greatest Game in the World"!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/the-greatest-game-in-the-world

So many awesome looking games out there that I wish I could play, but can't because I'm stuck with MacOS.

If you've got a WebGL game or an 64-bit Mac game, I wanna play it, so post it below!

(Unfortunately, the newest MacOS update seems to have disabled support for 32 bit apps, and some Mac builds I think have been failing because of that...)

If you've only published for Windows, please consider uploading a Mac or web build for poor saps like me (even if you can't test it properly!) The wider your audience, the more ratings you can get, even if it's by a small margin.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/charly-the-orphan

Thanks ! :)

It’s a game about driving … But driving nothing ! XD

Drive the air here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/nothing-is-my-car

Hello everybody,

try it: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/no-control

Feel free to post your own shameless advertisement below, I will do my best to play your game (web based preferred).

Become apart of the 10th Geta Game Jam between January 4th and 7th!

In this jam you get to... * Develop a game from scratch in just three days * Work either alone or in teams of any size * Inspire your game on a theme that will be announced at the start of the jam * Test your ability by confining yourself to the hardmode challenge (optional) * Post your theme and challenge suggestions in our Discord server * Work in any language, framework or engine

---> Interested? Join the jam here!

Some people said that my game was too hard, therefore I've made more easy version. You may try it. But I spend about 3 minutes to pass the original version. Maybe, you can do better? ;)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/antivirus

Help Jared kill zombies and blow up barricades ! This is an action pacted twin stick shooter !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/jareds-fresh-start