Yup. I’m in. It’ll be the first “big” Ludum Dare for me (the first one was mini-LD #46), so I’m kinda excited. For real.
Tools’n’Stuff:
I’m gonna target HTML5 version, so everyone can play the game w/o additional steps.
(and it’s out for almost 7 hours, I was sleeping, so I couldn’t write about it :c)
I welcome you to play my first “big Ludum Dare” game called “parallelsync“. Sadly, only desktop version is available for now, but I hope, I will be able to overcome the difficulties popped on my way to release, and make HTML5-version.
Have fun! 
“And the theme is… You only get one”
“Seriously? We’ve chosen THIS?” When I opened Twitter last Saturday morning all I saw was tweets that complete resonated with my own thoughts: there was SO many awesome themes and we have chosen something… something… argh… “I can’t even!” But the panic attack didn’t last for long. After almost 30 minutes of brainstorming I came up with the idea I always wanted to implement — to play with parallel worlds. Last time playing with them led me to light depression (which led me to mini-Ludum Dare and opened Jam Yesvember).
What went wrong:
What went right:
Summary:
Aftermath:
You can visit my entry’s page via this link. Thank you very much, hope you’ll enjoy it. Have fun! Oh, and I’d be happy if you rate it and leave a little comment for me. I love the feedback. 
Happy New Year to everyone! Let this year bring a lot of happines to you and let your #gamedev dreams become true.
Let me tell you a little about my PostLD time. After I such a great feedback I got on parallelsync I decided to make a “big” game out of it. This is a progress on prototype so far:
Yup, your eyes don’t deceive you! Vertical worlds, physics, real time, custom levels. As you can see I’ve read all your comments and drew some conclusions out of ‘em. More things to come! 
Have a great 2014!
P.S. If you haven’t already, I welcome you to try’n’rate the original version here. ~100 votes and ~250 plays already. 
’twas a long time since last “big” LD I’ve participated in. Very long. Like, you know, whole 4 months!
Final themes of this LD look kinda bizarre to me, but it just makes things more challenging and fun. So, my hype train is almost at its final panic station. Yay! 😀
Tools of creativity:
See ya all!
He-hey! What’s up! I’m glad to be a part of this great jam (I mean, compo… yeah, definitely compo) this time and this time I will do my best and try not to fail (yes, yes, “Beneath The Surface”, I’m looking at ya).
My tools of creativity are pretty the same:
I’m o-o-oh so-o-o ready. Good luck to us all!
Remember how you tried to jammed me twice?
Hi everyone! It’s 0x0961h and I’m ultra-mega-hyper hyped for this Ludum Dare (even though only few weeks ago I was, like, “meh”).
My tools of creativity are evolving slowly, but the core stuff is still the same old story:
I’m ultra hyped, and I’m soooooo in. It’s gonna be legen-
So! Ludum Dare 55 is almost over meaning that it’s time for me to wrap it all up in a text form and tell you my experiences with both event and my game, theGRIMOIRE_, also paving a path into its future at the end of the article.
My Ludum Dare began with the last round of voting. After failing to finish my 7DRL 2024 game after eight years of being in a gamedev hiatus, I thought that I should give Ludum Dare a chance, after all a lot of my jam games were made during LDs. With that said, themes that I saw in the last round were… not very inspiring to put it lightly. But after “fuck it, we ball” moment, I’ve waited until the theme reveal and…
…“summoning”.
The one that I voted against. Welp.
I woke up the next morning and started brainstorming the ideas. Summoning, summoning… what can I summon… I could imagine that a lot of people will end up making some sort of rituals, pentagrams, mages and dungeons (and I was oh so right), so I wanted to summon something else. But what?
My first idea was to make something weather-related along the lines of summoning some kind of weather conditions to proceed through the game. With no better idea in mind, I started thinking about the ways I could do the, well, summoning process. Choice fell onto DDR-like sequences of arrows or maybe buttons.
And then it kinda clicked. What if I made what I always do: a puzzle game. I decided to shelf the weather summon idea and thought of the way I can integrate summoning into a puzzle game…
…and that’s how theGRIMOIRE_ was born.
How it started...
...how it ended
First of all, what I did right is I took one extra day (Monday) to polish my game to a solid condition. A lot of people commented positively on the main menu, some noticed that I implemented key rebinding and I even saw someone using it. Everyone loved the music I’ve found, so it’s also a bonus.
What went wrong, however, is the difficulty curve. As I described it during streams, it was basically 1+1, 2+2, 238 squared, log(x) = y^2, 3+4, solve the world hunger. My game was designed to be “learned by experimenting”, however it lacked certain amount of levels to first force player through the mechanics to show them that they can do this or that.
My biggest issue was, of course, lack of undo feature. Many many times people had to restart the whole level and those groans of disappointment ringed in my ears for a very long time.
I personally think that a lot of frustration people experienced during puzzle solving in my game was due to lack of the ability to undo what they just did. I thought it will ruin the puzzle aspect and without the undo players will be sort of forced to think twice. What it actually did was punishing players for the experimentation. You know, the thing that I was actively encouraging people to do with the game design. I added undo feature in the post-jam version and, well, lesson learned, oh so learned…
Despite all of stuff that went wrong and frustrations along the way, one thing was interesting to see: people wanted to go on. Some had to force themselves to stop because puzzles were taking too much time to solve, but a lot of people was interested enough to spend time experimenting and solving puzzles which was very warming to see.
After all, I enjoy it when people play my games. Isn’t that what we are making them for?
And that’s it! Ludum Dare 55 is only hours away from closing its doors, the community will go into hibernation mode until the next one. It’s sad, but inevitable. And it’s sort of the vibe I love jams for.
What does it mean for theGRIMOIRE_ though?
To be honest, when I finished working on the entry I already had a thought at the back of my head that I really, really love the concept that I ended up with. After seeing people playing it and genuinely enjoying the puzzles, I decided that that’s what I want to do.
I want to add more depth to it, more levels, more mechanics, polish its graphics, its engine, add story, playtest it to the right amount of difficulty.
And I want to release it on Steam.
That’s my goal. I don’t know how much time it will take me and I can’t imagine the struggles I’ll have to go through building a community, interacting with it, working on the game, marketing it.
For now I know only one thing.
I want to see theGRIMOIRE_ on Steam. I think it’s the project that deserves it.
And I already started working on it from scratch, building it properly this time without cutting corners and hacking features on top of each other. This might not be my magnum opus, but it’s the game that I want to make and that I want to finish and release.
In case you are interested in seeing how the project will evolve, I welcome you to follow me on social media, like Mastodon (I’m here more often), Twitter (less often, but still poking my head in here), itch.io, read my blog and also maybe join my very very very young and small Discord server that I plan to use both for news, images, videos and for the playtesting/bug reporting purposes in the future when I’ll have a game in a proper state.
Thank you so much for reading it and playing my game! See you on the flip side!
