Can we please stop putting “is key” onto themes? We know it’s key. It’s the theme. If it wasn’t key, it wouldn’t be the theme.

Adding “is key” is just as redundant as adding “is the theme”.

I've completed my compo entry for LD 49, "Theory". Please enjoy!

You are Erwin, a cat that has been captured by a race of alien robots, the Drexl’erin. After weeks of experimentation on you, you’ve developed the ability to shift between a living and dead state, but only when not being observed. You must use this power to escape your captors.

Going over the successes, opportunities, and future of my entry, "Theory"

Successes

• Sound/Music -- I always try to do dynamic music whenever possible. This time around I also added a musical cue for when you were in danger, something I should have thought of in many past LD entries. Also, I'm gradually getting better at making sound effects from scratch!
• Graphics -- For once, I'm proud of the graphics I made. I haven't attempted pixel art for a while, and Erwin's run cycle came out decent. It was fun drawing the cutscene and dialogue graphics as well.
• Dialogue -- Having dialogue boxes pop up from time to time helped me get the mechanics across in a way that still flowed with the story. It didn't take long to code either, so I should definitely do this more often in future LD entries.
• Cutscenes -- I wanted to try doing simple cutscenes at the beginning and end, consisting just of text and a slightly moving "still" image. It felt like it was worth the effort in the end, because it really helped the experience to provide a little in-game backstory. Plus, the ending will hopefully inspire me to do more with this concept in time.

Opportunities

• More levels/mechanics -- I really wanted to make more levels and more game mechanics to go with them, but due to time constraints I only had time for 5 of them, and two "enemies" (the watchers and the sentries).
• Difficulty -- The last level was a huge spike in difficulty. People seem to be breezing through the first four levels, only to hit a brick wall with the fifth. I probably should have had a checkpoint somewhere in it, but I didn't have checkpoints coded. Kudos to anyone who sticks through and beats it; to everyone else, I apologize for making it so freaking hard.
• Stability -- Ghost form takes a long time to recover stability afterwards, but it felt like having it recover too fast made things too easy. What I should have done was put some kind of pickup that recovers your stability, and put them in places where the player typically ends up hanging out to recover stability anyway. That would have improved the overall flow of the game without compromising difficulty.
• Graphics -- I may be proud of what I did this time around, but there's still much room for improvement.

The Future

• I kind of gave clues in the ending cutscene that more was in store with this game. In fact, this entire concept came from a game idea I had a while back in which various animals are captured by these alien robots, and each develop special powers that you use together as a team to solve puzzles and escape levels, kind of in a Lost Vikings sort of way. Similar to Erwin (who was named and themed after Erwin Schrodinger and the "Schrodinger's cat" thought experiment), they are all connected in some way with animals used in theories, thought experiments, lab experiments, and so on. I won't list them all, but one example character is a dog named Ivan, named and themed after Ivan Pavlov, and his power would be to reprogram the behaviors of the robots, among other things. (If anyone finds this concept interesting enough for a full game, I could use some collaborators!)

Please consider playing my compo entry, "Theory", while there's still time!

Escape from the alien robots by shifting between being alive and dead!

I have completed my Compo entry, "Evacuate Immediately"

Protect the planet from asteroids and delay its destruction long enough for the population to escape before the BIG asteroid hits!

Going over various things about my compo entry, "Evacuate Immediately":

The Good

• The music, although not nearly as dynamic as some of my older entries have been, still came out great. I made the main music track longer so that it wouldn't get quite as repetitive as it loops, since the game can take a while to finish.
• All the sound effects were mixed from scratch, and I think they're some of the best ones I've managed to make for a compo entry.
• Visual effects came out decent for once. The explosions look nice, the Ion Beam doesn't have any weird glitches in the end (after giving me a bit of trouble while making it), and the asteroids don't look terrible (low poly, but as someone who knows next to nothing about 3D modelling, it was at least passable for a solo effort).
• Shortly before I finished, I discovered problems with the UI when running full screen, and had to fix them really fast. Thankfully I managed to do so before time ran out, and without any glitches.

The Bad

• I really should have taken the time for a better 3D model, instead of basically taking a low poly model and moving a few vertices around. I'll try to do something more advanced in the next LD.
• The game ran a bit too long, it probably should have been about half the length it was. Feels like that should have been easy to tweak, but I just left it as it was.
• Probably needed at least one more type of asteroid to shoot down to keep from being so repetitive. Maybe a small asteroid that is travelling faster than usual and has some kind of visual effect to draw your attention towards it, very little energy to stop but has to be handled quickly.
• That main asteroid size is ridiculous. Whether or not it helps drive home the hopelessness of the situation, I probably should have made it smaller. Then it might have been more visually striking as it gets close.
• There were errors when I tried to export to HTML5, so I had to skip that version. This has likely hurt my chances of getting more exposure and ratings.
• This is kinda dumb, but all throughout making the game, I kept accidentally typing 'evacuate' as 'evactuate' for some reason. Although I caught most of these typos and fixed them, several of them still appeared in the final version without notice until the compo was over. I really should have just done a find and replace, but I had no idea it was THAT extensive...

Notes

• I originally had plans to allow the player to launch missiles that would detonate and possibly destroy multiple asteroids in one hit, but since they rarely ever got close to each other anyway, it seemed pointless, so I skipped it.
• I'm really hoping the theme of this entry stands out. A lot of people are making "play until you lose" type of games for the inevitability of the game's loss, but I wanted to make the ending inevitable (the destruction of the planet) while still having a win condition (evacuating everyone). This is also why you get scored two different ways: how many people you managed to evacuate if you don't evacuate them all, or how far away the asteroid was when evacuation completes if you do.

There's still time to play my compo entry, "Evacuate Immediately" (and I only need one more vote, so I would appreciate it...)

Destroy incoming asteroids to prevent the planet's destruction long enough for the entire population to evacuate!

So I tried to embed a WebGL, and it successfully uploaded, and it gave me something to embed: $$embed-####.zip (numbers removed). I'm not sure what to do with this; putting it in the game page doesn't do anything, so I'm sure there needs to be extra things around it. What do I put there?

EDIT: Nevermind, it seems to work as long as it's there.

I've finished my compo entry, "Schism". Check it out!

There's still time to try "Schism", a game where you're uncontrollably shifting between dimensions! In the meantime, here's my usual analysis of what went right/wrong:

What Went Right

• Music: I don't think there's a time this is not going to top my post-mortem list. The dimensional shifts being on a 10-second cycle made it easy to make a set of simple 120 bpm 5-measure tracks. For both the normal world and the dark world, there are a total of 6 tracks, 3 of which are chosen from randomly from that world's set each time there's a shift. This helps alleviate some of the repetition, and create some interesting mixes of the various track (20 possible combinations). There is a stark contrast between the two styles of music (normal and dark) as well.
• Dark world visuals: The normal world is pretty basic; I made a tree in Unity, modeled a quick and ugly rock in Blender, made some textures for the grass and the trees, and it was done. For the dark world, besides the fleshy textures on the ground and trees, everything else was done using particles. The falling blood in the air, the wavy tentacle effects from the rocks... the one I was the most proud of was the tendrils coming out of the dark spirits that chase after you. The graphics in the normal world are nothing to sing about, but I really like how the dark world came out. The only thing I had to cut out was the tree tentacles; they were causing lag issues which in turn caused music to get out of sync, and the music was more important to me than the trees having tentacles.
• Adjustable map: I didn't end up using it, but I could easily change the radius of the playfield and the number of objects spawned, and everything was set up to accommodate whatever size I put in, including the placement of the wind barrier at the edge. The intent was to make it so that I could increase (or decrease) difficulty, but I never got around to using it. But the functionality was there.
• FPS movement: I didn't use any Unity plugins for the FPS movement, but scripted the mouse and keyboard movement myself. This is the first time I've done that, and I'm happy about it even if it doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things.

What Went Wrong

• Flat land: Because everything was flat, it's nothing special to look at. The normal world could have had benefitted from some actual grass objects to make it look less plain, but when you're under a 48 hour time crunch...
• Extra enemies: I wanted at least one more enemy once you collected the second crystal, but there wasn't time to figure it out and put it in. What I probably would have made is something that moves slowly, but keeps teleporting itself into your path, making it much harder to run from the spirits. There just wasn't time though.
• Landmarks: The biggest feedback I've gotten so far is that people wish there were more landmarks to help them navigate better. In fact, I had made the trees move around on purpose just to try and make it harder to remember where you've been, and in retrospect that might not have been a good idea.
• Crystals: It's a bit too hard to find the crystals. I should have had something that would point you in the general direction of them if you were too far away, or increased the distance at which the pings started. In any case, it needed improvement.

I completed my Compo entry, "Reaper of Souls". (Not my best work, but I'm at least glad I got it done in time.)

Finished our Jam entry, "Foxcrate"!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/foxcrate

I did the programming and music, and the art was by Kamiyoshi. Check it out!

Feedback has been positive on our entry, “Foxcrate”. It’s time to do my usual analysis of what went well or what went wrong.

What Went Well

• First and foremost, the actual game plan was completed pretty much in full. I had to make no sacrifices to any gameplay elements this time around. Of course, having an extra 24 hours than I’m used to (and not having to worry about doing the art) helped.
• Kami’s art came out really good! She insisted on doing the wobbly style where the same frame is drawn twice and it alternates between them, which wasn’t too tricky to set up (all the graphics tick on an internal timer so that they change in unison); worth the extra effort I think.
• The music loop, while short, sets the mood well and doesn’t feel that repetitive.

What Went Wrong

• The pathfinding for the map screen was a nightmare. There were probably easier ways to do what I was doing, but my weird convoluted way of trying to send a truck to the nearest intersection didn’t work all the time for reasons I couldn’t solve, and sometimes the truck even bounced back and forth between two intersections endlessly. I eventually just made it so that the truck can’t visit the same intersection twice, and that “solved” it, although it would still drive across the grass much of the time. The important thing is that it always reaches the destination.
• There’s still a game-breaking bug that occurs at random when exiting the truck loading screen while at a customer’s house. It’s extremely rare, but when it happens, you can no longer click in any buttons. It happens on the Windows download and the HTML5, so it’s not the platform. Without a way to duplicate the issue reliably, and nothing obvious causing the problem, I have no idea how to fix it.
• With more time, I’d like to have had more music (or at least dynamic music, like I usually do), and more customers to answer the door (currently there’s just one). I was so overwhelmed with fixing bugs in the last 24 hours that I just didn’t have time to work on any more music. And Kami’s insistence on drawing the wobble effect meant she was drawing double the art for almost everything; it was so much work for her that we both agreed to just have one customer (for now).

The Future?

• Like most of my LD entries, I’d like to expand this, but I’m not entirely sure how to make a full game out of this. Aside from adding extra customers to answer the door, the gameplay loop is pretty straightforward. The only way I can think of would be to add some sort of overarching story to go along with it, plus special events to deal with. Kami has expressed willingness to continue doing art for it if I decide to expand it to a full game. I just have so much on my plate already, and so many LD entries I’d already like to expand on, that I’m just not sure yet.

We finally got 20 votes for our Jam entry, “Foxcrate”! Thank you to everyone who played and rated, we really appreciate it! (There’s still time for more if anyone else wants to try it…)

My job is going to be severing a bunch of people in my department in a couple of months, myself included. I’m going to take this opportunity to focus on game development, and while I have other major projects I’d like to do, I’d like to first see if I can expand one of my Ludum Dare entries in the meantime.

So I’d like an opinion on which entry would be best to expand. I’m leaning towards either The Discloser, Theory, or my most recent, Foxcrate. But some of my older ones, like I Need a Charger or Cat Outta Hell might also be worth revisiting.

Any opinions on this would be great! (Or, if anyone wants to collaborate?)

I've updated our LD53 entry, "Foxcrate", into a full game, which can be purchased at itch.io here:

https://agentparsec.itch.io/foxcrategame

I've taken the original concept and turned it into a roguelite, where new options are available each day to add complexity. Everything from the ones that were in the original entry (Priority shipping, Fragile, etc.) to new things like Heavy Traffic or Porch Pirates.

I'm probably going to do more LD entry conversions in the future if this is successful. Please check it out!

I've added a trailer for "Foxcrate", which is also available on its itch.io page here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UriNWU2Ecxc

"Foxcrate" (my expansion of my LD53 entry) will be coming to Steam soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2598050/Foxcrate/

https://youtu.be/UriNWU2Ecxc?si=lU9BK4AP3aHq9IX_