This’ll be my first big LD I participate in.

I’ll use java and lwjgl and maybe some code sniplets from my site.

I’ll also stream the whole process at twitch.tv

Link (to site): freamcoding.blogspot.com

Link (to stream): twitch.tv/freamcoding

See you all tomorow morning!

First long day is over, managed to figure out an idea I felt comfortable with during the early hours thankfully so after waking up I could start the coding.

For the major systems everything is in and working, with the only exception of audio.

Left for tomorow:

– Different ai types (Allready have 2-3 ideas)
– Different monsters (Not a difficult implementation)
– Different traps (Same as monsters)
– Different spells (Same)
– Game over effect (Just a collision detection and a game over screen)
– Map read from files (Reading from a txt file should be easy enough)
– Plan 4-6 maps for the demo (This is the difficult part, since if they are not fun / challenging the game won’t feel good)
– Redo the unit arts (This is gonna be horrible, currently the placeholders for units are free to use graphics but I’ll need to replace them tomorow)

About the game:

In this game you are a Demi-Lich who must protect his phylactery from the heroes who tries to destroy it. You are only able to use spells to summon traps, undead minions and boil them in their own armor. Some of the enemies and summoned units will only walk around aimlessly (Mostly your zombies) while some enemies will use divine guideance (A* pathfinding algorithm) to find the optimal way to your phylactery.

Now I’ll go and play some games before sleeping, and I’ll return tomorow to finish whats left.

Hey guys, Fream here!

After taking part in 2 or 3 MLD I’ll be joining the 35 Ludum Dare.

Right now It’s not decided whether it’ll be the team jam or the solo competition, but I’m leaning towards the solo jam at the moment.

I’ll be definitely using the Unity engine, and probably Graphics Gale + Gimp for making the graphics, audio wise if I get lucky enough I’ll hook up an electric piano to the pc so I can record some things.

The whole process will be streamed as usual on: www.twitch.tv/freamcoding

Good luck to everyone who joins and I hope we all have as much as fun as I did during the MLD’s!

Managed to finish all but one game mechanics yesterday, today I'll be working on polishing and audio, and figuring out how to explain the players why this game following the theme. :D

Good evening everyone!

Managed to get everything right just an hour before the competition time ended. My second finished LD entry turned out to be much better than I expected and it's definitely helped me to re-learn why I'm enjoying developing games so much.

About the game:

In the game the player controls a group of three adventurer who's mission is to defeat the Eldritch Horror that's tries to take over their world. Can you help them do it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tECqYBV5B7U

Rambling: The only sadness I have is that I had to resort to 3rd party background music since I'm not able to make that magic happen on my own :)

Tomorrow I'll be at work so there is no way I can improve anything on the project before the deadline, I'll appreciate every bug report, I'm sure I overlooked quite a few during these last few hours.

Good luck for everyone, I saw some very good ideas being made during this weekend!

Ps: So many problems with the video audio and the editing... too tired... must fix it before I sleep... Zzz

I started working sometimes during the morning, quickly figured out an idea that we need to go deeper and deeper into a computer to find out why the system is acting up. Hopefully by the end we'll have some cool shooter where I don't have to draw a lot and can just use Unity's built in 3D objects.

You can watch me live at: https://youtu.be/NHUhaFAQwEA

The plans of having multiple levels and a story that actually make sense with the theme is long gone, but hopefully I can finish a single level and some playtesting before the end of tommorow.

I'm finnaly done, much much more tired then I was before the weekend and I dread the next morning when I have to go to work but it was an amazing time! :)

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-quantum-menace

Image:

https://youtu.be/BWIpZdDAvx0

While yesterday I felt like I am done with the game and too tired to continue especially with work on monday, I ended up deciding sleeping is probably some kind of hoax. Therefore I added a new gun, a tutorial and a story mode, graphical update and much more to my Jam submission.

Game is at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-quantum-menace

I'll be at the bed for like a day :smile:

First and foremost I would like to thank everyone who took the time to try out the game, I received lovely responses from everyone.

Now on to the business side of things, today I added some quality of life changes (namely: weapon switch with the mouse wheel and auto reload) and finnaly managed to fix the WEBGL issue I had with unity so now the game is playable from your browser, hopefully that'll convince even more of you to give it a shot :slight_smile:

Spent the entire morning throwing random ideas at my whiteboard until none of them stick and managed to narrow it down to two things: - You are stranded in an abandoned house/laboratory, and you can't move away from light sources in the game. It's akin to a horror game; if you venture into the darkness, you get eaten alive either instantly or very quickly. The objective of the game is to figure out how to position lights, move them around, and use mirrors (although I won't be able to make mirrors work in two days). Your goal is to escape from the building/laboratory you are in.

• You are captaining a spaceship that travels from point A to point B. The spaceship has a limited number of device slots, including solar panels, a shield generator, a battery, boosters, and a navigation module, among others. You need to replace these devices on the fly. For instance, when you encounter an asteroid field, you must activate shields to deflect the asteroids. If you veer off course, you need to install navigation modules to get back on track.

Ended up going for the spaceship one because it needs less animations, and reading about raytracing every light source got me a headache.

Shields and engines online, nothing else works...

Today turned out to be much longer emotionally and much shorter in terms of progress than I had hoped for. Planning the game was a lot of fun, and at the beginning, I was very motivated to work on it. However, I quickly lost motivation and realized that making the original idea work in a detailed and enjoyable way will take much more than 2 days. So now, I'm only sticking around to finish something because quitting halfway through feels worse. :smile:

On the positive side, I used ProBuilder for the first time and managed to put together something resembling a spaceship. It was much easier than using Blender, for sure.

Initially, I felt like the game would be rather easy to complete, and I thought I could spend the second day polishing it. I imagined I could use this extra time to write readable and clean code. However, that ended up taking a lot of time and caused a lot of frustration. Not to mention, it didn't really turn out to be as readable or reusable as I had hoped. :smile:

After that, I took an extended nap break and worked on fixing some shader graph for the shield. I still have quite a way to go before I can start polishing everything up.

Fighting trough the tiredness and finishing up some bugs and tilesets for my entry Runic Summoner!

Listen to the music and check out the animated menu!

This LudumDare marks my 6th time participating and my third consecutive Jam entry. As usual, the weekends have been a rollercoaster of emotions, but in the end, I managed to create Runic Summoner, which I am quite proud of. Let's break down how the weekend went and what I learned for the future.

• Pre-Event week:

Throughout the week before the event, I made sure to deal with every real-life responsibility I could. I ensured we had all the snacks at home, completed all the housework, and made sure nobody from work (or the family) could bother me. These all helped to make the weekend a much smoother experience than usual.

• Friday:

Right after work, I decided to install every software I would need. I really wanted to make something 3D this time as well, so I installed Qubicle Voxel editor to create models and tried it out a bit. Then I set up OBS and my new microphone for the stream. After that, I got bored and instead of creating the Unity project and testing some model imports, etc., I went and played Valheim until like midnight… Yeah, good start, I know.

• Saturday:

Surprisingly, right after reading the theme, I thought of an idea that was neither overcomplicated nor impossible to manage in two days. After some quick planning and setting up the stream, I opened Qubicle and realized I had no idea how it works. After a quick Google search, I swapped over to MagicalVoxel, which works the same way but somehow clicked way better for my brain. I spent the rest of the day focusing on coding the main game loop, doing my best to ignore how dumb everything looked with just different-colored cubes and spheres. My plan was to finish everything I needed to play the game, and then I could spend the second day on polishing and art.

Remember how I said the idea was doable in two days? So yeah, at the end of the day, I threw away about 40% of the planned content. Pretty good time estimate considering how it usually goes…

• Sunday:

Sunday started pretty alright. I was motivated to do some art and put them into the game. Unfortunately, soon after, this motivation dropped hard when I realized how much work needed to be done and also how annoying it is to draw everything by hand and import it into Unity. I was close to packing up and calling it a weekend at this point, but my wonderful partner helped me get through the worst of it. Soon after the first few arts were finished, I regained my motivation and spent the second part of the day on a mad sprint to fix all the bugs, create menus, and convince Unity to let me export the project on the web.

Things that I feel like I did well:

• Effective Breaks and Rest: I took way more time off to take a few 30-minute naps instead of suffering through the day tired. They always gave me some extra push for the next feature, the next bugfix, the next model.
• Building the Main Game Loop with Boxes and Spheres: It was way better than spending half the day drawing 6 extra enemies I had no time to implement in the end.
• Cutting Content: I think the game actually got better from not having 3 extra enemy types and mid-game upgrade options. It left more time to polish up and fix bugs.
• Actually Ended Up Learning a Lot: About how textures and emission maps work in Unity. My workflow to use them, on the other hand…

Things that didn’t go as well

• Not Having a Tested Workflow: To create models and import them into Unity was a major mistake. I think at least a few hours were spent figuring out how MagicalVoxel works, and copying .png files, opening them manually, finding that one pixel that I want to have emission, recoloring it to white so it can have any light effect, then coloring the rest to black… Every time it took forever and was single-handedly responsible for having the same projectile animation on every character.
• Playtesting: I Ended Up Not Having Enough Time to do a lot of playtesting or even release a working version to ask some friends to try it out. This led to inconsistent pacing, sudden difficulty spikes, and a UI that created a lot of confusion for the players.
• Streaming and Social Media: I spent almost the entire event live on Twitch, but I think it was hurting more than helping. Glancing over to the chat to see I have 0 viewers did affect my mood a lot during the weekend. I also didn’t have time to create posts on the LudumDare site during the event. The whole social media aspect feels like it takes an entire extra person.
• I Also Ended Up Being Cooped Up Inside: I believe going for a quick walk on Sunday would have saved a lot of time spent on worrying.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the weekend turned out. I learned a lot and found some extra motivation to keep working on games outside of jams. Would like to thank everyone who ended up playing Runic Summoner and hope to see you all again for the 56th LudumDare.

First of all I would like to thank everyone who played Runic Summoner and gave feedback on it!

I found some time during the week to create a post jam version that you can play right now directly in your browser from: https://freamdev.com/games/RunicSummoner/

Changelogs:

New Features:

• Added death effects for enemies.
• Added projectile hit effect for enemies.
• Implemented summoning effect for bosses.
• Updated aura effect for Paladin boss.
• Increased camera angle for better visibility.
• Ascended player model and attacks now accessible in-game (requires re-unlocking).

Bug Fixes and Improvements:

• Corrected spelling errors throughout the game.
• Eywas rune is now traversable.
• Targeting now functions properly on enemies.
• Left mouse button no longer required for basic attacks.
• Reduced base attack damage by approximately 33%.
• Increased heavy attack damage by 20%.
• Movement speed increased by approximately 30%.
• Close combat enemies now deal damage during "dancing around" phase.
• Reduced base health of all basic enemies by about 33%.
• Enemy healing effects weakened by approximately 30%.
• Adjusted enemy spawn intervals to occur every 8, 10, 12...30 seconds instead of every 37 seconds.
• Mage and Priest enemies now spawn one wave later.

Finished up most of the gameloop last night and jumped into replacing placeholder arts. Got into a strong "you vs the guy she tells you not to worry about" moment.

It's been hours since anyone bought anything from Bob, he is very sad.

Play the game at: Forged Below

Finished with almost 3 minutes to spare, totally had time to implement just. one. more. feature. Was fun to be here again, good luck to everyone on the finishing touches and hope to play many great games soon, after I slept a day or so... jk I got work in 4 hours... :office:

GAME!

Threw together a quick video to hopefully get a few more people to try out Bitcatcher now that it’s no longer broken or completely unplayable.

Trailer

See you on the leaderboards!