I have not made many games in past 4 months. As in videogames. I transferred into board game design and had a very successful Kickstarter campaign with over 3500 backers, so naturally I tried to brainstorm new ideas. Also, new school does not leave too much space for videogame development.

I spent a lot of time trying to make my last LD entry into a board game too. I had about 4 iterations of starting over with ideas built upon the last prototype. I ended up with something some people liked, some didn't. But a week ago, I finally got an idea that I think could be finally it.

Anyway, I hope to make something small and nice this time. A simple idea, straight to the point. And hopefully make it look nice.

My toolkit:

• JS+HTML5+PHP+CSS3+MySQL+phpMyAdmin
• Google Chrome
• Notepad++
• Audacity
• Krita
• Pavilion 4k monitor

Good luck everyone and have a great time!

It is 5 am and I really should go sleep.

After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with an idea and got some base code ready.

The core idea is that there are several high-score based minigames with high-score tables. When you hit the high-score table, you can decide to either submit it or sacrifice your score in order to gain "sacrifice points". Amount of sacrifice points gained is determined by how many scores are already in the table, your potential position etc. These sacrifice points are collected by all players collectivelly. Once enough sacrifice points are collected, another minigame opens.

To benchmark how many mini-games I can make, I timed how long it takes me to make Flappy Bird. I got it working and reasonably challenging in about 30 minutes, but could easily have been much faster if I hadn't made some stupid mistakes. Anyway, it looks like I could manage to make about 10 such minigames. Or more? Multiple difficulties will be unlockable too.

Here's my flappy bird after 30 minutes:

It will be a classic Sokoban style game. You have various powers - push boxes, swim in water, chop up bushes with your sword and jumping over obstacles. There will be 4 places around the map, each making you sacrifice one of those powers to spirits of the forest. Once you visit them all, you complete the level.

I hope to eventually come up with interesting puzzles where you have to use a power a lot before giving it up and look ahead.

This is all I have after 2 hours. Slow progress so far, but I think I know exactly how to do it now.

Anyway, time for lunch. Starting to get a bit irritiated, I would not like that to overflow into the night.

I am really satisfied with how my pixel art looks so far. I stepped a bit out of my comfort zone, and it seems to pay off!

In the game, player will have 4 abilities: pushing boxes, jumping over obstacles, swimming in water and chooping up bushes. There will also be 4 sacred places (a jumping sacred place is shown in the gif). Goal of the player is to visit all of them in order to get to the next level. Visiting each one however disables one of your abilities (the one in the gif is supposed to disable jumping). When you push a box over water, it becomes ground.

My dude still has a bit too many special abilities, such as flying and going through walls

Now, I will finish up with the sacred places, add bushes and then I have to just make the game work. Implement jumping, pushing of boxes, and finally make an actual level.

Then, level design, level design, level design. How to have whole sunday for that.

I was scared of this moment. What if the game just doesn't work? What if the puzzle design just is not interesting?

It took a while to design a reasonably interesting level, but I think I got something nice.

My dude can push multiple boxes at once, jump over 1 obstacle at a time (as long as the destination space is free), swim in water and chop up bushes. If he is in water, he cannot jump nor push boxes.

What's next? I need to finalize game mechanics to actually finally implement the sacrifice idea. I need to design a lot of levels. Some story would be nice, let's see how far can I get with it. Sound design will wait till tomorrow. I don't know whether generate synthetic sound or record my own. Synthetic sound fits the art style more, but recording sounds is so much more fun.

And maybe, I will even have enough time to animate stuff, that would be nice.

Already doing polish things such as level transitions, while having just 1 level designed. Got my priorities right! Anyway, I got the game working, and like the visuals already. I am glad I added the animation, it was much easier than I was worried.

Sound effects and level design (which includes tutorial, but it will be easy for this game) are the only two tasks needed to be done tomorrow. I don't think I even need menu and all that fancy stuff. Also, I am not going to ruin this with music.

I adjusted the visuals to fit the dark forest environment better. I am starting to like pixel art, it is very satisfying and you can get decent results with moderate effort if you are not experienced.

Goal of each level is to get all the glowing orbs. Getting each orb makes you sacrifice a specific special ability you have.

The yellow thing is not a funny hat, those are air tanks for breathing underwater

Ok. So I just majorly overslept. I slept 10 hours but don't feel rested. At all. When I woke up, I had this weird feeling that something doesn't check out. This weird silence and darkness.

But that is not important. I know I have to get food, and get to work if I want to finish all the tasks I need to in the very little time I have left.

There are not many tasks to get done. Just tutorial, sound effects and level design. But I better recollect myself. Fast.

I got everything done, except for level design. I got 4 very nice levels, but I would like to have like 15.

And that's 10 successful Ludum Dares in a row. Had a great time, as always.

Play An Adventure within a Deep Forest now in your browser! (Preferably Chrome). And don't forget to leave a comment and tell everyone how far you got on the game page.

There is some completing to be done, like more levels. There are 10 in total currently, if I count the 3-4 tutorial levels.

I am very happy with how my pixel art turned out. It was a first for me, and I loved it.

I will have about 20 hours for the game this time around, so I sure do hope I will be able to make something nice I can be proud of.

As always, I will do compo.

I am super thrilled about it this time, as I was forced by my uni to write a lot of C++ in the past month, with the past week meaning ~2000 loc of C++, so JavaScript will be a beautiful break from the rigid, formal and strict world of C++. I cannot wait for all the beautiful things such as garbage collecting, loose typing and just the overal light, easy and fun development cycle in JS :smile:.

My toolset will be pretty much my default and trusty:

• HTML5 + CSS3 + ES6

• Google Chrome dev tools

• Notepad++

• Krita (may not make any actual graphics since the last time was a bit disappointing, considering how proud I was of myself for the graphics)

• Audacity / bfxr (if needed, may not have time for sound design)

• (perhaps MySQL + phpMyAdmin)

I would love to make something that involves some real-life component (if not a board game altogether, in which case the toolset would obviously change). Eg. printing stuff as you go through the game and solving some puzzles with pieces of printed paper.

Anyway, I must not overcomplicate it. Some very simple straight-to-the-point idea. Just make it small and nice, there's simply not much time for anything more.

School may get in the way, as I have two deadlines the two days after Ludum Dare. Better get to work during the week, so I have time for the important stuff during the weekend :sweat_smile:

The whole saturday, and perhaps part of sunday I will be offline. I hope to mock up one of the first ideas before I leave, and have the whole day to think of that and other ideas. By the time I go back online, I will have to have a very clear vision of what I will be making and how. With the lower frequency of Ludum Dares, and my current streak, I better not fail.

Good luck everyone!

I have spent 10 hours today chopping and stacking wood in a team of 5. There was exactly one metric shitload of wood.

*There are 7 rows in the beast *

My back hurts considerably, and my fingers a bit. Fortunately, I can type at full speed without much of trouble.

So just a quick sleep, and I can get to Ludum Dare. I will have about 18 hours to design and develop the game, so I will definitely manage to make something nice.

I have two vague ideas, so hopefully at least one of them evolves into sharp and clear vision by the morning.

Good night and good luck everyone!

Initially, I wasn't very inspired by the theme, but as I started tackling it from different directions, I came up with some interesting ideas.

One of them was something deep and phylosophical about how much do you value your own life and for what would you be willing to lose it.

Another one was market with many currencies, one of them being your own life. When you trade your life, you have some chance of dying.

Next was a dystopian post apocalyptic text adventure with social points system, where you are trying to prove to a tribunal that you live a life worth living so they don't execute you and yada yada yada.

But then finally it struck me. Slavery. I don't think I have seen that interpretation yet, and it is a very workable topic.

For some reason, I came up with an idea of renaissance slavery, where you are a rennaissance "artist", and in fact are just trading slaves so you have the most diverse art gallery ever. Each slave will have a skillset, and will "produce" different types of art (or money to buy more slave or food to feed the slaves you already have). You will be able to also work on specific types of art, making that skill grow on your character.

The other option was building of a pyramid in Egypt, as the slavery is more stereotypical there, but the vision of rennaissance is much clearer to me.

The biggest problem will be whether I can make 8-bit rennaissance music :smile:.

I hope to have mock up prototype within about 3 hours. Will report then.

Title

Ever wondered what is the secret of all the extraordinary rennaissance people with great skills in many areas?

The dark truth they don't teach you at school is that they were trading slaves with each other who created art and invented inventions for them, which then they published as theirs.

Concept prototype, progress after 2 hours.

Each slave has some skillset that says how fast he produces food, paintings, sculptures, music and inventions. You will be able to sell and buy your slaves based on which art forms you lack (as the final score will be geometric mean of amount in your art types), sometimes having exclusive limited-time offers from colleagues.

You will have to feed your slaves with food they produce. If you don't have enough, their HP starts to drop.

What do you think of the icons? Is it clear what each depicts?

I am also thinking of how to implement the dark theme. I don't think I can create dark atmosphere, so I guess it will end up with silly and fun look and feel. We'll see.

I lost the vision of my previous project, and just couldn't see myself making it into an actually good game in time, so I switched to one of the other concepts I had in mind originally.

I am staying with the slavery theme, but it will be a quick puzzle game about building pyramids. I have the whole game clearly in my head. Now, just need to zone out and code without any speedbumbs for the next 9 hours straight. See you then!

After the first day offline and most of the second day working on wrong concept, I managed to pull myself together and make a game in the last 8.5 hours.

You are building yourself a pyramid. Try to get same symbols together and upgrade your stone mines with the money earned.

Where's the theme? Good question! Life as currency = slavery, slavery = building pyramids.

Now I have just over an hour left for at least a passable game page and I call another Ludum Dare a success for me. But I gotta say it was a close one this time.

... I am happy with the core gameplay. Also, as it turns out, it is quite difficult to finish. I am sitting at victory rate of about 80%, so it definitely is possible though.

If you are one of the players that cares primarily about the gameplay and doesn't mind lack of polish looking for a good challenge, try and snag the title of first non-author game finish!

Play here (html5)

Game page

Screen lapse of the crazy process of making a game in a timespan of 8 hours.

https://youtu.be/2PWO-cM96mI

Things to notice

• No messing around

• About 4 minutes spent on graphics

• A single 30 minute break taken

• 15 minutes to spare at the end

Game Page

At this point, I just don't want to break the streak.

I hope for this Ludum Dare to be as good as ever. Good luck everyone!

I may make a board game this time around.