I ended up starting pretty late at 10 PM PST, but 4 hours in and I'm pretty happy with the mechanic I've come up with and the implementation so far: a platformer where collecting a ring provides you power, collecting a ring when you already have power overloads and kills you, and jumping requires and discharges the power you currently have.
Here's a clip of a portion of the Acicular Facility. The level design and difficulty is inspired by games like Dustforce and Super Meat Boy.
I just need to design a few more levels and add an ending; should be doable in 3 hours.
I ended up starting pretty late, but for about 11 hours worth of work, I'm pretty happy with the final result. It's also my first time finishing something with the Godot engine and it was a blast to use :)
Here's Power Ring Facility, a difficult platformer with gameplay inspired by Dustforce and aesthetics inspired by Portal:
You can play Power Ring Facility online at https://itch.io/embed-upload/548948 or download the game for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux at https://kz.itch.io/power-ring-facility.
I'm a huge puzzle game fan and just wanted to give a shoutout to two really good puzzle games I've played so far.
Program robots using a loop of at most 4 instructions and direct them to drop a power box at the exit. The levels are really well designed and can be quite tricky. I also really liked the funny narrative that went along with the game.
An arcade style puzzle game where the goal is to find the sequence displayed on the bottom in the given grid. As you progress, the sequences get longer and longer. The game has some really nice audio; the jingle with each sequence you solve is really satisfying and the pulse gradually gets faster to warn you that you're running out of time.
So this was actually an idea I had floating around a few weeks ago. I'm going to be making a stealth roguelike where most enemies are somewhat overpowered but back-attacks instant kill and it would play like a roguelike that focuses on avoiding enemy detection.
Almost 2 hours in and I have a very basic grid set up with line of sight to come:
Implemented line of sight for my stealth roguelike now. The implementation is fairly standard I think: for each square within a distance of X of the player, use Bresenham's algorithm to look at all the squares connecting that square and the player and see if there are any walls. If not then that square is in the line of sight.
I have some of the core mechanics of my game implemented now :) The two genres I'm fusing are stealth and roguelike and the unique mechanics I've added so far are: * Enemies are typically overpowered but can all be killed if attacked from behind. * Line of sight is emphasized and you can spend a turn to peek beyond a wall. * You can switch between leading and trailing actions. In most roguelikes, the player usually moves first and then enemies move but here you can decide on each turn whether you want to move first or move last. This mechanic makes allows players to be able to sneak into the square directly behind an enemy and backstab them.
I've settled on an art style for my stealth roguelike that's feasible for a game jam and looks reasonably consistent and pleasant! All tiles are 64x64 and background tiles are drawn in GIMP with a 1 pixel, Hardness 100 brush with Pencil Generic dynamics using a tablet. Characters are drawn in the same way but then I set increase the contrast to max.
Added some items and a new enemy now. 
Things on my TODO list: - Shopkeeper - Add a way to identify potions - Alarm level on each floor, as the alarm goes up, the level gets harder (like in Invisible Inc.) - Random level generation
Adding line of sight visual indicators has made the game a lot more fun to play :D
I just published my stealth+roguelike entry, Haka the Robber, for #LDJAM!
This was a pretty successful jam for me overall! I'm happy with the core concept and managed to stuff in quite a bit of content for a game jam :D
What went well: - The game is pretty fun, I think. - Made use of my tablet for the first time and came up with a distinct art style. - Composed music for the first time with Chrome Music Lab. - Managed to write a decent random dungeon generator from scratch during the jam.
What didn't go well: - I didn't have time to implement a major stealth mechanic I wanted to do: an alert meter that increases as you walk around and get caught that would make the level harder. - I ended up having to copy and paste a lot of the code and by the end wished I had used a game engine instead.
After a couple false starts, I finally managed to win a run of our game Beggars CAN Be Choosers. I streamed the full run on Twitch if you want to compare strats and we would love to get some feedback on the difficulty of the game since we plan to do some balancing for a post-jam version!
@lambdaloop and I are finally done with our visual novel / DNA time-travel simulation game: Genomix! We had a blast participating in this one and are super proud of what we accomplished :smiley:
Looking forward to taking a couple days rest and then playing through a bunch of cool jam games!
For Ludum Dare 47, we ended up making an action roguelike called Limbo Library which we described to ourselves as Minit meets Enter the Gungeon. One of the most programming intensive parts in our development process was implementing the random dungeon generation. We ended up referencing an article about Enter the Gungeon's dungeon generation process and implemented something similar.
The basic idea we started off with was figuring out what the key room types were. We decided there would be normal enemy rooms and elite enemy rooms as the two main types. In addition, within a run players would be able to obtain 2 chests. We also wanted to introduce a permanent upgrade for players to find and rooms that gated player progress on that upgrade. This ended up being a teleportation ability called blink and so we had a blink upgrade and blink required rooms. Finally, we planned on a boss room though a lot of content was cut due to time constraints. Below is an image of how the rooms in a run are all connected.
Each run, the rooms are always connected in this exact way, guaranteeing that you would need to face at least 2 elite rooms on the way to the boss and that you would need to obtain the blink ability as well. Within each room type, we would have some number of handcrafted templates. We ended up with 9 different room templates for our regular enemy rooms and 4 different room templates for our elite enemy rooms. Here is what one of the room templates looks like in the editor:
Each room has 4 possible exits to the top, right, bottom, and left and we manually specified the coordinates of where the exits are in each room so that the dungeon generation algorithm knew how to fill in the hallways. The large blue rectangle pictured above is a collision box that causes the room to activate when a player walks into it. This raises all the doors so a player has to fight all enemies to continue onto the next room. It also tells the enemy objects to activate their attack logic.
I'll write more about how we did the actual geometry in laying out the rooms in a second blog post, but I just wanted to end with a zoomed out picture of the final result, with the room types annotated so that you can see how they correspond to the graph from earlier:
If you have any great recommendations for platformers from LD48 (either your own or someone else's) leave a comment below!
I'll either update this post or make a new post later on with a list of them and what's cool about each one.
To kick things off, Below The Ocean by Ismael Rodriguez is really amazing. It's Celeste-inspired but introduces a lot of fresh-feeling mechanics, has a great aesthetic, and the difficulty curve feels challenging but fair. The physics feel perhaps a little floaty, but that's because it's set underwater and I'm really impressed by how great the movement feels given that.
