I am in for this weekend, though I'm also in the middle of a release at work. Hopefully it is a quiet weekend and I can work on Ludum Dare all weekend. Anyways I will be using these tools:

• Unity
• Blender
• Photoshop
• Various proc gen music and sound tools (cgmusic :notes:, bfxr :space_invader:, etc.)

This time I want to take on a smaller scope game and polish it heavily. In the past I've gone for fully featured games (why did I attempt a city builder that one time?) and while most of the time I have finished the game, it ended up with me exhausted and the game super buggy.

And to everyone else out there: Good luck, have fun and learn a lot!

Hey guys, check out this wallpaper, pretty simple stuff but it looks nice I guess. :neutral_face:

I do feel like Ludum Dare is kind of like climbing a mountain and the achievement you feel when you get to the top is amazing. Much like iin Breath of The Wild.

Also bug report? These emojis don't work. (That comma is not there in edit mode but shows up in preview mode.) :womanshrugging: :manshrugging:

Play and Rate our game here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-planet

Hey guys, I hope everyone was able to learn something new this time around. I know I did! Anyways, now for some shameless self promotion. We made a game for the Jam. It's a FPS Platformer with a low-poly cartoon style, and I think it looks pretty good. The GIF below is a pretty good indicator of what it's like.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated :)

Pretty excited to do Ludum Dare again. This time I will be submitting solo.

I will be creating a game in Unity and I will use tools like Photoshop, Blender, Bfxr, and Audacity to create all the art and sounds needed.

I did some warmup this week that left me with some great architectural ideas that should minimise bugs and decrease my frustration. But we will see!

To everyone else participating: Good luck and have fun!

Hey guys, I hope your playing and rating is going well. I've seen some really awesome games out there, I really wish I could play them all. I wanted to take some time to write up a post mortem, for posterity. If you want to play the game first here' a shortcut there: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/mage-arena

Summary of the game :

This time around I worked on this a game called Mage: Arena. I set out to make an FPS game with Doom-esque sprite based graphics. As for the theme I took a little liberty and interpreted it as "The more you use, the worse it is". So in my game you play as a fire mage who wields intense fire magic that will hurt them if over used. You manage this with a mechanic called "cooling off" in which you cannot sprint or use your magic but your usage level will go down.

What I did differently this time

This time I approached the game with some more knowledge about C# and Unity, as well as experience gained at work over the year. I made more use of the languages features that I wasn't using before; Interfaces, abstract classes, type parameters, delegates and actions, lambda functions, etc. This made designing systems easier as I made a custom input system to assign inputs in the editor and a Finite State Machine controller that used ScriptableObjects and inheretance to define the states(Unity tutorials gave me the idea).I also brought more in Unity engine knowledge. I had been practicing with Blender for a bit and wanted to use that for the sprite animations. It worked out pretty well once I got the hang of it.

Consequences

Working on all of those systems took a lot of time, and while the investment was worth it for the more manageable code, it led to *MANY* features being cut. I wanted way more enemy types and spells, also sounds... sounds would have been nice.

Conclusion

At the end of the day I made a game, and I got some new custom plugins for my future projects. The source code for the game is available on github, I'm currently still working on it to add some enemy types and fix bugs. I think the project has potential so I'm going to continue it for a bit and see where it goes. Anyways, if you read all of this rambling and it helped let me know. Thanks for reading!

If a little behind the scenes of this development interests you, I post updates for these types of things here: https://twitter.com/mactinite

Hello Everyone!

I'm in and I'm bringing some friends!

I've been doing Ludum Dare now for many years now, I've participated in 14 events, going as far back as LD27! Lately I haven't been able to participate. Hoping to put something special together this time.

We'll be using the following tools:

• Unity
• Flask
• Logic Pro
• Blender (?)
• Photoshop

We've got an idea already which is great! hoping to have a prototype together soon!

Good luck everyone, and most importantly have fun! :smile: :v:

Away from home in unfamiliar land. Won't have much time but I'm in!

Hello everyone! I'll be joining again. My first ludum dare was LD27, This will be my 11th(!).

My goal this year is to finish a game in a healthy way. Going to get plenty rest, eat good food, and work with a purpose!

I hope everyone will enjoy their time this weekend and I can't wait to see all the games! :smile:

Just finished up my entry into the Jam. "The Potion Cellar" create some potions with unstable ingredients and tools.

Really wish I had more time to add random lines for NPCs, and more upgrades. But it's fun for what it is.

Come check it out you can play the whole thing in just a few minutes. :)

Entry Page Link

Come check out my brawler. It's heavily inspired by Mario & Dark Souls. It's one part platformer collectathon, one part Action Brawler.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/punch-bean-and-the-legend-of-the-gold-coins

Heya :wave: I’m just doing the traditional I’m in post. I’ve been doing Ludum Dare for awhile now. (Since LD29 on and off). This competition got me programming and making games, and as of now I’ve been a professional software engineer for the last 6 years! Please if you are on the fence about joining or worried about how you’ll perform, just jump in! Every year you join is a win for you and a win for all of us!

This year I’ll be using Unity again, and I want to make something 3D again. Last year I took a whack at an open area platformer/brawler and while it worked out I didn’t have much time to play test or plan out level design. This year I want to have a good idea of the mechanics and level design before I ever place a vertex.

Here’s to a good dare! :champagne_glass: Cheers!

My very first Ludum Dare was Ludum Dare 27, and the theme was "10 Seconds". Almost 10 years ago! Time flies! So I was thinking, why not test my skills a little, and re-imagine my very first Ludum Dare entry.

My skills were basic and the game was basic, but I was proud of it and it's meaningful as a first entry :

https://web.archive.org/web/20160322033119/http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26320

The new version is totally going to blow it out of the water (hopefully) and will be nice to see how many skills I've gained since then.

Good luck y'all!

Thank you to everyone for participating in this ludum dare and also for playing and rating my game, Underworld Management!

Every time I participate in ludum dare I try to push myself to try new approaches to game design and development. This time my focus was on intuitive gameplay and tutorialization. I think I managed to create a game that can be picked up by anyone and was able to dabble my toes in to some light tutorialization, something that I have never attempted before.

This time, I also tried a new art style. Heavily borrowing from games like Don't Starve and Cult of the Lamb I think it turned out great:

Pairing a hand-drawn style with 2D billboards in a 3D world - it was pretty freeing to step outside of the pixel art and 3d-modeling realms, though it took a while to really nail down the process. I could further improve this process with the 2D animation package and 2D bone-based animations.

Unity has some weird workarounds to get the look I was going for. Shadows for sprites required checking boxes in debug mode and writing a special shader. Using 2D physics forced me onto an x/y grid, which was difficult to navigate in-editor. In hindsight I think I would have started with a 3D URP project and 3D physics, instead of sprites and 2D physics.

All in all, I think this was a great project that really taught me some great new strategies for future projects and future ludum dare events. I hope that you will take the time to try it out and give me some feedback!

Thanks again for a wonderful Ludum Dare!!

Play Underworld Management

I’ve been doing this a long time (ld28?!) it’s fun let’s do it again.

Using Unity, Blender if I absolutely have to. I’m also turning 30 this month so this is the last LD of my 20s. One last chance for a banger game jam to round out the decade. Anyone else actually read these? If you read this you’re a real one.