I will be using PIXI.js for graphics and audacity for sound. I have several genre's of game in mind but I'm waiting for the theme to be announced to find the best fit.

Good luck all!

I have always had this idea in the back of my head of doing a crossover between mining/exploration and a tower defense game but the genres never felt like they would work well together so this was the perfect opportunity to give it a shot! I submitted my game very late last night and was expecting to be busy all day today but I got home with an hour left and was able to do some last minute balancing and tuning!

LD Entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/adventure-defense

And a screenshot:

This is my second time participating in the Jam and it was a ton of fun! We spent almost the entire first night brainstorming ideas and settled on the basic idea of sacrificing your friends to complete a level. After we settled on the mechanics, we figured out that the Santa/Elf theme worked perfectly as a story. It ended up being a really enjoyable puzzle game with a lot of potential for fun, unexpected, and complex puzzles!

The Premise:

You must deliver the presents at all costs... even if it means sacrificing a few elves. Use your power as Santa to manipulate the elves into sacrificing themselves to help you deliver your presents across the deadly spike ridden arctic.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/santas-slay

We won't have time to work on it tomorrow so we had to submit our jam entry tonight! Everything seemed like it was done until the last minute when I realized maybe one more small bug fix would be nice. After about 5 hours of bug fixing and minor features after I was "pretty much done", I present to you: Rise of the Purple Slime! A game about tending to your delicate purple slime as it grows and takes over the planet. Massive fluid simulation should never mix with javascript but with enough optimization we gave it a shot! Enjoy!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/rise-of-the-purple-slime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj6b2LC6TEI

I made a gameplay trailer for rise of the purple slime! Now I can empathize with all of the streamers who played our game. Because it is a single-threaded fluid simulation in javascript and not fully optimized, our game is just barely able to eek out 60 fps even on relatively new hardware. Adding any additional load like streaming software immediately made the game almost unplayably slow. With some tweaking I was able to record but it was not easy!

Jam Entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/rise-of-the-purple-slime

What a jam! We definitely bit off a bit more than we could chew for this one although I am still happy with the result and learned a lot. The final result is a groundhog-day/stanley parable/witness crossover with a few mysteries/puzzles. If you have not played Seeker yet, you can play it here. This post contains some minor spoilers.

The initial goal was to create a game where the level appears very simple at first but the player is set back to the start immediately after finishing only to realize that they learned just enough to find the first secret. For the final game I am pretty happy with how this turned out where there is a blue tinted grass that means a block is a button or trigger of some sort. The first time you play the level it is almost impossible to avoid stepping on the trigger to reveal the first door while moving to the right. After this the player may look to the left and realize they could have gone left all along to find the same trigger mechanism that opens a new part of the map. There are several other mechanics ranging from the common platformer features (breakable blocks) to custom controls (mouse movement/clicking affecting various things) to things that seem like aesthetics becoming key mechanics.

These first few levels were all made on paper and planned from the beginning but it took almost 48 hours of the jam to get to the point where the engine was polished enough and had enough mechanics to start adding new puzzles and the last 3 or 4 endings were all added in the last hour so it got a bit hacky at that point! So far for every game jam, I have made the engine from scratch in javascript which has led to a lot of unique mechanics but this is the first jam where I felt that the game would have been much easier in game maker or unity. It ended up being a lot of work to make a proper platforming engine from scratch and we did not end up getting to do the custom shaders and fancy effects that we initially envisioned.

After finishing the first 3 carefully made guided endings, the player now has enough knowledge to find 4 more challenging endings with a bit of exploring. There are a total of 10 puzzles with 12 endings although the lines between the puzzles start to blur at the end. For a game-jam this is definitely a huge design challenge and balancing is incredibly difficult since we are already spoiled on the secrets which are important to gameplay. I think it ended up a bit on the easy side for the first few endings in order to cater more to the game-jam audience and accessibility with the last 2 being a lot harder and the middle feeling well balanced. Overall I am really happy with how this turned out and I think while it isn't very extendable in it's current form, it proves that the concept is workable and I really want to make another game like this in the future.

Code

Game

LD Entry

Here are a few screeenshots, although since the entire point of the game is that the mechanics are not obvious until you play, it is hard to tell what is going on in a still screenshot:

Seeker looks like a very simple platformer but is a lot more than that. After looking at the comments, I was very happy to see that most people found around half of the endings meaning the beginning learning curve is probably about right. The whole challenge with making this was definitely balance and I spent far longer on these first 6 doors to ensure they kept leading you to the next. You can do them in any order as well so the "First 6" can be different for different players. While I view this as a success and giving text instruction goes against the point of the game, for the sake of the game jam players and respecting that nobody has an hour to jump around a single level looking for clues, I have provided a full list of spoilers in the approximate order that I expected they would be found. If you are completely stuck, just click down the list until you learn something new! Hopefully this allows people who want to enjoy the full game without spending too much time!

(also added to entry)

Play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/seeker

Hints/Solutions:

1 !> Jump on the blueish grass to the right to push it down and open the first door.

2 !> Jump on the blueish grass block to the left at the start of the hill to open up the gravel pit in the middle. Then jump on the gravel to make it fall and get to the door below.

3 !> Jump on the gravel to the left of the spawn to find a hidden room. Click and hold while underneath vines to whistle and grow the vines which you can climb to the door!

4 !> Whistle underneath the vine hanging from the tree to climb it.

5 !> To the right of the tree there is a field of flowers and a door. The door closes when you step on any blue flowers so avoid squishing blue flowers to get past this door.

6 !> If you jump up above the tree (to the left) there are six "buttons" in a row. The correct code must be entered and is different each time. To determine the code, listen to the pitch of the bird's tweets (or watch the position of the notes).

7 !> On the left side jump against the wall. There is a hidden door that remains open as long as you have not stepped on any red flowers!

8 !> Behind the red flower door there is a gravel pit maze. The solution is to first go right. Then go right again but push against the right wall and you will find a secret passage leading to the door.

9 !> In the gravel pit, destroy only the blocks on the left. This side has a secret entrance to a new area.

10 !> To move the turtle, move your mouse.

11 !> Past the turtle door, destroy the gravel to find another entrance.

12 !> To the left of the turtle area, jump against the wall. There is a secret area here.

13 !> In the secret area mentioned above, whistle for a while and vines will come down from another secret area above the room.

14 !> There is a secret area on top of the mountain on the left. Climb this mountain (using the vines) and go to the very top where there is a secret entrance leading to the door.

15 !> On the right side above the first door, there is a hidden area. To open the first door, avoid squishing yellow flowers. To open the second door, you must squish all blue flowers! There are blue flowers on the far left side of the map as well as the ones on the right.

16 !> Behind the Yellow/Blue flower puzzle door there is a secret entrance to another door. You have to jump over the first door and fall into the hidden pit behind it. (this is probably the hardest to find)

Had to end this one early but I still got a pretty solid base game out. As usual I hope to keep improving on it later but that seems to never happen!

Deep Mine is built on a falling sand engine I abandoned 6 months ago. It ended up feeling like a Noita/Motherload crossover which I am pretty happy with. The biggest missing part I wanted to add were enemies but I think it is still enjoyable without them and there are still plenty of ways to die.

Play Here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-mine-1

Also playing around on the title screen is way more fun than I thought it would be :laughing:

I'm having wayyy too much fun with this engine so I went ahead and made a little intro title screen that is 1000x better than the plain text I have in the original game!

If you enjoy falling sand games, give it a play!

Entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-mine-1

Wow what a fun jam! I had a great time making Deep Mine then playing everyone's games. There were a ton of great high quality submissions. After getting so much feedback, I have compiled a list of things I learned and plan to apply to the next jam:

1. Make a game that is easy to play
   • I enjoy challenging games that may take a few tries to get right when I am playing a game but I realize not everyone has these preferences and these kinds of games are very difficult to get right in a game jam. My game for this jam feels relatively easy after hours of continuous practice and despite my attempts to make it easier (no permadeath, moving all the minerals up by a few hundred blocks, increasing ore density, etc) it still ended up being hard enough that a significant percentage of people gave up before seeing all of the gameplay. I think the solution here is to just be more self aware of what gameplay mechanics I might be good at due to practice while making the game so I can adjust the difficulty accordingly.
2. Avoid unintentional or confusing cues
   • My game has a bug where mining Ice, Leaves, and a few other worthless materials causes a popup that says "+ (Name of material)". This is because I made the mistake of creating a list of materials that did not take up inventory and left a few common ones off... This minor bug led to a lot of frustration when people filled up a whole inventory full of ice just to find out it is worthless.
3. Guide the player to the optimal strategy
   • I wrongly assumed that everyone would find the best strategy of just continuing to dig straight down with occasional cave exploration to get extra resources. As much as I want to avoid having to give a block of text describing the strategy, I should have hinted that as you go deeper, the materials get exponentially more valuable. I noticed many people that played would end up grinding away at the limestone/copper layer and end up getting bored because I failed to communicate to the player that going deeper gave better minerals. If you played motherload or any similar games, it might seem obvious but after watching a significant number of people play my game, I have concluded that it is not obvious and there needs to be some hint here. This leads to my next point: A story with dialog could have helped me sneak in some hints toward better strategy.
4. Have a story if possible
   • My game did not have a story this round. Actually almost none of them do as I prefer to focus on making new and interesting mechanics and tend to neglect the equally important story telling aspect of game design. This along with programmer art is probably my biggest weakness and I think adding a very simple story in future games should help me engage the player more fully.
5. Avoid tricky mechanics
   • There is a bug that caused wood to catch fire when you drilled it. I thought this was so funny that I ran with it and made it a feature. Burning down the forest accidentally with your drill is hilarious when you have an upgraded hull and coolant to withstand the fire damage. Unfortunately I did not realize that some people would drill the trees first (classic mining game mechanic) and would almost instantly die or at least cause a pretty difficult hazard right by the shop. Another funny mechanic I added was exploding the player into lava when they died. This is fun when you know what lava is and avoid it but it isn't as much fun when you have not been introduced to lava yet and immediately die a second time exploring this new orange substance.
6. Test on multiple browsers
   • This is mostly due to how much slower Firefox is than Chrome combined with the fact that my game is a bit of a CPU hog. Delta timing makes up for this but unfortunately due to the custom implementation of the engine, I probably missed one somewhere. (I use matter.js for polygon physics but this requires a lot of integration work with the completely custom sand engine).

I'll try to improve on these for next time! As for the current game, I am stuck between continuing/finishing it in its current form and just giving it a bit of polish then making a completely new terraria-like game which many of you suggested and I agree would seem like a much better use of this engine.

Here is a quick gif demonstrating the tree mining (not a good idea):

Feel free to give it a play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-mine-1