This game is FUN! And totally hidden in the 0 Votes section (Not anymore!). I highly recommend you give it a few minutes of your time, especially if you enjoy fighting games.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/pluto-vs-the-sun

This is really tiny, but very well executed. The developer did a great job and I highly recommend just messing with it for a couple minutes and dropping them a line: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/picotroid

Chalk Run is really well built, with a fantastic character controller, and a slick, well tested concept. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/chalk-run

Enjoy difficult games? Check out the updated version of ATLANTIS!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/atlantis

We'd love your feedback!

I'm still looking for folks who want to come and give valuable feedback over here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/atlantis

Last night I hit the 400 Reviews Mark: If you post your game here, I'll get to it when I wake up in a few hours. I'm hoping to hit 500 Reviews before Ludum Dare ends.

Hope to see folks soon!

It's been a real blast hanging with folks, rating games together, streaming, and just derping about. Thanks so much for playing our game (If you haven't yet, go give it a run!). If you like, give me a follow on Twitter and reach out, I am enjoying all the conversations and debates I've had and would love to have more folks to chat with.

@OccultSoftworks

I think we're gonna try and do a full release of ATLANTIS in the next few months, so if you enjoyed it, follow so I can show off updates and get beta testers.

Thanks all! Schedule permitting: See you next time!

Go to bed. We may not see anything until Saturday.

With the end of LD38 only hours away, I wanted to put out the offer to anyone who has submitted feedback, played our game, and wants to see more to click this link:

https://goo.gl/forms/NrY7YRrcGhc9f8T73

We'll be occasionally sending out info about the release, invitations to the Alpha and Beta, and access keys to folks and having a list to work off of would be great. I promise we won't spam your inbox!

Also, give us a follow on Twitter @OccultSoftworks to get more frequent updates, or to chat about game development.

Go to Bed!

I can rest now... Close my eyes... one last time...

We didn't do nearly as well as we'd hoped. We're all divided on "What happened?" with a few categories.

Congrats to all the medalists, and thanks for giving our game a shot!

1286 Ranked Games / 1840 Total Games

Category: Result: Percentile Ranked: Percentile Total

Overall: 311 : 24.18% / 16.9%

Fun: 504 : 39.19% / 27.39%

Innovation: 223 : 17.34% / 12.11%

Theme: 304 : 23.64% / 16.52%

Graphics: 247 : 19.2% / 13.42%

Audio: 164 : 12.75% / 8.91 %

Mood: 156 : 12.13% / 8.48 %

There's a lot of discussion about changing the way LD is scored, most of which involves adding additional layers between a game and a final score. This irks me, because as game designers, we should know better than to add additional friction between the user and what their desired outcomes should be. IE: Play Games, Get Score. Doesn't get better than that... simple information is highly compressible and easily learn-able.

My modest proposal: Don't change the scores. Instead, incentivize participation in the voting phase and being a good LD-Citizen both during and after the jam.

Reward users for going the extra mile with badges below their names, colored usernames. And allow the rating of feedback. A [<3] is great for passive posts but it encourages users to post fluffy or watered down comments. Instead, allow users to rate the feedback being given, and open up user awards for "Best Feedback". Have some kind of persistent score from jam to jam, and give us access to our analytics so we can see our numbers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uME02Tb0n18

Hey Guys! I'm kinda swamped in Contractor-Land, I had a number of clients show up out of the blue and I've been doing my best to keep my head above water, but I've forgotten to really dig down and do some LD Entries and I'd like to rectify that.

If you like, post your game, and I'll do a video or longer-form analysis, critique the entry, and provide some suggestions, sort of like what I did with LD38. I'll be doing these in the couple days of free time I have this weekend between crunch sessions. (If I get an overwhelming number of submissions: I will do my best!)

All I ask: If you like action shooter games in space, Give my game a go down here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/detritus

Thanks for everyone who played DETRITUS! And grats to the winners! Already looking forward to November!

We're going to try and make this one as our team's fifth Ludum Dare. A member of the family passed away this past thanksgiving and we are a little unsure if we can commit to the full jam, but we really want to try.

Team: Programmer, Artist, Designer, and Audio Engineer. We're possibly going to be joined this time around by a Junior Programmer, and a UI Designer for a few hours as well. If we get too much overlap we may shard off a group to make a second game.

Production Tools:
Unity 2018.3 or Unity 2017.4f1 depending on how stable 2018.3 ends up being.
Blender 2.79
PyxelEdit and Aesprite 1.2.7 w/ Cintiq
Audacity 2.2.2, FL Studio 20, & A bunch of instruments we have in the house.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Substance Painter / Substance Designer
Unity Collaborate for Source Control and Distribution

Prototyping Tools:
Shadron 1.3.2 - Shaders
Pico-8 & Pixel Vision 8 - Mechanics Testing
More Notecards and Graph Paper and Origami Paper than you can possibly imagine.

This was an interesting jam, we were down our usual designer so the hat ended up with me. We've made it a point since LD38 to spend extra time in pre-production, getting everyone on the same page, and establishing a set of guidelines for us all to use, and I'm not sure we would have finished with the workload we had if we hadn't done so. I wanted to write this post to give folks some helpful advice as they look to the future, and hopefully someone will find it useful and avoid our mistakes!

What We Did Right:

Here's all of the stuff I think we did well! There's stuff to improve on after every jam, but we've managed to get a lot of stuff here down as a team.

The very first thing I defined was our Unit Sizes, in Pixels. This was rigidly enforced from the very beginning. It meant the artist didn't need to go back and resize things after the fact, once an Asset was done, I as the person in charge of integration (More on this later) could rest assured that it was correct, process it for Unity, and start using it.

We spent extra time Friday night getting everyone on the same page about what exactly we were making. I laid out the mood, what kind of mechanics I was looking at implementing, and what I was hoping for. We went as far as doing some light worldbuilding to make sure everyone was completely on-board with the project.

I spent the week before the jam doing warm ups, researching, getting re-familiarized with the API, and reading... so much reading. I felt very on the ball this jam, which was a good feeling I don't normally have.

When figuring out the game, we took time to figure out what the strengths of everyone on the team was, what people were comfortable doing, and what our tools and engine were best suited for. Everyone was busy 100% of the time, nobody finished early or late. Everyone had a list of things to do from start to finish. Our communication was much better as a team.

What we Did Wrong:

And the stuff we did wrong... Some of it is just endemic to it being a jam. Kludge and rush jobs happen, it's the nature of the beast, but there's a lot we could have done better.

We had our Artist install Unity ahead of time, and used Unity Collaborate to make things easier, but her lack of familiarity meant we had to have someone hand-integrate every asset for her. This is one of those things we'll need to fix by sitting down between jams, and doing some light training.

I broke my own rule here and waited to do a build until the last second. The first build is always the roughest, and if I'd been doing it nightly like I usually do, it would have taken 5 minutes instead of 40.

All of the new goodies in Unity's 2018.3 Beta were too hard to resist, but it resulted in a highly unstable Editor, and complicated the build process.

We are so used to working as a team of four that when one of us can't make it, it throws off our groove. I scoped as though I still had our Designer, but he couldn't make it this time.

I spent way too long on the character controller, sorting out physics quirks, that the animations and gameplay (And AI) suffered due to neglect. I need to better budget my time and not get bogged down in that.

I'm just not very good at it. I can make either totally braindead and uninteresting enemies, or I can make superhuman terminators. I can't seem to find the sweet spot...

What's Next

I'm gonna do a Design Post-Mortem because I want to talk about some of the decisions that went into the gameplay, even if we didn't quite reach our full desired gameplay loop. I think folks will find it interesting.

Alrighty, so I meant to do this earlier but work got pretty insane. So this is a quick and dirty design postmortem, I'm gonna lay out the decisions that went into De-Railed. I'm not gonna say I accomplished every goal, or even did everything particularly well, but I love chatting design and want to lay my thoughts out for folks who may take an interest.

One of the first Combat Design Decisions was: This character is not a soldier. They should not be able to tear through enemies quickly, and their hit points should be beefy enough to be forgiving, but low enough that if a player wants to run from combat they have enough time to do so. The level design was intended to funnel players into dangerous zones, but to give them opportunities to flee, hide, etc.

To Accomplish the Clunky, slow, unweildly feeling I wanted out of Melee, I decided early on to do a few simple things.
A) I set it up so that a Melee Attack would halt your horizontal Movement. This means you can't just "Hack and Slash" Run through the level, you need to time your attacks. I did not however, stop vertical movement, so it remains possible to jump up and slash at a target hanging out on the ledge.
B) Animation Commitment: Attacks take a Loooooooong time to complete, and once you attack, you have to wait until the animation completes before you can take other action, and you cannot cancel the attack. There's also a cooldown after attacking before you can take action.
C) Melee Attacks do 2 Damage to Ranged Weapon's damage of 1. This translated to general play as players shooting wildly at a target, and finishing the enemy off with a Wendigo as they don't have enough time to shoot the enemy enough to kill it before it reaches them.
D) The Weapon Attack Box is pretty small, and extends only as far as the very edge of the weapon. It's also only around for a single frame.

Ranged Attacks are designed less around animation commitment, and more around giving the player a choice in the accuracy of their attacks, they can either have highly accurate fire, or highly inaccurate but fast fire. It's a difference of a little over half a second, but in that time the enemy can close rapidly once disturbed. My intended play was that the first shot players took they would wind up, think about what they were doing, and then fire after a full second or so of aiming. I however, didn't want to penalize players too much for RNG making it so shots would "Barely Miss", so I applied light homing to the projectiles , as you can see in the editor view with the purple lines.

I think this is where I made the biggest mistake in that I didn't adjust the health pool after testing. I set the HP Amount at 5 early on because it was a good square number, but I didn't have enough time to really test how this played. I honestly think at this point I should have lowered the HP Amount to 3. Health Packs were added at the last minute (Really the last Hour, but still), and threw off the way the game played and I never revisited it.

If you're on controller, pressing (Y)/(▲) will reveal that I left this ingame, it was originally intended to cause the Wendigo to flee from an area, but it ended up getting cut at the last minute because the logic caused some really weird movements. If i had been more clever and less sleep deprived, I would have converted them to a flare of some kind and left them in, but alas, Hindsight is 20/20. My original intent was to make these very limited in use, they actually exist as a GUI Element and pickup-able item but it was disabled before I built the game.

1) Have a better Sprite Animation System. I had to cobble that together at the very last minute and it sucked.
2) Spend more time generating content and interactables. The character system is very overbuilt for what exists in the world to form interactions.

Hope folks find this interesting. Chat me up here or on Twitter (@OccultGameDev) to talk design!

Still planning on a Post-Mortem, but I've had a few friends ask how we did the procedural maps (Map, only the first one made it into game for the Jam) for Edge of Twilight, our entry over here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/edge-of-twilight

To Start, for those who aren't interested in playing (Side note: We could use a few more votes, give us a shot if you like Difficult Strategy Games!)... Here's a quick overview of the map configurations in games, and the XML that runs the procedural map generation service.

The Scenario File, which is an XML Data Sheet, holds all of the Data that makes up the Game Scenario. It's loaded at runtime and parsed out to all of the sub-game functions. The one we care about is the Map Generator Service. The MapGen gets two crucial pieces of information, how big the map is, which is used to create a set of initial valueless tiles. And then it gets the list of procedural rules that it runs in sequential order.

To flavor a map, I use the SETTILE function, and tell it to set the map to tiles of that type by using the @ALL modifier. I can also use it to set specific points on the map as specific types of tile, using the @(X,Y) command, or using the helper @CENTER. If no positional modifier is specified, it will be random. I can also specify a modifier inside the spawner data, using the "on" tag, which will only allow the tile to be set on that type of tile. I can also restrict the range on the map, using the minx/maxx, miny/maxy modifiers.

By adjusting the order in which I change things, and how I layer the changes, I can achieve pretty good results considering the limited Tileset and timeframe we had to build the game. I wish we'd had enough time to write the other two scenarios, but a lot more goes into them than just the Map Construction, and we cut it too close on too many other vital features. But I'll cover that in a Post-Mortem later!

Thanks for giving this a read, and, I guess, Follow me on Twitter? I Don't know: https://twitter.com/OccultGameDev

This will be our Eight Ludum Dare as a Team!

Our team is in a bit of flux, we may be assimilating a few recent grads from a local university, and our lead programmer recently got a new job in the industry, so things are a little uncertain.

Team Members: Programmer, Audio Engineer, Artist, Producer, Animator, and a Designer.

Production Tools:
Unity 2018.4, UE4, or GameMaker Studio 2
Blender 2.8
Houdini
PyxelEdit & Aesprite w/ Cintiq
FMOD Studio, FL Studio, Audacity
Adobe Creative Suite
Substance Painter / Substance Designer
Unity Collaborate for Source Control and Team Distribution

Prototyping Tools:
Shadron for Shaders
Pico-8 for Mechanics
Tons of Graph Paper and Origami Paper

My third Ludum Dare, I'll be back (And maybe with some new friends in tow). Gonna be fun! (I dunno if I'm gonna have time to rate >500 Games again, that was an undertaking)