I recently got back into game dev after a very long hiatus. I have a couple of old released games under my belt from around 10 years ago, and a number of mods, maps, and unfinished games, but I've never actually participated in a game jam. Really looking forward to my first attempt, and my only real ambition for my first time is to actually post something people can pick up and play and understand.

I'm excited about this year's themes and I have a handful of ideas that fit with most of them.

I'll be using Godot, which is awesome but is pretty new to me (my past games were made in Microsoft's XNA framework), and I'm also looking forward to finishing my first pixel art game, since my previous titles were based on Photoshopping over prerendered 3D images or stock photos. I've gained some beginner/intermediate art skills during my hiatus and I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation to be able to put them to use.

Good luck to everyone and I'm thrilled to play as many of your games as I can!

It's actually a game now!

Have to that art looking better, juice up the gamefeel, and work on the balance. More coffee, please.

Here's my game. I followed compo rules but I couldn't get it done in time, so it's a jam! I need sleep. Badly. I'll play as many of your lovely games as I can after a nice, long nap. Hope everyone had a great jam (if you're done!) and I hope you all have an amazing day!

Wanted to talk about my thought process on developing my "garbage truck in space saves the planet by collecting trash" game. Fair warning, this is going to be a bit lengthy, so here's a GIF and feel free to just ignore me--or better yet, go play my game!--if you're not interested in reading about my design process for LD49.

Going into LD49, I knew I was going to participate this time, and when the final round of voting happened I had a few themes in mind that I thought could fit with any of the choices. "Unstable" was actually one of the worst ones in terms of fit, but I think it's still okay; you don't have to squint too hard to see how it works.

Orbital Cascade is, as far as I can tell, not a real term that people use--but it is based on a real thing that can happen and a real danger. There are tons of satellites in Earth orbit, and if eventually there's a bad enough traffic accident up there, the resulting debris could cause a cascading wave of further collisions, like a horrible domino effect that gets worse and worse and destroys most of our satellites up there. This would be very, very bad, not just up there, but down here on the planet, because we depend on satellites for a lot. This is the scenario depicted in the movie Gravity, by the way, and the real term for it is Kessler syndrome.

So anyway, that's an inherently unstable situation where the equilibrium of our entire space infrastructure gets thrown out of wack, and lots of stuff is literally thrown out of its stable orbit.

All of my ideas for LD49 were based on movement as the core gameplay loop. Wanting to make a game about 2D top-down movement has been a thought stuck in my head for years now. You see a lot of 2D sidescrollers about movement, and you see a fair number of 3D games about movement in general, but top-down games? That's a rare breed these days, although they used to be more popular, especially in the NES days. These days, top-down games tend to be more focused on action or shooting or strategy. But I think there's some inherent fun in moving freely in two axes while accounting for momentum and steering your player character, and that's what I wanted to explore here.

(I did end up sort of having shooting, in order to destroy and collect the debris objects, but since it 100% auto-aims and you only have to be in range of the object in question, I think I succeeded in placing the focus squarely on player movement.)

One of the major challenges was getting that player movement to feel good. In the end I went with a slightly offbeat mouse + keyboard approach wherein the mouse controls your rotation and the keyboard controls your thrusters in four cardinal directions. I took this approach because I wanted the player to have very fine control over the steering but I didn't want to make them use a controller in an event like this. I think in a game that's about movement you want to reward skill and precision from the player as much as possible, and that's what makes it satisfying. I debated with myself about whether to include the left and right thrusters; since momentum is based on which way your ship is facing, this means that "strafing" is inverted when your ship is facing down, which can be counterintuitive.

In the end I decided to err on the side of player freedom and keep it in the game, but I turned down the thrust applied to a little over half of the main thrusters so that mistakes would be less punishing. You don't have to use the side thrusters at all, but you can if you want, and they do offer advantages in certain situations.

The only other major design question I had was about what to do with the debris once the player collected it. I could have just had the player destroy it with no collection mechanic at all, but that felt a little too simple. In a game that's basically a movement-focused twist on a twin stick arcade shooter like Geometry Wars or Nova Drift, just flying close to stuff and clicking seemed a little boring. So I knew I wanted to let the player collect it and somehow drop it off. I was initially going to have a collector ship that hung around and you'd sort of dock with it and sell your stuff. But that felt awkward and like it slowed down the gameplay too much, plus it wasted even more gameplay real estate when I already had the Earth sitting right there taking up a third of the screen. Then it hit me--small objects burn up in the atmosphere. So what if the player just breaks up the ruined satellites and drops off the pieces in the atmosphere to get rid of them?

Initially, the atmosphere was going to be a soft hazard that you had to venture into in order to destroy some of the debris, then get out of before you got burned and lost health. But when I tried out the idea for dumping the cargo without the atmosphere damage mechanic, I really liked it. I think it adds a nice bit of pacing into the core gameplay loop so you're not always doing the same thing. And who doesn't like hearing the positive feedback of money pickup sounds? Slot machines wouldn't exist without that.

It also adds a slight decisionmaking/planning element into the game. You want your momentum to generally be oriented toward the atmosphere as much as possible so you can drop stuff off more quickly; and you have to weigh being more toward the center of the play area to reach more of the debris faster versus the risk/reward of being able to drop cargo off faster by sticking close to the atmosphere. You also have to pay attention to your cargo status and think about when to start moving toward the atmosphere as you prioritize what to pick up. All in all, I think this is the mechanic I was most happy with having found.

Some of the other things, like the powerups and the shop items, were things I had in my mind as mechanics I generally like and wanted in the game. If I had released it as a compo game--which it would have been eligible for if I'd finished fast enough, by the way--I would not have had time to include those and I think the game would have been slightly weaker for it. Since it's a jam game, they made it in, at least in a very barebones form. In an expanded game, more powerups and upgrades, and perhaps some active player abilities, would be areas I'd definitely want to explore.

Anyway, I'm not sure who (if anyone) cares about a long-winded blog post on the design of a game jam game, but if you're out there, hope you enjoyed it! Back to playing other people's awesome games!

LD49 was my first game jam, and my main goal was just to finish. I definitely accomplished that goal, and I ended up fairly happy with my game. On the successful side, I personally found it fun to play, I thought it was reasonably polished given the time constraints, and I scored well on art.

On the downside, the game was a bit too difficult, mainly due to unintuitive and tricky player controls, the idea and mechanics weren't as interesting as I would've liked, and I didn't manage to include music.

My goals this time are going to be a little bit more ambitious (but hopefully not too much so). My main goal, aside from finishing again, is to do something where the idea is a little more interesting and thematic and features human characters. I also want it to be more intuitive and easier to pick up and beat. Bonus points would be actually making some music this time, but we'll see.

Good luck, everyone!

Going to be a long day in front of the computer, so be sure you keep your blood flowing and your muscles loose. Take a couple of minutes to walk around and do some stretches once an hour or so, your body and mind will thank you!

Not really, but I do think finishing this game in time probably made it to the top 5 "most tired I've ever been" in my life. Got it submitted yesterday with under 30 minutes to spare after killing a gamebreaking bug at the last minute that crashed the game only on the release build.

Even though it was hard, I had a great time making it, and I'm having so much fun playing other people's games.

Here's my game, The Fire Will Die.

It's a story-driven survival adventure about a guy and a talking bear. Check it out if that sounds fun to you!

Did one of these for my previous LD game and found it helpful for getting my thoughts together, so here we go again. If you haven't played my story-driven survival game The Fire Will Die, feel free to check it out! Otherwise, let the self-important ruminations begin.

The Idea Process: Put Two Together

One of my mentors taught me that one of the best ways to come up with an idea is to take two or more unrelated ideas and combine them. I found this idea particularly useful when prepping for this Ludum Dare. The final round of theme voting is basically a set of unrelated concepts, and some of them work well together. So I started smashing themes together and tried to think of games that could combine two or more of the ideas. Then I came up with very brief designs based on that. In this case, "Folklore" (specifically the talking bear from the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red) combined well with the actual final theme, "Delay the Inevitable".

Once I had that combination, just thinking about what a talking bear might need if they stomped in on you during the winter got me 3/4 of the way there; then it was just a matter of fleshing out the mechanics and characters and coming up with some sort of ending. There was some thought of having the bear actually threaten to eat the player character if she wasn't fed, but I decided to go for the slightly-lighter route of two tortured souls commiserating. Because that's the kind of story I like.

Game Design Challenges: Things that Get Cut 'Cause it's a Gamejam

The funny thing about game design is that the simpler the game is for players to understand and the developer to build, the harder it is to come up with a great gameplay hook to draw people in.

In this case, I knew I was making a survival game and the core mechanic would relate to a fire inevitably going out. What I really wanted to do was involve wind and oxygen in it somehow. I thought about having to protect the fire from the wind with stones when it's too windy, and maybe take them down when the wind dies out. But in thinking about how to explain this to the player, I realized it just wasn't going to work in a game jam--both because it would take too long to develop and test the system, and also because I don't think lengthy tutorials about systems work well in this context. At least, I couldn't accomplish those things while also trying to tell a story, which is something I really wanted to do this time. So it got cut, and now you just have to throw sticks into the fire. It's less interesting than I would've liked, and maybe more complicated mechanics can make a comeback in a future, full version, but it gets the job done without bogging the player down.

Development Challenges: Solo Development Is Hard (especially without outside assets)

The main thing I thought fell short in my previous (and first) Ludum Dare game was sound design. I wanted to do better this time, including actually having music that I made and could be rated on. I have a little background in music (a very little), so I knew I could do it if I was set up correctly, which I made sure I was this time.

I also wanted to actually make sound effects instead of just using a generator. I have a semi-professional sound recording setup in my closet, so why not use it, eh? So I got in there and did some foley work.

I also wanted the art to be a lot better and feature animated human (or animal) characters. Last time I defaulted to a space game out of being intimidated.

So uh, maybe you can see where this is going. Doing all of this stuff by yourself is hard, and that's why some of the past winning compo games have impressed me so much. To handle it all and do it in only 48 hours is insane; like the production values on Adam Younis' top-ten placing Trauma last time around.

But it was seriously fun getting into the "sound booth" (it's a closet) and making animal noises and banging on things and such. A totally new experience for me. The music, I think, also came out well, mainly thanks to the power of virtual instruments, some of which sound insanely good.

And on top of all of that the gameplay scope was two or three times larger than my previous entry. Yikes. Luckily, I've improved a ton as a developer since then, so I was able to (barely) get it done.

My advice for anyone wanting to do it all yourself is to have everything set up to the best of your ability ahead of time. Every software package--know how to use it, have everything set. Every piece of audio equipment. You can't afford to waste an hour figuring out how to add a virtual instrument in Reaper and still plan to finish.

Final Thoughts: Play To Your Strengths

I'm happier with this game than my last one, and I think that's because I focused intently on storytelling and mood instead of putting so much into mechanics. I know that runs counter a bit to the typical focus for Ludum Dare, and it may hurt my overall ranking in the end, but those are the things I have the most experience with and they're the things I'm good at. And really, being happy with your work is what this is all about, right? Well, that and learning, and sharing the joy of development and gaming with the rest of the community.

Thank you to everyone who has played my game and anyone who is about to! And for reading my incoherent ramblings, if you got this far.

Arbitrarily cutting this off at 30 ratings received at the time of this writing, 'cause we can all see which games are near the top of the "Grade" section. Just a few games I thought deserved a little more attention!

Delaying Ludum Dare The gameplay is pretty much "basic sidescrolling platformer", but it's a solid one that works well and is fun to play if you like platformers, and there's a twist with all the elements surrounding it that makes it simply charming and great. Seriously brought a smile to my face.

Feast or Famine A simple top-down twin stick shooter with rooms in the vein of Binding of Isaac or old school 2D Zelda. The vampire theme works well and is incorporated into the gameplay, and it just plays well and has plenty of levels and a good difficulty curve.

Ydunian Prune A Cookie Clicker/idler type game with gorgeous pixel art graphics and some interesting thematic/story elements. Not everyone's favorite genre, but if you like these games like I do, check this one out.

(...and shameless plug, check out mine if you're into story-driven survival adventures).

I've done LD twice before, and had a great time, but ran right up against the 72 hour limit for a Jam entry both times despite initially trying to do a Compo entry. This time I was absolutely determined to get into Compo, and I just barely managed it! Up front, do be aware that if you play my game, it may not run great on older machines (like anything worse than a GTX 970 and mid-range CPU from the same era). Bullet hell type games made in Godot require some optimization to run well, and I just didn't have time for that.

I really wanted to keep it simple this time, so I went into the jam planning to make a twin stick shooter, and I was going to adapt that to whatever the theme would be. I figured a lot of people would be making watery or spelunking type games for "depth", so I decided to go a different direction and make it aerial depth--so "Altitudes" was the obvious title. That decided, the next obvious thing, being a twin stick shooter, was to make it an airplane game--but what kind of airplanes? I grew up obsessed with WW2-era aircraft, and that was the kind of specificity I needed, so I immediately settled on that.

My process for these jams is always to start with one big mockup image with a bunch of layers containing most of the pixel art I will need for the game. I don't want to have to interrupt my coding flow too often later to go back and make art. In this case, I utilized reference images of various WW2 fighters and bombers to come up with some "inspired by" designs--nothing 1:1 with the real world, since I had gameplay concerns to think about and this wasn't exactly going to be a realistic sim, but for those curious, my designs were loosely based on the Supermarine Spitfire, the Boulton Defiant, the Messerschmitt Bf 110, and the Henschel Hs 130.

I really wished I would have had time to do some kind of water effect, and to add more detail to the sprites and background, because that would have really enhanced the game, but I just ran out of time to do visual polish.

As far as gameplay goes, my concept here was inspired a little bit by Ikaruga's polarity system--what if you have to swap between two layers to fight bad guys, and for good measure, how about a third just for picking up loot? A number of players have commented they find this frustrating, but overall I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. It brings in something I repeatedly come back to in my game design career--the idea of multitasking, of juggling different tasks. It's one of my favorite things to add to gameplay because it adds another layer of complexity that increases the game's skill ceiling.

The biggest design challenge for this game was how to make it clear which layer the player was on--what altitude their plane is at. It was immediately clear that just having a layer of floating clouds in the middle and changing the scale of the player and enemies wasn't going to be good enough, so I added a blur shader to all of the sprites in the game and changed the level of blur based upon which layer the player was on--so their layer would always be clear, while other layers would be blurry. This I think was good enough to at least make the game work. I don't love using these kinds of shaders on pixel art, and it's still a little bit of a clunky game mechanic, in my opinion, but I think it ended up being playable and, at least for me, decently fun.

I was also determined to include some kind of random player advancement system. For that, you get a "pick three" shop in between waves and random crates that drop into the ocean from destroyed planes above. Collect money, buy upgrades. I wish I could have included more rewarding visual/audio feedback to the player completing a wave and buying things in the shop, but again, I just ran out of time. It all functions though, which considering it was all implemented in the last five hours before the deadline, I think is pretty insane.

The music is just a midi file I quickly wrote in the last hour or so and rendered into game audio. Bass and percussion, all you really need for quick-and-dirty BGM like this.

The sound effects were fun--running around with my phone banging on stuff with an old metal towel bar I had laying around from the last move, then bringing it into Audacity and massaging it with a bunch of static and effects. I'm surprised at how well I was able to create a reasonable facsimile of gun sound effects. The money sound effect is just me jingling some change. The rest of the sounds are just playing around with white and brown noise--amazing what you can do with those and some audio effects.

All an all, it was exhausting, but I'm proud of what I accomplished!