Hello !

I’m going to try the 48-hour challenge for the first time :).

I will use C++ with SFML library, Photoshop and/or photofiltre for graphics, and whatever I’ll find for sound because I don’t know anything about sound and music. I know programming in C++ is not the best idea for a Ludum Dare, but it’s the only thing language I really know.

Hi everyone !

I’m very excited for my first ludum dare, I could’nt sleep tonight because of it. But despite that, everything’s ok and I work well.  Here is what I’ve done :

(it’s a gif, you should click on the image)

I saw other people that had a very similar idea, but I’ll try to make this game as original as I can !

Now, let’s work on the graphics, because… yes, it’s ugly.

Graphics are now way better than this morning. Not perfect but I’m still happy since I made this in only one afternoon 😀 .

Everything is going fine. I should finish on time . The main part will be level design and music.

Here’s a little dragon I made :

I finished my first participation for the Ludum Dare, and I’m very happy with what I’ve done 😀 ! It  was a great experience, though it was exhausting. I would never have thought that I could work so much in only 48 hours.

Please try and tell me what you think of…

Here’s a little screenshot of the game :

The game has 6 levels. Your goal is to reach the end of each level by jumping on platform and switching between 2 worlds.

No it’s time to sleep. I am so exhauzzzzzzzzzzzzzzsdfgdfg

I’m not sure if my game design ideas will work but everything is fine for the moment. Here is the animation I made for my monster :

The first day of the contest is slowly reaching its end and I’m thinking of having some sleep. I should be able to finish my game in time even if it is still not a game so far. Here’s a little gif showing different kind of mechanics :

The deadline is really close and I already have a finished game, but I desperately need more levels and even more game mechanics to make it really fun and interesting… I’ll try doing that in the 5 hours left.

I finally finished my game. I think it’s a total …

I did better than last year on every category ! Still not on any top 100, but I’m close to it Surprisingly, I got a rather good grade on “Humor”, I am not sure what was so funny in my game but thank you ^^

Thanks to everyone who played my game (No Pictures Please) and for all the comments, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Good things

• I was really not sure that my idea would work in practice and I spent all the weekend worrying about it until I finally got some levels. After all the votes, it seems that it was actually a good idea and I might develop it further, I already have some ideas of improvements.
• Innovation was my main weakness last year I think, I’m happy that this time I found something more original.
• I had never really done animations like this for my games (with drawings), it was a good experience.
• I received much more comments this year than last year, that was really enjoyable.

Bad things

• Despite all my efforts the graphics are not as good as I wanted, I should probably try to improve that for next year.
• As many people told me, the game is too difficult. I think it would not have been that hard to improve that during the weekend. I should probably let people test it before I release in order to adjust that kind of things before I release the game.
• Even though it took enough time to find a more original idea than last year, I feel like I should still spend more time in the beginning to find more ideas instead of keeping the first good idea I find, but it’s really hard to control myself.

See you next year !

Hello !

I realize I did not make any post during the contest so I’m gonna make at least one now that it is finished.

It was my third participation, and probably the hardest one for me. The creation process was chaotic, the scenario was changing continuously, and I was really not sure that I would have a working game until the very last hour. My first complete project made with Unity too. But I am glad to say I did it !

This is a very strange game, focused on story and graphics. I’m very curious to see what comments I will get as I really don’t know what to think about it myself 😛

So, if you want to meet this cute little fox :

… then go see my game and enter the Mysterious Room of Dr. Ludum !

And good luck to the participants of the Jam for your last hours !

Hi ! I'm in for the fourth time.

I'll be using Unity with C#, Photoshop/Photofiltre for graphics and probably Audacity and LMMS if possible for audio :)

But for now, time to sleep ! Good luck to everyone ! :grinning:

Hi ! I realize I did not write a single blog post since the beginning of Ludum Dare 38. So, here is my game :

:twohearts: A Cage of Love :twohearts:

It tells the story of two lovers stuck in a world that is shrinking around them. How will the story end ? You will know if you go check the game :grin:.

PAGE OF THE GAME

Usually, I tend to do games that try to be funny or at least not serious. This time, I wanted to tell a more serious and sad story, which is actually a kind of metaphor based on personal experience. As I wanted to mostly work on the narrative part, the gameplay part is not great. Still, given the few comments I received and after I retried it myself, I feel quite happy with it. I hope to be able to do more games like this in the future !

Results are finally in and they are interesting ! I'll make this post to conclude my participation to this Ludum Dare.

Ratings

When I submitted this game, I really didn't believe in it, there were a lot of things I could not make properly and I thought I would get very bad ratings. But in the end this was great ! Not my best ratings overall, but I still managed to be #10 in the Theme category :smiley: . Not really a category I was looking for but I'm still happy !

Here is my evolution from previous Ludum Dare participations :

Unsurprisingly, my Fun score is the worst : there is not much to do in the game, it is slow, it is full of bugs... I was really hoping to find interesting game mechanics but was not very inspired. I also got a smaller rating in Graphics than last time. From comments I thought it would be a bit better, but it's not so bad :slight_smile: . So overall my previous games were better games. But...

I got a much better score in Theme !

My idea was to have a world which is getting smaller and smaller, and to have the player go through the same level day after day, but with differences due to the disappearing of the world. In the end I didn't manage to create that as cleverly as I wanter gameplay-wise, but I guess people liked the idea !

I have better audio !

Okay, not a big increase, but still, I keep improving little by little. I get most of my points from sounds, as I never made music. This time, I wanted to have some music. I made some 2-3 notes game over and opening "musics", which I quite like. I actually also tried a longer melody which was only in the title screen but I sadly didn't have any comment about that. People probably skip it directly :slight_frown: . Still, this forced me to actually create some music and I really hope to have something better next time !

Better mood !

Okay, from what I read a lot of people don't really know how to rate this category and I'm not quite sure too. But this is my best rating in this category, which means people liked my little story and narration. I'll come back to that.

The story

I usually do games which are not serious at all, with bad jokes and all. This time, I was inspired to do something more serious and personal, and it was very interesting. My game tells the story of two lovers living in a lovely house. One day, the world around them disappears and it keeps disappearing everyday, confining them in their house. At the end, the player has the choice to leave or staying stucked with the girl. As I explained, it was kind of metaphorical and personal.

Here is my interpretation of the story, which I didn't give : the boy is in love with the girl, but there is actually something wrong. The rest of the world disappearing represents what the boy is losing day after day because his relationship with her is taking all of his time. While the boy tries to fix that, the girl doesn't care. Some people complained that the girl wasn't helping in the game, but it was intentional. I wanted to show that despite all the love showing, there was actually something wrong : the boy sees his life escaping him and looks for help but the girl does not understand.

Now it was really interesting to see the interpretation of other people. Some comments I got : "I think I grasped the metaphor, it has some meaning to me too", "Nice that you offered a choice at the end! Wasn’t too easy for me, I could relate to the situation! Thanks for making this game!", "I’m not sure why you hate the player so much in a game about the perils of love. Maybe that’s the point. Hmmm…", "I thought the partner seemed really passive [...] It made the last choice pretty easy for me. Maybe that was the point, but the partner would have been more likable as a character and the loving relationship more believable with some teamwork in the gameplay[...] Love takes two sides working together.", "Despite the fairly short buildup, the ultimate decision has a lot of weight behind it"

These are really unusual comments and I loved reading them. This really pushes me to keep in that direction for future work, as it's something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. I'd like to thank all the people who let a comment : @sgadrat, @gozz, @simonhutchinson, @bunnery, @diegoctorguet, @r8berto, @blinry, @kevtukk, @mandarad, @willowblade, @ryte2byte, @tweedle, @smiling-cat-entertainment, @rixud, @shiitman, @zeriver, @davidthelazar, @nedmakesgames, @gaiusjulius, @feltip, @axoona, @stuntddude, @sparrow, @m-1 . Sorry for those who died in front of the phone booth :sweat_smile:

Some lessons learned

• Test the game more and fix major bugs. People won't necessarily read your warnings in the game page, so it's better to have something with less content but that does not frustrate the player.
• Same thing for graphics : it's better to keep it small and have everything perfect than a lot of things with inconsistent quality. I saw lots of games in the top rankings of Graphics which are very simple but clean. While I don't want to abandon the hand-drawn style, I think I can do better.
• I need real music if I want to improve in the Audio category.

See you in Ludum Dare 39 ! :grin:

Still lacking too much of the gameplay, I'm getting quite nervous about that. But I'm very happy with the rest ^^

As usual, getting the results is a lot of frustration. Anyway, here they are:

Some comments: * I ranked very badly in Theme. I am extremely surprised by this. I used the theme in the following way: you have a bag full of useful tools, but as you collect gems, you are running out of space and must thus decide to throw tools away one by one. I still think it was a quite interesting idea and that it fitted the theme correctly. Also, I haven't seen any game with the same idea. Still, I got one comment telling me "does it satisfy the theme though hmmmmm". Last LD I was ranked 10th in that category. If any person who has played my game can explain this to me, I'm very curious :smile: I suspect many people didn't even get past the point when you first have to throw away a tool and haven't read the description either. * I'm in the best third of the ranking in Graphics, and it's the highest rating I've ever had in this category (previous record was 3.54...). I expected a bit more since I felt my game was way more polished graphically than my two previous games, but I'm still happy. * My rating in Audio is not very good either. Although I had some little music in the beginning and spent hours recording original sounds, this is ALWAYS something that nobody ever mentions in the comments. Also, many people didn't even rate my game in this category (again, why?). I'm really starting to think that I should just increase the volume to make sure the players realize there IS sound.

The rest makes sense to me although I'm quite disappointed that a few silly bugs ruined the experience for a lot of players :sob:

Compared to my previous games, it's rather good, although I haven't really improved:

That's it for me! Thanks to all the people who played my game and took the time to leave a comment! See you in the future if I decide to participate again!

The results are out and I'm so happy! Those are the best results I've ever had in the Ludum Dare, after 6 participations. I scored better in every category than in any past game, except for the theme.

I wrote all the dialogues very late, 7 hours before the deadline and in less than 2 hours. I was exhausted and I felt like what I had done meant no sense at all. I'm so glad it didn't and people liked the writing of my game :grinning: It was also the first time that I composed real music for a jam, and it's nice to see that it paid off! Still a lot to learn, but I'm finally improving in that category!

I usually do a what went right / what went wrong post-mortem, but I feel like I just need to keep training, no big lesson this time. Just one advice for anyone who'd want to do a puzzle game like this: give the soluce. It's so hard balancing the difficulty in such a short time, it's better to make sure that people will be able to play your game until the end and won't get stuck too quickly (level 2 was obviously too hard in my case).

Finally, I'd like to thank all the people who left a comment on my game: @baturinsky, @mdotedot, @uzpykes, @robowarrior1982, @john-gabriel, @erkberg, @towergame, @ladycerberus, @bastienre4, @imzary, @godsboss, @ladybenko, @tylerkealy, @lazzor, @cavedens, @techsec, @brainloaf-studio, @shaymin, @braian996, @kfischer-okarin, @franrf, @javicoder, @chuchugeralt, @blockerz, @psiv, @txanevk, @projectaroid, @stanov, @andyem, @lone-wolf, and @brice-mahier. Some of your comments made me really happy :heart:

I hope you all had a great jam and see you next time!