In which I quote mysterious comments that you can only understand by playing the game!
That, or by reading the description But that’s way less fun.

(And don’t forget to press Q once you’re in the game! We hide that surprise every time!)

“Ah, the monstrosity of politics. Excellent game :)”
-Patomkin

“Nice entry! Really makes you wonder how some people manage to do this in real-life to real people.”
-derr

“This is one of my favorite entries so far!
I didn’t have enough clues to figure out most of the choices, but that did not interfere with the well crafted story.
Well done guys!”
-theholychicken

Play the game here!

Or here!

Or here too!

They all lead to the same place either way.

Click the link of your preference!

Okay, I’ll stop.

Right here.

A cutscene from the game

I am incredibly happy with this summer’s Ludum Dare results. Not only feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in areas we only started experimenting in, the game managed to get 3.11 on kongregate which is huge new record for us and motivation to keep ever going.

Now, what is this game, you may ask?
It’s an interactive story with a somewhat uncommon interpretation of the theme: instead of straight up Godzilla-style destruction we went for the more subtle dictatorship-building kind.

What went well:

• We kept it simple. This may sound silly but it feels like the hardest part of every LD is planning small, then cutting most of it off to fit in time. We focused a lot on doing the MVP (Minimal Viable Product). We made just enough conversations and cutscenes for the story to have a beginning, an arc, an ending. We could have added so many more, had the ideas for them all. But rather than shipping a game with 8 incomplete and ugly and inconsistent levels, we decided to have the 4 we had and polish them.
  We added effects, refined the texts, had playtesters fish out the bugs and try to break the game by clicking everywhere they shouldn’t be clicking. This all ended in a much better experience all-together. Keep in mind, a longer game is not necessarily better.
• We dared to go for minimalism.
  This saved us both time, effort and probably made the game better all around.
  Instead of full figures and faces, we used silhoutettes. Easier to draw (art is a weaker side of our team compared to the visual wonders some others make here ) and it allows the player to place the characters of their own imaginings into their place. We had a very clear idea of how our monster would look but others from all around the world would probably have different ideas so we settled for an evil-looking hat.
  The other artistic decision was making the game full grayscale. It ties in well to the old-timey atmosphere and generally dark storyline and also saves us the color-picking effort.
• Teamwork. This is the 6th Ludum Dare the full team takes part in and by this point, we work together really well. There is a general sense of who is a master of what and how much progress we should be making by the nth day and the need to ask each other what we should be doing once we finished X task is smaller every time.
  Despite our scheludes being all over the place, we managed to make our best game yet.
• Shine, polish and juice. We added a bunch of effects that really help the atmosphere appear. See one below for example.

What went wrong:

• The aforementioned scheludes. We didn’t plan ahead enough for the LD and families and stuff so I believe if we had more working time we could have done some more features and scenes.
• Spaghetti code. We did not have a conversation-framework so we made one on the fly – making the final debate that has a large conversation tree instead of the randomly rolled standard kind of the first 3 was a lot of pain and copy-pasting. Seriously. For lack of better ideas to name them, I made 40 functions with the names one, two, three… forty.
• Recording device. Our music is praised a lot in comments but it was recorded with a camera that was lying around the house. It would probably be even more gorgeous with an actual microphone.

Very sinister!

Gameplay

Play the game by clicking here!

I will stream LD games for the next few hours!

What games will I stream? It is entirely up to YOU, dear reader!
Suggestions and self-promotions are not only welcome in chat, I ask you to do just that!

Say your own game, a friend’s or just one you liked and I will play and rate it.

Join me here: twitch.tv/eemmbbeerr

As a (hopefully) discussion starter I would like to begin by sharing with you the method I use for giving “Theme” scores to Ludum Dare games.
1 – Game is completely unrelated to the theme

2 – Game is extremely loosely related to the theme by a tangential graphic/sound/mechanic

3 – Game is related to the theme (here: it contains an unconventional weapon) but replacing that particular weapon with another unconventional one (it does not shoot BULLETS, it shoots POTATOES! – not much would change with BANANAS! instead of potatoes) causes no change in the gameplay or the feel of the game

4 – The theme is integrated into the game – if I removed/replaced all theme-related elements then the game mechanics/story/mood would fall apart and become senseless. In other words, the game relies on the theme to work

5 – The game IS the theme. Not only would the game fall apart but it would do so in many respects and all mechanics require the theme to make sense.

I usually give 2/3/4s as a Theme score because 1 and 5 are rather outliers.
Now, here is the question:

How do YOU rate Theme scores? Just a personal ‘feel’, a guideline system you made or something else entirely?

Shameless self-promotion because if I post something why not include it anyway: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=26778
The Drunken Quest for the One Vodka!

I think we have our thumbnail picture already. Might also the the background of the main menu.

Them hairy arms. They should distract you from the small white line on the left side I accidentally made. Whoops.

Letting you guess what our game will be about

Not to be confused with an actual professional studio and named after the infamous “Half lemon joke” we are ready to Jam!

4th game so far, all in Ludum Dares because Ludum Dare is awesome in an unparallelled magnitude!

We’ll be using FlashDevelop —> ActionScript 3 to make the game for Flash Player so people won’t have to bother downloading. For sounds it’ll be Audacity and whatever black magic Music Guy conjures his awesome tracks up with. For graphics, it’ll be GIMP, Photoshop, Illustrator… possibly paper and a scanner… and MS Paint because why not?
This will be our most awesome game so far, I can feel it!

Good luck everyone!
Especially us!

I think I have just found the perfect music for the situation. The end of the Jam is hurtling towards us at blinding speed and I wonder if we can get our game coherent enough in the hour-or-so time left.

Good luck for us and for everyone else still Jammin’!

Muse – Time is running out

Since the graphics will be all hand-drawn… here’s a small example of how it’ll look (though… might need some work on it still).

Here is our protagonist’s walking animation!

Hello everyone!
The 4-man team of Halflemon Studios (that has so far made games solely for LD so do not get worried, we are as far from professional as possible) is going to give this #29 LD a shot!
This time the following improvements can be expected:
– Cheesier jokes! – Art guy no longer using MS Paint! (took some serious convincing…)
– Art guy will Adobe Illustrate or even draw by hand! (he’s amazing at the hand-drawing part, that’s why he was selected as the art guy)
– We got a music guy! So no longer will 2 people without any experience in composing have to try to get something out that at least doesn’t rip the player’s ears to shreds!
We intend to land in the top 100 humour spots again (last time it was #99) and possibly move up a little. Oh, and if all ratings were above 3 stars, that would be great!

Third time is the charm, right?

Good luck everyone and have a wonderful Dare!

We’ve just finished our first game as a studios and I’m happy about it. The game is a puzzle-y platformer with the slight backstory of an electrician chasing vandals (puns tailored to this situation).

Our art guy decided to work with MS Paint all the way and I’m not sure about the responses it’ll get but eh, it does have an unique look to it

We did some programming beforehand but apparently this is not enough. It’s either we made the game a bit too complicated to code or we just did not make enough interfaces and such. There should be a collision system in place before we start working next time as it took way too long and it needed way too many fixes along the way.

If anyone’s interested, a link to the game is here: Play Cable!

Collision detection is a bit iffy at rare times but it’s working. If you can narrow down specific cases of getting stuck (preeeetty unlikely as we’ve done extensive testing) feel free to tell us.

Oh, also:

Look out for him! (hint: level 15)

A newly formed team of 4 people we’re going to try our hand at Ludum Dare Jam. This is our first time working as a team so one hand might not know what the other does for a while but hope it’ll work out well.

Language: Actionscript 3

Editor: Flashdevelop

Art: It’s up to the art guy. Either based on scanned paper or he’ll use some program, I’m no expert on this   GIMP will surely be used though.

For sounds, we’re using Audacity for editing, sfxr for sound effects and musescore for composing the music – we’ve already made a few tracks but will probably have to make a new one fit for the theme.

Ideas: Full of them! I’m hoping for Corruption but there are dozens of other amazing themes.
I also might stream a bit after the LD, trying out games, I already have the software set up so… stay tuned I guess? Take this line of text with a grain of salt though, I just might not do it.

I wish you all luck, have fun Ludum Daring!