Hello, fellow devs! We’re proud to present our little game Last Dive!

Last Dive is a 10-15 minutes underwater action platformer focused on exploration and timing. It also has a little story to go with it.

We always imagined that it must be quite an emotionally intense experience to dive in deep sea – the beauty and exoticness of the landscape contrasting with an ominous feeling of loneliness and vulnerability – so our first focus was on capturing that feeling. Then we worked to develop an actual game around it.

It is a short game.

YOU CAN PLAY IT HERE!

 
Other than that, we wanna send our shout out to this community!

It’s being a pleasure to jam with you, sirs!

Spent the whole weekend drinking beer with friends, which probably makes it official that this is my most casual participation ever! Still, had some fun playing with lava and physics. If I manage to make a game out of this tomorrow, it is bound to be something super simple. Which is fine by me! 😀

Maybe this can be made into a fun game, don’t know… For now, I’m just playing with some physics!

What’s up, fellow jammers!

A couple weekends ago, a part of our community – more specifically, many Brazilian Ludum Darers + other devs + some special international invitees – have gathered (virtually) for a weekend and created games to support a charity institution that provides education and health assistance to poor children in Brazil. The event was called Super BR Jam, and the games that were created were bundled and are now on sale. Ah, and 100% of the proceedings are being donated to charity. Yeah, it was practically at the same time as the Charity Game Jam, so all hearts are on the same place! 😀

This jam also holds special significance for us Brazilian indie devs. So far, Brazil hasn’t been known for a strong development community, and with our sweat and blood we are working to change that! Unlike two years ago, when each developer probably thought he was the only guy developing games in Brazil, our community is now becoming increasingly united and developed, with indie events and joint efforts such as Super BR Jam becoming less and less rare. Really guys, this is a HUGE step forward for us! So, as if helping charity wasn’t good enough, Super BR Jam is also full of that special meaning for us Brazilian indies! 😀

So, if you’ve watched the video above, you know the deal – it is a pay-what-you-want bundle containing a handful of great commercial games including Magicka, Dungeonland, Out There Somewhere and others, plus all the games that were created specifically for Super BR Jam! Below is the trailer for 49 Bullets – the game we created. It is in fact a spiritual successor to Super Fair Trial Show, which we developed for Ludum Dare 27. As of now, there is another video in production that contains gameplay footage from all of the jam games – I’ll add it here as soon as it’s available!

So, how can I help?

• Well, first off, you can always buy the bundle and have access to all of these neat games!

• If you can’t or don’t want to buy it for any reason, but still want to help, then spread the word! The bundle will remain available only for a very limited time, and any help getting the word out will be greatly appreciated! Once again, this is a charity bundle and all of the proceedings are going to Solar Meninos de Luz, so even promoting this bundle is a way of making a difference on these kids’ lives!

Thanks so much, and see you all in Ludum Dare 28! 😀

Gabriel – @pixel_cows

Hello, everybody! Better late than never, here goes a quick post mortem for Super Fair Trial Show! You can find a more complete description in our blog, if you’re into blogs and stuff.

What went right:

• Most people seemed to enjoy the shoot-dodge-shoot-rules changed oh crap where’s my weapon-dodge some more gameplay!
• Tons of procedurally generated stuff! I know, replayability doesn’t count too many points in Ludum Dare since most people play each game 15 minutes or less. Still, I always love making it! Why? Because!
• Low res + pixel grid + realtime lighting. It even makes our rushed pixel art look passable! 😀
• Multimedia Fusion. I’m always complaining about it, but truth is it just wouldn’t be possible to make all these systems work in 72 hours in a platform we didn’t know so well…
• Tweets! Everyone loves tweets! BTW, here, have some more tweets!

What went wrong:

•  Difficulty curve. The game does feature progressive difficulty, but we didn’t have time to make the procedural AI follow a smoother progression, resulting in some levels being too easy and others ridiculously impossible!
• Controls (or making the controls more clear). Many people didn’t get the “Hold J to shoot without turning your character” command and thought it was some control glitch
• Enemies are too damn ugly! They were designed to be ugly, but they turned out much uglier than I planned! hahaha

Hhere, take another screenshot. People love posts with screenshots! 😀

A couple remarks on the ’10 Seconds’ theme

When the theme was announced, we honestly didn’t like it at all – 10 seconds sounded like too little time to convey any relevant gameplay! Of course, it is totally feasible to create good games that somehow only last 10 seconds, as proven by many great games developed by fellow Ludum Darers! I guess we just wanted to make an arena shooter where each match lasted longer than 10 seconds, and that’s why we ended up going for the “every 10 seconds the rules change” approach. We think it worked well!

This is one of the great things in Ludum Dare – by committing to the restrictions, you have to leave your comfort zone and experiment. In the case of Super Fair Trial Show, the constant rule changes during the fight really spiced it up a lot and made the game much more interesting than it would be if we didn’t have to fit the theme at all!

The future of Super Fair Trial Show and other random stuff

We’re making an action-RPG-exploration-something game based on Super Fair Trial Show’s gameplay and systems. As you can guess it’s not an arena shooter, but it will inherit a lot in spirit from its father game! By the way, by all means we haven’t abandoned the development of The Journey of Eko! It’s going strong as always; this other game is a faster, parallel project that doesn’t rely on difficult-to-create content as much as Eko, so we saw it as a nice project to fit between Eko’s builds. There’s a little more info on this side project together with Super Fair Trial Show’s complete post mortem in our blog – feel free to take a look!

Other than that, I just want to thank the whole community for all the encouragement and support. As always, it is a pleasure to jam with you guys!

Regards!

Gabriel and JP

aka Pixel Cows

So, Ludum Dare is getting bigger and bigger at each edition. This is AWESOME! More cool games to play, more insights gained, more great people to meet!

With all these newcomers around, I noticed that quite a lot of people in this edition don’t have a clear understanding on how to get their games played and rated. We veterans know that, but it might not be as obvious for newcomers. Anyway, the ‘strategy’ to get a lot of ratings and comments on your game is quite simple:

Go play and rate a lot of games yourself!

I’m not saying this because this is ‘the right thing to do’. I mean, it *is* the right thing to do, cause you’ll allow many other developers who worked as hard as you to also get feedback about their games. But it’s more than that: Ludum Dare has a ‘the more games you rate, the more you’ll get ratings for your game’ logic embedded into its workings.

It all starts with the games that are shown when any Ludum Dare participant clicks on the “Play and Rate Games” link. This is the screen that is shown:

In order for your game to receive ratings, it must show up on this screen. And what is the criteria that the system uses to pick which games show up here?

It’s actually simple! Have you noticed these little numbers below every game’s thumbnails?

The games that currently have the lowest Default score (the “D” among those numbers) show up on that list. Almost everyone who’s navigating on the Ludum Dare site to play games will play one of those games shown on that list – therefore, they will be picking one of the games with the lowest Default score. Getting your game played and rated boils down to keeping your Default score low. (yeah, in this case, the lower, the better)

The Default score is calculated by considering 2 basic factors: how many games you have rated (your Coolness score, show as a “C” in those little numbers below the thumbnail), and how many times your game have been rated (your “Ratings” score, shown as an “R”). The most games you rate, the better will your Coolness score be, and therefore it will go up in the priority list to be shown among those games in the “Play and Rate” screen. Your own game will be played and rated more or less proportionally to that – when someone rates your game, your game goes down in that priority list a little bit, so that other games can also receive a fair amount of ratings.

tl; dr: you keep playing and rating games, and your game will keep going up in the priority list that decides which games appear on the “Play and Rate” screen. As your game gets there and is played, it will go down in the priority list, and if you want to receive even more ratings, you have to keep playing and rating games too!

A WORD OF ADVICE (for people considering exploiting this system)

So, we are all gamers here and when we see a system, the first thing we do is start thinking on how to exploit it. “Duh, I will just open a thousand games and give them random ratings, preferably low rates so that they don’t compete with mine, and my game will be played thousands of times and I’ll be rich and conquer the world!”. If you think like this, you are in the wrong community. This is not even a proper competition and the winner doesn’t get a prize, and also cheating the rating system won’t make your game go well in the ‘competition’ (what makes you do well in the competition is making a great game). You should be here in a humble spirit, more than anything else to learn from others, make some friends and improve your craft.

With the ugly stuff out of the way, that’s it!

My most honest and warm welcome to all newcomers! I still remember my first time here last year (hell, I still feel like a noob, to be honest), and one of the greatest things I took from my first participation was the feeling of belonging to a community made of such nice, smart people. If it’s your first time here, I want you to feel the same way! It is awesome and beautiful how this event is growing at each edition.

So, every one of you newcomers, I can’t hug all of you in person, but please feel hugged. And now go play some games, give them honest ratings, be sure to leave a nice and thoughtful comment containing some honest and useful feedback! We’ll be doing the same for you! 😀

Cheers!

Gabriel @pixel_cows

So, I realize October is gone for a while, which ultimately means I failed at the October Challenge. Oh crap!

Still, I’d like to share some of our progress here, since this game started as a Ludum Dare game and at this point I feel our game owns so much to this community. This is how it’s looking nowadays:

Now here’s a little visual story of that. Back in August, 2012 we participated in Ludum Dare 24 and made a little game called Singularity, which was born from our desire to test some ideas on procedural generation. Not a particularly great game, for sure, but I think it turned out fun considering it was basically a tech test! Here’s how it looked:

Still, I felt the melee combat mechanic was really lousy. We were already developing The Journey of Eko back then, but it was essentially a physics-based platformer with linear progression and no procedural generation whatsoever – and in Eko, the combat also felt lousy despite the time we had put into it! I felt bad that we couldn’t manage to get it right, so during a 2 weeks vacation I took as a small side project to tweak Singularity’s combat mechanics and feedback, so that if I struck on any insights I could apply those to Eko. I imported some of Eko’s art assets and made this little test:

It is Singularity with improved combat and Eko graphics instead of silhouettes. It was almost October, and we decided to take the October Challenge and try to make something that we could sell out of this test. We worked on it and, eventually, what we were calling The Journey of Eko was this game, not the old, sluggish, overcomplex physics based thing we had before. Oh yeah, October was gone and of course we didn’t have anything to sell, but it’s ok! It became our main project, after all, and it surely deserves the extra time.

Since then, we’ve been developing, developing, developing… The first video on this post is from a January build; I hope to soon be able to replace some ripped graphics of our current build, so that we can share our recent progresses! 😀

The reason I’m posting this here is that I feel we own so much to this community. First, because our game in fact *IS* a Ludum Dare game (there’s still rushed comments made during LD24 in the middle of Eko’s code, and some of Singularity’s silhouette graphics can still be seen even in our latest video)! Second, because when we started participating in LD, we developed a certain way of thinking that ultimately made us much more capable as developers. We were all about looooong development cycles planned entirely on paper and we were always afraid of tossing away what was already completed. Now it’s all about getting things done, playing, having fun, getting feedback, redoing what isn’t working, and adding stuff that we feel is necessary or that would be fun based on our experience with actually playing our game (not only planning it in our heads). For that alone, I’ll always think of Eko as some kind of legacy from Ludum Dare.

Love you all! Keep doing what you do! <3

Gabriel – @pixel_cows

You know what this is? Look carefully:

Yeah, that’s a weird haired dude pissing on an alien. But it’s also much, much more than that: it’s McPixel, a game developed by fellow Ludum Dare veteran Sosowski being sold on Steam!!! Wait, let me say it again: it’s on Steam! STEAM!!! Here’s the link, go see for yourself (and while you’re at it, support one of our colleagues and buy it!)

This game was originally created for Ludum Dare, then Sosowski gave it a real polish, added tons of content and submitted to Steam’s new Greenlight system (for everyone living in a bunker, it’s a new ‘popularity evaluation’ system that Valve put in place to detect promising indie games that aim to be sold on Steam, basically based on ‘how many likes the game gets’). And McPixel is the very first game to actually be added to Steam through that new popularity method. It all started here, right here where we stand, in the Ludum Dare community! How great is that?!

There are no words strong enough to describe how FUCKING PROUD we are! I’m sure someone who’s actually important in the LD community (maybe Sosowski himself) will announce it here with a better explanation, better English, better wording and useful links. So Sosowski, in the meantime we’ll just leave you with our humble encouragement message:

Congratulations, best of luck with sales! We’re really proud, and I’m sure I speak for the whole community on that. 😉

Gabriel and João Pedro – aka Pixel Cows 
@pixel_cows

Results are freshly out of the oven now, and once again, the winner games are AMAZING! Congratulations to the developers who reached top 5 in the Compo and Jam:

Overall
	4.38	ncannasse
	4.34	Wan
	4.33	Carl Graves
	4.22	deepnight
	4.17	Benjamin

Overall(Jam)
	4.23	X-0ut
	4.20	Team Clew
	4.18	Adhesion
	4.15	Elisée
	4.03	ConflictiveLabs

To make it that high in the list, one needs a great idea, attention to detail, skill and discipline. You guys rock!

Also, everyone here knows it, but it’s never too much to say it again: Ludum Dare is all about making games, and we all managed to get that done.

So, congratulations, everyone! It’s an honor to jam with you! 😀

Gabriel – @pixel_cows 

 www.pixelcows.com