We submitted our game early for once (mainly because we all need to get up early for work), overall pretty pleased with it though.
You can try it here: From the Sea, Freedom

We’ve been in since this morning, but just realised we haven’t actually managed to post anything on the blog yet, so here is our first update.
After a few hours trying to decide between 2 ideas, we decided to go for the slightly simpler one, as we won’t all be around for the whole weekend.  We’re doing another relaxing exploration-type game, only this time underwater.  Originally I wanted it to be a fully featured underwater gardening game (with tech trees and everything), but we’ve scaled it back even more, so now the basic idea is that you’re looking for dead coral and helping it to grow again.  Here’s a screenshot:

We are Second Dimension Games, and this is the postmortem for our entry into Ludum Dare 33 – Brood. There are three of us (four if you count Darwin…he’s a cat): Adam S., Adam D. and James. Brood is a frantic arcade monster management game, played using the mouse. We’ve learnt a lot as always, in particular we’ve learnt that “brood” means bread in Dutch. This is not a game about bread. The game is about managing your brood of monstrous hatchlings, and keeping them well fed on people (and each other, but not on bread). We’d love it if you’d give our game a go HERE.

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There have been some amazing, creative entries in this competition, we’ve been blown away by the art, ideas and occasionally the utter craziness on display. We wanted to present some of our highlights from the rating process. There are many more great games out there to discover and we’ll keep playing and rating, but without further ado, here are our picks:

Meet the Monsta
By Schrodinger GamesThis entry has an extraordinary visual style coupled with brilliant human-produced sound effects and music, which make it stand out from the crowd.

Separated
By rxiA wonderful take on the theme, exploring loneliness and rejection. This entry, by Ludum Dare veteran rxi, has a great atmosphere and a nicer ending for those who are patient enough to wait for it.

1-800-Monsters
By ponywolf
We love how the theme can inspire people in very different ways, 1-800-Monsters is a great and unique take on it. Playing as a disgruntled birthday entertainer, you must thoroughly ruin children’s parties by stealing presents and blowing up castles!

The Troll’s Toll
By baykush_figtree
An entry with charming poetry and a twist that turns it from a characterful fantasy game, into something else entirely.

Monday Night Monsters
By spotco
A sports game was definitely not something we were expecting from this theme! Especially not one this polished, it oozes style.

The Trial of Tyrone Rex
By Manky
A courtroom drama starring dinosaurs….it’s as entertaining as it sounds. We’d like to see a bit more gameplay to it, but the writing and voice acting are great.

Thanks for reading! We hope you check out the games on this list, they’re well worth your time. There are many more great entries out there so keep playing and rating, we will!

Our entry – BroodIf you’d like to check it out, our entry into this Ludum Dare Brood can be found HERE.

Written by Adam D., a team member in Second Dimension Games. We created the game Brood for Ludum Dare 33. I’d like to apologise for the length of the article, but I wanted to be thorough and hopefully some people will find it helpful and informative.

I’m very pleased with our entry into this LD (play it HERE), it was a close call but I managed to come back for another competition. We all worked together on the game concept, but my specific role was to create the environment artwork, the UI, main menu (and help screen) and the large monster. I also got the chance to do some animation, specifically the tentacle animation, which made for an enjoyable change. I thought I’d write up my working process for designing the screens and environments of Brood for anyone that was interested.

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We’ve submitted our game for LD 33! Brood is an arcade monster management game. You play a monster mother looking after her hatchlings. We’d love it if you’d try out our game HERE

The first mockup is about ready, it’s starting to come together so feeling good about tomorrow.  I think this is the furthest along we’ve been by this time.  Hope you guys are all OK out there, probably time to get some sleep

We’re in and we’ve made some progress!  We’re thinking along the lines of a single screen game where you’re a giant cave monster, and you have to manage a sort of hectic monster nursery (crèche/kindergarten).  See below for some preliminary sketches…

A big thank you to anyone who has played or commented on our game Miyu, you guys are great.

For those of you who missed it, or haven’t got the time to play, never fear!  I present for your viewing pleasure, a wondrous 720p 60fps YouTube video showcasing over 2 minutes of white-hot gameplay action.   Don’t miss the opportunity to bear witness to this premier, world-exclusive, never-before-seen, unprecedented footage!

If you get to the end without your mind being blown by the high-octane action, then try the game HERE

Here is a postmortem for our LD Jam game Miyu.  We were going for a fairly relaxed game with some exploration elements.  You can see if we succeeded HERE

Time Management
By Edge

This is my 9^th Ludum Dare in a row, working either solo or part of a team, and I think I’m finally starting to get a bit better at time management.  This is the first LD where I’ve felt on top of things for most of the time.  The 3 of us sat down for a meeting right at the very start to discuss ideas, and I think we worked through it pretty well; it felt like a logical discussion where we pitched things and pointed out the pros & cons of each potential game.  Once we’d settled on an idea, everyone contributed to it with significant additions or improvements.  We followed our own advice and put out fairly regular playable builds, and this helped the guys doing art to get a feel for the game. We also used simple notepad files on Dropbox to set up task lists, which led to fewer surprises and probably eliminated a bit of time wasting.

For the first time ever, we didn’t end up having to design levels with 10 minutes to go, the only thing we ran out time for was more interesting secrets to discover around the environment

Gameplay & Sound
By Edge

I had the dual tasks of getting the gameplay working and creating the music/sound (2 things we wanted to be linked in some way anyway).

In terms of the gameplay,   this was the weakest area of the whole package I think.  We wanted to go for something that encouraged a bit of exploration, and were leaning towards a more relaxed experience.  The general movement of the player through the landscape and the creating of the portals actually felt pretty nice, and before there were any enemies everything was looking sweet.  The problem is that it’s quite hard to eliminate all terms of traditional gameplay or challenge, so we ended up with a sort of enemy herding mechanic to drive exploration.  This has been one of the main criticisms from voter comments, and I think it’s valid.  It can definitely be a bit awkward to herd those guys into the portals, although that might partially be due to bad communication about the controls.  When using the mouse, you don’t need to hold the left button to move, just to move faster; I think many players may have been holding the button at all times and therefore zooming around at high speed.  High speed would make it 100 times harder to herd the little spirit guys into those darn portals.  Although admittedly it wasn’t a smooth experience anyway, so we needed to improve on that.  The problem was further compounded by not letting people know how many spirits were left on the level.

The sound was a lot more successful, I managed to write music that I think captured the relaxing moonlight theme, and went well with the fantastic art that Adam & James came up with.  I also managed to create sound effects that complimented the music I think; they stood out but still loosely harmonised.  The audio did a great job of reinforcing the overall mood of the game and I’m really proud of it.

Concept Art & Environments
By Adam D.

My role involved helping with the game concept, doing some testing and mostly working on the game environment assets.  I’ve been sitting out the last few Ludum Dare competitions for a variety of reasons, so I was pleased to be back in this time and I’m also happy with our end result. As Edge mentions earlier in this post, there are a few issues with the herding gameplay. I think they mainly stem from the fact that we had mixed goals. We wanted to create an exploration game, but to accommodate the unconventional weapon theme, we introduced a herding mechanic. I’m pleased that we didn’t go for an easy option. Yes there are some flaws in the mechanics, but there is a lot of potential too and we tried to do something a bit more outside of our comfort zone.

In terms of the environment, I personally found it helpful to produce mock-ups for a variety of screens. It helped me to organise the required assets, and also to visualise them as a whole which maintained a consistent style. If I were to improve the process further, it would be to create a slightly more accurate mock-up of the main game environment. The main game screen that I designed was created at the screen resolution and so was quite confined, in the final game the islands were spaced much further apart with a larger amount of empty space in-between

Characters & Animations
By James

I am very happy with our entry for LD 32. Our team was at full strength this time round with three members. This meant there were two of us doing art and design, as this is one of the more time consuming elements, it meant we could get the exact look and feel we wanted. We started off by deciding on a colour palette and then making a mock-up screen of the game. This helped us early on to get a consistent and interesting feel, it helped to add new characters and designs to this page to see if they fitted in with the mood and look of the game.

I mainly focused on animation and used a program called Spriter. This program is pretty new to me but I had practiced beforehand. Unfortunately I wasted a lot of time figuring out how to do a lot of stuff with the program. As well as general bugs with Spriter we had trouble using the animation contact sheets Spriter produces in Construct2. I learnt a lot during this LD, so hopefully we won’t waste as much time in the future. I would have also liked to have done more work on level animations and had more things the player can discover but unfortunately ran out of time.

Some other things I would like to improve on is to spend more time on the planning stages. I think we could have spent more time working on the game mechanic. The herding mechanic we used for this entry didn’t feel as good as it could have done. Spending more time in the planning stages before we put too much work into it would help

Conclusion
By Edge

I think overall this was a good entry for us, we managed to achieve our goal of creating something with a nice relaxed mood and a degree of exploration.  We managed our time a lot better, and finished something that could have been bigger, but was basically a complete package to our original spec with no real compromises.

The gameplay was pretty good, but needed some improvements on the enemy herding and explanation of the task to the player.

The graphics and audio were probably some of our best work during a LD, so we’re really pleased with the mood we created.

Thanks to everyone who played and commented on our game, if you haven’t managed to check it out yet then you can do so HERE

Got our game submitted just in time, it’s called Miyu.  We’d love for you play it. Now it’s time for a lot of sleep

Give it a go HERE

We’re soldiering on to the end of the Jam tonight (3am UK time), got a lot of level design and sound effects to work on today.  Just finished the title screen though, take a look below.  Hope everyone’s doing OK out there

Here’s a GIF of our main character, he’s a floaty guy that we haven’t named yet.

It’s the earliest we’ve ever managed to have a clear idea of what the game will look like, now we just need to get moving on animations and movements.  Here, have a screenshot:

Hey everyone! We’re in again, for the 7th time in a row I think, really looking forward to it.  We have all three members of the team for this one, so hopefully we can come up with something cool.  Haven;t checked the themes at all this time as we want to be surprised.

We’ll be using the same tools as last time: Construct2, GIMP, Cakewalk, GarageBand, sfxr, Korg Synth, Spriter Pro.

Good luck to everyone, and expect cat photos soon.

So we submitted our game, hooray!  Also, it’s approaching 3am here in the UK, and I am so very tired.  I just poured myself a glass of wine, then put both the bottle and the full glass back into the fridge.  Then I looked at my hand for a while wondering where my wine was.  Thanks Ludum Dare, you have broken me.
Anyway, here is our game.  It is called Alpha Circuit and is mostly about being an anti-virus program and destroying tiny malware monsters.  I think that’s what it’s about, who knows.
Well done everyone who finished, and thanks for trying our game.  Link is HERE