UPDATE: The jam is on, and the theme is “You can’t see everything!“

With two months having passed since the last LD, some of you might miss jamming already… Well good news, the 2nd edition of the Alakajam! event starts soon!

If you’re free on February 23-25th, you might be interested in joining our young community for a week-end of jamming:

• The two weeks prior to the jam are dedicated to an original 2-step voting system (Week 1 = submission/voting, Week 2 = shortlist ranking
• The jam itself lasts 48 hours, both for solo & team entrants, with start/end times suited to Europeans (7pm GMT)
  
• Two weeks of community voting then take place until the winners are announced!

Our first jam back in September was great fun, ending with 50 games and some really awesome entries! We hope to see you there

 Last Friday started the 1st Kajam, a regular event inspired by MiniLDs. The main difference with MiniLDs is that Kajams are actually rated competitions, focused on learning a specific aspect of game development.

For this month, the topic is Game Juice! The goal is to make a small game with the best Game Juice (or Game Feel) as possible.

Schedule

• Oct. 13th – Nov. 19th: The jam. You have around one month to work on your game and submit your entry! (see also the event rules)
• Nov. 19th – Nov. 26th: The rating phase. For one week, all entrants will rate how juicy the other games are – and that’s it: no Overall, no Originality ratings, just Juiciness!
• Nov. 26th: The definitive rankings of the most juicy games are announced

Resources

A list of videos and articles on game juice/game feel is available on the announcement post.

Bonus: 1st Alakajam results

(more…)

We are just a few hours away from the 1st Alakajam, a new 48 hour long competition hosted on a dedicated website. This is your last chance to join the launch of this young but enthusiastic community! We’re planning for around 50 entries this week-end, which looks just about the right size to get to know each other, yet big enough for proper competition.

You can still help choose the final theme by ranking the theme top 10. See you there!

Update: The theme is ALCHEMY!

The new Alakajam! site, founded by Ludum Dare veterans is hosting its first competition on the 22-24 September week-end! Since it’s only two weeks from now, we have just launched the theme selection phase for the event. In a variant from Ludum Dare, people can simultaneously suggest theme ideas and rate them. Come & contribute your theme ideas!

Theme submission/voting page

If you were to reinvent Ludum Dare, what rating categories would you pick?

We have a poll going on currently at Alakajam!, for a new 48-hour long competition held in between Ludum Dare events. Among the topics we’re trying to figure out, we’re wondering what would be a good improvement over the current rating  categories, which are as we speak: Overall, Graphics, Audio, Fun, Innovation, Theme, Mood & Humor.

If you have suggestions, make your voice heard by answering this quick form! Thanks for your contribution

EDIT: The submissions are now closed, thank you everyone! You can see the results over there. If you’re interested in joining us, the first competition will be held on the 22-24 September week-end, see you there!

Alakajam! competition categories form

Feedback Friends! results

1910 games have been made during the LD36 jam, and in the weeks that followed, they gathered no less than 18983 19000 comments! Congratulations everyone. While there’s no winner everyone is a winner due to the lack of ratings, we just unlocked for you a couple new ways to browse the LD36 entries:

Of course you can also still browse games randomly or through the usual Ludum Dare 36 event page.

Dare to play: the best of LD36

Some of our streamers released compilation videos curating their favorite games, go check them out!

Larry Chupacabra

Molpe the First Siren

Lists

• Best of Ludum Dare #36 – Top 20 by SamuelSousa
• Jam Favorites: Ludum Dare 36 by Jupiter Hadley

Did you make a best of video/article of your own? Let us know in the comments!

(NB. trophy icons are made by Patacorow)

Using the data scraped for Feedback Friends, I just ran a little query to answer some questions like “Who are the oldest LD36 submitters?” or “I am older than the average submitter?”.

Note: by “old” I mean “who subscribed for the longest time”, which is easy enough to figure out by looking at UIDs, those incremental, public numbers assigned to each account. You can check your own UID by looking at the URL of your game.

For instance, the elder of LD36 is Jovoc (UID 34), who apparently was here since the very first Ludum Dare, and still takes part regularly! Here’s the top 10:

+------+------+--------+-------------------------------+
| rank | pct  | uid    | author                        |
+------+------+--------+-------------------------------+
|    1 |    0 |     34 | jovoc                         |
|    2 |    0 |     55 | negativegeforce               |
|    3 |    0 |    169 | joss                          |
|    4 |    0 |    484 | Sébastien Bernery             |
|    5 |    0 |    547 | ladybenko                     |
|    6 |    0 |    627 | Atridas                       |
|    7 |    0 |    680 | Arowx                         |
|    8 |    0 |   1012 | Tange                         |
|    9 |    0 |   1049 | AtkinsSJ                      |
|   10 |    1 |   1066 | jplur                         |
+------+------+--------+-------------------------------+

View the complete list on Pastebin

You can use this list to find your own name and figure out where you rank in terms of seniority 😉 I for instance am among the 7% oldest members who took part in the event, my first event being LD24 [/bragging]. Also:

• The median user is from LD33
• At least 1/4 of the users are new accounts who never took part in an event before, LD or MiniLD
• As shown by Tijn’s work on past events, the turnover is especially big for the Jam category, which can be explained (in part) by the fact that teams come and go with each event, often requiring people to create new accounts.

Previously, in Ludum Dare…

In case you missed it, LD36 will be a little bit unusual, in that it won’t feature ratings.

To bring everyone up to date, the reason behind that is that PoV, when announcing his break from running the August LD, has also raised concerns over the ratings system. He recommended not to use it for this event, and following a poll made by Sorceress, we voted in majority to follow his advice.

Now, some of us really wanted to still find a cool incentive for players to play each other’s games. Ludum Dare may be enjoyed for the competition, but getting loads of playtesting and sharing feedback with each other is also a great part of what makes the event special.

So here comes our little experiment:

Click the logo to access the mini-site. Not me, the logo… Ok ok you can click me

The Feedback Friends mini-site

Here’s how it works:

Right after LD36 ends, you’ll be able to use this little thing to browse games and find those who need feedback the most. The more games you comment on, the higher you’ll be featured! The goal, of course, is to make sure everyone gets some comments on their games, and reward the more active commenters with more feedback.

If you’re curious, you can already browse the games from Ludum Dare 35 to get an idea of how it works.

Open beta: MiniLD #69

Starting today, the mini-site will be open for the current MiniLD in order to test things out, gather opinions and make some tweaks.

Please share your suggestions & bug reports in the comments. And if you’re curious, feel free to check the Github repository!

[Update] The Ludum Dare world map

Additional announcement: Will Edwards is looking for contributors (artists/programmers) to upgrade a project he made for LD30.

It featured a nice map of the world, where people could place their entries and find their neighbors. It also encouraged commenting on other games, which is exactly what we’re trying to do. It would be a nice way to complement the Feedback Friends, so if you have some skills & free time, you know what to do!

Here’s how our time management looks like for the Squ Jam entry!

Here’s a quick list of lessons learnt:

• Art takes time – for the first time, I (Wan) planned to focus on art rather than code, and unexpectedly I ended quite happy with the results, given my average drawing skills. The hard part instead was that I’m not used to spend that much time squeezing out assets, and for a rushed coder like me it certainly was a good lesson in patience.
• Review your technical bottlenecks *before* the jam – Every other LD we end up making a platformer, and every. single. time. We spend ages on issues with collisions management and the integration of TilEd (our map editor). The main reason, in the end, is just that we’re not very experienced with physics engines, and it shows: a large part of our time & energy was spent on it, instead of happier things such as level design.
• Spend more time on level design – Of the total 5.5h logged as “Level design”, maybe 3h max was spent on the final levels. It’s still more than our previous entries, but we do seem to procrastinate that task… Too bad because that’s where you get to show that cool gameplay mechanic, and overall, for a platformer, good or bad level design make or break the fun of a game (emphasized for future me :P).
• With good hardware, audio is easy – It’s a more advanced lesson targeted at musicians, but I just discovered how important a good audio interface is. I bought one right before the jam, and not only I was finally able to record noise-free voices, but also the overall mixing and sound-picking for the music felt much easier. The game features no less than 6 – short – music pieces, yet I managed to wrap up satisfying tracks in less than 4 hours.

“How to make art as a s***ty artist”. The making of Squ’s assets probably deserves its own post :P

Overall we still made a great deal of progress in time management since our last entry together, learnt a lot of things and had a huge amount of fun as usual. Thanks for reading! Now go play and rate our game 😉

Hi! We’re a team of two from France, and we’re in for a… hey sixth Ludum Dare already! It’s still as much fun as the first times, if not more.

Techs

• Engine: PhaserJS (with a custom game template built from previous entries, feel free to reuse code)
• Music: Propellerhead Reason 8, Audacity
• Graphics: Photoshop
• Editor: Notepad++
• Other optional stuff, depending on the game: JXFR, TilEd…

Previous entries made together

Minotaur (Platformer) LD32 – #61 Innov., #131 Overall

Corponnected (Management Sim) LD30 – #12 Fun, #14 Overall

Sisyphus (Buggy platformer) LD25 – #46 Overall, #48 Fun

Have fun everyone!

Link to game page

Here’s a post-mortem for the Minotaur entry, a platformer we made as a team of 3 based in… France? UK? Australia? Ehem let’s say “Earth”.

This entry is the 3rd one I made with fellow programmer Manu, and 5th overall, so one good thing we can say is we’re quite getting a grasp on how to manage our time/energy and the scope of the game. We already knew the engine we were about to use (Phaser), and most of the tooling around it (TileEd, etc.), plus we’re starting to have a sense of what can be done in 72 hours, to avoid scope issues.

The week-end was far from being uneventful though, so here’s a few thoughts about specific topics.

Physics-based platformer? You’re gonna have a bad time.

If there’s one thing we didn’t realize when choosing the idea, it’s that we needed to actually learn to work with physics libraries.

Up to now, we always used Phaser’s “Arcade” physics engine, which is pretty basic and works well for simple things. But we quickly realized that it was nowhere near the requirements for a game where every element of the level can actually move. More precisely, the Arcade engine doesn’t handle well situations where more than 2 bodies are colliding together (ex. : cube stack).

Yay…

Conclusion: we reluctantly switched to the more powerful P2 library, that’s also packed with Phaser. That’s when we left the comfort zone…

BETTER THAN GOAT SIMULATOR! PARTY HARD! GET HYPE!

Fortunately, getting the basics to work took less time than expected. However, when looking back at it, we overall spent hours and hours of tweaking all through the week-end to make the gameplay actually stable and fun. The hard part, with physics libaries, is to actually understand which lever solves which problem:

• Having troubles making walls slide past each other? Lower the friction.
• Don’t want the player to be able to push stuff just by walking against it? Lower its mass.
• Want to force the player to follow a moving wall? Create a constraint.
• Want to make sure walls don’t move an inch until you grab them? Make them static.

Not mentioning the various bugs that took hours to solve, be it about world bounds, collision groups, detecting collision directions…

But in the end we actually got it to work, and that was incredibly rewarding. There’s still a few glitches but the game is mostly playable, so we’re now proud to say: YES, we know how to make 2D physics games!

Graphics vs. Level design

One of the main events for this entry is we teamed up with Jack, a talented graphic designer we met the day before on /r/ludumdare. It was pretty improvised, but still a great opportunity, since “Graphics” is the one category where we’re always struggling the most. As a pair of programmers it can be hard to make good-looking art…  Plus given how long art can take to make, it’s often been hard to find the good compromise between programming more features/contents and making better art trying to make better art.

Working with a teammember dedicated to graphics was mostly new to us, and we couldn’t help notice how it changes the dynamics of game dev a bit: suddenly you have to discuss upfront how the game will look, what are the capabilities you’re looking for, which limitations you can accept, the dimensions of the tiles… And then stick to that. Plus, even if you try to thoroughly discuss the theme/style you’re looking for, you’re suddenly blind to a big aspect of the game, being how it will actually look.

Well, until you actually get some art:

The first artwork Jack shared with us. Exciting!

That first artwork was really exciting, and helped us adjust the story, figure out the shaders we’d need, and in general plan things out a bit more precisely. And of course we were motivated by knowing how good the game could look in the end!

That’s about when we made a little organization mistake: what would have been best at this point was to get a tileset done so we could start designing levels. The focus was instead put on the character animation, which took quite some time. It was totally worth in the end (try the game to see it, importing a gif wouldn’t do it justice :P), but the side effect is we started really late the work on the final levels.

On the good side, the tileset was pretty nice in the end, and a great moment occurs when you finally integrate the sprites into the game. Suddenly everything looks 100 times better! Yay, I’m making an actual game! After that, we eventually managed to produce enough content to make the game enjoyable, but there’s still some improvements that could be done about the levels. Mainly:

1. I do believe some aspects of the base mechanic are underexploited ;
2. We didn’t fully take advantage of the art provided by Jack, as most backgrounds for instance were patched together in a hurry.

The final level 2 background, hacked in less than a minute, half an hour before the deadline. Sorry Jack.

In the end I think the game still looks pretty good, and we definitely couldn’t have reached a such level of polish as a team of two. When comparing the game with our previous entries, the difference in art quality is pretty obvious I think.

About the game idea…

I’ll end the post with a little confidence about how we found our idea: the week before LD, we actually brainstormed ideas for most of the themes of the final round (here’s our file, beware it’s in French). I’m not sure how fair it is but there was that post featuring a ranking of the themes after the last round, and because of that we were almost sure that the theme would be either “Companion” or “An Unconventional Weapon”. I’ve never seen a such post before but it was definitely a bit of a spoiler I think! So we did have some ideas in advance.

On the other side, the telekinesis mechanic was an idea for the “You are the Power Source” theme, not the final one. Since I really wanted to try that platformer game, we eventually chose it over the other ones, and plugged the theme on the story more than the mechanic. But hey telekinesis is actually used to destroy robots in the game, so technically it is an unconventional weapon!

Thanks for reading this, if you haven’t already we’d be glad to get your feedback on Minotaur. And congrats to all contestants, we’ve played some really awesome games already. Cheers!