Hi there!

Have you ever felt being cornered or frustrated because you feel like someone already did what you’re doing? Well, I know that feeling and what I do is I look at other unique games out there and figure out how they did it. Then, maybe, I can look at other things in another perspective just like they did. Here are some of the games that thought outside the box to immerse us with unique and innovative gameplay. Enjoy!

Video Games With Unique and Innovative Gameplay Mechanics

Im almost done with Kungo. This awesome neandertal with his magnificent pets 😀 got a cach em all!

Now you can have:
TRexie: baits really hard!. If you place it strategically, you can have a big guardian.
Trixer: likes to run and ram! It’s a wild guy but a great companion to make you follow everywhere as a bodyguard.
Terox: Fly far and love home! This one its tricky, you can take him anywhere but after a strong and long attack it goes back to his nest egg.
Lonx: A simple budy with a long and crazy neck. Hits everything around him, just like Trexie but with more life than tooths.

At this time the game for the ludum dare is almost complete 😀 with tutorial and a general lvl

It’s simple but this time is only for pc just because i couldnt get time to set the touchscreen controls, but it could be in a future version.

You play as Kungo, a neandertal that protects the eggs of dinosaurs from alien invaders, to do it, you count with your streght, and that’s it. So break rocks, throw rocks and burn them into ashes.But to help you, each egg can hatch a powerfull dinosaur with special habilities, place them smartly and Destroy the Alien Spawners to win for the world!

After finishing some “core” systems i started with the gameplay! (finally i can see something working)

A tiny bit of the start:

Hi all,

I made a gameplay video of my game RobotJet for this ludum dare.

The video has different levels than the ludum dare submition and I also added two sound effects. However the game mechanic is same so if you haven’t played it yet, you can do so at http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=55647.

Also please leave a comment if you have some suggestion because I plan to finish this game and release it for iPads because recently i found out that love2d already supports iOS development.

POST MORTEM:

I think everything worked as I expected. I had this game idea for a week or so before the competition already in mind. I wanted to implement controlling player by modifying the enviroment instead of using the direct controls.

First idea was to move a ball from left to right side of the screen by creating hills and valleys using physics. I didn’t manage to draw the controls for this game on the paper so I went for a simpler solution using the grid. Somewhere in this point a simpler idea of using gravity and collecting something instead of moving from left to right emerged. This led to the robot collecting batteries with a puzzle-like levels using gravity controls and walls to navigate robot through the level. Only problem with puzzle-like game is that creating puzzles takes much time. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to prepare good set of levels but I wanted to try the idea.

Because i was not able to do actual programming until the second half of the second day of the jam due to logistics, I had a plenty of time to come up with a concrete idea and solve almost all the problems. So when I started to program I had a pretty good idea of the game mechanic and what I had to do.

Programming phase was pretty straightforward. I wanted to use Love2D because it is supereasy for prototyping even if I hadn’t much experience with it. I had some experience with lua programming from Codea app from iPad and my previous ludum dare entry. I also did a simple pong game one week before ludum dare as a training

After half day of programming I had the game ready and basic graphics in place. After few hours of sleep I had to go to work on monday and I could show my game to my coleagues(sorry boss :-)). They liked the idea but didn’t like the graphic and there were no levels. Actual player didn’t even look like a robot but more like a ghost back then

After work I rushed home to finish some graphics – draw the robot and create tutorial levels. Luckily I remembered the wonderful Tiled map editor which helped a lot with level creation and it exports directly to a Lua so I saved some time by not implementing any tools.

Anyway I knew I couldn’t make good enough levels because I was still exploring what robot can do. I spent a lot of time putting obstacles in front of the robot and watching its behavior because sometimes I was suprised what can be done using such simple game mechanic (it still surprises me because today i found a simpler solution to one of new levels presented in the gameplay video).

When the time was dangerously passing by, I finished fooling around with the robot and went back to doing actual work. I polished graphic – as I am not any sort of good painter I did my best using piskel app as pixel graphic editor for robot and tiles. Also at this point I found out that I can do a tutorial by drawing directly in the level and showing the gameplay features one by one. I don’t know if this is good or understandable, please let me know in the comments if you find tutorial good!

I showed the game to my brother and he created three of the campaign levels. I had to polish them a little bit afterwards because one of the was not passable and other were easy to get stuck. I wanted that robot won’t get stuck without the possibility to unstuck (Robot cannot react to the modifications to the field has is alread standing at – for example if in the hole where he cannot go left nor right he won’t shapeshift to go up if shapeshift controller placed over the robot).

I though that player should not die/stuck during the game to not feel bad about his skill and won’t get frustrated from starting over so every situation must be resolvable.

Afterwards the time was almost up so I packaged the game and submitted.

Next day I fixed some bug that prevent last level from being finished – spawn point. This was clearly caused because I haven’t had enough time to replay every level after every change.

For the future I plan to create a proper set of levels to illustrate all things that can be done programming the robot using just gravity and walls. All levels I am creating now are resolvable by putting the controls in place before the level starts so instead of rushing during level player can solve the puzzle by thinking before the level starts and preparing the setup for the robot beforehand.

This ludum was enjoyable as always but after this one I feel a little bit special because I really like the resulting game (even bad graphics and no sound and almost no levels 😀 ) mainly because of possibilities it presents.

Regards everybody and see you in the next ludum dare,

Jan

Hi everyone, just uploaded a short gameplay video of my entry ‘Court of Talis’.

You can check out ‘Court of Talis’ over here:  http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=63291 

Yeah, someone made a gameplay of our game, and he was AirAssassin15! He has lots of cool stuff on his channel, including some other gameplays, so go check it out

Here is the gameplay. By the way, we want to thank this youtuber for the video, really, thanks a lot!

Taking a break from code to figure out the scene layout. Cats arrive via the pneumatic tube on the left (because where else would they come from?), you poke them into the shape you want on the table in the middle, then you place them in the box on the right. Once the box is full, a lid—with a bow on it, natch—drops on, the box moves off, and a new one appears. Thoughts?

This episode covers the following games: Gjallarhorn by NoWandStudios (got it working this time), The Tie Game by Dejvo, Sanctuary Station by Joror, and SHRiNK by qkerguelen! Check them all out in the video!

If you’d like your own game to be played on my channel, just let me know via this form and I’ll get to you as soon as possible. Be sure to include an alternate means to notify you if you don’t have Twitter! People who’ve commented on my game (which I’ve updated since the jam!), and people who posted first get priority. Follow me on Twitter to find out which games I’ll be covering next (if I remember to post about it).

I’d recommend submitting soon if you haven’t already, as my schedule is going to be tight with my work on the #towerjam. As I go down my list I’ll have to make shorter segments for each game (as much as I don’t want to) or postpone them until after the jam. Once the voting period ends on LD34, I will close the form. I may still accept requests to LP your game, but there’s no telling when I’ll get to it.

That aside, this has been a blast! It’s inspiring seeing everyone’s different takes on the themes and how they each tackled the Ludum Dare challenge. I’m even more determined than ever to hone my developer skills and make an outstanding game for #towerjam! Hope to see you all there!

You can follow my progress on my #towerjam game on Twitter. I’ll make a website for it once I have more to show as well.