Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!
Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created. You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game. We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.
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Release: LD34c (15 December 2017)
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- Add keyboard support
(space to start / left-right arrows to rotate Santa direction)
- Updated help screen
- Version displayed on Menu screen
Altough i didn’t really show up there this is my fourth atempt at the Ludum Dare. I’m really happy to be able to participate again. And for this edition i’m sharing the same room as @pauljoannon and @Kokonaught. Check out their game !
I’m still working with love2d + grafx2. I did some music in LSDJ, but i need to export it and i don’t have my usb cable … Right now my progress is very slow. I hope to finish at least under the 72h to submit my game to the Jam.
I decided to go with a game about depression and suicide based on personal experience. You’ll be to depressed to go out of your room and you need to find a way to improve and not kill yourself. It will be isometric and you’ll be able to control it with the mouse. I got the isometric grid displayed plus a character that can move around it. I did some gameplay and scenario planning.
I managed to get the code done relatively quickly. The first version was done on first day.
Everything was done by myself.
Some friends played it during development and told me their perspectives. I thought it is not a good idead to show the unfinished prototype but surprisingly it helped a lot.
Wrong:
Spent too much time on graphics because I am not good at it.
Tried to do the sound and music myself and this is the reason why the game has no sound and no music. I was not able to put together egyptian-sounded music that was not horrible.
On last day I haven’t slept much only two hours. I think this was mistake because all the stuff from than took at least twice as time as it should take normally.
For the next time:
Just find the music online.
Sleep more
Get more friends to play it during to tell me what is wrong.
LD was fun and the feeling of having the game done is very rewarding. Already waiting for the next jam
Aaand big gratulations to all who managed to finish the game.
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,
I made a game about a terrible person who has to keep the map clean by scaring away the nice dogs before they poop on the map causing the clouds of green smell.
This was my first jam/compo ever, so i am proud i was able to make something in the 72h. Originally i wanted to do a compo(also first), so i did all the assets by myself, but i was so tired that i rather went to sleep and eventually missed the deadline. I enjoyed the whole process of making a game and also the people here posting the comments with game progress which kept me motivated to finish.
It is 4:30 AM here in Prague so i rather go quickly sleep to get up for my dayjob in the morning 😀
The Adventures of BizMan now has graphics! And I’m glad to say the only thing missing is the music and sound effects! I’ll get to those tomorrow. And I’m most definitely going to write a postmortem.
(Click to view 1008×717 GIF) Programmer graphics = !good
So I started working at 11am, 7 hours after compo start because time zones. I didn’t have an idea immeaditely but after I did, I’ve been making good progress. I think I’m gonna focus on the gameplay and code today and then add graphics and sound tomorrow. For the record, I’m using LÖVE/Love2d/Lua and am making a top-down shooter where the unconventional weapon is money. This is also the first time I am coding everything myself and not using Stencyl (a game maker, basically)
Hello everyone! It is not my first time here in Ludum Dare. However, it is my first time to make and submit an entry that I am truly proud of, because I set myself that it is already complete. I failed so many times before. I lost the chance to submit because of my negative energy. I haven’t gotten enough courage that I have today. So yeah, hopefully. You can visit the game that I’ve made and play with it. It is only for Windows. So please bear with me!
If you want, you can do feedback on my game. So that, I can see what are things to be learn and I have to work on.
So. I didn’t want to participate this time. My first and last time was LD26 (theme: “Minimalism”) and I coded entirely on my phone in 3 hours, resulting in a poor Tetris clone. Half of LD31’s time is over, and I haven’t been coding for years, but I’m gonna give it a shot. Even if I fail, isn’t Ludum Dare supposed to be about being a challenge? So, I have half of the time and most likely I’ll fail hard. Probably I’ll just keep coding after time runs out, I want to get back to coding. End of story.
Tools
– Sublime Text, as the coding IDE
– LÖVE, as the engine
– Pinta, as the graphics tool
The workspace in its full, messy glory
The game thingy so far
What’s good so far
– For the first time ever, I’m using object-oriented programming. And it’s working quite well for now.
– I’m making a tile-based maze game. Never used tilesets or tiles at all. More of the challenge and it’s working
– I’ll need to either add Tiled support into my game (Tiled seems freaking amazing at first look!) or code my own map editor, or use hardcoded tables. The first two options are even more of challenge (and fun!)
– First time developing on Linux (latest stable Xubuntu release to be precise), and though I’ve been customizing it quite a bit, I’m proud to be using it for programming.
What goes bad
– Time. I don’t know if I’ll even manage to get something usable till the jam deadline. The solution is just to keep coding when LD31 ends.
– Hardcoded maps. These need to get replaced by either Tiled maps or some own external map editor.
– Preparations, because I haven’t made any. This means downloading stuff while coding and setting up your workspace and libraries. Not good at all.
Anyway…
Really excited to be back into coding, good luck everyone, I can’t wait to play your games! Wish me good luck, too. I’ll need it!
Sparkiy lets you create something new wherever you are. Create new project, write description and take some screenshots. Make your game unique and fun to play and share it with your friends and family. All from comfort of your sofa on your tablet, laptop or whatever device you prefer. Sparkiy features touch friendly code editor and easy to learn scripting language – Lua. Graphics and engine API is simple and clean so that you can get your ideas to life in just a minutes.
I will be developing Sparkiy windows client application in parallel to LD game. You can track my progress over at GitHub where I will commit new changes to application and game code.
Here is the list of tools I’ll be using for both application and game development:
I have spent all of today getting over my aural creative block! This video is meant to show off the audio in my game. Tell me what you think about it, I’m not quite sold on the sound effects.
Also, try to see if you can start spotting which enemies are dreams and which aren’t! (Hint, some turn faster than others).
I now have two different kinds of enemies. One is “real” and the other is a “dream” enemy. They have slightly different behaviors. The dreams are smoother, slightly slower, and turn slower. Your goal is to shoot the dreams with dream bullets, and the real ones with real bullets, if you misjudge and mismatch it, you lose points.
