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Transplanted my beat up Grape gameboy Color into a new body, added red buttons and a glass lens

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One thing about jam games being too difficult, particularly with respect to Ludum Dare, is that the judging target audience are other developers. I’m not going to pretend that developers are amazing game athletes, but they do tend to have played a *lot* of games. I think this absolutely inclines jammers to lean a little more towards the ‘challenging’ end of the difficulty spectrum because you can assume the judges playing your game are fairly experienced. Overly easy games can be stormed through in moments without feeling rewarding and that will be reflected in the ranking of the game.

Scanline

“A procedurally generated platformer made for cgajam” - It lives up to the billing. And, of course, the color scheme is gorgeous.

It’s not without its faults–I found it to be brutally hard, which is a common hazard for game jam games. I’m not that great at action games to begin with, and the constant dying made it hard to really appreciate the level generation.

(General rule of thumb for game jams: your game is too fast and too hard. 90% of the games I play from Ludum Dare can be vastly improved by addressing that. Ideally, get someone else to play it and watch them. If you can’t, try giving yourself a handicap, like an off-screen distraction, and see how it affects your performance.)

And it’s prone to lots of rapidly flashing colors, so watch out for that.

Still, putting together a complete, original, procedurally generated platformer in a game jam is quite an accomplishment. It’s the kind of thing that looks easy from the outside, but can be surprisingly tricky to pull off this well. Even research projects that replicate Mario levels take a lot of work, and they’re just borrowing the rules from an existing game.

https://rxi.itch.io/scanline

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I did a linux. Honestly if you don’t have waving tentacles as your desktop i dont think i want to know you

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Lighting test

Been beating my jam basecode with a stick this week. Here’s a quick lighting test

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TEN YEARS

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Front Mission 4 looks pretty dang nice when you crank the resolution. Causes a little GUI glitchiness but it’s worth it for those high res Wanzers

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Definitely my favourite game i’ve played so far this #LDJAM (though I’ve only played this one and my own)

Over the weekend, Ludum Dare happened. The 38th one, which was special, because that means that Ludum Dare now exists for 15 years. Pretty impressive!

A bit less impressive was how the event was hosted, as the organizer and administrator of Ludum Dare decided to use a new, hand-made website for it. Ultimately I understand the desire for a new website - the old one ran on some kind of modified Wordpress and scales horribly apparently - but I allow myself to mention some criticism: the new site just wasn’t ready. And right now browsing through the games isn’t any fun, because thumbnails are missing. The submission process was broken and eventually didn’t feel much like an achievement. And the whole streamlining of the tidbits around the event - the theme submission, the theme slaughter, the voting - makes the whole thing less homely, less “personal”. Of course in the end it means decreased work for the organizer, I understand that.

Anyway. I submitted a game which I called “The Treachery of Game Dev”. You can interpret that title as you like, but I would recommend doing so only if you actually played it. If you want, you can download it on itch.io and tell me (in the comments or by mail) what you thought of it. I’d be delighted!

Overall the game became a bit less “meaningful” than I intended it to be, because of the time constraints and because I had another case of an emotional rollercoaster during the weekend. For example, the idea wasn’t clear from the beginning, and I tried different stuff first. Another reason was that, in the end product, I wanted to have a talking character in the game, but didn’t know how to make one.

First I tried Blender. I felt a blocky character made of boxes might be okay, and I would animate/pose it in Unity. I failed because I have no idea how to make a good hierarchy of objects in Blender, and how to export this hierarchy correctly. After being sad for some time I thought I could draw some sprites. I scribbled around and decided that my ugly style just didn’t fit the game. Then I went fully insane and downloaded MakeHuman. I made some creepy looking character (because MakeHuman doesn’t allow making non-creepy looking characters) and exported it. It had like a trillion polygons, and the whole experience lowered my motivation even more. Finally I had the idea to make photos of somebody and edit them slightly and use these as sprites. That’s what went into the game, and I was surprised that it looked good enough.

During this I wrote a little dialog system. It doesn’t allow much, but the player can choose answers from time to time. A simple dialog tree gets internally generated out of a text file looking like this:

The number of indentings before a line of text determines if it’s a line by the NPC, or a choosable answer for the player. It allowed writing simple dialogs very fast.

Another thing that was a horrible experience was modeling the level. Before I ultimately chose the tool I always fall back to when I get annoyed too much (3dsmax), I tried ProBuilder. Somehow I own the Advanced version of it on Unity’s asset store. During the jam I sometimes got into the mood of “hell, I won’t finish anyway, I’ll just experiment and try tools”, and that’s why I finally imported it into a project. I really don’t know how people can use this efficiently. You can’t snap vertices or move them to exact coordinates (or at least I couldn’t find out how), and just the simple feature of “selecting faces via mouse” failed every other time. It was stressful, and the stress only stopped when I removed ProBuilder from the project.

But, despite all odds, in the end I could submit something. When sharing the game I try to be as vague or even misleading as possible, because I want the experience to be a surprise. That hurts the “virality” a bit, as I don’t want to talk blatantly about the game’s structure and content. The usual suffering of an artist, I guess.

Oh, and if you see carcass - tell him I said ‘hi’.

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SIGNAL? http://voxel.itch.io/signal

PLAY. REWIND. DONT BECOME STATIC

MADE IN 48 HOURS FOR LUDUMDARE

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Lovely anim, but his upper body seems quite stiff

Another test by @Coreymill . 32 frames walking animation.

What you think? Yay or nay?

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Wow, MegaDrive games had the best palettes

Arrow Flash for the Genesis/Mega Drive.

One of the coolest looking game intros I’ve seen in a long time!

It’s like Cutie Honey and Gundam joined together to make the best 80s anime video game setting possible.

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Argh it even comes with a tiny square pizzaaaa

It took me about a year of trial and error but I made a papercraft robot. The challenge was making it so that users don’t need glue or scissors to build it! You can purchase it here. http://etsy.me/2frsrXd

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Got to love a feline in a fez

it’s ya boi cat merchant

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Rebuilt art by Cosimo Galluzzi