Archive for : September, 2014
I had failed. It was almost 1 a.m., and there was just one hour to go before the Ludum Dare 30 deadline. I’d been tweeting progressively lower percentages of how likely I thought it was that I would finish, but now I knew. My game didn’t even have a goal yet. It was time to give up.
In the last two and a half days I’d had about as many hours sleep, which made giving up even more tempting. At the same time, giving up would have made it all for nothing. My decision to continue would determine if my entire weekend had been meaningless torture or fantastically enjoyable.
I looked through the assets I had not yet used, and scraped together the most minimal idea for a goal:
if (player.x > goalX) {
...
...
profit!()
}
The game very nearly was that short. Luckily I’d already made it possible to add conditions to Levers, and I already had a Key class. I simply needed to check if the player collides with the key, tween it to invisible, set a boolean to true, and add that boolean to the condition on the lever. I admit, this is a really cheap way of extending the play time of the game. Thanks to the key we hid “far out West”, the player now had to walk all the way across the map again. Twice!
Having spent probably more than half my time on art, and another big portion on the music, at least this way there would be some time for players to see it before the game ended. Queue dramatic ending, a deep sigh of relief, and pure disbelief.
Somehow . . . I had actually finished.
Welcome to my new blog! Hooray!
Having played a hundred games from Ludum Dare 30, I’ve decided that my first post should be a compilation of some of my favorites so far. Tada!
This jam entry looks, sounds and feels amazing. And it’s funny. And it looks amazing.
You play a hungry cat in a wibbly-wobbly-quantumy-wantummy superstate of being alive and dead at the same time. Or something. If you are observed, your wave function collapses (which is bad, by the way). You must creep along the floor without being seen by your owner, with the help of your quantum ghost cat powers.
This is a rather weird one, but I had to put it in this list because I really love the art style. That, er . . . lama? The way it moves is hypnotizing. As far as I can tell, the world goes on forever and becomes progressively more dangerous (and pretty).
You play “Chipset-0”, the mechanized maintenance unit. You must manipulate power cells to plug humans back into the system. Honestly, I have no idea how deepnight can keep doing this kind of thing in only 48 hours. It looks beautiful, with incredible detail in the particles, lighting, physics . . . Completely insane.
I’m a sucker for roguelikes, and this one is astonishingly complete for a 48h compo entry, with consistent graphics and nice music. Jump through wormholes, gather resources, and connect planets to unlock new tech. Can you find your way home?
Made by the previous overall winner of Ludum Dare, HopSlide is one game masquerading as two. One is a platformer in which you must search for letters and various colored zones, the other looks like a puzzle game, and they are both closely related!
This one is such fun, with a great look and really great music. You must collect glowy things while avoiding all instances of your previous self. The mechanic is similar to snake, but more chaotic.
NECLiD is an interesting take on the classic Sokoban game. As in the original, the player must push crates onto targets before reaching the goal, however, it soon becomes apparent that the levels are impossible. Then, with a shift into the other plane, the world breaks apart and new tiles appear, with a new character to help solve the puzzle.
NECLiD is well rounded, with cohesive art, music, animation and level design. My main issues are with the controls (give me arrow keys, please), and the slow movement speed, but overall this is a very impressive 48h entry!
(Edit: It seems you can increase the speed and change the controls from the options. My main issues are invalid; this game rocks.)
Because why not try to become a massive all-consuming clump of asteroids and planets?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
This list is by no means exhaustive, so not all of my favorites are here, and 100 games is barely a dent in the 2500 game hoard of LD30 entries, but it’s a good start, right? Also, be sure to check out my (very short) 48 hour entry: Sinister.
And that’s it for my first blog post. Stay tuned for more words.
– Joe
The contents of this blog are highly unstable. Do not consume if you have an allergy to game-related ramblings and/or death.
Proceed with caution, brave adventurer. Turn to blog post number 2.