Ludum Dare 43, one of the most prestigious gamejams is starting November 30 (in 18 hours!). Final round of theme voting is now taking place. Check it out:
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Should be taking part here - got 2 days out of the 3 spare. Let’s hope the theme is decent this time!
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I’ll try compo with my nonexistent art skills because that’s what big boys do 
This will be my first game jam 
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sooooo how was it? Where are your HTML5 playables? =]
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So the summary of my first jam would be :
The good:
- Learned A LOT about the engine
- Learned to use Audacity (even though there is only one sound effect that’s using it)
- Learned to use aseprite (even though I have two left hands and animations are crappy, but I need to start somewhere)
- Meditation really helps to clear the thoughts
- Working under time-pressure works much better for me than goofing with side-projects
- Reducing the scope is necessary
- Reaching the finish line is a victory in itself
The bad:
- Wasted whole morning on getting an idea
- Wasted rest of the day on my guy falling trough tiles and camera not looking where I want it to.
- Defold crashed several times while typing in split mode
Luckily I’ve found platypus and defold-orthographic by @britzl to save my butt.
The delay caused me to not have (in an ideal scenario):
- parallax background nor the background image
- particle effects
- more tiles to make something coherent
- background music
- couple more levels ( I’ve wanted to have multiple endings)
- scoring system
- speech bubbles with text/dialogues
The link for the game: https://dzuvan.itch.io/ldj43
Overall the experience was amazing. I just wanted to see if I can finish something. Time flew by, I can’t remember the last time I was so immersed.
The issue I had on Saturday turned this into a one day jam, but that didn’t stop me from having a blast. I can’t wait for the next jam to participate in.
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This is the first successful game jam for me.
The theme was fairly good this time, which makes all the difference. I found that it’s worth spending more time at the beginning brainstorming ideas rather than just going with the first thought that comes to mind.
Defold is really ideal for this sort of project. It allowed me to focus on the game itself and get stuff working very quickly indeed. This is the first time I’ve attempted a platform type game and there were no issues to speak of apart from a bug where the player can ‘stick’ to walls. If anyone asks, it’s an unused game mechanic.
Looking forward to playing some of the other entries 
Link to HTML5 build - https://benjames171.itch.io/ice-runner
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I love it. Great job 
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This is amazing!
Any tips on learning how to create art such as that? 
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I love the concept of dying as part of the game design. But also the art is great!
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I’ve been interested in flock simulation for some time. So I’ve decided to do something with sheeps flock for this LD and contributed almost all time in a sheeps behavior. And then just quickly added some simple gameplay =)
Here it is - Sheeps Empire!
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Some gifs from early states =)
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This is amazing!
Any tips on learning how to create art such as that?
Glad you liked it!
There are a couple of rules I use when drawing pixel art. Firstly each ‘chunky’ pixel is actually 4x4 screen pixels which gives it that nice retro feel. You can set Defold’s render script to display your graphics like this automatically - you also need to set the default texture filter settings to ‘nearest’ in game.project
Secondly, choosing your colour palette is really important. I usually use a limited palette containing about 16 colours. Creating good palettes is an art in itself so I generally use a pre-made one from here - https://lospec.com/palette-list
Also, here’s the tileset for Ice Runner to give an idea of what that looks like in raw form:
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nice! What did you use for pathfinding?
Thanks a lot!
And the game is so polished! =) Liked controllable wall sliding and dying as a mechanic is great!
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There isn’t any pathfinding =) I don’t have collisions and sheeps are just points and forces between. So, it’s just bunch of vector math =)
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Wow, nice one! I love how the limitation in available colours can enable some really amazing pixel art.
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banner saga with defold 
no battle though!
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