#ld41

Hey! If you didn’t know I participated in Ludum dare 41 with @vsemily and my good pal Jimineybob. In 72 hours we made BEAT, a rhythm based horror game where you have to time your steps with the beat in order to avoid tripping!

There’s also a sarcastic talking phonograph, if thats the type of thing you’re interested in!

Hey! I made another Ludum Dare game, Heck Deck!

It’s a Bullet Hell + Card Game with a bit of Super Hot :D

Go play it!!

Pretty average (for me at least), but it’s nice to be up high with the innovation scores again. This one was a little more clusterfucky than last time as far as the design goes, so it’s nice to see that it still scored pretty highly. There were some pretty interesting choices we made with this one, which I’ll make sure to write about later some time in a more detailed review.

Link is still here if you wanna check it out.

I haven’t got around to checking out the winners yet, but I still have some recommendations left over from my time rating.

Low stress language This one is cool mostly for the ideas that are behind it rather than the implementation, which is pretty lackluster. It’s essentially a game about diffusing a bomb, however the instructions are in another language. This kind of learning infused directly into the game design is a concept that really has a lot of unexplored potential in games, and it would be cool to see something like this expanded out to something much more feature rich.

Frogger, the Jigsaw This was really suitable to the theme, literally two different core mechanics jammed together to be conducted simultaneously. I dunno why more games didn’t do this, as the multitasking factor alone made for an interesting experience. As it was, there actually was a fair bit of overlap between the two mechanics, but in a fairly indirect way.

In other news, I’ve returned to working on pitfiends, trying to wrestle the sprite ordering system into working properly. I’ve also been writing up an analysis of my 7DRL entry, so expect that soon(ish).

HOLY SHIT

so, the results for Ludum Dare 41 came in, and wow im just in shock. I’ve made  14 ludum dare games so far, and I never in my life expected to place even top 5 in any category, and i ended up placing first in one.

If you missed it before, you can check out the game here: https://torcado.itch.io/heck-deck

Finally got those archways “done“. Currently they’re still very WIP, and I’m going to be doing a lot more work with them to shift away from the cardboard box aesthetic, but for now they’ve helped me to ask a bunch of fun questions about my graphics system. Questions like, why are the stake heads drawing over the top of the roof, and why is the inside of the arch just as light as the outside. Perhaps even the age old mystery, why is that line bent like that. So far I only know the answer to one of those questions. Hopefully by next week I will have answered the rest.

I’ve also been playing through a bunch of LD41 entries. I still stand by my statement of two weeks ago, that the theme was pretty restrictive in it’s specificity, but despite this there were still some pretty amazing entries. For Instance:

Forbidden Love Although it isn’t very long, 15-20 minutes at most, this one was subversive and surprising in a way that I don’t often see in Ludum Dare games. If there was anything I would want to compare it to, it would be Frog Fractions, a comparison that I do not make lightly.

Tactical Hydra I honestly can’t think of any improvements that I could possibly make to this one. The idea is awesome, and the execution is masterful. Everything fits together really well, making for an extremely enjoyable experience. It’s also really fucking hard.