More cool games have shaken loose from the Ludum Dare tree. The Sun and the Moon is a free (obviously) puzzle platformer in which the puzzles are in the platforms. You play a small, er, dot thing, that can dive beneath the surface of the floating world's platforms. Do so, and your momentum reverses, causing you to 'fall' upwards.
Every Friday the PC Gamer team shines a torch into the dilated pupils of the week that was. As usual, read about the good stuff first, and then the not so good stuff on the second page…
More from the mammoth stockpile of Ludum Dare 29 entries: Vertico, created by Sebastian Janisz, is an isometric "three degrees of freedom" shooter, in which you dive to explore a vertically stacked coral reef. Along the way you'll meet a selection of ocean critters, and, like any good marine biologist, will shoot them to death. Er, it's for the best—a sinister obelisk is making them angry.
Ludum Dare 29, the merely days-long game development competition, took place this past weekend. In addition to the usual screenshots, panic, and lack of sleep on display in developer Twitter feeds, this weekend’s Ludum Dare hit a record: 2,497 games were submitted to the competition, an all-time high. The theme for this weekend was “Beneath the Surface,” so most of the games involve mining, digging, or swimming in one way or another. Phil took a look at Beneath The City, but that's just one of the free games to come out of the weekend.
It's been another record-breaking Ludum Dare, with 2,497 games made and submitted for the 29th run of the game-making competition. With so many new games now available to try, it'll take a while longer for the best to be found. Even so, some highlights are starting to surface, of which the turn-based, Thief-inspired Beneath The City is undoubtedly one.
Making an entire game in a weekend is a daunting affair. I vaguely remember attempting Ludum Dare once, before disintegrating a couple of hours later after drawing one terrible platformer sprite. If only we could program an AI to design - and create - games for us. Mike Cook has been doing just that for his PhD project. For her first Ludum Dare, his AI game designer ANGELINA has come up with the unsettling, albeit basic To That Sect, which you can play here. As a game it's awful, but it's worth exploring to see what fascinating design decisions ANGELINA went for when confronted with the theme 'You Only Get One'.
Continuing last week's theme of games either disappearing or not working by the time I come to try them, I wasn't able to play Cookie Clicker in time for this week's roundup, but I've just had a quick go and it's bloody wonderful in a Candy Box/A Dark Room sorta of way. So play that! But also stick around for another collection of cracking confectionary, which this week is brought to you by the letter, I dunno, Q. Enjoy!
Well I was going to include Space Email in this week's roundup, but the novel communication experiment was taken offline before I got the chance, thanks to internet jerks once again ruining everything they touch. It's not all bad news though - this bankest of holidays will be enlivened with the likes of Eastward Quest, Robot Planet, Socrates Jones (think Phoenix Wright for philosophy) and a game that uses the pause button to startling effect. Enjoy!
I can't be the only one who's grateful for the popularization of game jams. Ludum Dare 26 gave us the gorgeous browser game Gods Will Be Watching from indie studio Deconstructeam—and apparently, publishers were just as impressed with it as us gamers. Devolver Digital, who last year brought us the much-loved Hotline Miami, has now confirmed it will publish the commercial release of Gods Will Be Watching, promising to match all funds raised through its already-successful crowdfunding campaign.
Gods Will Be Watching, a product of April's Ludum Dare 26 game jam, has achieved full funding through Indiegogo for the development of a "bigger, but deeper" version of the point and click, pixel-art adventure game. Spanish game studio Deconstructeam had set a goal of €8,000 for the project, but has seen nearly double that amount roll in with nine days left in the funding period.
The theme for the 26th Ludum Dare gamejam was Minimalism, which is a principle that doesn't apply to the competition's number of entrants: all 2,346 of them. While we've been seeding their sparse delights into the weekly Webgame RoundUp, my basic calculations suggest that, at the current rate, it'd take between 9 and 11 years to feature them all. Fortunately, Sebastian Standke of Superlevel.de spent two weeks playing every single entry, and has distilled them down into a still-mammoth list of 269 recommendations, delivered in a 20-minute chiptune backed video.
Ludum Dare 24 winner Evoland's central theme took you through an evolving game world that started as an 8-bit monochromatic Zelda like dungeon crawler, and ended as a flash game styled Zelda like dungeon crawler. Admittedly it wasn't sweeping in its scope, but what can you expect from a game made in 48 hours. Now Evoland is set to be revisited and expanded with a far more dramatic evolutionary path.
Gallant heroes? Honourable soldiers? Noble knight? BORING! Sometimes you just want to cut loose and be ridiculously, cartoonishly evil. Thank hells for the 25th Ludum Dare gamemaking jam, then. It's theme was You Are the Villain, giving entrants 48 hours to create a game that celebrated the twisted and horrible. Today, the most bad-to-the-bone overall winners have been revealed.
A corridor stretches before you. Draped in murky tones of grey and black and punctuated by pools of light, the passageway beckons you forward. You're unarmed. No information appears on the screen. You can't even jump. The only goal: figure out where the hell you are.
The Stop Online Piracy Act took a blow earlier this week when Congress delayed the vote in the face of opposition from The White House, but its Senate counterpart, PIPA is still going. Many sites are planning a blackout tomorrow to protest against the bill. Ludum Dare are planning their own protest, in the form of an anti-PIPA game jam.
Their mission is simple: "Let’s protest! Make anti SOPIPA games on January 18 and make the internet crawl with these! It’s the best we can do, let’s abuse it and help the internet stay the awesome place it is now!" Heavyweights like Minecraft creator, Notch have already thrown their hats into the ring. You can follow the latest Stop PIPA chatter on twitter by following the #SOPAJam tag, and keep track of the latest entries on the Ludum Dare site. Thanks to Sosowski for the tip.
"Alone" was the theme of the latest Ludum Dare indie game contest. Anyone who fancied joining in had 48 hours to create a game based on the theme. Then, everyone got to play each other's games and rate them based on categories like humour, fun, innovation, graphics, audio. The game with the highest overall score takes the top spot.
The latest Ludum dare competition challenged developers to create a game in 48 hours based on the theme "Alone." Minecraft creatory Markus 'Notch' Persson has turned in his entry already. It's called Minicraft, a top down, 2D take on Minecraft. You have to roam the world, punching trees, blocks and zombies in your way as you try to find the only other sentient being in the world, the Air Wizard, so you can kill him.
Every four months, there's an open competition to make a game in 48 hours. It's called Ludum Dare, and each competition has a theme voted on by the participants. December's contest, Ludum Dare 19, kicked off last night with a theme of Discovery. I've decided to try entering, and I'll be blogging my progress here and on the Ludum Dare site.
Day 1, 6AM
Discovery is what I was hoping for. I think one of the close runners up, Containment, would probably have led to a more interesting selection of games, but I had a clearer idea of what I'd do for Discovery. I knew if this one ended up being picked, I would have to make something involving randomised content. That's what makes Spelunky so exciting to play, and that's probably the greatest game about discovery I've ever played.
