I recently wrote a blog post for my Alakajam 21 game "Falling Thingies." Check it out here! https://bluepinstudio.com/blog/2025-03-15-Falling-Thingies-Post-Mortem/

FLO∀T Post-jam is available to play!

• Lighting and post-processing
• Music
• Formatted speedrun time

Control the gravity to avoid hazards and zombies in the space station.
https://aslangames.itch.io/float

The 22nd edition of our 48 hour game jam starts on Friday, September 19th, book the date!

The full details will be updated here in the weeks prior to the event.

Thank you so much for playing my game. It means a great deal.

I chose the upside down approach because I wanted to have the cannon change positions on the screen, left, right, top, bottom but there just wasn't enough time.

You are right, it is time to add some music and particle affects.

I am going to add some bonus ups too:

1. 10 balls will enter the play area and fall up into the platforms
2. 15 seconds to allow any hit to score points top and under
3. 15 seconds where the platforms score doubles
4. Extra Ball
5. Add 2 1000 point platforms

If anyone in the community can think of anything else that might be cool to add to the game I would love to hear it.

Thanks to all who have played the game, it is greatly appreciated.

My game is a downloadable executable for Windows.I imagine you get the message where Windows does not want you to execute the program.

I am curious as to how many here do not download a game and play it, but will more likely play a web based game.

The reason I ask is that I am thinking about learning how to use emscripten and if it is worth the trouble.

Thanks ahead of time for any input.

I managed to set aside plenty of time for AKJ. I even was mostly focused on making my game for almost all of Saturday. At the end of Saturday, I had a character who would fall in a tunnel. I didn't have the tunnel yet, well not really, but I did have mushrooms he could bounce off of and I was struggling to make it so that when you move the mouse he would point his arm in that direction. I didn't have shooting but I did have mushrooms he could bounce off of.

I also had soundtracks for both the main menu and the game play! I was also working on "boing" sounds for bouncing off mushrooms.

Also, I implemented the cypher from xkcd. Don't worry, changing it back to normal is just a button click away.

Unfortunately, at the end of Saturday night, my mind was thinking, this is the same game as AKJ4 or LD48. I lost almost all motivation to continue. I drew dinosaurs and helicopters and other evil things to make sure you ended up dead, and hadn't even imported them in to the game yet. Meanwhile all the people on discord were complaining about not being able to get their orbital mechanics simulators working here, and I was complaining about not getting my falling simulator working.

In any case, that is my sad tale. I just found out I can't seem to host images here, so I will update this post with screenshots when I find a nice place to put them. Edit: Posted images to mastodon. I don't know if they'll break after some time. Bonus image:

Hello! This is my first blog post, so I'm quickly gonna introduce myself. I call myself Taevas, and I sometimes do web or game development. I think I'm more skilled in web development, but I find game development to be more enjoyable, it feels less redundant and more creative among other things.

While I do enjoy making games, I haven't really finished any, I run out of steam before I'm able to make something I'm satisfied with, and one reason for that is that I try to make big things and making big things takes a lot of time, effort, and motivation!

So one day, while browsing Lemmy, I found out about this game jam which was gonna start in less than 24 hours, and I just thought "screw it let's try this", cuz a time pressure to deliver a complete game seemed like an excellent way to create motivation! With a time pressure, I can't just work 1h a day and let future me make difficult decisions, when time's ticking, if you think of something, you gotta deal with it immediately, you know?

And so I made a game

But not the game I thought I was gonna make, I aimed to make a sort of puzzle game where your only control is the strength of the gravity using a graphical slider you can interact with with your mouse, and it was gonna make heavy use of the physics engine of Godot, but I realized about 20 hours into it that "the player" could clip through walls, and I never managed to understand why, that issue was very likely my fault and not the engine's fault, but I gave up on any idea that'd involve level borders or walls and the such.

So instead of making something where "the player" would need to get from Point A to Point B by carefully going around obstacles, I made something with the elements I've already created where "the player" would need to reach a lot of Points in space as quickly as possible, without real obstacles! That moment when I had to make that decision definitely was stressful, and interestingly, if I had that new concept from the beginning, the game probably would have been fundamentally different, I probably would've went for something where you move forward in a restricted space (think Space Harrier) instead of… is it what's called 2.5D, 3D environment where you only move in 2D? So yeah, DreamBall, my game, turned out that way due to specific circumstances, but I have no regrets!

DreamBall was made entirely with free and open-source software, on Linux, with Godot as the game engine and LMMS for the "music" and the sound effects. I discovered a bunch of things throughout those 48 hours, and was able to do most of what I wanted, and some things beyond what I anticipated!

One little aspect of it is how the music works: The more velocity "the player" has, the more there are instruments that play. It is a cool concept I've borrowed from Rain World's "threat music" where, the more you're in danger, the more intense the music gets. My music-making capacities are extremely limited, so by making use of this concept, I have a very good excuse to not subject the players to terrible music the entire time they're playing! ("the player" is not supposed to have high enough velocity for the music to play for more than 15 consecutive seconds)

My music-making capacities may be very limited, but my graphics-making abilities are actually even worse, which is the main reason I've went with 3D over 2D. I just can't do graphics, so simple shapes do the tricks! Though in retrospective, using 3D probably allows for more flexibility when it comes to the camera and the environment. It may also add a bit of "wow" factor? Either way, it feels like I wouldn't have any reason to use 2D unless I had assets to work with.

All that to say, those 48 hours were very tiring, but not only did I learn many things, I finally finished making a game I'm satisfied with, especially given the circumstances! Choosing to participate in this game jam was a very good decision.

As we all know 48 hours is really not enough time to create a finished game. We can make a loose outline and put some graphics on the screen but ultimately if your idea is good then there will be a lot of work to do.

I think I am going to continue building this game. I am going to add a few things as are depicted in the list below:

1. Update the High Score Screen:
   Fix the High Score handler to display your last five scores in order.
   I am thinking about writing a little server client handler to store everyones score and then show the high scores of everyone.

2. Start Screen
   Update the Start Screen where you can enter a player name.

3. Add Bonus Ups

4. Change ball to add a multiplier

5. Add different sized balls

Finally, where is a good place to upload images so I can post some images of the game?

• Tripped over Godot's Light2D node limit of 16. Ended up just using textures additively blended instead
  • Need to write a simple 2d light system in Love2D/SDL/Raylib to understand the challenges involved and experiment. I've created a bunch of games in the dark at this point and likely will again in the future.
• Doing things at different scales, like drawing a battle royal-esqe death circle or creating a mini-map, is easier then it looks since it's just doing the math and scaling it
  • probably not so at the next magnitude. I vaguley remember someone in Godot creating a big space game and struggling with the fact that floating-point percision rounding caused snapping, which they solved by just doubling up the coordinates for a finer aproximation.
• Simple, consistent agent behaviors lead to emergent strategy
  • Arrow peg always shooting arrows(even when not converted) protects normal pegs that spawn close to them from barbarians naturally on the map, leading to less relience on good RNG for the player
• Steering behaviors continue to have great ROI for relatively little effort. Getting the agents to follow the player at an offset and avoid crowding via a repulsive force works better then I thought it would. Would've liked to added pursuit and evasion behaviors(basically the agent leads the target so the player has to rapidly change directions to evade), but ran out of time. Should get a snippits library with these thigns set up prior to save time in future jams.
• I was very dissapointed by the theme. Partly because "Gravity" Is too general and can be satisfied with any physics implementation(or doing a space setting), but also because I've already made one jam game with orbitial mechanics and I didn't feel like doing a repeat. Would've really liked "Unwelcome Guest", "Out of Frame", or "Mushrooms" more. But we play the cards were dealt and I decided "Gravity" could mean "Drawn to" represented by being drawn towards the light and people being drawn to a leader.
• Less obvious, and viable, things I would've done with a little more time:
  • Make it so getting people to follow you took a little time to increase risk
  • Adding enemies with Pursuit/Evasion behaviors, like a wolf that tries to lead you off or a spear throwing that avoids your path of travel
  • Telegraphed metors that could wipe out the players band or be used to kill a large mass of barbarians

Hello everyone.

This is my submission for the 21st Alakajam. This is the first game jam I have taken part in and it has been very fun. There are a lot of features I wanted to add, but could not due to the time constraint. It is very short but I hope you have fun with it.

The game is a platformer where you can transform into a soul and move towards soul anchors. These can help with traversal through walls and over gaps. I used python and pygame to create the game. Unfortunately, I had no time to add music, so there are only sound effects.

I am not used to using this platform, so sorry if the format of this post isnt the best.

Link to itch.io page