I just finished a video that covers and explains the development of Wandering Soul from the top level!

Didn't make it up in time for the 48hr deadline, but at least uploaded for the Unranked section. Although I think I must have accidentally set it up as Solo and now I can't change it, maybe Monsieur Admin can help me set it to unranked as it should be please :) ?

I feel like I should post something about lessons learned, but I make the same mistakes every jam so lets not pretend next time will be any different.

• Used the less than most stable version of Unity that gave me no benefits and might have wasted a bit of time wondering why setting the font sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

• Spent too long drawing pixel art tilesets that didn't actually work anyway, too much time drawing assets that are hardly ever seen and not enough time with the ones that fill the screen like 95% of the time.

• Gameplay is not that interesting, didn't worry too much about combat not being that exciting because I thought "ah its not really about the combat" but actually didn't have time to add that non combat stuff anyway, so it sort of is about combat, but either way if you have a mechanic you might as well make it as interesting as it can be, and if I had spent more time play testing earlier I might have realised there was some quite easy stuff I could have done to make it more strategic and interesting.

Anyway next week starts the 7 Day Roguelike so maybe I'll make a sequel for that and expand it with some more interesting mechanics and maybe even procedural levels.. sounds like a stretch already.

Anyway despite all the usual issues I still had a lot of fun making a thing

P.S I'm still working on the previous raycasting jam too ….if that ever gets to be playable I'll post a link.

Hello everyone!

I thought I would share how it was like to make Submerged. During the theme submitting phase, we had talked amongst ourselves to find out what we wanted to create. Turns out, one of us wanted to go cave exploring, one wanted aliens, another one wanted a mermaid fairy paradise, and the last one wanted to create a game about linguistics. I am not going to lie, I thought we were doomed. BUT turns out, Ancient Ruins was the perfect theme to create an alien mermaid underwater cave diving adventure centered on merm-alien culture! Who knew?
We hadn't put much thought into what our gameplay would be like beyond this desire to create a game that had a little bit of what we all loved and was centered around exploring , so we analysed our strengths. We had two team members who had jammed before (Hekkusu and myself) and two newcomers who are from other fields but had an interest in dabbling in game development. So we put our strenghths to work!
I programmed, did the sound design, and worked on scenery.
Hekkusu was our main animator and character artists, making portraits, enemys, our character (and pet!).
Louise7 was a first time jammer and created a beautiful storyline for our game, made a script for every bit of dialogue!
and Shooliagods, also a newcomer, managed to make our UI/UX clean and beautiful, making portrait frames, small pixel details (all the bubbles!!) that brought everything together.

***So this post is an encouragement to everyone who is not a dev, you can do it! You too can jam! ***
So congratulations to all the first time jammers, I hope you are proud of what you accomplished!
I know we are <3

TREASURES is a rouge-lite platformer where you collect treasure and then return to the surface. While at first this game seems to be simple, it actually has a high skill cap. Here are some tips and tricks to help you collect more treasure and get better at the game.

1.Wall Climbing. If you are stuck in a place that seems you can't get out of, try wall climbing. Move either left or right, jump(space) and press J, you will grab onto the wall and stay there until you jump or press J again. Now while you are on the wall repeat the steps again and you will scale the wall like it's nothing (just make sure to time your wall jumps).

2.Rare treasure. There are three different rarities common, uncommon, and rare chests. When you are looking around for treasure, if you see this one then something expensive will be inside! https://im.ezgif.com/tmp/ezgif-1-d45e583bc1e5-jpg/ezgif-frame-001.jpg

3.Hidden Treasure. When you encounter one of the tents or huts make sure to go near it because a treasure could be hiding behind it.
Sometimes treasure spawns behind tents or huts so keep an eye out for them.

4.Head Up to the Surface When You Have Low Health. When you are descending in to the lower levels of the cave make sure you keep track of your health, spikes, creatures and even falling could end your run! So be wise and make a descision to go up before it's too late.

5.Make Wise Descisions on what you are carrying. When you find some treasure take a little time to think "Is it worth it to pick this up". Remember you only have twelve slots before you can't collect anymore treasure, so make sure you know what treasure you're picking up so you don't run out of space when you find rare treasure.

6.Better treasure. The deeper you go you will find better and more expensive treasure but you will also find more creatures so make sure you are ready for it.

Thank you for reading this post. If you have any questions about TREASURES, feel free reply and ask.
The game https://alakajam.com/11th-alakajam/1089/treasures/

Didn't get the game to work as a standalone and had to work today but finally sorted out Pyinstaller, Python versions etc. so you can enjoy this gem of a game… ;)

My first game jam, please be gentle (or not) :)
https://alakajam.com/11th-alakajam/1060/flooded-ruins/

Play Wandering Soul Here

'Tis a hard game. I'd advise not playing it if you aren't comfortable with bullet hells. lol

I had some framework problems, but it was really fun and I had a good experiense (it was my first game jam). It was hard and time was passing too fast, but I managed to make a game

Thanks to the organizers for this event!

Mid-jam I feared that I won't have anything remotely playable, but in the end I was able to submit something.

What went well

• The scope was rather well chosen all things considered. Fortunately I was able to shave off a lot of features that I have initially planned, without compromising the core gameplay too much.
• I was very pleased to discover the pixel tool in Affinity Photo.
• Choice of a 12x12 tiny block size helped a lot, since this was my first foray into pixel art after two decades.
• Love2d was great to use, I didn't have any hickups.
• Somehow I managed to retain a normal sleep schedule.

What went poorly

• I have realized way too late that my logic for making pieces fall after explosion is wrong. This makes the game harder than intended.
• I've spent too much time animating the conveyor belt, when I realized I could have had it done in a few minutes.
• The controls are not well explained and somewhat unintuitive, they require more work. This is similar to my previous game, so definitely something to work at.
• Too much time wasted just playing around with the game rather than coding.

What's next
I'd like to continue working on this one a bit. There are so many features that the game is missing:

• Music and sound.
• Actual puzzles, requiring some planning.
• More levels.
• Crawling, jumping, falling…

Some of the features I wanted to have in the original game. In my head the game should have looked much more like ancient ruins, in the current version one has to squint quite a bit to find the theme.

• Sand tiles that always spill over.
• Buttons and doors.
• Water and water bricks.
• Traps.

What went wrong?

• Wasted time writing boilerplate that should have been base code
• Should have brought in Tiled editor immediately
• Base code didn't have audio, didn't end up shipping any
• I might have RSI? Typing all weekend hurts like hell
• Wasted time on the snakes when they don't really have any place in gameplay
• Didn't build gameplay around "Give the player interesting decisions" and "Give the player a reason not to press the button" principles. The game isn't really challenging, even slightly
• Wasted warm-up weekend building a web service that I didn't end up shipping
• Wasted time on making a resizable canvas which didn't work and didn't ship

What went right?

• Learned how to use TypeScript and work around JavaScript's footguns. So now all my games can be HTML5
• Kind-of ECS turned out okay
• Flavor text was fun to write
• Premise is high-concept, avant-garde, and post-modern, maybe I'll re-use it
• Pathfinding only has non-critical bugs in it
• Probably a personal record for most diversity of NPCs and interactive objects in any game I've made
• Recorded video of the jam, which I could make into a timelapse or something
• The object layer in Tiled was really helpful, resulting in a much more complex game map than any of my older games
• First game I've made with multiple levels
• State machine for level progress and transitions works pretty well
• The game is generally architected a little better than my older games

What can I do different next time?

• For warm-up weekend, make sure the base code can play sound and load maps from Tiled
• Review video during warm-up weekend
• Focus on "What does the player do? What's the fun part?" from the start
• Refactor ECS so it's easier to use

Hi, this is my fisrt jam, and my first project, hope you like it, looking forward to play your games, it had fun building mine.
https://emmalp.itch.io/papespanic