I’m ecstatic to find out that today, The Sentient Cube reached 100 ratings! I’m so happy, I even put my formerly useless Wacom tablet to good use! Observe, my programmer’s art:

On top of that, I have this ridiculous spike on my site’s visit:

I just figured out why this happened, but I’ll get around that later. I’ve got more pressing things to talk about.

First, I’ve rated up to 55 games. I really need to bump this up big time, so I’ve decided to do a live streaming on Twitch.tv on Sunday, 8:00 pm EST. Profile name is japtar10101. I’ll be taking requests, so feel free to post your game’s URL into the comment section.

Second, as per tradition, I talk about 5 more awesome games I recommend you play. Which, albeit, puts a total of 10 games recommended…or about 20% of all the games I’ve rated. Well, without further ado, here’s my list:

Square Quest

A wonderfully compact Legend of Zelda quest where you just fight, explore, and solve puzzles in it’s blocky glory!

Add Removal

A genuinely innovative and smart puzzle game where you have to selectively remove colors to reveal a number combination. An excellent twist on the ye old I Spy game.

Time to Think

Ludum Dare’s answer to Mirror’s Edge. Absolutely gorgeous graphics and tough-as-nails platforming.

Terminally Ill

Incredibly bleak (to a point of parody) story helps sets the tone to this mind-screwing minigame series. Seriously, you expect me to play 2 games at once!?

Kriok

I know this is a really old puzzle game, but I can’t get enough of it! It’s puzzles has more than one solution, and all are very creative.

I’ve mentioned earlier that there was a weird spike on my site. In fact, it turns out Rock, Paper, Shotgun has mentioned my game (among many others) via a Haiku:

The Sentient Cube
Hey, cubes do not roll!
Unless they’re katamaris
Who turned off physics?

Considering most of my visitors are English-speaking countries, this explains the spike well enough. However, a little more Googling reveals far more wide-spread references.

For one, IGN Italia mentions the game:

Restando in tema di blocchi colorati voglio poi citarvi il bel The Sentient Cube, di Omiya Games, praticamente una versione ridotta di Katamari Damacy che con un un po’ di sviluppo extra (e controlli meno “svolazzanti”) potrebbe evolversi in un gioco davvero interessante. Lo scopo di ogni livello è semplicissimo: nei panni di un cubo rotolante (e senziente, almeno stando al titolo del gioco) dovremo toccare gli oggetti colorati per attaccarceli addosso, tramutandoci via via in un’ammasso di forme geometriche colorate che rotola. Mano a mano che le dimensioni di tale matassa di oggetti aumentano gli elementi del fondale che possiamo “inglobare” diventano colorati e le nostre abilità di movimento aumenteranno. Rotolando e assimilando bisognerà raggiungere l’uscita di ciascun livello entro il tempo limite. Facile, colorato e abbastanza efficace, senza contare che in ciascun livello c’è nascosta una patata da trovare e raccogliere. Così, come extra…

Yeah…I can’t read that, so here’s Google Translate’s translation of the webpage.

Another international location I’m apparently having a boom at is Russia. There’s Tiny Games, Small Games, Игры YuWik, and this strange Youtube video.

Lastly, there’s a NSFW Let’s Play video of someone…enjoying the game? I’ll stick with the positive assessment on this one.

Anyways, thanks a lot for all the support!

I have finally uploaded a time lapse video for my LD26 entry, “The Fair King”. Feel free to watch it here!

Clear the stage by dividing the colors by as close as 50% as possible

For me, Ludum Dare is a chance for me to try something that is out of my usual reality. Game making, art creating, very short deadlines. In keeping with this spirit, I decided that I should move myself outside of my comfort zone, and try a brand new game engine, and a brand new platform. I decided to use libGDX for the first time, and make a game aimed towards the Android platform.

I know that it is not best practice to try out new libraries in the 48 hours alloted by LD, but I wanted this to be a learning experience, so I went ahead with it anyway. Here is the usual “what went well” and “what went poorly” breakdown:

What went well:

• Think 5 ideas, pick the 6th: My game idea became simpler each iteration, until I had an idea simple enough that I could implement in a day.
• Porting to android: LibGDX made porting to android really simple, and it motivates you having your game on a mobile platform
• Image levels: Levels in my game can be stored as images. I used Isopix to work on puzzle levels while I was in the train.
• Version management with Git: I had to rollback the game a few times when I tried to add some functionalities, and Git made it really simple.

What went poorly:

• LibGDX is quirky: You have to use power of 2 textures for portability, the font class is a mess, and different drawing models use y-positive or y-negative axis.
• I’m tired of autotracker: but I haven’t yet learned to properly use any sequencing software for linux. I want to fix this by next LD.
• No playtesting: means that I missed some pretty obvious interface mistakes. For example, I should throw away invalid moves, instead of showing an obvious “lose” screen for these, also it is not obvious where you should begin the line from.

It was fun, and I’m happy with the result. Please give me your opinions here.

Just finished my web game, Centroid! It’s sort of a puzzle game; the objective is to find the center of mass of objects on the screen. I am not sure if it’s too easy or not. ;P

You can try it out here: http://gdriv.es/centroid

This was my second time participating in LD48. The minimalist theme was helpful since I didn’t have too much time to work over the weekend.

I look forward to playing all the great games I keep seeing posted!

Finally! I have posted my game

I’m kinda sleepwalking and can’t think straight… but I *think* everything is all right. I’ve spend the last 6 or so hours polishing and adding levels. There were still a few things I wanted to add to the game, but it is mostly completed as I imagined.

Making mobile games is kinda fun! libGdx has some very strange bugs and pitfalls, but I will let that for the postMortem.

As for now – I will go get some sleep, and you will go play my game

Yay! For once I can say that I finished a game. Although it’s not much, the base is there and I can add as much content as I want. It’s a pretty satisfying feeling.

Linewalker is a 1D adventure/puzzle sidescroller. The game is rendered in 2D, of course, but you’re constrained to moving only left or right. Multiple dimensions are faked using portals which take you from one lineworld to another. Designing puzzles with these constraints is extremely difficult and as such I would hardly consider the puzzles I put in the game to be very puzzle-like. Some time after LD26 is over and judging is done I’ll get around to adding puzzleworld2 where the current game ends. Hopefully it will be a bit harder. I had hoped to have three puzzleworlds for LD, but by the time I finished the first one I realized that goal was far too ambitious.

Best of luck to those who are still working on their games. Never give up.

Atrakt 4096 alpha – Progress update before the last run (~32h)
Significant additions to the gameplay, i’m getting more and more confident – my stuff is getting playable already. The game needs sounds, level complete screen, AI tweaking, pathfinding and score system. I’ll try to add at least sound and an additional level or two more in the remaining couple of hours. Check the progress here.

trap room

a short puzzle about escaping from a room full of trap

play on kongregate

this is my first game this year, as I’m joined #onegameamonth

this is my 3rd game so far, and actually my first non-jam game because the other two are LD game

I created this with flashpunk+ogmo editor ex

when i’m creating this, i’m thinking about making some simple game with simple mechanic that i actually can do it and finish it. i’m choosing puzzle genre because i think for simple game, puzzle will be the best choice. well, i dunno how this turn out before i get some feedback, but i hope you will enjoy this game…

Hello fellow game developers,

I wanted to make a plug for a game I’ve just submitted to Steam Greenlight.  The game is called Camera Obscura, and it’s being developed by a small group of college students from UC Irvine.  We started it in a game jam almost two years ago, and we liked the idea so much that we’ve continued to develop it into a full-length game.

Camera Obscura is a puzzle-platformer that revolves around a unique mechanic that allows the player to activate a camera flash so bright that it creates “afterimages” of all visible platforms.  These platforms are solid enough to walk on, and they can be moved around for a short time, mimicking the player’s movements.  This ability allows players to cross wide chasms, reach high platforms, and otherwise alter the shape of the environment to accomplish the ultimate goal – reaching the top of the mysterious Tower.  You can see some gameplay footage here to get a better idea.

The Greenlight page is right here.  We’d really love your support and your feedback!
Steam Greenlight | Camera Obscura

The game also has a full, custom soundtrack by the amazing Trenton Ng, and we’ve shared a few of the tracks here:
Soundtrack

Thanks for your time,
Brian MacIntosh

Just mere moments ago I clicked submit on Ubuntu Software Center with my October challenge game. Motivated by the challenge I finally got around finishing a game I’ve been working on since Ludum Dare #21 (its actually post compo version of the game).

The game has been pretty much ready for a quite long time, but needed new levels and polish which I constantly put off by bad excuses .
For now the game is Linux only, but the code is written in crossplatform way and I’ve compiled few test versions in Windows using MinGW.

Fingers crossed the game actually gets accepted to the store.

About the game:
-Sliding block puzzle game with twist
-Includes fully featured level editor and online hi-scores

Screenies:

YouTube “Trailer”
(for some reason YouTube really killed the quality of the video)

Hi everyone!

Some of you played my game “Lab Lights,” the game I created for the miniLD #36.
Well if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a difficult puzzle game where you push around batteries, crates, TNT, and magnets with a main goal of lighting up all the lights in each of the 23 levels in order to get to the last room and turn on the generator!

You may play it on my site here:
http://www.zanzlanz.com/GamePage.php?n=Lab%20Lights

Here’s the link to the miniLD entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-36/?action=preview&uid=11407

Screenshot

So here’s what my feedback was like:
When I put it on Newgrounds, it got daily 3rd best flash submission and later front-paged for a few days!  A rush of reviews and comments appeared.  Many people loved the difficulty of the puzzles.  A few people mentioned how rare it is these days to find good puzzle games this hard.  A few people compared it with “Chips Challenge” and “Shove It.”  MDeathM (on Newgrounds) says, “All in all, a phenomenally challenging and engaging puzzle game. Thank you for this creation.”  These words are very nice and I can only thank Ludum Dare for challenging me to make it.
To my surprise, Ryry67dude (on Newgrounds) made an hour long let’s play of it (and rage-quit at level 17) the day after the release!  Here’s his video:
http://youtu.be/8GMa8hw5aJ8

Unfortunately though, not everyone enjoyed the difficulty level of it.  Many people got stuck on level 2 or 7.  Some players mentioned I fried their brains, heehee!

Since I recognize how hard these puzzles are (I describe it as brutal), I made a full walkthrough of all 23 levels.  Here’s the video:
http://youtu.be/XMvwN4WGut8
(You should subscribe to me as well )

Lastly, some people said I should make a sequel.  I was thinking about it lately, and I think it would be a good idea.  I have some new gameplay elements that would be cool to add (Lasers and mirrors, differently sized boxes, teleporters, and boulders).  If you have any ideas, I’ll be happy to hear them

Thanks for listening to my rambling, and thank you Ludum Dare for another fun experience!  If you want, you can rate and review the game in the comments on this post.
- Zanzlanz

I think I’ll go with something semi-obvious: Escaping from a prison-like building.

I’m thinking this will end up being a puzzle game.

That’s it for now.

I intend to participate in this mini, and even though I’m hosting it it seems pretty fair, because I don’t actually know what I’m going to do yet. But I have several ideas…

• A transportation game, sort of like Transport Tycoon. Little innovation value, but probably fun to program and play.
• Sort of a reverse version of the above, where you instead of handling transportation and trying to make a profit from that, you are the customer of transportation. Either as a government kind of thing, or just a company with stores and factories. A little more innovative perhaps, but I’m not sure how it should play yet.
• A factory/conveyor puzzle game, where you build or process some kind of product. Inspired by Manufactoria, among other things. Also not very innovative, but a good thing with puzzle games is you can make lots of levels for them, if the elements are good enough, and they tend to be fun.
• Some sort of industrialization sim, where at a start there’s just a bunch of low tech farms, and then innovations makes things more effective, there becomes a surplus population, cities are formed, new industries are formed, and so on. Think it would be really interesting, but probably too large for an LD.

So just have to figure out which to do… so far I’ve just got my base code up and running.

Hi, it’s been a while since i sit down and do a game myself. So, I really hope i can finish this one in time;)

yue

Well after an incredible amount of work I have finally released my first Flash / ActionScript 2.0 game! You can play it here if you’d like. I hope it is cool to post here because it is relevant in that the original game play idea came from my Cryptid Puzzle Challenge entry in the Mini-Ludum Dare #7 competition back at the beginning of the month.  I also wanted to really share it all with my buds here at Ludum Dare! 

TurnStyle is a unique visual and memory based puzzle game where each of the 15 puzzles are original illustrations that follow a complete story arc over the duration of the game.

Every puzzle is made up of individual pieces which have been randomly rotated so that they are scrambled each time. You must work quickly and efficiently to rotate the individual pieces into the proper alignment before the timer runs out.

There are easy, medium, and hard difficulty puzzles mainly guided by the amount of individual image pieces that make up each puzzle and the way that I break up the images into pieces.

Personal best records are stored locally for score and rotation count per puzzle. Global high scores may be submitted to the Mochi Leaderboards at any puzzle progress screen. You are able to retry a level if the time runs out.

I haven’t submitted it to any portals or whatnot yet so it is living at it’s mochi-ads home right now.  I’m using their encryption, version control platform, advert api, and leaderboards/facebook api.  Seems pretty easy to setup.

I will try to post more about my adventure in creating this game and learning Flash over at my personal site but for now this is finished!

Hey folks- finished my game:

• Windows build
• Mac build
• Source (linux build instructions in readme, requires Gosu available from RubyGems)

CONCEPT:

You’ve received 4 scrambled images of possible cryptids:

Use your Crypto-Computer ™ to unscramble them!

You have 1 minute to complete your task before the
evidence is lost forever.  You will receive a
30 second bonus for each cryptid you discover.

Each cryptid image is made up of 4 individual pieces.
Unscramble each cryptid by clicking on the numbered boxes
to rotate a distinct piece of the puzzle image.

* Left mouse button for clockwise rotation.
* Right mouse button for counter-clockwise rotation.

Enjoy!

Here is a current screenshot from my simple cryptozoology puzzle game.  It is coming along fairly well schedule wise.  I have 3 of 4 crpytid puzzles completed and just need to draw one more so that is good.  I still need sounds and maybe score a little game soundtrack for it too later.  Need a menu, perhaps highscores just for practice coding that and still searching for a title I like.

I’m glad that I finally picked a game scope that allowed me to have something playable early on and really gave me time for polish, tuning, and asset creation.  As this is my 4th LD (2 full, 2 mini) maybe I’m FINALLY learning something about scope.    If anything, I probably went too far on the side of simple but we shall see.

so I couldnt think of what else to do with theme, so here is a little puzzle/score/maze-em-up.
[ This here is the download link ]

sorry its not as funny as my other games

and heres a final desk shot, make sure to note the almost finished pack of hobnobs, the hardcore biscuit for hardcore people

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6esGTALq4
Source: http://sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/minimalist02.fla
Browser Version: http://girlflash.deviantart.com/art/Dot2doT-83299341

My game is done now. You can download it here, enjoy

http://d.skalle.googlepages.com/ld10_final.zip

This zip countains source code and linux executable. Windows executable should come whenever I have the time.

Checked the winning theme this morning (around 7 hours after the start of the competition) and my mind was just blank. I opened up GraphicsGale, drew a bomb which I was quite pleased with, and that was it. No ideas popped into my head, and aside from deciding I wanted to use the bomb I’d drawn, I had nothing to work on or with. I then went out for the afternoon.

I got home 3 hours ago and started doodling around, until about an hour ago I finally have an idea.

It involves trying to detonate all of the bombs on a level by sliding them around so that when one explodes, it ignites the fuses on any unlit bombs next to it. At the start of the level one or more of the bombs will already be lit, and to make things more interesting, the bombs can have different length fuses.

I’m hoping to be able to come up with a range of levels of varying difficulty, but there’s only just over a day left, I want to get at least some some sleep tonight, need to get to bed early tomorrow, and I’m in the mood for coding rather than working out level designs, so I’ll just have to hope I can get the bulk of this written tonight and in the morning, to leave me a couple of hours early evening tomorrow to put together some levels.

I’ll be coding this in FreeBASIC and just using the standard graphics library, so it’ll be cross platform and work without any dependencies, unless I also find the time to add sounds effects and music of course,  in which case it’ll need FMOD.

Got to pop out for an hour now, but when I get back I’ll put together a quick mock-up screen.

It’s got MOON, it’s got NO TEXT, and it’s got blocky pixels, chirpy audio and all the other essentials!

This was a strange “compo”, but several interesting games came out of it and I had a good time working on mine. The 24-hour time limit was rather severly busted, but that’s fine I suppose. DQ means surprisingly little around here, especially since this compo had no voting.

As usual for me, the main idea was a technical one and involved using a sphere-mapped rectangular playing area. As one theme was “moon”, this seemed easy enough to work in. The actual game concept was undetermined until rather late in the process. At first I was thinking that maybe you’d drive across the moon in some vehicle, collecting things… but that didn’t happen, so I changed it. The final game is pretty cool imho, where you drop/stack colored chips onto the moon to make them disappear.

This all sounds very lame and boringly puzzly in theory, but the main challenge is the hideous control scheme. You don’t control your position directly, or even your speed, OR the acceleration – but the next-higher derivative! Tap right and you’ll see very little happen at first, but after a few seconds the moon starts slowly rotating in the chosen direction, and then it goes faster and faster unless you compensate in the other direction. It’s very easy to overcompensate and end up in an oscillating back-and-forth motion where you have no real grasp of what the hell you’re doing, but play the game enough and you can enter into a sort of zen state where you can “feel it” and get along pretty well. This is really essential, since you need to position yourself very accurately over the chips to avoid missing (and thereby creating a new stack which needs to be completed and removed).

Unsurprisingly, most people that tried the game hated it. Once I realized where it was going I pretty much tried to make it as evil as possible, much like a lot of old C64 games which you find in some old dusty drawer without a manual and have no idea whatsoever what to do with. You’d start a game and almost instantly die, and the controls weren’t obvious at all or severely broken. Ah, the heritage.

I’m really happy with the music though, sets the mood nicely. Imho the game is worth playing a few minutes for that aspect alone if you’re a retro geek.

Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read some instructions (that you shouldn’t really get if you want the full frustrating experience).

Download: Windows version (575 kB)

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Quick instructions: Arrow keys to move/rotate, Z to drop chips. Do not drop like-colored chips on top of each other.
There’s a small cheat which might make the controls a tad easier to grasp – type “showyou” at any point to bring up an acceleration graph in the top-right corner.