On the one hand, I might be a bit late to the whole Worldle-variant thing. But on the other hand, I made a game for something other than Ludum Dare! That makes a change…

This game’s available at https://slidlegame.com .

In the 5×5 grid of letters, there are two overlapping five-letter words – one horizontal, one vertical. Your goal is to reveal both of them at once. Click and drag to slide letters around the grid. More detailed instructions available from the question-mark in the top right hand corner.

A game about balance.

Use the arrow keys or WASD to move and push cubes around, use the spacebar to jump and push downwards.

Over time, cubes will drop in from above – your goal is to stay balanced for as long as possible, and also keep hold of as many cubes as you can. The game ends when all your cubes fall off. Good luck!

Downloads:

Windows
HTML5
Source

The given theme was “Digging Deeper”. So I started with a vague idea about the “Deep State”, and ended up with this.

Your mission is (a) to figure out what’s truly going on, and (b) to keep the red string / pins of your conspiracy corkboard nice and tidy. Click and drag to move pins around. Once no red strings are crossing over, new information (which is to say, new pins and string) will appear.

(Sometimes it won’t be possible to uncross all the strings – so once you’ve dragged things around enough, a bin will appear in the bottom right corner that you can drag things into and unstick yourself.)

Once you’ve ███████████████████████, the game ███████ ████████████████. You can’t ██████████████████████████ – ████████████████████████████. To ████████ the game, use the █████████████████████████████████, █████████████ ██████████████████████████ world map. Good luck!

Downloads:
Windows
Source – Love2D archive. To run this on Linux, install Love2D, then run “love InkblotShade.love”.

Okay, it’s been a while since I actually posted any games here, rather than just uploading them to ldjam.com and then calling it a day. In the time since Ludum Dare, I even got round to creating a separate Android build and making it available on the Google Play Store, before doing anything with this website. But on the plus side, all I need to do is edit the published date on this post, to make it look like I posted it just after Ludum Dare – and nobody will be any the wiser! (Ahem.)

A friendly game of pool – but on a circular table.

Every shot must be played clockwise around the table. You’re not completely stuck in a loop, since it’s possible to bounce the cue ball backwards off things – but it’s difficult enough to do that that I think the theme name still applies. Full support for both singleplayer and local multiplayer.

Downloads:
Windows
Mac
Linux
Source
Android – Google Play Store

This Ludum Dare’s theme was “Keep it alive”. I typed it into Google Image Search for inspiration, and got lots of houseplants, relationships, and TCP/IP connections. So naturally I based a game on that last one, and made a Space Invaders hacking game about ping-pong balls.

Arrow keys or WASD to move around. If you’re near a ping-pong ball, press Space to shoot it.

Your aim is to stay connected to all the computers for long enough to hack into the network. When a ping-pong ball hits a computer, it “pings” the computer and keeps the connection alive. If computers stay disconnected for too long, they will alert the authorities and you will lose the game.

The log text to the right will fill up over time. The level is complete when it reaches the bottom of the screen. There are seven levels, each with a new type of device. Good luck!

Downloads:
Windows
Source – Love2D archive. To run this on Linux, install Love2D, then run “love keepalive.love”.

Okay, I admit it – I kinda ignored this Ludum Dare’s theme of “Start with nothing”. Having been playing around with GLSL for a couple of weeks, I really wanted to spend this Ludum Dare writing shaders rather than complicated game mechanics. And I may have had this idea floating around in my head for some time before the start date. In my defence, “nothing” is the number of points you start off with! So it’s not completely unrelated!

Making this game did lead to me learning all sorts of new things about GLSL, though. For one thing, I learned that the GLSL pow() function is only actually well defined for positive numbers – which means that if your blob-generating code relies on raising a negative number to the power of three, some machines will give you a negative number while others will just arbitrarily give you a positive number instead, so you end up with twice as many blobs and no big spaces to dodge between. At least it was a quick fix when I learned what was going on.

You are the small blob to the left of the screen. Click and hold the mouse button to move around. Each time you make it from one side to the other without falling into any larger blobs, you get one point. Post your high scores in the comments.

Or you could just sit there and stare at the gently shifting inkblot patterns. Either are good.

Downloads:
Windows
Source – Love2D archive. To run this on Linux, install Love2D, then run “love InkblotShade.love”.

The given theme for this Ludum Dare was “Your life is currency”. So of course I had to take that literally.

In this game, you are the Archipelago Dollar, the new currency of a loosely-aligned trade federation of island city states. Every time you are used for trade, you gain points.

Click on a city to increase the money supply there.

The black icons show which goods are produced by a city, and which goods are in demand. The yellow circles show how much money is in a city.

Cities cannot buy goods unless they have plenty of money. If a city has no money, it cannot even sell goods.

Cities with more money will produce more goods, but also demand more.

Cities with lots of money will gain more money over time – if any city experiences hyperinflation, you lose. Cities with little money will lose money over time – if three cities run out of money, you lose.

Each trade slightly reduces the total money in the system.

More cities will join the trade federation over time.

Any resemblance to real-world macroeconomics is entirely coincidental.

Downloads:
Windows
Linux
Source

An abstract dragging-things-around-and-not-knowing-what-things-mean simulator.

Controls: left click to drag things into one another, right click to sacrifice them into several less-complex ones.

Goal: Turn your

into a

Good luck!

Downloads:
Windows
Mac
Linux
Source

A Tetris-like hexagonal line-joining-up game.

Tiles fall from the top of the screen. Press space to rotate them. Use the arrow keys to move left or right (or down, to fall more quickly).

Each tile can connect to other tiles in different directions. Once you’ve got a group completely joined up (no mismatched edges), it’ll vanish, freeing up space and scoring you points. Larger and more densely-connected groups score more points.

The game ends when you run out of space.

(And if you were wondering – ‘rajola’ is Catalan for ‘floor tile’.)

Downloads:
Windows
Source – Love2D archive. To run this on Linux, install Love2D, then run “love Rajola.love”.
Play online – WebGL

This Ludum Dare, while I was waiting for the rest of the Dark Field Games team to arrive so we could get started, I sketched out a couple of game ideas for the newly announced theme – “Combine Two Incompatible Genres”. We decided to use the turn-based vertical-scrolling-shmup idea for the team game, so I spent Saturday on that – making the artwork, hacking together a decent-looking rain effect, finding some suitably atmospheric royalty-free music to use, and generally working on getting the atmosphere right – while JDWalker and Cosmosquark handled all the coding and gameplay.

Afterwards, though, I thought about those other game ideas I’d sketched out, and decided to code one of them up in the remaining 24 hours. So that’s why I also have a turn-based six-degrees-of-freedom space shooter set in Ancient Rome.

Two Second Detective

The back alleys of Fain City are filled with criminal types. But tonight is especially unusual.

You control Detective Bob in a top down turn based vertical shooter. Shoot the bad guys and look out for suspicious activity!

The music is Mystery Sax by Kevin MacLeod.

Downloads:
http://sasha.sector-alpha.net/~cosmosquark/LD41/two_second_detective_windows.zip

Etiam in Aeri

Controls:
Hold the right mouse button to rotate the camera. Click the buttons to control your villa. Press Esc or Space to restart the current level.

Buttons:
Top row: Strafe left / Thrust up / Increase speed / Stop / Thrust Down / Strafe right

Middle row: Fire / Do nothing

Bottom row: Yaw left / Pitch up / Roll anticlockwise / Roll clockwise / Pitch down / Yaw right

…not that you really need to know those. I’d say it’s much better to learn what they all do by trying things out.

Downloads:
Windows
Mac
Linux
Source