Ludum Dare 31 has come and gone, but many great projects featured PlayCanvas over the course of the weekend. Here’s your round up for our involvement in one of the most popular Game Jams in the world.

What is the Ludum Dare?

Remaining active for over 12 years (making it one of the longest Game Jams in existence) to this day LUDUM DARE is an event run by game developers for game developers. During a Ludum Dare, ‘developers from around the world spend a weekend creating games based on a theme suggested by the community’ competing for a grand prize of nothing. Crazy we know, but this grand prize is for good reason. Your prize is your product.

Ludum Dare 31 and PlayCanvas

Over the past weekend there was some great developing happening with PlayCanvas in the Ludum Dare. You can find the projects on our explore page but these incredible developers endured espionage grade sleep deprivation and probably experienced the full spectrum of human emotion. So for their efforts, we’ll happily give their creations some love.

The theme for LD31 was ‘Entire Game On One Screen’.

PlayCanvas user FELLADRIN made a colourful and thoroughly addictive balloon grabbing game called Ora Bolas! (seen below).

CREFOSSUS incorporated sky high teddy bears and computer brain interfaces in his 3D conceptual game. You can dig into the crazy story behind his project by clicking here.

Winter Blast, a twin stick shooter style game was also created over the course of the weekend. In this game you play a snowman in the unfortunate position of being subjected to wave after wave of evil, life draining snowmen. How long will you survive?

One game ‘jumped’ right into LD entry with Boing. Including things like super cool level transitions, the finished game is an incredibly fun side scrolling 2D style game. Why not check it out here?

While admittedly the finished version of Last Line of Defense is still in progress (post competition), one developer still managed to put together a fun tower defense game. Why not help this developer finish their game by commenting your advice in their devlog?

If you have enjoyed playing any of these games, log in on the Ludum Dare site and give them a well deserved vote on their respective Ludum Dare pages. You can also watch, star and comment on the games devlog via their PlayCanvas Pages. Replying to devlog posts in particular can really help the creator improve their project as you advise help them.

PLAYHACK December

If you feel that a weekend is too much of a rush to take part in a game jam then we have a great alternative for you. Last week we started our second PLAYHACK, after some great entries in our first PLAYHACK.

Our game jams work slightly to Ludum Dare but only in the amount of time given (1 month in our case) and the fact that we provide the model for your game. If this interests you, then you can find out everything you need to know about PLAYHACK December in our introductory blogpost and maybe we will be talking about your game at the end of the month.

Its been a year full of huge announcements for us and the first iteration our Asset Store is certainly no small matter. From the PlayCanvas Store to a Ludum Dare deal (and everything in between), here’s what has happened at PlayCanvas over the past week.

PlayCanvas Store

Today we launched the Beta version of the PlayCanvas Store! While the current version only has around 40 3D models in total, as the PlayCanvas Store grows we should hope to see thousands of game ready assets become available to our community. Try the beta for free at https://store.playcanvas.com/.

This preview version of the store features assets from 4 of our great partners:

http://www.propsplanet.com/
http://gamedevmarket.net/
http://cgtrader.com/
http://3dmodels-textures.com/

Soon we’ll be giving all of our PlayCanvas users the chance to become vendors, opening up their assets to over 20,000 PlayCanvas game developers. If you’re interested in becoming a vendor for the PlayCanvas store, please get in touch: sales@playcanvas.com

Features

Cubemap Textures

We now support cubemap assets. In turn have also deployed a cubemap editor which allows you to create cubemaps by assigning 6 images to each slot of the cube. To make your materials appear reflective you can reference a cubemap, then the material will reflect the sides of the cube (pending that you assign a cubemap to the Reflection section of a material).

Skybox Scene Setting

We also support Scene Skyboxes. Before if you wanted to make a skybox you needed an Entity with a skybox component, but now you can create a cubemap and then assign that cubemap to the skybox slot in the Scene Settings.

Material Upgrades

We’ve deployed more and more interesting features to the material editor. Look out for more big things happening here.

Particles

Our particle system beta is moving forwards. We’re getting close to releasing this for everyone. Get in touch if you’d like to try it out early.

Community

PLAYHACK December

We are 4 days in to our 2nd game jam and this month you talented developers have a pretty appropriate model to play with. We’ve given you Santa and one of his ‘normal nosed’ reindeer to keep you company this December. Find out everything you need to know here.

Ludum Dare 31 – DEAL!

If a month seems like too long to make a game. This weekend is Ludum Dare 31, a 48 hour game making competition. It’s a great way to get a feel for the full process of imagining, designing, building and then shipping a game.

We’re running a special deal this weekend. If you enter Ludum Dare and complete a game using PlayCanvas we’ll give you a FREE PRO 15 account for a full year. Can’t say fairer than that! See the Ludum Deals page for more details.

Stay In The Loop

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