An astonishing number of games don't mention the controls used anywhere within the game.

This might sound like a strange observation coming from someone whose entry was vague about controls, but part of the PURPOSE of my game was for the player to have to decipher what to do. And, even so, I still directed the player to "click" and told them to use "Space" with a piece of text that spanned half the vertical length of the screen. Aside from those, arrow keys are the only other controls used in my game. So, even for a game whose INTENT is for a player to FIGURE IT OUT, I still told players 66% of the controls. So many people didn't mention them at all - it's astonishing. And, if you tell me, "it's on the LD page," I'll respond by saying, "You gave me an entire folder of stuff to download and not once in that folder are any controls mentioned?"

Here's a fun fact: I had a power outage during the review process. Guess what I could play during that power outage - previously downloaded games that told me the controls. I couldn't go on some site and learn the controls, nor would I want to.

You have to convince me (or anyone) to play your game.

The second I can't play your game in a browser or without downloading something, you've given yourself an extra job of needing to convince me to proceed. When I began the jam review, I only played in-browser games. After all, with thousands of game options, why would I download some random game that might be junk? That being said, I remember the very first game I downloaded from this jam. And, you know why I downloaded it? I was intrigued. By the title. And by a picture. By a post. That game was "Unicorn Fart Jam."

You're intrigued too, aren't you? I also remember the second game I downloaded; I think I was convinced by all the glowing comments. Maybe some pictures too. That game was Nabi. Both of those games were worth downloading, for very different reasons. By the way, when the power went out, I played Nabi again. Ironically, to my first point, this game doesn't explicitly tell you the directions, but they are intuitive, and, by that point, I was probably already hooked by the look and feel (and the comments), anyway.

Both those games convinced me (in different ways) to download them. And they set a high bar for future downloads. If your game page says, "this is something I threw together in 6 hours" and you're asking me to download something - I'm not doing it. I'm not wasting my time, if you can't put the effort in.

That being said, I can be convinced in different ways. One game, I was convinced to download because they received a lot of harsh comments in their game feed. In my own game feed, I had someone tell me "its something that I could pull off in way lesser time" so I could sympathize with receiving harsh comments, and I checked out their game.

Some people are d!ck5

That's all I have to say about that.

The Theme should be used WELL (or just don't use it, idc)

I got no problem with the LD40 theme, in spite of my game and its title. But, a ton of people were not very innovative about it, in my opinion. I think this can be factually proven - just look around at all the games that used the theme in the same way. The ones that stood apart were innovative about it. In other words, if your game merely did one of the following:

• the more enemies you have, the harder it gets
• the longer you live, the harder it gets
• the more you collect, the harder it gets

Then, thematically, it wasn't innovative. Also, if your game merely did the above, thematically, then your game probably became difficult quickly, which brings me to my next point:

There were a lot of difficult games

I think a lot of people fell into the theme trap implicit to the theme, "The more you have, the worse it is" and their games became difficult to unplayably difficult, which often became not fun, or worse. In my estimation, the games that elevated themselves in their use of theme did one of these things:

Provided a pressure relief valve.

While they may have included an element that made things get worse (more coins, more food, etc) they also provided a way of getting rid of (dumping) said element.

The simple game, "Brick Racer" comes to mind. I played this game early on, and remember the comments claiming it was too easy. The objective of the game is simple - get from point A to point B. And, yeah, that is simple, if you're going as slow as humanly possible. But, this game has a timed online leader-board. So, the goal is to go fast. The "gas pedal" is essentially a pressure relief valve, or a choice, as it were - you choose your speed, and, therefore, your difficulty level (which brings me to my next point).

AND/OR

They gave the player alternative choices.

"Factory Panic" comes to mind. You can play it one way and have the game progress to a certain difficulty, but, then, because of the various choices available, no matter how difficult it gets, you can always think to yourself, "well, what if I played it this way instead." It might not actually ever become easy, but it can encourage the player to play again, because they're trying something new - a new strategy, approach.

AND/OR

There was a nice difficulty progression.

Early on was easy, so that anyone and everyone could at least play their game for awhile. On the flip side, for the skilled players, the game eventually became rather difficult.

Ludum Dare was fun.

And I plan to participate again.

That's all for now, though there's probably other things I learned. If you have any take-aways that we can all utilize in LD41 (I plan to participate), feel free to post them in the comments. :)