Results time! Ludum Dare 43 has come and gone, festivities are over, and it's time to consider just how did-we-doodly-do! Needless to say, our team at Whales And Games is once again very proud of the results that we have obtained from Super Sellout, our runner where you sacrifice your integrity for sponsor money. Making this the third time that we've have achieved a game in the 100-Overall, here are our results!

Rumours say that when we saw the 5th place slapped on the rankings, a collective part of our team screamed on the inside right in the middle of new year celebrations. To get 5th with a 4.6 in Graphics is a really outstanding surprise and one that completely caught-us off left-field. Getting 39th in Audio and 44th in Humor is also heart-warming and validating for each correspondent team member.

However, not all is perfect, and clearly aware that there were both Innovation and Fun problems on our game as we released it, and the feedback and ratings we have received definitely tell us that there’s still stuff we got to tweak and polish further.

Like last time, we’re glad that we were able to experience so many new games and everyone’s creative vision. Although last time we only sneaked in @sebastianscaini’s game into a fanart of ours but this time around we not only snuck theirs from Dark Roads, but also tagged in Dog Dog Dungeon by @bubblewandgames, Please Player by @noa-calice and Sacrificio Inc. by @reality-blind, as well as ourselves into a single four-seat car!

This is not to say that there weren’t more fantastic entries, much per contrary as proven by the likes of Serial Dater from @coleslaughter and company, Master Key from @jeremy-ryan, Medic! by @eryph and Rogues Like Beer by @nickzangus between many others! Unfortunately, they didn’t fit into the car this time, but who knows in the future?

Like always, this wouldn’t be possible without the effort of all of our team. If you’ve read our post-mortem, you might already know that the goal we set out for this jam was to test our synergy as a team. While we will be having to adapt a better labour structure in the future and will have to tone down on desk fisting, we’d still like to thank our team, and, completely agnostic to who was chosen to make this post, thank @moski for his incredible work with the graphics that gave him the so deserved rank, @zachary-blystone for joining us again handling the game’s on-the-spot audio, @kroltan for his patience and programming expertise, @jorgegamedev for wrapping together the project into a fantastic amalgamate, and last-but-not-least @ponchoguy for his support at always being available to take up a task if it needed to be done. And of course, @robinhoodpt which unfortunately was unable to join us this time around, but still asked if there was any way he could help around.

Thank you for this great end-of-the-year final and for playing Super Sellout. We look forward to seeing more from everyone in the future! If you’d like to come to chat and discuss your results or ratings, we’ve got a Discord server open 24/7, and, of course, if you’d like to keep up with us for future editions, we also have a Twitter and Facebook pages you can follow!

2019 will be our waggy-iest year yet, and we got a whole sea of fun planned in advance! Cheers! :fireworks::whale:

As an addendum from our team,

While we are happy with the results we have obtained, we have seen a lot of people in the front-page who are feeling down with the results they have gained from their games, at which point we have to intervene and say don't feel down because of numbers.

At the end of the day, you have a game that you've made yourselves, and while you might be feeling a bit down because you think it's not as good as others, it is not completely true. Art is subjective, and what some might enjoy, others might pass to the side. Take that opportunity and take into consideration what you can do better, and don’t let it demotivate you.

It's clearer than the sun on the sky that the current rating system is definitely borked in a variety of ways that we hope to write up in the future (most notably how games with no feedback given even qualify when they shouldn’t and somehow get seven awards), and that you should always take your results with a grain of salt, even if they're great.

Don’t demotivate, don’t feel down, take a moment to step-back and think about how you can take the world by storm next.