Believe it or not, my game didn't place top 15! :'(

But I don't really care about that! What I was more interested in was how this entry compared to my last. So here's the results of my previous Ludum Dare #40 entry: Shape Invasion

And here's the results from my entry for this Ludum Dare: The Landscape Hates You!

Overall ranked 113 places higher

Fun ranked 81 places higher

Innovation ranked 112 places higher

Theme ranked 207 places higher (highest high!)

Graphics ranked 201 places higher

Audio ranked 27 places lower

Humor ranked 147 places higher

And Mood ranked 129 places higher

Honestly, I was fully expecting my LD49 entry to rank lower than my previous entry; but I'm very glad that mostly isn't the case! I guess I'll now give my opinions on the improvements and deprovements:

FUN

How enjoyable a game is?

I can see how Landscape does better than Shape Invasion in this category. There's actual LEVELS in this game, allowing for a more unique experience than Shape Invasion's repetitive boring gameplay. And also how there's better interaction between the player and obstacles in Landscape.

INNOVATION

What it does different from the rest?

Well it sure is more unique than Shape Invasion's barrage of shapes that you gotta destroy. I didn't know how to use GameMaker: Studio's Box2D physics system, so I had to come up with something non-physics related. After typing up a handful of ideas for roughly an hour, I decided to go with this:

It hurt my soul a bit just going back to the footage I had recorded. Those recordings hold some real bad memories. It's seriously unlikely if I WANNA make a timelapse out of the development!

If you've played my entry, you can tell that some of these ideas didn't make it to the final game. Elemental blocks suggests particle effects, something I'm not too familiar with in GameMaker, so I decided to can that idea. Tower blocks and Exploding blocks didn't make their way in because that would just be annoying; though at the time I only thought this about the Tower blocks, it's only with hindsight that a block randomly exploding and hurting/killing the player would just be cheap.

You know what? Since I'm talking about my godawful experience making this entry, I may as well include my journal(?) that I wrote during the jam. It was originally my ideas document, but then it just became a devlog sort of. I'll have a .txt file here, but if you want to (for some reason), I'll include the original LibreOffice document, for those who care about when it was made (like yours truly):

.txt file: (with added note that are not in the .odt file!)

.odt file:

Uh, make sure you have the zoom at 100%! Just in case things look weird!

Shape Invasion was just a bunch of objects piling up, and you gotta destroy them or else the game ends! Oh my!

THEME

How adequate and unique is the theme implementation?

Is it just me, or is Innovation and Theme kinda the same thing? Well, anyways, this was the biggest improvement upon my previous entry, and that makes a lot of sense. The Landscape Hates You! has levels filled with blocks that behave erratically, and it's NOT just a bunch of physics objects piling up, making the game LAG because I didn't give a care about game management!

As stated above, I pretty much couldn't use GameMaker: Studio's physics engine, so I had to come up with a compromise. Whereas Clickteam Fusion's physics system was just a matter of importing the Physics object, and assigning physics behaviors to the objects that are to be affected by physics. I haven't dedicated any real time to learning how to use GameMaker's physics, and honestly I don't want to; at least, not right NOW, because I have a seriously bad taste in my mouth from participating in this compo.

GRAPHICS

How good does the game look? Or at least, how charming the programmer art is.

Yikes, I keep yapping on about my terrible experience with Ludum Dare #49, but it really CANNOT be understated how distraught I was. And graphics was where it reached it's absolute boiling point! I was legitimately CRYING from all the stress while animating the player character! I swear, even NOW, when I remark on this point of the development, god forbid, I still feel tears welling up. Though ironically, that isn't happening as I type this, but I DID feel a slight bit of tear-welling for a second.

In the roughly 4 years since a last participated in a Ludum Dare event, my artistic skills have gotten significantly better! And I certainly wanted to showcase that in my entry. In my return posts from before the jam started, I knew the first thing I should've done was to replace my profile picture.

This was my original picture:

Yeah, I couldn't draw at ALL back in 2017. But as my skills grew, and I returned to the site, I decided to replace that picture with a self-portrait:

I wish I could've made a drawing for the thumbnail of Landscape but I was rushing real hard to get this game out the door in time, and I'm not a big fan of the name I came up with in mere seconds before making the first of a couple builds before submitting. But I'm going a little off topic here; all I could show for my drawing skills is that I can do a MUCH better walking/running cycle than previously.

To compare, here's the walking animation in Shape Invasion:

And here's the running animation in The Landscape Hates You!:

I mean, even the Landscape animation is a little awkward, but there isn't any shrinking proportions unlike the Shape animation.

I also had the idea of giving the block types different sprites to indicate what they are; but I then decided that it would be better if the player didn't know what the block they step on will do ahead of time. I'm not sure how the game would've changed had I taken the time to include different sprites, but I know for certain that the block types would've looked something like this that I made for an unrelated project a few months back:

Just in case you're interested, it was gonna be a puzzle game where these blocks would have to interact to reach some goal. It didn't really go anywhere.

Good lord, this has been going on for so long, and there's THREE other categories! I should make the rest of this post a little shorter!

AUDIO

Are the sound effects good? Does the music sound really good? Or is the sound design/voice overs very fitting/good/hilarious?

I absolutely DESPISE making music! Currently, I believe that a bad drawing is embarrassing for only a little bit; but a bad musical composition is torture for several times longer! Admittedly, I don't have very much experience with writing music, but I have a pretty hard time bringing myself to get past the starting phase of a track.

I think the music I made for Shape Invasion was absolutely horrific, yet it scored highest in the Audio category! Go figure. This time around, I simply didn't have time to make music; so my game could only have some sound effects. I elaborate on the 'boing' sound in the text files above, but the sound of Break blocks is just me going "KRKRKRKRCKRKKRCKKRKCKRKCRK" in the phone's microphone and editing it together in Audacity.

You know what? I'll add the full recordings in this post as well! So you can hear the sound effects that never were! There's extra boings!, a few jumps!, and me making weird demon noises as well! The second file is mostly me recording landing/footstep sounds that didn't make it into the final game, and that's were the 'jump' clips are. At the start of the 2nd recording, I even managed to make a perfect stapling sound with my mouth, unintentionally, of course! I didn't have much time to record these, only a few minutes really. So yeah, here's the recordings and sound files! I know you'll love this, @peace-of-cake-games!

There's just not that much going on in Landscape, so it makes complete sense that it would rank lower in this regard.

HUMOR

The funny stuff in a game. Whether it's witty dialogue, silly sounds, or just being amusing unintentionally.

Well, Landscape does have those 'boing' sounds, and Shape has witty dialogue. Thinking about it, I can kinda see how Landscape wins in this regard. Shape only has some witty dialogue at the start, while Landscape has those sound effects all around the game. It's surprising that in both of these entries, it was the part that I thought was the worst/didn't put all that much effort into that ranked highest overall!

MOOD

What's the feeling or vibe you get from the game?

It's shocking to see that LANDSCAPE managed to score higher! Probably the thing that I hate most about this entry is how BARREN it looks! I barely even got to show off my artistic ability! Though it's not like I'm a professional artist, absolutely not!

This one's a mystery to me.

OVERALL

How everything meshes together.

In all, I'm glad to see that this game is an improvement in ratings; though it still was nowhere NEAR worth all the mental torture it took to get here! It really sucks, because I don't even really feel like doing anything regarding game development after this! I do feel like I'd be better off forgetting this even happened. I'm still very grateful the game managed to escape the Danger Zone and get a rating, I really am. Really, the worst thing about all this is that I made all those return posts, and now I just kinda feel like leaving AGAIN!!! I am now SO glad that Ludum Dare happens only twice a year!

In November, we are going to be moving to a new house; it's not far from where we already live, so it won't be too bad. But I still am feeling a bit stressed out about it. I mentioned earlier that I briefly felt tears come to my eyes, but right now I'm definitely feeling their presence.

Ever since I was young, I felt worried about missing out on something forever. It's a real curse of mine that's been lingering inside me for over a decade. And Ludum Dare 50 is most definitely something I DO NOT WANNA MISS!! I know I've already missed a lot as is; but just in general, I am terrified of what the future has in store, and that does not just regard Ludum Dare 50.

So, if you actually bothered reading this far in: first of all, I'm sorry this post is so long. I have a tendency of wanting to give as many details as possible regarding a topic, and I just wanted to really get this out here, as it's been a while since my last real post here.

Secondly, I have just one question to ask you all before ending this post:

What was your most miserable/painful time during a Ludum Dare event (that you'd rather forget)?

I'd really like to know; though I realize that this is kind of a touchy subject. Though I will NOT guarantee that I'll see them immediately, I really want to relax a bit and just leave this Ludum Dare behind. And as always, you do not have to answer the question! But I'd be interested nonetheless.

Anyways, thanks for reading this, and have a good night, everyone!