Results are finally in and they are interesting ! I'll make this post to conclude my participation to this Ludum Dare.

Ratings

When I submitted this game, I really didn't believe in it, there were a lot of things I could not make properly and I thought I would get very bad ratings. But in the end this was great ! Not my best ratings overall, but I still managed to be #10 in the Theme category :smiley: . Not really a category I was looking for but I'm still happy !

Here is my evolution from previous Ludum Dare participations :

Unsurprisingly, my Fun score is the worst : there is not much to do in the game, it is slow, it is full of bugs... I was really hoping to find interesting game mechanics but was not very inspired. I also got a smaller rating in Graphics than last time. From comments I thought it would be a bit better, but it's not so bad :slight_smile: . So overall my previous games were better games. But...

I got a much better score in Theme !

My idea was to have a world which is getting smaller and smaller, and to have the player go through the same level day after day, but with differences due to the disappearing of the world. In the end I didn't manage to create that as cleverly as I wanter gameplay-wise, but I guess people liked the idea !

I have better audio !

Okay, not a big increase, but still, I keep improving little by little. I get most of my points from sounds, as I never made music. This time, I wanted to have some music. I made some 2-3 notes game over and opening "musics", which I quite like. I actually also tried a longer melody which was only in the title screen but I sadly didn't have any comment about that. People probably skip it directly :slight_frown: . Still, this forced me to actually create some music and I really hope to have something better next time !

Better mood !

Okay, from what I read a lot of people don't really know how to rate this category and I'm not quite sure too. But this is my best rating in this category, which means people liked my little story and narration. I'll come back to that.

The story

I usually do games which are not serious at all, with bad jokes and all. This time, I was inspired to do something more serious and personal, and it was very interesting. My game tells the story of two lovers living in a lovely house. One day, the world around them disappears and it keeps disappearing everyday, confining them in their house. At the end, the player has the choice to leave or staying stucked with the girl. As I explained, it was kind of metaphorical and personal.

Here is my interpretation of the story, which I didn't give : the boy is in love with the girl, but there is actually something wrong. The rest of the world disappearing represents what the boy is losing day after day because his relationship with her is taking all of his time. While the boy tries to fix that, the girl doesn't care. Some people complained that the girl wasn't helping in the game, but it was intentional. I wanted to show that despite all the love showing, there was actually something wrong : the boy sees his life escaping him and looks for help but the girl does not understand.

Now it was really interesting to see the interpretation of other people. Some comments I got : "I think I grasped the metaphor, it has some meaning to me too", "Nice that you offered a choice at the end! Wasn’t too easy for me, I could relate to the situation! Thanks for making this game!", "I’m not sure why you hate the player so much in a game about the perils of love. Maybe that’s the point. Hmmm…", "I thought the partner seemed really passive [...] It made the last choice pretty easy for me. Maybe that was the point, but the partner would have been more likable as a character and the loving relationship more believable with some teamwork in the gameplay[...] Love takes two sides working together.", "Despite the fairly short buildup, the ultimate decision has a lot of weight behind it"

These are really unusual comments and I loved reading them. This really pushes me to keep in that direction for future work, as it's something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. I'd like to thank all the people who let a comment : @sgadrat, @gozz, @simonhutchinson, @bunnery, @diegoctorguet, @r8berto, @blinry, @kevtukk, @mandarad, @willowblade, @ryte2byte, @tweedle, @smiling-cat-entertainment, @rixud, @shiitman, @zeriver, @davidthelazar, @nedmakesgames, @gaiusjulius, @feltip, @axoona, @stuntddude, @sparrow, @m-1 . Sorry for those who died in front of the phone booth :sweat_smile:

Some lessons learned

• Test the game more and fix major bugs. People won't necessarily read your warnings in the game page, so it's better to have something with less content but that does not frustrate the player.
• Same thing for graphics : it's better to keep it small and have everything perfect than a lot of things with inconsistent quality. I saw lots of games in the top rankings of Graphics which are very simple but clean. While I don't want to abandon the hand-drawn style, I think I can do better.
• I need real music if I want to improve in the Audio category.

See you in Ludum Dare 39 ! :grin: