I made a short video showing how I made my Ludum Dare 48 game, BugDive. https://youtu.be/9hu1jmuS4SU

Thanks again to everyone who played and rated Crashdown during the rating period. During that same time we've been taking notes of your feedback and making an updated, more polished version of the Ludum Dare prototype. This project was a ton of fun, and we all learned a ton. If you get a chance, please check out our version 1.1 and let us know what you think. You can also follow us on twitter to see whatever we all end up doing next!

https://koboldskeep.itch.io/crashdown/devlog/255315/post-jam-version-11-is-out

Well this LD was certainly a ride!

Intro

Our game was a Strand-like, meaning that players can partially see each other's changes to the world. The core gameplay is simple open-world exploration, arranged in a highly linear fashion moving from north to south.

Scoring

Check out our results here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/red-stranding

We didn't very high ratings, and we think we know the reasons.

1. We simply didn't finish everything we wanted. The game is very incomplete, and it's obvious while playing.
2. The artwork is kinda ugly. We didn't have a lot of time to polish the graphics or sprites or anything.
3. The new player experience is very poor. This is elaborated in the Data Analysis section below.

Data Analysis

Since our game connects players to each other via a database, we can see rough analytics about playtime and completion rate.

Note: We gave players the option to play offline, and some did choose to do so, so these numbers do not include those players.

• 64 total players
• 24 made it past day 10
• 6 players (other than us) made it to the goal, Grandma's House
• 22 players never made it past day 3

Day 10 is important to us, because that's when a player becomes maximally connected to the other players. It's a gradual process that starts with zero connectivity on day 1.

So, from these numbers, we can see that about 1/3 of all players likely never encountered another player's effects! Given that this is the core premise of our game, this is quite bad.

However, about 1/3 of all players did make it past day 10.

Special thanks to @ruruie, @cievers, @gcake, @wouter52, and @jitspoe for providing key feedback and testing the game to its full extent!

New Player Experience

Given the data above, and from watching people play our game, we can safely say that the new player experience was quite bad. We probably lost a lot of people early on, who never got to see the Strand-like features. Our ratings almost certainly suffered due to this.

So, what could we have done?

A way to showcase the game's features during the first minute of gameplay would have been nice. We have considered a few options:

• Have an area near the starting house that always shows changes from all players, kinda like a shared sandbox area. This would give players a chance to try out the online features without breaking the game's balance.
• Introduce an item to the game, available from the start, that boosts the player's connectivity rate to the maximum for a day. This would ensure that everyone trying the game for only a minute or two would get to experience the full effects of the online system.
• Do a better job of explaining things in-game. Players who didn't fully understand the online system seemed to become simply confused whenever another player's structure became visible to them.

Cut Features

Time was not friendly to us this LD. We didn't meet a lot of our goals.

• We were planning on having a much larger open world to explore. This was by far the most ambitious part of the project. This did not get finished at all. We completely ran out of time and had to implement the entire level in just a few hours.
• We were planning on having more structures and movement abilities that would help traverse the landscape more easily.
• Enemy AI was cut entirely, and the enemies just move straight towards you. This was primarily due to limitations in Godot's tilemap-based pathfinding support.

Future Plans!!

Yes, we're planning to continue working on this game.

In fact, we've already started working on our first post-jam version, which we plan on releasing in the near future.

Here's a sneak peak of the updated visual style:

If you are interested in playing this post-jam version, please follow the itch.io page, and join our new Discord server!

Discord Server

It's a bit empty right now, but we've made a community Discord server for the game. We intend to use this server as the primary source of feedback on the post-jam version of the game.

Join it here: https://discord.gg/wVXhx7CCQr

Grandma is waiting!

Playing the top 3 games from each category

https://www.twitch.tv/itsboats

I was one of the creators for "A Taste of the Past" and we are planning on releasing a full build sometime later in the summer! We'll be brushing up on some of the animations and narrative, as well as fixing bugs and implementing cute new features! :smile: :ramen:

I know a lot of you guys are planning on polishing your LD48 projects and I would love to send you all some love! Feel free to drop your game dev socials so we can follow each other through this process! :smiley:

If you're interested, here's our socials: Discord Twitter

I updated a new version. Mainly added sound effects and some suggestive stuffs.

Also added a copyright-free music as BGM.

GamePage:https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/digaway As my first entry, Ludum Dare was as interesting as I thought.

I learned a lot from it. I hope I can do better next time and give feedback to more games (and learn English better!).

Thanks again to everyone who played and rated my game :)

The Linux32 and Linux64 builds are downloading right now, but once they're done I'll have Aftermath v2.1.1 up and running! (If anyone actually cares to try my Compo submission's new version)

The list of improvements currently is:

• Made the text actually readable (sorry about v1.1.1)
• Added randomly generated stars to the background of the world so the sky isn't boring, and it's different every time you play! ✨✨
• Made a better walking animation (still my artistic weakness)
• Added backgrounds to each of the endings
• Flashback images for a slightly more immersive experience, sarcastic yay
• I took out that incredibly stupid 10 second decision timer and made the text advance on input, not every X seconds
• A couple of very minor art changes you probably won't notice unless your screen is 480p, meaning the game will be at the intended resolution instead of upscaled
• Now that the protagonist has a name (shoutout to @alprog), the story has been rewritten in third-person instead of first-person (there goes the RPG element, but at least a character of mine has a name for the first time ever 😄)
• Much-needed bug fixes (no more falling off the edge of the world, sorry)
• The source code file is actually somewhat comprehensible now, I added some //comments as I made adjustments
• Added a credits screen you get to read after unlocking an ending
• Probably more changes, but I'm too stupid to remember them all
• Oh yeah, and I did some layering and texturing and stuff and now there's a fun lighting effect when you're near a burning house in the background. That's actually one of the originally planned features that got scrapped really quickly since I only managed to make it work for the first time a few days ago, when I was working on the post-Jam "version" of last Ludum Dare's game

Yeah. The game was so incomplete since I intentionally overscoped that allllll of that is the improvements of one version. 😅

Since Ludum Dare 48 is over, I'm working on moving all of my projects to Itch.io, and this is only a fun project and not a commercial release game like the post-Jam game I'm working on for last LD's game, I'll only have the HTML5 version active for one more week, and the post-Compo version is currently download only! You can play it in your browser if you want, though, just download the source code and open it up in Construct 3. Even the new update is open source, have fun doing whatever the heck you want with it. (Don't steal my publisher name and logo, though. 😜)

If you actually want to play a game by someone who does everything themselves, meaning they're not incredibly talented in any areas at all,

You can play Aftermath v2.1.1 on Windows, MacOS, or Linux! (32- and 64-bit options available for Linux and Windows, since I try to support as many platforms as I can)

This LD was truly special for me because I did not think my game would resonate with anyone. I never expected it to do well in ratings, but I'm happily surprised I hit the top 10% in Audio and Mood. :v:

I tried to make an experimental art game. You know exactly what it is: the kind of game that you think "alright, it's a thing, but hot damn that dev is pretentious." I wanted to make a game that says something without an actual narrative, I wanted a symbolic game where the message is conveyed more by its mechanics than by words or story.

I think I kinda succeeded? What I did succeed at is making a game that I consider finished, which is rare for a game jam. It holds on its own and found, even if meagre, some audience. I hope it inspires more people to try and tell stories via game mechanics and gameplay rather than relying on the usual narrative techniques from the other media. I think games are so unique in that they can truly be experienced. We have the chance of contributing to one of the youngest art medium, one of the most innovative and with so much room to grow and explore and figure out what games are. Let's not waste it, let's try new stuff, let's create and dream and continue to be absolute nerds about it all.

I especially wanted to thank the below for their support and their kind words. If you've enjoyed the game and want to support me further, please come watch the devlog and consider subscribing to my channel. It really does help.

https://youtu.be/O0YTtjdOuJk

@littlegamer - for sharing my game on the last day of ratings amongst their favourites. There were some truly amazing games in that selection and I'm honoured you included me. :star:

@judgezedd, @moski, @limbo, @tombuston, @not-as-artistic, @zhi, @c3ll256, @lelulagames - for really "getting it" and letting me know you did. i feel less alone now, thank you. :two_hearts:

@kevinworkman, @fatebreak, @goodwincek, @petrroll, @geckoo1337 - for your thoughtful feedback and observations. It means a lot that you took the time to dig and the care to help out. We need more devs like you. Thank you. :gift_heart:

@icoso, @giovannibarrottu, @rouge-dragon, @frogmen, @tauheed-game-dev, @felo07, @collin-visser, @woolchara, @wallkysek - I am pretty sure I owe you folks the Audio and Mood high rating, thank you. :heart:

@fictions, @liam, @zimny11, @virimine, @freezerbot, @the-neon-shark, @verygenuinecraze, @gao-ming, @phealsout - for getting lost with me in a sea of memories. Thank you. :heartpulse:

Took a while but I finally made my devlog about my LD48 Game: Ninja Descension (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/ninja-descension)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sZkRe4oFXw

Got a game you're currently developing that you want feedback on?

I stream game dev regularly on Twitch in my spare time. Every other Monday I host Honest Feedback - a stream dedicated to giving feedback to games that are actively being developed. The idea is to give feedback to games that are still in the development process that can feed into the games continued development. It isn't a "live" queue system like LD streams, but instead I select 3-4 games to give feedback on from the queue before each stream. I email the developer before hand too, in hope they can attend the stream as we give feedback.

For more information and to submit your game, visit the Submission Form!

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LD48 seemed like my best entry yet, but it has the worst ratings I've ever gotten for a completed game.

just wanted to vent. :slight_frown:

Hey guys I finally came up with a small devlog, so here's the link to it:

https://kuviman.itch.io/dig-world/devlog/255566/so-i-made-an-mmo-in-48-hours

I've always been a bit skeptical about the usefulness of sentiment analysis, but Ludum Dare comments are basically reviews, which are essentially the canonical setting where sentiment analysis is supposed to be meaningful, so I figured it might be interesting to take a look at the sentiment of comments from LD48. I downloaded all comments via the ldjam.com api, and measured their sentiment using VADER via NLTK.

As you've probably already noticed, the vast majority of comments are positive:

The average sentiment is 0.668 (where 1 is most positive, -1 is most negative, and 0 is neutral), and only 7.5% of comments are negative (sentiment < 0). The sentiment is slightly lower among anonymous comments, but even then the average sentiment is 0.336 and only 21.4% of comments are negative. Moreover, there are hardly any anonymous comments (only 112 out of 82973 comments, or about 0.13%, are anonymous).

So, given that comments are overwhelmingly positive, is sentiment (as measured by VADER) a meaningful measurement? Well, it does seem that the average sentiment of comments on a game is correlated with the game's final score:

So there is a signal here, but it's not particularly strong. However, if we restrict our analysis to games with a larger number of comments, the correlation becomes a lot higher, presumably due to the Law of Large Numbers:

For comparison, here are the correlations between the overall score and various category scores:

So if you have a very large number of comments, VADER sentiment can be about as relevant to the overall score as people's actual numerical reviews in categories like Audio, Innovation, and Graphics. But for the vast majority of games (i.e. about 90% have less than 40 ratings) the signal is about as meaningful as the Humour score, which is the least important of all category scores.

I just tried to have fun making jam game, but "No matter how deep you are I will find you and revenge my kitty" gets 14th place in humor and 99th in fun. I really happy about my work can make somebody smile or maybe even laugh.

So just want to say THANKS everybody who rated my game.

P.S. I really want to release this game in future, but here a very big work to do so I will be happy to get some extra feedback if you have 10 minutes to play my game.

LD game page

Format of ratings: x/x: (ranking as seen on website)/(estimated total games rated 20+ (in category you submitted to)) x%: (position in ratings, percentage form, with 100% being 1st place and 0% being last)

Note that the rating percentage is only a rough guess. ┌───────────┬───────────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────┐ │ LD │ Game │ Overall │ Fun │ Innovation │ Theme │ Graphics │ Audio │ Humor │ Mood │ ├───────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┤ │ 44, jam │ The Healthy Gladiator │ 914/1169 - 22% │ 931/1169 - 20% │ 701/1169 - 40% │ 720/1169 - 38% │ 956/1169 - 18% │ N/A │ N/A │ N/A │ │ 45, jam │ Trick or Retreat │ 910/1189 - 23% │ 545/1189 - 54% │ 916/1189 - 23% │ 1038/1189 - 12% │ 938/1189 - 21% │ N/A │ 325/1189 - 72% │ 798/1189 - 33% │ │ 46, compo │ Beware the Dark │ 802/1288 - 37% │ 601/1288 - 53% │ 610/1288 - 52% │ 980/1288 - 24% │ 715/1288 - 44% │ 295/1288 - 77% │ N/A │ 111/1288 - 91% │ │ 47, compo │ Pi's Great Escape │ 559/ 712 - 21% │ 498/ 712 - 30% │ 328/ 712 - 54% │ 499/ 712 - 30% │ 533/ 712 - 25% │ 416/ 712 - 41% │ 217/ 712 - 69% │ 525/ 712 - 26% │ │ 48, compo │ Backwards Quest │ 742/1079 - 31% │ 721/1079 - 33% │ 440/1079 - 59% │ 782/1079 - 27% │ 760/1079 - 29% │ 441/1079 - 59% │ 228/1079 - 79% │ 596/1079 - 45% │ └───────────┴───────────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┘ (Made with https://github.com/LoneWolfHT/ld-results-history)

I seem to have beat my previous records in Innovation and Humor, my game was still incomplete too so I'm happy.

I tried to make a post-jam version but my idea was a little too ambitious considering the base Godot helpers I have in place right now. I have other bigger projects I must spend time one

Next time I'll try to lower my sights and prepare more code that'll get all the things like scene-state-persistence, proper scene-independent-data, and etc out of the way

Thanks to everyone who rated my game! I didn't return one rating because it was Windows-only and didn't work with WINE, they had 20+ ratings already though so I don't feel too bad

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Even at the rate stage, I marked for myself some of the participants with "post-ld" fixes. In some cases, these were separate links, but many simply left one link to the game. And this does not apply to fatal blockers, but ordinary improvements and bug fixes. And, as it turned out, such works in fact can take a prize. I certainly do not want to talk about the quality of the games themselves, these are amazing works with cool ideas and implementation. But isn't this a direct violation of the most important rule of jam - time limits?

Personally, I spent some of the time fixing bugs, which I could spend on adding new functionality to the game. So that later, after the jam, you can calmly fix all the bugs and correct the balance. This can go very far.

Is a simple "changelog" really an excuse in this case? Do you often see this? Can an ordinary participant do something about this?