didnt stay up very late because you thought the results would show today. I certainly dont forget that every, time.

I wonder if it’s still possible to get enough reviews. :o I'm trying to leave at least twenty reviews for other people. Gogogo!

Looking for more games to review before the jam ends tomorrow! Comment your game here and we'll play/rate/review it!

Also check out our game if you haven't already! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/ld57-game

Every jam I learn new game design things and get to see the flaws in how I make games and art and improve. I typically write down those lesson every jam and see if I'm making progress.

These are the highlights of what I learned this time, keep in mind that these are my subjective conclusions and opinions:

• Planing as much details as possible of the game on day 1 helps with cohesion and prevents hacky on-the-fly decisions.
• Starting with a very simple idea (typing in this case) and polishing from there makes for a much more relaxed experience (I had day 3 free for polish).
• A game that leans towards being too easy is more enjoyable than one that is more on the difficult side of the spectrum, on a scale from 0 (too easy) to 10 (too hard) a 3 or 4 works well.
• Aim for no more than 10 minutes of gameplay, keep the experience short and compact.
• Some people will instinctively avoid reading the tutorial text, prefer gamepaly tutorials when possible.
• Avoid controls that trigger web shortcuts (tab, ctrl+something etc...).

What game design and art lessons did you learn from participating in this jam?

Mike's Twitch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY5Apk2gi4U

The latest version of the build can be downloaded from the game page:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/depthshouse

I've seen some commenters point out the giant enemy spider in the room. Let me explain how we draw it!

First things first, I'll explain something about the game itself.

Our game is made for the awesome PICO-8 fantasy console! Because of that, we have to do all the everything ourselves, just like on actual retro game consoles.

So, there are two parts to this. First, we need to figure out how the legs move.

The legs have two joints: one at the spider's body and one knee, as such each leg is defined as two lines: from the body to the knee, and from the knee to the tip.

The body is a static point, the knee rotates around a point, and the tip rotates around a point, "left" legs rotating counter-clockwise and "right" legs rotating clockwise. We draw lines between those joints and boom! Leg.

Then we need to actually draw the cool stuff.

The spider is drawn from outline to fill, with some overdraw on the outline so there aren't any gaps. Since PICO-8 doesn't have a "thick line" builtin, we have to improvise and do the thick lines ourselves.

The fangs, as well as the pattern on it's back, are sprites, and the eye is a pair of circles.

For some PICO-8 specific stuff:

To draw the black outline on a sprite, we use pal(15, 0) to replace color 15 with a non-transparent color 0, giving us a black color that is distinct from the "background" color. You can actually spot it on a few other sprites, as well as a full "non-transparent black" tile.

For the checkerboard pixel fill, a special function exists in PICO-8 for setting a 4x4 fill pattern, using a number in which bits denote which pixel would use primary or secondary color. We use it like this:

lua fillp(0b1010010110100101) -- Let's cut it up to make it more clear. Mind that numbers don't actually work like this! fillp(0b 1010 0101 1010 0101)

For flashing effects, we just pick a color and randomize it with pal(c, 1+flr(rnd(14)))

The game is here, play it! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/spider-cave-offensive

​Hey!

Since the rating period is finally over, I've uploaded a new post-jam version of the game! There is not much of a new content, but many changes to the game's balance and UI. Give it a try, even if you haven't played the original version!

The new version is available on itch: https://smeljey.itch.io/into-the-depths

Changelog

​Main menu finally has a decent background!

Far from perfect, but this is kind of thing you do when you have no artist in the team :/

Per turn income in the UI

Now you can see how resources will change after the end of the turn. Also, there are small tooltips with the explanation of what the resource is used for.

Balance changes

• Increased initial food consumption (-1 -> -2)
• Added passive production income (+1 per turn)
• Tweaked food rewards for some buildings (Farm, Well, Water Mill)
• Houses now give gold each turn after constructing
• Decreased production rewards for certain buildings (House, Forge)
• Forge now gives production per turn
• Warehouse no longer gives production. Instead, it has increased gems reward.
• Increased required gold for levels 2 and 3

There are also some bugfixes and minor UI changes :)

How to extend this further?

Would love to hear any ideas or the first thing that came to mind...

LD57 Extra: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/depths-4

Same post on Itch.io: https://aizomon.itch.io/cosmic-junker-simulator/devlog/932744/cosmic-junker-simulator-ludum-dare-57-dev-log

Cosmic Junker Simulator Game Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/keep-the-lights-on

Play on Itch.io: https://aizomon.itch.io/cosmic-junker-simulator

===========================Postmortem Starts Here===========================

The initial idea was to create a survival horror co-op experience set aboard an abandoned spaceship, where players must share each other's light sources to survive illusions caused by anomalies.

I used Unreal Engine 5 and the First Person Shooter Template Pack (FPSTP). Being a dad, I could only spare about 5 hours a day over the weekend for the game jam, totaling around 10–15 hours. It went horribly, as I spent most of my time debugging replication blueprints.

Looking back, the prototype was clearly overscoped given my speed (or lack thereof) in writing replication code. Here's what I initially planned:

• A generator emitting light to maintain both players' sanity, which could be picked up and dropped.

• Each player equipped with a headlamp providing a cone of light to resist sanity loss.

• An enemy that spawns from an alien sac when touched or shot, featuring basic AI.

• A spawn manager to handle random distribution of ammo, alien sacs, and fuel barrels.

• Sanity-draining volumes assigned to dark zones.

• An engine room that accepts fuel to trigger the end-game condition and update the UI panel in the pilot room.

• A basic circular layout containing around six rooms (excluding tunnels).

• Sanity-dropping screen effects.

• Alien sacs or enemies spawning based on player sanity.

All of this needed to be fully replicated. Debugging replication was extremely slow, and testing the core loop was painful — it was tricky to control two windows at once just to keep the headlight trained on the other player.

https://youtu.be/azSLPCNkJww

While most features were technically implemented, some didn't replicate correctly, breaking the gameplay loop by the end of the 72 hours. I soon decided to return to the drawing board and move the game to the Extra category.

This time, I chose to start small, focusing on a simple but immersive single-player experience. After playing a few other jam entries from the Jam category, I decided to pivot to a lonely space scavenger concept — salvaging junk in hopes of bringing something valuable back to the ship.

The new, smaller scope included:

• A gravity gun to attract and launch space junk and creatures.

• A gravity-switching room to separate two drastically different experiences: flying in space and walking inside the ship.

• Doors that could be locked and unlocked at runtime.

• A first type of collectible junk: food items.

I spent a fair amount of time ensuring that the atmosphere, especially during gravity transitions, felt immersive. This even involved some early SFX work — which was necessary for me to feel confident about the game's tone.

Following that, I allowed myself to "noodle" — experimenting with ideas without a concrete plan, freely shifting between prototyping and market research. This creative phase was crucial to discovering what made the experience special.

Eventually, I found inspiration by looking at space scavenging from a Slime Rancher-style perspective. Capturing alien creatures as part of the scavenging loop felt interesting and unique. I spent some more time experimenting with this mechanic and soon faced a design choice: Should I give players a clear end goal or leave it as an open sandbox?

This challenge pushed me to rethink my initial design pillars. I decided I wanted a soft end goal — something to gently motivate players, without undermining the atmospheric experience. My first idea was to display a "total estimated scavenged value" at the end, but it felt hollow. Worse, it encouraged players to speedrun scavenging, which directly clashed with the mood and immersion I had worked hard to build.

I realized the core of the game wasn't about speed; it was about soaking in the lonely, strange, atmospheric journey.

With little time left, and knowing polish would matter more than a forced end goal, I prioritized meteor impacts, an additional SFX pass, and small tweaks to deepen immersion. As a compromise, I added a nickname system at the end screen, based roughly on what players had collected — a fun touch, though admittedly rushed and needing more refinement if I ever return to this project.

That pretty much sums up the journey of Cosmic Junker Simulator! Thank you to everyone in the Ludum Dare community — your passion and feedback mean a lot.

Key Takeaways: - Co-op games are risky for jams unless you're very experienced with replication coding. Debugging eats up precious design time.

• Giving ideas time to "cook" matters, even in a jam setting. Having design pillars early on helped me prioritize when under pressure.

• Validating a core gameplay loop always takes longer than it seems. Even small end-goal tweaks cost more time than I expected. Luckily, focusing on atmosphere from the start allowed me to deliver a playable experience even without a fully fleshed-out loop.

https://youtu.be/7IrllvSalf0

https://www.twitch.tv/xpmonsterx

In my own subjective ranking of the games I played on the stream that were submitted by the developers.

* We will be waiting on and discuss official results there as well. *

Participating Games

1. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/the-drop

2. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/minddive

3. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/a-knight-and-his-well

4. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/saturation

5. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/walking-simulator

6. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/profundidude-in-search-of-planet-telex

7. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/squirrel-swirl

8. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/high-pressure-arena

9. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/explorer-of-the-depths

10. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/not-too-deep

11. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/paladino

12. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/slip-stream

13. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/a-new-hell

14. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/echo-of-fallens

15. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/depth-rhythm

16. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/hexadig

17. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/view-in-the-depth

18. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/little-delver

19. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/hadal

20. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/bucketbot

21. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/mr-moneys-phenomenally-soggy-water-removal-romp

22. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/deep-fry

23. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/upstream

24. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/nine-lives-deep

25. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/helmet-man

26. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/serp-slurp-spicy-hot-chocolate-3

27. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/graffiti-tower

28. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/bedrock-rush

29. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/wrinkles

30. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/grimm-syndrome

31. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/btw-beneath-the-waves

32. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/pretty-fish

33. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/deepest-descent

34. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/dungeons-below

Thank you all for submitting your games :slight_smile:

I will be posting the final results later on like it was done before HERE

~Xp

Game got 3 ratings in the last hour with 0 people playing it and 0 comments.

Another LD team got 10 ratings at the end with no comments and no downloads.

Don't do this. Don't just rate games without having any impression of what they are like. PLAY THEM. Random votes help no one and ratings barely contribute to your smart rating anyway. Good comments/comment karma are what get you through the system.

Could it have been people that wanted to wait until the end to rate? maybe. I doubt that accounts for all of the votes, though.

That's all I have to say on the subject.

Now that ludumdare is over and everyone is looking for their next project, it's time to introduce new tools so that your next game is significantly easier to create.

• https://meshpage.org/meshpage_4 (tool download page)
• https://meshpage.org/ (main page)
• https://meshpage.org/view.php (3d model viewer)
• https://meshpage.org/gltftozip.php (gltf to html5 converter)
• https://meshpage.org/meshpage.php (tons of example scripts)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/tlya

Hello Ludum community!

In this post I will explain how I created the music for Lifted, explaining my tought process in detail. Hopefully this will inspire devs who have not touched music composition to give it a chance. I will mark music concepts in bold face so you can look them up.

As a disclaimer, I am self-taught in both modern music theory and ancient Greek music theory. So I use two classifications for what is commonly referred to as modes or scales: the modern or Glarean classification and Greek octave species and genus and I'll try to include both at least once. I also mix ancient meter (poetry) theory when dealing with rhythm.

My DAW of choice in which I write all my music is Bitwig (in part because it's the only commercial one that supports Linux).

My general process when composing a new piece of music is:

1. Chose the scale (color palette of notes, each associated with a feeling/emotion), and instruments
2. Write a motif (short sequence of notes that will be the theme if the song and will be repeated troughout the song with variations)
3. Create new motifs by developing the original motif
4. Build short melodic phrases from motifs
5. Derive chords from the melody
6. Build long melodic phrases from short melodic phrases
7. Build longer forms from long melodic phrases
8. Mix the song (adjust volume and panning for each instrument)
9. Add post-effects

I will now explain how I created both songs in my game: Lifted and Overworld. You can listen to them in the following video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaVM0hgKvS8

0. Lifted

Choosing the scale and instruments

For this piece, which was to be the title screen theme, I chose to start with the A natural minor scale / A Aeolian scale / Greek Aeolian tonos (diatonic genus) on A. This is a scale that evokes sadness. I also chose piano and violin (Grand Piano and VlnEns_Trem_) as the instruments for the parts, which are also commonly used in sad music.

Creating the motif

This is the palette of 7 notes of the A natural minor scale.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1' A B C D E F G A'

With these, I wrote the following melody.

Notes: ABCD BCDE

In this motif we have two sequences of four notes that ascend in step-wise motion. The idea behind this motif is that the first sequence lifts the second. Both sequences are identical in terms of relative pitch progression, but the first sequence starts at A, while the second starts at B, a note higher. The first sequence sets the home pitch of the entire motif at A so the second sequence at B sounds higher, and so it can be said that the first sequence lifts the second.

We'll label this motif as section A.

Laying out the form (1)

For starters, let the violin play section A twice solo, and then twice again with piano accompaniment that we will create shortly.

Violin A A A A Piano - - x x Piano (bass) - - x x

Adding chords

For the chords, I chose to go with a standard i-iv-v-i chord progression, which has the v → i perfect cadence. In the A natural minor scale this is Am-Dm-Em-Am. However, I realized that I messed up the placement of the third in the Am chord, placing it a semitone higher, thus turning the A minor chord into an A major chord instead, and so the progression actually ended up being A-Dm-Em-A or I-iv-v-I.

Laying out the form (2)

Let's add the chord progression to the song form.

Violin A A A A x Piano - - x x x Piano (bass) - - I iv-v I

Developing the motif

We have no piano melody, so let's create a variation of the motif. I raised the home pitch of the motif up a fourth, from A to D, and made the whole motif half as long (or twice as fast), so it fits twice in a measure.

We'll label this variation of the motif as section B.

Laying out the form (3)

Let's add the piano melody to the song form, and let's play it twice after the chord progression has played once. The violin will rest while the piano melody is playing.

Violin A A A A - - x Piano - - - - B B x Piano (bass) - - I iv-v iv-v iv-v I

Laying out the form (4)

Let's finish up the song by having the violin play section B once while the piano melody rests, and end it by having the final I chord play out solo.

Violin A A A A - - B - Piano - - - - B B - - Piano (bass) - - I iv-v iv-v iv-v iv-v I

Creating the final mix

Now that we're done with the score, let's adjust volume levels and panning.

I left the volume of the violin as is at -10.0 dB.

For the piano, I made the volume of the melody louder at 0.0 dB, and the chords quieter at -6.0 dB, as playing three notes simultaneously stacks up the volume, compared to just playing just one note.

I duplicated the violin part and panned one violin 30% to the left and the other one 60% to the left.

I panned both parts of the piano 30% to the right.

With this, we are done with this song.

2. Overworld

Choosing the scale and instruments

For this piece I chose to start with the E Mixolydian scale / Greek Ionian tonos (diatonic genus) on E. I chose piano (Grand Piano) as the main instrument for this song.

Creating, developing and modulating the motif

This is the palette of 7 notes of the E Mixolydian scale.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1' E F# G# A B C# D E'

I started with this motif.

Notes: E F# D

Then I transposed it up by 1 semitone.

Notes: F G D#

Then I flattened the G into an F#.

Notes: F F# D#

We'll label this motif as section A.

We'll develop section A by opening it up a bit (spreading the pitches apart).

In this case, I flattened the F into an E, and double sharpened the F# into a G#.

Notes: E G# D#

We'll label this new motif as section B.

We'll develop section B by adding a C# as a leading tone to D#.

Notes: E G# C# D#

We'll label this new motif as section C.

Adding chords

I derived the following chords from the notes of each section in the melody.

A. D#m from [D#, F#] B. E from [E, G#] C. C#min7 from [E, G#, C#]

With this, each section has an associated chord.

But before we start laying out the song form let's pay attention to what happened to the color palette of our song.

This is the palette of 7 notes of the E Mixolydian scale that we started with.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1' E F# G# A B C# D E'

Our song, on the other hand, now contains all the following notes: E F F# G# A# B C# D#. Notices that we're now using 8 notes in our song instead of 7, and that F, A# and D# are not in the E Mixolydian scale. In fact, our song is now closer to the C# Dorian scale than the E Mixolydian scale.

This is the palette of 7 notes of the C# Dorian scale.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1' C# D# E F# G# A# B C#

The only note that our song uses that is not in the C# Dorian scale is the natural F. So that is the chromatic note in our song.

We started writing our song with notes from the E Mixolydian palette and ended up creating a song using an octatonic scale, with notes from the C# Dorian palette and the natural F as an extra 8th color.

Translating the chords into Roman numerals we end up with ii (D#m), III (E) and i7 (C#min7).

Let us now lay the song form.

The short melodic phrase

I decided that the song form will consist of playing the original motif, that is, section A, twice, and then playing the derived motifs.

Piano A A B C Piano (bass) ii ii III i7

With this we got ourselves a short melodic phrase that is 4 measures long. We'll label it S.

Notice how this chord progression looks like a small move upwards, followed by a large move downwards, as if saying "We thought we would leave the depths (1 note up) but decided to stay in the depths. Not in the physical depths, however, but deep within ourselves is what is above the depths (double meaning, therefore 2 notes down)".

Also notice that this song can't be played by a single piano because the melody and the chords are on the same octave.

The long melodic phrase

We can build a long melodic phrase by repeating the short melodic phrase twice that is 8 measures long. We'll label it L1.

Let's develop the long melodic phrase by adding a fugue to it, we will add a contrabass playing the same melody as that of the piano, in the same key, two octaves down and starting a quarter tone later. We'll label it L2.

Let's develop it further by adding drums to it. I will define two patterns labeled 1 and 2. Each pattern will have the duration of one measure.

``` Beats: ◡ = Short – = Long

Drums: H = Hi-hat closed R = Rim C = Cowbell

(1) HHR ◡◡– (anapaest monometer)

(2) HHRCCC ◡◡◡––◡ (tribrach+antibacchius dimeter)

SD = 1112 ```

Our drums short melodic phrase will play the anapaest monometer 3 times and we'll finally play a tribach+antibacchius dimeter to mark that we are about to repeat the short melodic phrase. We'll label L2 with the drums as L3.

Putting it all together

This is the resulting song form hierarchy.

Long melodic phrases L1 L2 L3 Short melodic phrases S1 S1 S2 S2 S3 S3 Contrabass - - - - - - - - A A B C A A B C A A B C A A B C Piano A A B C A A B C A A B C A A B C A A B C A A B C Piano (bass) ii ii III i7 ii ii III i7 ii ii III i7 ii ii III i7 ii ii III i7 ii ii III i7 Drums - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 Loop point ^

L1 is the intro and will only play once, then L2-L3 will loop indefinitely. We ended up with a 24 measure long song.

Creating the final mix

Now that we're done with the score, let's adjust volume levels and panning.

I left all the instruments at -10.0 dB except for the drums, which I lowered to -15.0 dB to give a sense that they are moved to the back.

I panned both parts of the piano 30% to the left (even tough technically a single piano is not enough to play this song), and the contrabass 30% to the right.

With this, we are done with this song.

Things I forgot to do

Because I was in a hurry for this game jam, I forgot to apply post-effects, such as reverb and compression, especially compression. Because of this, the quietest instruments may be not heard at all and the loudest instrument may be too loud.

Apparently, our LD57 submission was frontpaged on newgrounds.com and I never even realized. Fun.

Have to say, I've been having much, MUCH more luck with people finding my game on Newgrounds rather than on Itch.io, by a factor of at least 10x more views, and that's not counting being frontpaged. I guess I'm mainly uploading my games to Newgrounds now!

I need to step-out briefly to pick up my wife, but unfortunately we caught some dudes "5 bombing" (no, not "1 bombing" as everyone fears) some games. The bad data can be purged easy enough, but I needed a bit more time to dump it so I can later trace the culprits. :police_car:

I don't think I'll miss the "all results" time, but I'll keep you updated.

Mike

EDIT: In case the folks below aren't joking, lol, there's nothing wrong with leaving all 5's. However, operating 9 accounts that leave all 5's on a few dozen games over the span of a few minutes is pretty sus. Oh, also submitting fake games to do it is the heinous part.

EDIT2: Sorry again for the delay. The bad data is gone, I've just been shocked (flabbergasted?) to learn a user did something malicious. As mentioned, spammers make sense, but this was cruel. Anyway, results should be up within the hour.

Hey Submariners!!

It’s hard to believe, but it’s already been 18 days since we submitted Hello Darkness for Ludum Dare 57 — and the response from all of you has been absolutely incredible. Your feedback, support, and enthusiasm have meant the world to us!

Since then, the team has been hard at work crafting a Post-Jam Version of the game — a version that we believe is truly worthy of your time. Whether you have played it before or are just jumping in, we are incredibly excited to invite you to dive back in and experience what we consider the definitive edition of Hello Darkness.​​

Below is a comprehensive list of changes for the new update:

• Difficulty curve has been adjusted to extend play time.
• Some environment geo has been modified to balance gameplay.
• Radar Siren range has been doubled so players can hear it from the back of the sub.
• The warning system has been tweaked to be more reliable.
• Impact sounds to the sub's hull are now directional.
• Fixed an issue where the machine failing sound for equipment wasn't firing.
• Water will now appear to pour out of cracked windows.
• Particles have been extensively optimized to improve overall performance.
• Machines will now spark at the first damaged state.
• Directions and inputs now appear when mounting the helm.
• The reticle is less jumpy when switching between indicators.
• The toilet will now be highlighted when holding a full bucket.
• The Wrench and Bucket now play animations when used.
• Water has been modified to stand out better inside the hull.
• The color and scale of some tools have been adjusted to stand out better in darkness.
• Modified the compression of textures to ensure they appear correctly in web build.
• Fixed a bug where the depth zones were not being counted properly.
• Fixed an issue where suffocation audio continued playing after death.

We have done a number of optimizations to help improve the overall experience, more specifically: getting our html build to not crash. Suffice to say, we are confident we have achieved that. That said, even with all the improvements, performance in the HTML version still varies a lot depending on your device and browser. We’re pretty new to developing for web, and this jam has been a huge learning experience for us, and everything we've picked up will definitely help future projects. If you’re playing the HTML version, we highly recommend using Chrome — it seems to run the most consistently there. Honestly, the fact we got it running at all feels like a small miracle, and we’re super proud of how far it’s come! Still, we recommend downloading the .exe for the best experience.

You can find the post jam version available on our Itch Page

While there’s always more polish and features we could add, we’ve decided that with this latest update, we will be wrapping up development on Hello Darkness. It’s been an amazing journey, and we’re so proud of how far the game has come thanks to all of your feedback and support.​

Rest assured, this will not be the end for Tiny Bot. We hope to continue bringing new creative ideas to future jams. In the meantime, we’re shifting our focus back to our previous project, Poppet​ which has seen massive improvements since our 1.2 update released at the end of October. We're not quite ready to show anything off just yet, but we promise — it’ll be worth the wait. You can expect more updates from us in the coming months!​​​

Thank you again for being part of this journey with us. 💖​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvywDxxf68 Announcing my favorite and least favorite games I played!!! We'll be playing all the winners!!! Once we know them!!!

Hey, so this Ludum Dare I decided to shake things up from my typical routine and pretty happy with the results!

For past jams, I would typically wait until after the voting period to continue working on a game, if I come back to working on it at all. My thought process behind this was to gauge people's reactions to the game and analyze their feedback before taking the project further.

This time around, I decided to continue working on it right away with the goal of seeing how far I could push it by the time the voting period ended/results were revealed. Happy with how far I was able to take it with the free time I had, and looking forward to trying to take it further

Both the post-jam version and the original jam version can be found on my itch page

Post-LD57 version: https://nohroko.itch.io/project-fantasy-tactics

Original LD57 submission: https://nohroko.itch.io/into-enemy-depths

Life is roadblocks

...

Guys, can you tell me why the ratings didn't appear? We collected more than 20👉👈

Thanks in advance for your reply♥️

Can't you guys just change the date to a day later lmao, anyways each time theres some problems with showing results and they appear correctly a day after lmao

Mine is only showing comments, I can't view the rest of it, like the game or description or ratings??

Its been like this since the first ratings deadline passed, but the page was fine for the entire ratings duration

all I can see:

page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/ld57-slappys-reef

And I friendly remind that I am hosting fork of ldstats at https://ldstats.home.yogurtthehor.se/

Also - thanks Mike for all the work you've done today for making results live :)

Thank you very much! I'm glad I could bring everyone who played some joy!

Had a blast yall! I ended up playing somewhere around 50 games and yall are super talented people. Did much better in almost every category this year and felt like this was one of my best game jam performances yet! Thanks for another great Ludum Dare!

Thank you so much to everyone who rated and played through my game! Amazing job to everyone that submitted a game!

Hope to see you in 6 months o7

Also because our whole chat went to sleep lol. If your game was in the top 15 for compo or jam it will be played on stream tomorrow!!!! Starting between 2-3pm CST!! We hope to see you there!!!!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvywDxxf68

Let's fricking gooo! First time category win! It's was as easy as A to B

Nice

Jokes aside, thank you to everyone who played my game and for the feedback!

Let's jump into it!

What went well

• I was happy with the overall concept and execution, and although I only put together three levels, there was enough design space to make them interesting and different from each other.
• The visuals and polish came out well in my opinion. Dragging items around and opening and closing containers was really satisfying!
• I managed to squeeze a number of Easter eggs into the game, in the form of bootleg game titles, card game references, and references to previous projects of mine. I even made a reference to Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum, which was secretly actually a reference to @100th-coin's Super Mario TAS that involves swapping NES cartridges at mach million while telling yourself you're playing Mario.

What could have gone better

• Implementing the core system took quite a bit longer than I had hoped, especially the squashing of weird corner-case bugs for containers that contain other containers.
• The scope was smaller than I would have liked (partially because of the previous bullet). I was originally hoping to have more varied challenges and situations, or continuity between levels (like packing your suitcase, then having to take out and rearrange items while in the line for TSA).
• I can't help but feel there was something missing from the game as it currently existed. A little bit of a story, a twist mechanic, or an "aha" moment. As it is, the game flows perfectly smoothly, but there are never any moments for fireworks.
• You can't pet the cat. You can however shake her around violently while she purrs, which is most of the way there.

What went... unexpected?

This has been kind of a strange play and rate period for me, because in addition to getting players from ldjam.com, my entry was also featured on the front page of Itch.io and has received a lot of additional non-LD plays through Itch.

Which is great! But also the amount of traffic, in combination with being packaged with PyInstaller, made Windows extremely confident my game was a Trojan.

Yet another reason to have a browser build if you can! If I only had the Windows build, most people would not be able to play the game without additional scary steps of whitelisting the file in their antivirus software.

The results

I'm quite happy with my game's performance this time around! Not necessarily as exciting as some of my previous entries, but still a worthy entry.

The amount of eyes on the game this event (mostly through Itch) has been really exciting, and at times overwhelming, but I'm really happy that the feedback has been largely positive! The most common complaint by far was that the game was too short, with some people also having difficulty with the final level. It's possible I'll have to revisit this game at some point when I'm not so busy with my current project.

Speaking of which...

I'm working on a full game! I've teamed up with @daniel-alhadeff to make a deckbuiilding roguelike based on my LD52 entry, Fallowtide. If you're interested in geometry puzzles or card games, check it out! A public demo is coming out next month.

Moonsigil Atlas on Steam

That's all I have, thanks everyone for making Ludum Dare such a great experience. I don't know for sure if LD58 is actually going to happen in October or not, but I'll see you all then if it does! ☃

"Red, come in! This is Mission Command. We need to talk about how the mission went."

Without fail, I seem to make some "critical blunder" in every one of my Ludum Dare entries, despite the notes I take after each one. And while I genuinely believed I followed my previous notes very well this time around, I'm not so sure now that I've done some reflection. Here's how I will be structuring this postmortem:

• From concept to game

• The critical blunders

• The bright side

• Reflection part 1

• Results

• Reflection Part 2

• Closing Thoughts

From concept to game

So the theme was "depths" and like always, I fell in love with an Idea I had for a losing theme. It's definitely a weakness of mine. So anyway, imagine if the theme was "keep it together" because wow this game would fit so much better. The concept: The moon has been destroyed, and your job is the use magnets or something to stick it back together.

Step 1: I needed the ability to make a bunch of amusing shapes for all the moon chunks, and I needed to be able to make them fast. I put together a very simple "triangulation by ear clipping" script for creating meshes from a list of points, and a script for the unity editor allowing me to take a list of vector 2's and simply drag them around the scene view to make shapes.

Unity's Polygon Collider 2D worked incredibly well with this! I whipped up a character movement script, some player animations, and got started programming the "magnets" to stick moon chunks together.

And as usual, once the main mechanic was working, I became increasingly ambitious. I like giving my games a story, and if possible adding cutscenes. I began asking questions like, "Why was the moon destroyed?" which lead to "Gender Reveal Party." which I felt was such a good bit, my game would be significantly worst without these cutscenes. I like having boss fights, I like having acapella music, and suddenly I had a lot on my plate.

I forget the exact order of operations I took. I frequently bounced back and forth from writing music, drawing, and building the big level. I added a little shop to the game and fun artwork for all the characters who talk to you.

Once most of the level was put together, I began work on recording voice lines and making cutscenes. I started with the victory + credits cutscene and worked backwards. After that was the boss fight cutscenes, then programming the boss fights. Then the tutorial and programming the tutorial, and finally the introduction cutscene. With pretty much everything in place, I got feedback from my roommates, made some changes, and got ready for submission hour.

And I'll be honest, I was really happy with what I submitted. Until I watched another one of my friends play the game, and I realized just how bad my in-game tutorial was.

The critical blunders

I'd like to stress that the main mechanic of the game wasn't explained. In the tutorial. Oh dear.

So here's what happened. I wanted to explain an in-lore excuse for my anti-softlock features. You can "drill" through moon chunks that crush you, since you would otherwise get stuck. You can drill through any moon chunks you've already restored, because again, you could make an inescapable path. Additionally, there's a button in the HUD to simply teleport you to the surface of the moon if anything else goes horribly wrong.

So here's how the tutorial plays out. Before you are given the ability to move, you shoot a box in a way that will intentionally crush the player. Through this, the player learns it's okay to get crushed. Moving that box reveals a sign reading "Use WASD to move", and now the player can move. I then give the player a fun physics puzzle where you use a box under you to gain height. After that section, I introduce the wall climb ability with another sign on the background. Then the drilling through chunks mechanics with another sign. And now the player exits the tutorial, and begins to move around the surface of the moon.

At this point, the player should learn how to use the un-softlock button in your HUD. Through a voice line, "Mission command" says "There's now a button to take you back to the surface if anything goes wrong".

Blunder #1: This "un-softlock button" is in your HUD. All the other controls were keyboard buttons. Players ask "What button do I press if I get stuck?" While the dialogue just keeps going and making bad jokes. Despite the button in the HUD blinking, out of all 7 of the people I was able to watch play the game, one of them actually clicked it. One. I should have added a big blinking arrow pointing the the HUD or something. Again, despite this button blinking, it is eventually required to leave the first boss fight arena. When I saw comments of people getting stuck in the boss fight arena, I just felt awful.

Blunder #2: The whole "shoot moon chunks to re-attach them and fix the moon" thing wasn't ever explained. The core mechanic of the game. While there's a secondary objective of collecting "gravity gems" which unlocks the boss fights, I need to stress again and again, the main objective of reconstructing the moon was being overlooked. I don't think a single player I watched even tried shooting the moon chunks until 2 or 3 of the 4 gems were collected. That could've been at the end of the tutorial, forcing you to combine two chunks before leaving. Even better, force the player to use the HUD button to leave after that. Ahhh.

Blunder #3: There are multiple ways to softlock in the tutorial. The HUD button was supposed to be disabled during the tutorial, but you can "resurface" before unlocking the ability to move. Whoops! Also for some reason if you complete the first step of the tutorial before the opening dialogue completes, the dialogue engine locks up, eventually preventing the boss fight dialogue from playing, leaving the fight unbeatable (and leaving all dialogue missing!).

So at this point, I went from being incredibly happy with my game to being incredibly upset at myself. I pretty much refrained from playing and rating games because I just didn't even want people playing my game. I felt bad.

Even worse, this "lack of tutorialization" is specifically something that I have been recently struggling with in my other jam games, and something that I was incredibly aware of going into this one. My notes specifically say verbatim, "Full in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained." And I didn't explain it?! Unreal.

The bright side

Okay cool, with all that behind us, let's talk about what went well. Because despite those absolutely massive mistakes, I still think I did a lot of things well. For instance, the character design! I mean, just look at the villain of the game, "The Necromooncer":

What a fun looking skeleton man. I also just noticed I accidentally moved part of the crescent he's riding with his animation... that shouldn't have happened, but oh well! But look at these guys!

I mean, they're fun.

I think the music for this game also turned out really well. I've been trying to learn some music theory, and I added diminished 7th chords to the song, which absolutely slap. I mean, it really turned out well. The acapella music this time around also turned out well! I will say, recording one of the lines for the diminished 7th chords was incredibly difficult, because it really just feels like a flat note. I actually chose not to include one of my harmony tracks, since I rushed a bit and it fell out of sync with the other notes.

But I'm still really happy with how that turned out, and this is my 7th LD in a row with acapella music!

I also believe the jokes in this game are some of the funniest I've had in my LD games. The gender-reveal moon-explosion, Mission Command's 4th wall breaks, the bit about giving "Yellow" a fake walkie talkie, Yellow obtaining a real walkie talkie and Mission Command apologizing for that, the "Box Co" product placement, and of course the earth exploding at the end with another gender-reveal. I'm writing this before the results are live, but I'm optimistic about my humor score.

The graphics category has historically been an interesting one for me. Last Ludum Dare I had the critical blunder of making a computationally expensive shader for a minor background detail, which caused framerate issues that I didn't notice on my beefy PC. The art style of the characters clashed with the art style of the background forest, too.

This time, the background/foreground elements are a lot simpler. Partly due to not having the time to make them more detailed, but it also kinda works with the story as the game is canonically the set of a low-budget television show. Perhaps the lack of details works. I used a lot of colors from the NES color palette in this game. I didn't restrict myself exclusively to using the NES palette, but I enjoyed making my characters look like they could've come from a NES game.

Granted, that's significantly more colors than a NES sprite could have without tremendous object overlapping, but I really like that palette.

Reflection part 1:

So if you completely ignore the fact that I didn't explain how the game works, it turned out really well! Let's see how I did when examining my notes from LD passed.

LD52: "Focus on a single mechanic."

The "single" mechanic of this game is the whole magnetic-moon-chunk-attachment mechanic. But to be honest, I kinda wish I did a little more. A few comments mentioned the single mechanic getting a bit stale by the end, and I wish I had done more with it, or at least added some more stuff to the environment to play with.

LD53: "Get feedback before the deadline."

The feedback I got before the deadline was mostly that my roommate wasn't aware of the cave leading to the first boss encounter, so I added big arrows. There were a few minor bugs they had that I fixed too, which is nice, but it completely missed "the big issues" mentioned in the critical blunder section. That might be partly my fault though, as I was pushed for time when getting this feedback, so I probably gave them too much direction just to speed it up.

LD54: "Full in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained."

So, we've already explained how I completely fumbled this one. Lots more reflecting to do here before the next Ludum Dare. This game had a tutorial, and I still dropped the ball, right? Perhaps if I made a tutorial that really highlights the core mechanic in a step-by-step way for the player to learn how it works, it could have been way more intuitive.

LD55: "Make sure the camera isn’t jank."

I'm really happy with the camera in this game. Sure, it's "stapled" to the player for the most part, but I think it's zoomed out at a good size, and the view map button has a really cool zoom out of the whole level. I think I should've bound that to "TAB" instead of "M" but oh well.

LD56: "Be reasonable with your shader effects."

So, the only real shader effect I had was a neat shockwave when two moon chunks collide. I think it looked cool, while not being distracting or computationally expensive.

And what did we learn this time?

I frequently find myself just repeating notes I took from previous game jams. I think it's pretty clear why I'd like to just repeat what I said in LD54. In the spirit of writing something new, I think the big takeaway from this game is to scope smaller. It sounds ridiculous to say it, but I think my ambition is really getting the better of me here. Maybe it's not even a scope issue, but the map I made for this game was huge. I keep looking back at "Inbox Fool" and a little bit of "Prince Charmony" where it took place in small rooms. Every time I make a game that happens in one large map, I just wish I structured it like those other games. Maybe that wouldn't work with the concept I had for this game, but I still could have made the map smaller. It takes like, 60 seconds to go from one side to the other. It's much too big. The map was time consuming to make, and it didn't really pay off the way I thought it would.

And now I brace for the results.

Results

Honestly, nothing to write home about. I'm a bit shocked I only scored 20th in audio... the main music track, acapella, and voice acting in this game I thought was some of my best. Oh well.

Reflection part 2

Reflecting on my score in graphics (3.85 stars, 80th place) I'm just now realizing how strong the graphics score for my LD56 game Prince Charmony was. I'm a bit shocked to see the score dip this much, though I guess in hindsight it shouldn't have been a surprise. There's basically no details, just a looping star texture for the background, looping moonrock texture for the foreground. This was my worst score in graphics since LD42, which... ouch. So note to self, forget everything I said in my Prince Charmony postmortem, go nuts with the art I guess.

I think at this point I need to ask if the cutscenes are worth it, because those take a lot of time to make, and evidently aren't really paying off. I was talking about "scaling back the scope" as the main takeaway from this one, and perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the kind of cutscenes I've been making.

I think the 4 stars flat in audio was the biggest shock. The past handful of LD games I had around 4.4's in audio. It's especially shocking since I thought I put some real music theory to the test in this one with those diminished 7th chords... I was really happy with how this music turned out. My LD43 game scored higher out of five stars in audio. You know, perhaps I could have added some sound effects... I'll keep that in mind for LD58.

Closing thoughts

Welp... I have more reflecting to do on this one than I thought I would. The bad tutorial in this game is specifically something I need to think about during my next game jam. It was pretty painful reading the comments of people getting stuck or softlocking, especially considering how happy I was with this game while submitting.

In other news: just like what I learned from Ribbon 2, the scores don't actually reflect my growth or skills as a developer. Yeah, it sucks having ratings similar to my games from 6 years ago, but I know the music I wrote in this game is better than what I wrote 6 years ago. Regardless of the scores, I'm happy with the game I made.

I feel like I've been saying this for a while, but I need to stop making platforming games during Ludum Dare. Remind me during submission hour of LD58 to slap myself if I upload another platformer. Unless its status as a platformer is ambiguous like my LD50 game, I've gotta start trying something new.

"Red, you still there? This is Mission Command. I'm just chiming in to let you know the studio ran out of money and we didn't get picked up for that second episode we were all hoping for. Anyway, we've got two trucks full of action figures with your face on them... I don't know if you are interested, but if you could take all of them with you on your way out I'd greatly appreciate it."

☃

Congratulations to the winners and thank you, everybody who rated and commented my game!

With an improved score and ranking, I surmise that players generally liked the prologue's more comprehensible premise, plot, and characters. But like in the case of the prologue to Lily Adventuresses! Episode 2, this prologue to Episode 3 is just the beginning of something more grand.

And as of this post, I've just finished writing the penultimate chapter to Episode 2, which should clear the way for a full release next month! Stay tuned.

Episode 1: https://dagitabsoft.itch.io/lily-adventuresses-episode-1-she-who-lost-everything-but-her-name (FULL)

Episode 2: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/lily-adventuresses-episode-2-rise-of-the-arcritters-prologue (LD56; PROLOGUE)

Episode 3: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/lily-adventuresses-episode-3-the-explorer-sisters-and-the-deepest-depths-pr (LD57; PROLOGUE)

Looking through the comments section of a controversial entry where someone suddenly said that compo was becoming less and less popular, I made the following statistics out of curiosity ↓

Will Compo finally disappear? Should Compo finally disappear?

Ten years later, because only three people signed up for compo, every ld77 compo participant received six big trophies xD

A large post-jam update is now available for Scares on Schedule, taking all the feedback we recieved over the rating period into account. The game's difficulty has been fine-tuned to ramp up more slowly, hopefully making the game less frustrating. We've also done a bunch of extra polish across the game to make it the best it can be, and attempted to better teach the game's mechanics to the player.

We hope this update will provide a great experience for new players, and encourage previous players to give it another try! We have tried our hardest to make the game feel both fair and rewarding.

🎮 You can play or download the game here: https://berry-games.itch.io/scares

Changes

Balance

• Villagers now only require 1-2 minigames each at the start of a run. Spawn rate increases now additionally increase the amount of minigames each villager requires, so once the maximum difficulty is reached, they will always require three minigames each like in the original version of the game.
• There is now a visual alert when new villagers spawn off-screen, and a new visual + audio alert when an off-screen villager is nearing the staircase.
• The melody minigame now has only 5 notes. The hitbox for ringing each bell has been widened slightly, and the same bell can now be rung repeatedly without waiting for the animation to finish each time.
• In the candles minigame, the candles' hitboxes are larger, and the timer has been extended by 1 second.
• The matching minigame now has only 4 cards. To improve visibility, the cards now have higher contrast, and the matching pair of cards will always draw above the others to make tracking them easier.
• The BOO! minigame now has a more lenient timing window. It also resets faster, so the overall minigame takes less time to finish.
• Upward acceleration when hovering objects in the hover minigame has been increased, and the timer has been shortened by 1 second.

Polish

• Thunder sounds have been added to the title screen, and the backdrop has been replaced with a more detailed version.
• All minigames now use the horror sting sound to indicate success.
• A new sound effect has been added to signal when tutorial / difficulty up messages appear.
• A new application icon has been added.

Fixes

• The behavior of scares interrupting other scares has been fixed to work as originally intended (environmental scares interrupt each other, and minigame scares interrupt all scares).
• Villagers can no longer become scared without animating, and can no longer continue walking after their final required minigame is completed.
• Minigame success and failure sounds can no longer play multiple times in a single minigame.
• The "(NEW BEST!)" text no longer suddenly disappears when the camera begins scrolling backwards at the end of a run.

I love Ludum Dare I love games I love each and every one of you !!!!

I decided to use the time between the end of the compo and the end of the vote to continue working on my game and show it after the vote. So here it is! An updated version, which will be the continuity of my Compo game.

Currently a very small-sized prototype (I just finished the level transition system, so now I can start expanding the world), with which I hope to create something more whole over time, even if small.

Escape the dungeon - What did he do to deserve this?

A puzzle and adventure game where everyone is wondering, What did he do to deserve to end up in the dungeon? So many questions that only your curiosity will answer!

Escape the dungeon - What did he do to deserve this? is also an attempt to a be as reasonable as possible to a no text game, meaning that any language could play the game.

The puzzle will, in hope, would emanate from symbols scattered through the land and the dungeon, which in turn, when correctly pieced together, will create your path to adventure, along the way, we might know why did he do to deserve to end up in the dungeon!

Where I will post updates from now on: https://barnabe-wild.itch.io/escape-the-dungeon-what-did-i-do-to-deserve-this

I kinda like the sound of the idea and it would appears fun, that's why I intend to push the project a little further. There is no speed on this project, it's spare time.

Glad to have participated in this jam, thanks!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/raindrops

Thank you everyone for your good ratings and your kind reviews playing my entry - RainDrops. Finally, the results are exactly what I expected. I wanted something good in the innovation category and I got it. See you for the next LudumDare. Waiting, I wish you the best. God bless you ++

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/neuronic-netronics

Thank you to everyone who played my game Neuronic Netronics! I know the play experience is a bit rough to get into but despite that I ended up with my first top 10 for innovation! I think this score is mostly from the gimmick I had this LD of hand-writing everything in web assembly, although maybe the few people that got far enough also appreciated the mechanics. Next time I'll switch back to a more "normal" setup and focus more on making a game that's actually fun.

I didn't understand how it happened with the voting Jam. But this is my last Ludumdare.

Thank you everyone for playing & rating my game :gem: Dyamid :gem:!! I don't know what to say, except that I truly appreciate all the feedback from you (It really motivated me to kick-start my next project :two_hearts:) and I am already hyped for the next jam!

Greetings everyone and have a good day / night! First of all, I wanted to say thank you for a such great event and everyone's submissions this Ludum Dare. It was my first such event and I had a pretty much joy attending with my first ever game! It was also a pretty much fun playing other people games and rate them. But about that a bit later. Through last 6 years after graduating from the school I was looking what to do. Tried many different niches, travelled across the globe and visited quarter of all countries and found something that inspires me pretty much - gamedev! So here am I :) Thanks to every member of that interesting wide-edge community. You together created something supernatural this month.

Now a bit about the Ludum Dare and something I would advice to consider to change. The rating system seems to be a pretty weird. Not talking about my game, because it is pretty bad (which I expected anyways to graduate half a star higher), but about other Devs games. I have seen so many cool ones with outstanding graphics, music and so in a row which could even be contenders on the Steam let's say. But they take only 80+ place! Not to offend someone, everyone did a great job, but it is a bit strange that some games have 4.5 rating with 20 reviews, and 3.5 rating with 100 reviews. Just mean that probably, with lower amount of reviews a game is more likely to get a high place :) My solution here - to boost graduating amount of reviews to at least 40. So the impact of reviews would be much smaller and developers would have additional point to rate others games and find potential gems.

Another problem I see here is the Rating games as well. Me, as an example, not playing any AAA games. I play only indies and games which are pretty similar to ones presented on this event. But at the same time.. I may not like the graphics. The music. Something else. And rate 1 star let's say. But 10 other people could like it. But next 100 people would not like it either. Yea, I know it is digging too deep (wasn't it Depths theme this time?), but.. There may be some kind of a reminder how people should rate games. With the smallest possible depend on their own beliefs. In that I count checking Dev history / additional information to rate.. Or just trying to "boost" the mood of the Developer. My solution here is to make a rate history open for every member, including the average grade. Additionally, based on complex calculations, make a median rate of user's grades to change the grade of specific game they rated in higher/lower side!

Additionally, wanted to tell some words about that yesterdays incident. That kind of behavior is unacceptable and I am really sorry for Mike it happened in that kind of event. I do not know details, but seems someone tried to manipulate the reviews in some kind. That is blatant and just a spare of time for someone's standing behind that attack. People should value other's effort and better would be if these "attackers" spend their time creating a better game :) Additionally, you made a worse evening not just for a Mike, but for a most part of Ludum Dare community :P

What about other suggestions, I am pretty sure it would be much appreciated if demos and early projects which started on Ludum Dare and would be published on Steam / Nintendo Store / Epic etc.. Would receive additional coverage here on Ludum.. And probably would be appreciated if every game would receive a views counter on their page :)

Special thanks to Ludum Dare, @pov and staff for hosting an opportunity to become better. Thanks to every Developer presented on the Jam. GG, Well Developed! :)

@pov, and dear friends of Ludum Dare,

As some of us have noticed, there are fewer and fewer participants in Compo mode.

Compo mode is my favorite, but I've often thought that it would be better for me, as a solo developer, to have more time, like Jam mode.

It also seems to me that there are two distinct Jam sub-modes: - "Team Jam" - "Solo Jam"

So, what do you think about creating a "Solo Jam" mode?

Looks like Granny really had some "funny bones"! We were so thrilled to check this morning's Game Jam results. It's the first time we've ever won a trophy (like... actually even outside of game jams *snort-laugh) – and it's a gold one! Huge thanks to everyone who played and rated our game, and to everyone whose games we got to play as well. We're really happy we joined the Game Jam again – every time it's a wonderful experience with an amazing, supportive community. :heart:

Hey all, firstly, congrats with your entries and congrats to the winners!

I take pride in having made the 3rd most rated compo game, which implies the 3rd most played game. I never expected that. I received nearly exclusively positive comments and I want to thank the community for that.

This edition was special, as I missed the 3 earlier ones due to life getting in the way. Even the host can appreciate this, as he was putting a lot of effort in brushing out cheaters, clearly while paddling his way through life (picking up his wife for example).

However, odds are this was for realzies my last Ludum Dare, as the work and effort, both during development and during rating, is simply not reflected in what I get out of it. Don't get me wrong, the ratings are in line with what I can do as a solo dev, but they don't line up with what I see.

As I understand I am not the only creator of a "popular" game that sees this happen. It probably is indeed statistically very much expected that larger numbers of ratings (about 400% of the winner in my particular example) tend to drag your average down drastically. The median would be a lot nicer to use here, but that info isn't available so I can't be the judge of that.

And yes, ultimately, it's about the game you make, the feedback you receive. Very much so. But this no longer has more weight than working for 48 hours, ignoring family and life. I effectively am writing a book on game jams, and I think I found a nice closing chapter after this edition. At some point, you outgrow game jams as a compo-dev.

As this honestly made me a bit upset and took away everything I saw in the spirit of Ludum Dare for years, there's no point.

Thank you Mike for hosting and your work. Thank you for letting me meet lifelong friends and thank you for teaching me so much. Thank you, game developers, artists, audio-experts, UI developers... Thank you game design document builders, playtesters, streamers.

I'll flat out say it, thank you all for your shitty little games that made me giggle.

See you in the next, it's been fun!

DrJavaSaurus

With the tiny percentage of all games people can look at and rate and the subjective nature of rating itself, the final rating is more or less based on luck. To get a higher score, you need to get lucky on getting people that: - just happen to like your game/style/genre - generally give higher ratings to all games - give 5 stars to every game they look at. This skews the results the worst. Seriously, who wants a participation reward? If you want to give those, just congratulate people on making a game in the comments.

Comments, on the other hand, are the most valuable , as long as they are honest, so you know what people like and don't like about what you made. The best ones tell you what and how you can improve.

Just remember: one good comment is worth a thousand 5 star ratings.

Grabbed my last 16 games scores from the API - mildly interesting - looks like the game I made from 4 compo's ago is still the best of the bunch :smile:

No improvements statistically over the last ( latest game not in top or bottom )

I have fun to play and comment your games! This is an interesting experience. We all now have our own unique history!

To remind some of you that The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way — not the points, leaderboard rankings, or trophy icons - I’ll list the universal goals of every game jam. Next time you participate, focus on what truly matters to ease the pressure of expectations.

• At least 20 strangers played your game.
• Someone shared valuable feedback about your game.
• You identified patterns in feedback, clarifying what to improve next time.
• Someone posted a screenshot from your game.
• Your game gained attention on itch.io, YouTube, or another platform.
• You implemented a new feature you’ve never coded before.
• You learned something new about the tech or engine you used.
• You overcame or abandoned a struggle you’ll never repeat again.
• You received praise for a specific mechanic or feature.
• You discovered a clever design pattern you’ll reuse in the future.
• You managed the scope, delivering a complete game experience.
• You encountered a funny or sneaky bug during development.
• Your game evoked an emotion in a player (laughter, joy, sadness, etc.).
• (Team) You learned to distribute tasks effectively under time pressure.
• You connected with at least one new person in the game jam community.
• You received a comment that made you proud of your work.
• You are still a gamer and you played and rated at least 10 other participants’ games.
• You experimented with a new art style or aesthetic.
• Your game was mentioned in a game jam recap, stream or blog post.
• (Team) You collaborated with someone from a different skill set (e.g., artist, musician).
• You submitted your game before the deadline (with time to spare!)
• You created a memorable character, lore or story element.
• You received feedback that challenged your assumptions about your game.
• You inspired another participant to try something new in their next project.
• You documented your process or post mortem (e.g., devlog, notes) for future reference.

and finally: - You left the jam feeling more confident in your game dev skills.

thank you guys

This (Spicy hot chocolate 3) is our first game with a rating meaning that our games are officialy not too good to be rated!!1! Im so happy, the game is number ~2.7/36. I just hope our next game will be playable without the java developement kit. And who knows maybe we will be number 1 average out of 2000 ratings, whatever "average" and "ratings" mean!!1! :smiley: :mushroom: :coffee: We wish to thank all the individuals who were tortured by our games.

The... Si.. falls unconscious

Seriously though, I know ratings are not important, but the truth is my friend and I are very pleased and grateful. In my long LD career, this is the first time to score below 80 at any category, and while I knew we nailed the theme I was definitely not expecting 6th place, and definitely not as an entry in the oversaturated "Jam".

Getting 187th for Innovation is too generous though, as I mentioned on the game's page and at the end of the "game", this is heavily inspired by Neal and their excellent Space Elevator, you can try it here

Results are pretty good. My best score since I started doing game jams. I think what worked this time is I had an idea of an original concept pretty soon during the week-end. Also, I chose a minimalist style so I was able to iterate quickly on the idea and find a good presentation to deliver the concept.

Maybe it's a good flow for me to work with 1-bit pixel art to focus on the game mechanics.

After the game jam, I took into account the feedback and started to work on an other version with better graphics and better immersion. I tried a lot of style but finally managed to have something interesting with voxel art. Here's a comparison. There's still a lot to do.

Before:

After:

I also learnt that maybe I should consider making games with no pressure and focus on what I like. The game I made for LD57 is not a publishable game, there's no financial potential, it's just a game for a game jam. But working on it is a good hobby and maybe it is just enough.

The end has come - congratulations to everyone who managed to finish their games in time! With a lot of conversation going on about the scores, let me add some thoughts to the bucket - starting with where our game, Tidehold, placed.

Imho - it's alright! We haven't beaten any of our records when it comes to placement in categories, and got a bit of a dive since our last game, Cheddalier, which reached a surprising 22nd overall. Yet, the placement doesn't matter much outside of the bragging rights: Tidehold is the game we're eyeing the most when it comes to future work and moving on to making it a small, paid title to be fully released.

Why? It's the easiest to build up on and we spend the most time fleshing out the basic UI and comfort of play. Cheddalier was fun for a jam game, but would be much more tricky to expand on - Tidehold is less innovative, but because of it, there are tons of similar games we can draw inspirations from and flesh out new elements very quickly. Plus, simple strategies are much easier to market than dice-based games, and have existing playerbase waiting for more titles in the genre. Unfortunately, our little mice-and-dice game would probably have a harder time positioning itself in the market.

Want more reasons why placement doesn't matter much? My least scoring Ludum Dare game overall (although personal top in Mood and Audio) was covered by PC Gamer https://www.pcgamer.com/games/life-sim/dark-roast-cafe-is-an-adorably-satanic-cozy-game-where-you-employ-quirky-demons-to-help-run-your-business/ !

What matters is not the score, but what you make of it. And we're making steps to make Tidehold into a proper game :)

Really happy with how my game came out and it's lovely to see that reflected in the ratings, thank you to everyone who played Puppeteer!

If you want to try out some perspective based platforming puzzles you can play it here: https://benskca.itch.io/puppeteer

Hi guys !

I just wanted to thank all of you for this great time on LD57, played great games with fantastic design, had great comments and feedback on my first LD game + on our first game (for the team composed of my brother and I as we used to make games with a team of 5 members, essentially on GGJ every year).

Eleven Studio is just born on this LD57 !

The community here is so kind. I just can't wait for the next one in October ! See you there !

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT :rofl: here one of the future evolution of UI, what d oyou think about ?

Do not hesitate to follow us on itch : https://elevenstudio.itch.io/

First of all — thank you to everyone who played, rated, commented, left feedback, recorded videos, laughed, cried, ran out of ammo, and punched a bee in desperation.

Thanks to you, this was our strongest Ludum Dare performance ever as a team — not just in terms of score, but in how we felt about what we made.

This was the Ludum Dare where we finally clicked.

🛠️ What Went Right

We actually planned first. Instead of charging in with vibes only (RIP Paper Cat Farms), we spent about an hour deciding what we really wanted: a short, punchy game you could beat in about 10 minutes, dense with action, and fun enough to come back to.

We balanced from experience. We followed an old-school design principle (popularized at id Software, creators of Doom and Quake):

"If you can beat your game blindfolded, that's Hard. Normal should come before that."

This helped us keep the main route satisfying but not soul-crushing. Endless Mode is there if you want to hurt yourself. 😉

Our small early maps were intentional. We learned during testing that huge mazes with three enemies hiding at the end were just... boring. Early levels are small and fast on purpose to keep pacing tight and fun. Later levels grow larger and more challenging.

🐝 The Soul of the Game: Ammo Management

We received tons of thoughtful feedback (thank you again!) about ammo scarcity. Many players noted that running out of ammo could feel brutal — but also strategic.

We want to be very clear: this was deliberate. Ammo management wasn’t a flaw — it was the soul of Dive Into the Hive Mind.

We didn’t want you to be Rambo. We wanted you to think like Agent 47:

-Make every shot count.

-Decide when it’s worth the risk to punch.

-Adapt when things don't go to plan.

Some players loved this tension. Some struggled. But we believe it gave the game its identity, and we’re proud we stuck to that vision.

🎨 Behind the Scenes

Bizzybee – Art, Music, and SFX Biz went full mad scientist, doodling like a whirlwind and composing electric, neuron-inspired music centered around the note B ("bee," get it?). Despite a recent chronic fatigue diagnosis, she powered through and made more art for this LD than ever before. Constraint truly made creativity flourish this time.

Fgeva – Programming With up-front design this time, there were no last-minute panics. Fgeva hit all our main goals and even some stretch goals — though he may or may not have been hallucinating from sleep deprivation by the end. (LD tradition!)

Balimaar – Programming Terrified about implementing procedural generation — and then utterly euphoric when it worked. This jam had way fewer "we're doomed" moments thanks to early planning. Also: much less bee-serk panic compared to LD56.

🎯 Moving Forward

We are soon to release a Post-Jam Version fixing many rough edges:

-Polished visuals and SFX balancing

-Smoothed out web build issues

-Controller input fixes

-Small tweaks based on feedback

But importantly: the ammo balance remains true to the original vision. We made a game that demands careful thought and adaptation — and we’re sticking to that.

❤️ Final Thank You

Thank you for diving into the hive mind with us. This was hands-down the best Ludum Dare we’ve had — and it’s thanks to all of you who played, commented, encouraged, critiqued, and took a chance on our weird little bee-brain experiment.

We hope you had fun. We sure did.

🐝💚 — The Hive Mind Team (Bizzybee, Fgeva, Balimaar)

Introduction

Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I did one of these. Why is that? Well, 3 years ago I graduated college and got a game industry job of my own, woo! But that also means I didn't exactly have the creative energy to do a lot of game dev in my free time. But now I'm back, baby! And with all the experience I've gotten from my job to boot. Did these lessons guide me to game jam greatness? Let's find out!

What went well

The Grapple & Wall Cling

While the game starts out fun, it really shines once you get into the cool movement options provided by the whip later in the game. The grapple points are just super fun to launch off of, making for some daring setups. But the wall cling is what really turns the game on its head. I especially love the room with the moving blocks, since the grapple interacts with the collision in so many cool ways. It also lets you take some creative shortcuts, if you can spot them. I'd actually be kinda interested to see what a speed run of this game would look like 👀

Art & Animation

I've definitely improved on my pixel art ever since I started Ludum Dare back in high school. I'm really proud of just how expressive and bouncy the characters are in this. I mean, just look at my boy move:

Even a simple enemy like this arrow trap got a nice little arm pump:

One aspect I'm particularly proud of is all the little details in the HUD. My favorite has to be the effects on the health bar when taking damage:

Enemy Behaviors

One of the major skills I've learned from my job is how to polish an enemy, and I think I did a fairly good job here. Even a simple enemy like the snake has this nice ease in/out to its movement. This is not only visually appealing, but helps test the player on their knowledge of the whip's range:

This bat enemy has to be my favorite though, the way it moves around is just so fun (even if I did phone the art in a little, lol)

Room for Improvement

Engine Troubles

One big thing I learned from this job is that my old custom engine... sucked! Like, really sucked. So one of my goals this jam was to use a new custom engine created with all the lessons I've learned over the years. So, in preparation for this jam I spent some time laying the ground work for this engine, getting sprites animating, physics working. But I wound up having to spend a lot of time during the jam both adding new features to the engine, like hitboxes and easing, while also fixing major issues with the physics system. My original intention was to participate in the Compo, but I was nowhere near done and wound up having to take an extra day to finish as part of the Jam, making this my first Jam entry. I actually didn't take Monday off work since I foolishly believed I wouldn't need it, so I had to pull an all nighter on Sunday to finish, which was... not great 😬

Bugs

As you might expect, new engine means new bugs, and I wasn't able to fix all of them in time. Notably, there were some bugs with the grapple near the end of the game which let the player clip through walls in some places. This didn't make the game unplayable, but was annoying enough that I decided to make a post Jam version to fix it Monday night.

However, some players reported that the game wouldn't start at all, or the sprites would all be missing. Eventually I got in touch with a player who had this issue and was able to get an error log from them. Turns out it was a system language setting issues. It was easy to fix at that point, but a frustrating issue to run into. Let this be a lesson not to rely on system string functions working the same in all languages!

Not Enough Grappling!

You may be surprised to learn that the grappling mechanics, which are the best part of the game, were actually added on the last day! I always intended this to be a metroidvania, but now I'm not sure if that was such a bright idea. By the time you get the grapple, the game is almost over. There're barely any setups that combine the grapple points with the wall cling before the game just abruptly ends. This also means there's not much time to really learn the grapple before putting it through its paces, so some players had a lot of trouble on the final section. Maybe it would have been better if you got the grapple really early and the whole game was built around it.

Control Concerns

Some players reported frustration with the controls. Some of this is normal for a castlevania-esque game like this, but some I think could be improved. In particular, a lot of players were frustrated you couldn't change facing direction in mid air. This was done so you couldn't re-grab the same wall with the grapple (maybe this would have been more apparent if you got it earlier, lol). But I could have just made this a limitation only when jumping from a wall cling, and let you change dir when jumping from the ground. Or, at the very least, I could give you like 10 frames or so at the start of a jump where you can change facing dir to make it a bit more lenient.

The results

I'll be honest, I'm a bit disappointed with my final results. My usual goal is to get top 100 in at least 1 category, which I missed out on this time (although I came close with Fun). This was somewhat expected since it was my first time doing the Jam, which is a more competitive category. But my raw scores were also about on par with my past entries, which felt a bit discouraging. I really felt this game was an improvement.

Part of me wonders if some people who couldn't start the game due to that crash just rated it poorly without playing; one player did comment that they couldn't play but left a review "based on the gifs". But I doubt many people did that, and I'm probably just coping here, lol.

Conclusion

So, was Depth Delver a success? Well, if the point of this game was to take all the experience I've gained over the years and pour it into something that would blow my past entries out of the water, then no, by the numbers it didn't achieve that. BUT if my goal was to gain new experience and improve my skills even further, then I do think it was a success! I was able to make significant progress on my engine, and I'm confident now that I could make a game of a similar scope within the Compo deadline next time (and without the bugs).

So, thanks to everyone who played and rated my game, I value each and every one of your comments more than you know. And, until next time, see yah!

PS: here's the game if you wanna try it yourself: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/depth-delver

Thank you very much for playing and rating my little game! :two_hearts:

What I learned

I'm an overthinker and usually overprepared for events; after multiple attempts I was burnout and couldn't participate on previous LDJams.

I was laying in bed when noticed a LDJAM stream, I was not aware that it was going to happen that weekend. I challenge myself to a single mechanic, a bite-size web experience, where I could polish my stronger traits. Discuss the game with my wife and proceeded to setup the game models in blender.

I had to kill my darlings, since I only had 1 day to make it: a smaller level, single camera angle, no dialog or humor and shooting mechanic. Submit it at 7 am CST on a Sunday and went to my planned commitments.

Previously; I was accused of flowing the board promoting my games so I kept it to 3 posts, and focus on playing games.

I woke up to my best rated game so far. I was not expecting this! My goal was to have at least one stat within the first one hundred of compo.

Results

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUHZBGWL5T8

...and that might be just why it worked.
(A CLOCK IN post-mortem and a story on telling stories or is it deep to tell a deep story?)

How it started:
How it ended:
It ended up ranking #3 in Mood. (Bragging, I know, but I'm proud that for once I succeeded on what I tried to succeed)

:whitecheckmark: What Went Right: Taking Away Control (At the Worst Possible Time)

For most Jams, I like to take a few hours (or a whole night) just thinking about the theme, no rush, no pressure, just letting ideas brew while I walk around, talk to family or even sleep on it.
It's honestly one of my favorite parts of the jam: wasting time on weird, probably (likely) bad ideas that only sound good in my head 😅.

This time, the idea came a little faster (for reasons I will discuss a bit downwards) and I spent half a day building it out.
It became one of my favorite memories from this jam: brainstorming a slow, invisible way to break the player.

At some point, the perfectly cruel mechanic clicked:

Spoilers ahead:
If you plan to play the game, go now, it's pretty short, runs in the browser, can even be played from your mobile, one of the feedbacks I got from my wife is that the text was small on the phone, so if you click the post-its, the text enlarges.
Come back here later.

Continuing:

What if the moment the player finally got how the system works, right at that satisfying peak where you're just starting to master it, the game would start taking it away?
Without warning.

One day, the first click happens for you, with an odd subtle sound, minimal feedback. The first one, so you are not sure what happens. It does not happen again, until...
Next day, two clicks.
Until you're just... there.
Present, but no longer necessary.

I wanted players to feel a tiny sting of unfairness.
And then realize:
that’s the point.

There are plenty of small little things that I think add to it:
Hidden visual cues: crosses growing on buildings... the city itself quietly turning into a graveyard for obedient drones.
Post-it notes that come back (depending on the answer you gave, hinting at something darker).
Your base salary just sort of continues...
And even the way the game ends is cryptic: wtf happens?
Well, only you know.

It is possible to end the game on the 3 screens, it's pretty hard to trigger on some (and time-consuming).
I was kind of hoping someone would eventually stumble on them accidentally (some hints on the comments made me think some did).

:whitecheckmark: Minimalism Helped the Story

Well, as usual, drawing takes me FOREVER, does not matter if I try to rush it, I always take way too long to make one button look right (Not a perfectionist, I just suck at it, there is always something weird I many times fix with some lucky pixel I forget to erase).
And well, compo timing being short, and I had even less time with family visiting, so, minimalist art style was not a design choice, it was basically survival.

But it ended up helping the game a lot...
The static screens, muted colors, black screen transitions, and limited interactions made the world feel colder, flatter... drained.
Which is exactly what the story needed.

Instead of showing a bustling city full of life, what we got was that 2 shades of gray 6 shapes of squares kind of city.
Instead of celebrating progress, everything around you just sat there, grey.
The way the city faded into grayscale as you commuted, the old computer screen (with PERFECT buttons), the dead, boring apartment...

Almost like I found a cheat code for making bad art work (I amazingly got 82 in graphics).

:whitecheckmark: Its fun thinking about story telling.

Instead of explaining how the game works, I was thinking on foreshadowing things, and how to add them.. etc.. I don't have much to say on that, except that I had a blast doing it (even if only thinking about it).
Recommend.

Also pretty nice to try to just tell enough of something, and later hope someone gets it.. and when some one does? Oh boy, that feels coooooooool. Also Recommend.

:whitecheckmark: Building the World First (And the "Game" Second)

One thing that helped a lot was thinking about the world first, before even worrying about the game.

"What kind of world would this exist in?"
"What would someone do there?"

Judging emotions "evolved" from Judging reputation in the ideas realm. Then it became a work game, and rest just came.

You are just categorizing human feelings on acceptable or not acceptable, sort of reducing people 0s and 1s (the reports also sort of devolve in that way). It felt fun to me, but I think that if the game had been longer, it probably would have gotten boring. (Maybe I also found a cheat code for bad mechanic)

This ideas could only come from building the world first. I will definitely try that again, even if I make a dumb flying-armored-tree-bird-killing game once more.

It was so much faster to make everything connect... I usually take forever to be satisfied with an idea.. .

:x: What Could Have Been Better - Balancing BOREDOM

Well, I got BORED testing the game.
By the end of the compo, I wasn’t proud anymore, I genuinely felt bad... all that gray, hidding crosses, heavy messaging and all that thinking on "how to make this darker" eventually DOES GET INTO YOU.
I even started cutting things out: the commute home gets shorter after the first day because I literally couldn’t stand playing through it anymore.

One commenter suggested clicking to stop the alarm clock.. well.. I had a starting thought on that (alarm sound was probably the last thing I added).. but that thought was interrupted by another th.... NO

The game actually has an internal apathy system: some stuff you do (or don't) slowly build it up, and if it reaches a limit, the game ends.
It was extra challenging fiddling with it, because... how do you measure "enough" boredom for someone that will play it only once when you played the DARN THING 200 TIMES?

Another thing: how do you make a boring game on purpose without just making... a boring game?
One of the commenters very cleverly pointed it out that If you succeed at making a boring game on purpose, well... you end up with a boring game:

I think the trouble with making a game exploring a “bleak” or “boring” situation is that if your work succeeds (and I think this does) then it just feels bleak and depressing

And... yeah.
The Fun score kind of reflects that. 😅
(Heh. Maybe I found yet another cheat code.)

:x: There is No Way to Win

I wish I had found (and had time for) a way to let players beat CALM, or at least reach a hidden "happy" ending.
But honestly... I just didn’t have the energy left to do it.
Even though I stopped working on the game with 9 hours to spare, a miracle for me, since I always finish in a mad cursing rush fixing last minute deployment issues (does not matter the engine... amazing, I always f... something up)

GOOD ENOUGH.

I couldn’t even think of a way to beat it.
Now, some ideas are floating around... maybe for a post-compo version.

I think that even if I added, and ended up cutting the happy ending later, just knowing it existed might have made the whole experience lighter for me while making the game.
Instead, it was like I sorta believed the thing I was trying to build. Goddamm weak minded fool, game is not even that good. (funny thing: vacation ended today and I go back to work tomorrow)

:thinking: Lessons Learned

• Building the world first helps a lot.
  Even if you don't have a full gameplay loop yet, understanding the vibe and rules of the world makes every design decision faster and more natural later.

• Emotional games hit you too.
  Making a bleak game will bleed into your mood after a while. Plan for that. Hide an happy ending? Take breaks? I did take a few walks outside during development, it was sunny.. helped a bit.

• It's FUN telling stories"
  Even though it has an expiration date on some cases, it can be fun to tell a story as it is to build a fun mechanic. Will definitely try that again.

This was such a fun experience and my friend and I had a blast. Thanks to everyone who left reviews and rated us. We had a lot of fun playing everyone's games!

I think if it wasn't for us actually enjoying playing the games and engaging with the overall process we might have left less ratings/comments.

Mostly, since it seems like being on the Smart page for a long time and getting more ratings actually hurts you in the long run?

Not sure, but we saw some amazing games that had tons of engagement and thought for sure they were going to win first place but it seems like the more ratings you get the more you actually regress to the mean. Which makes sense unless you have some standout art, or standout concepts like certain games do.

Which actually makes the whole thing feel way more random than we had initially believed it to be.

That being said, it was cool that we know at least 78 people played our game, and coming out of it with our first ever game being rated consistently above 3 stars in every category is an amazing feeling!

Thanks to everyone who played and rated!

Postjam Update

|?|???| |:-|-:| |||

My first game jam 1 month afer picking up Godot and game dev in general.

I actually thought I wouldn't be able to finish and submit but somehow managed.

If anyone reads this and is on the fence to try - go for it, the learning experience alone is worth far more than building a game in isolation!

Massive thank you to everyone that played my game, it means a lot!

Next, a post-mortem is in the works and I am planning a post-jam update to address the feedback. Not really expecting anyone to come and play the game again but it is important for me to get it done.

What a ride, see you in October! <3

Those are some fantastic scores. Thanks to everyone who played Down Golf! ⛳

I've been trying to sit down and write a post-mortem for way too long now. I also want to make a long-form YouTube video with the post-mortem, which will be a first for me. Stay tuned! Hopefully I'll get it done in the next 2 weeks. ⏳

Postmortem? Eh, not feeling like a full postmortem. Here's some yapping:

• What went well? Game was made, game is fun. Some minor glitches, but mostly ok.
• What went welln't? Idk, could've been more fun i think? Some extra visual cues wouldn't have hurt. Need to work on my basics as far as graphics and audio go. I probably can't put a finger on it because...

...Personal best set! Finally top 100! Hard to point anything out when it's literally the best thing we made yet. But also... The game is doing well on Newgrounds! Still receiving plays after ratings on LDJAM closed up.

Also need to work on teamplay. I've teamed up with @byzilio for the first (technically second) time, and it went mostly okayish. We've decided to continue teaming up, he does most of the gameplay-related code and I do graphics, audio and presentation-related code. Always wanted to step away from the low level stuff and up towards what makes the game look well. We still need to figure out how to make our code click together better, because frankly, it's a glorious mess... 🤣

NEXT GOALS: - Reach top 10 on LDJAM! - Reach 4.5 on Newgrounds! - Have more fun! - Make more fun!

Team Cardboard Box, signing out. See you all in October!

My friend @drazil100 and I have been maintaining a spreadsheet of our Ludum Dare scores. Our data also includes scores for my son, @jason-higerd, since he's participated a couple times. Drazil started participating in LD35 and I started participating in the LD36 mini-jam, so we have 20 games in our combined stats now. (Though only 18 have scores, because LD36 was a mini-jam that didn't do ratings, and my LD50 submission was too late to get any feedback.)

While looking over these historical scores, I noticed that the games where I participated solo tended to have pretty poor Fun ratings. Our first collaborative game in a scored jam was Diminishing Lands in LD38, and its Fun score of 3.551 was the best Fun score either of us had achieved up until Drazil knocked it out of the park with Loading Zone, his LD53 entry, with a Fun score of 3.684. But by contrast, my only solo-developed game to do better than 3.1 was Lily vs the Swarm in LD46 with a score of 3.429 -- respectable, but also an outlier compared to all of my other games between LD41 and LD55 ranging between 2.52 and 3.079.

Even my son's first game that he made when he was only 11 years old, Running Out Of Space (LD42), got a 3.444, beating all of my solo games. (This stung particularly badly because my submission for LD42 got my worst Fun score ever.)

So I set a goal for myself for LD57: I wanted to get at least a 3.5 Fun rating.

I knew I was going to have to really focus on what makes a game fun if I was going to break away from my usual ratings. I couldn't get distracted by flashy effects or deep game systems. So I looked at classic arcade games that needed to be fun the moment you dropped a quarter in the machine and thought about what they had in common. I saw that it would need to be easy to pick up but with a moderate challenge, relatively fast-paced, with tight controls. I knew I had to boil the mechanics down to a solid core and make sure that the basic interactions felt fun.

When the time limit ran out, I felt pretty good about it. I felt like I had done the best I could. I hoped that the best that I could do was actually good. And I waited for the rating period to end.

3.761!

I didn't just meet my goal -- I blew it away.

It's the game people are calling The 349th Best Game Of Ludum Dare 57 - and it's just got a new update!

Ludum Dare is a great source of feedback on a game so I've made a few small tweaks to respond to some of the comments I received during the rating period. So let's dive in to what's new in v1.1.0

Chill Mode

Deep Space Delivery Office I think succeeds in somehow being a slow game and quite stressful at the same time. For folks that want a slightly less (based on comments from @tetrapteryx and @christian-zommerfelds) constrained playthrough I've added a new option to the game to make it a bit more relaxed. In Chill Mode, when the reward for delivering a piece of cargo reaches zero, that cargo will simply disappear, rather than clogging up valuable cargo slots on planets and in space stations. This should make it much harder to hit penalties from maxing out cargo space, and much easier to have a longer, more relaxed session. Chill Mode high scores will be recorded separately to non-Chill (stressful mode?) runs, which leads on to the next v1.1.0 change...

More Info On High Scores

High scores will now show the number of deliveries completed on your high score run, along with the number of days you kept the Post Office running.

Quick Cargo Transfers

Rather than having to select a piece of cargo, then right click the freighter / planet / space station you want to transfer it to, you can now right click on a piece of cargo to transfer it instantly. This will only work if there is only 1 place the cargo could reasonably be transferred to. For example, if 2 freighters are docked at a space station, right clicking cargo in the space station won't transfer it - you'll have to use the old style left click to select, right click on target method for that. At least until I get my mind reading engine up and running. This was a bit of an attempt to deal with some more of the feedback from @christian-zommerfelds.

Bug Fixes / Balance Tweaks

Fuel Tankers can now be sent to refuel Shuttles, and Shuttle fuel usage has been decreased Shuttles aren't really meant to run out of fuel, but I've occasionally run into a bug where they really seem to guzzle the stuff up. So this change should turn this from a minor nuisance into a minor-er nuisance. Fixed a bug where the "Show More" button in the upgrades shop could be clicked when it "Show More" button wasn't being shown. Fixed a number of bugs introduced by changing how the high scores worked You know how it is with these things Not really a bug fix or a balance tweak, but the title screen now handily (for me at least) shows the version number

Please go and have a play here

Firstly i'd like to thank everyone for playing, rating and commenting on our game. The feedback has been super valuable.

The Good:

This is another set of consistently high results, similar to our last entry Checkmite. As we've grown and gotten more professional team members we too have tried to grow as programmers to make the most of their talent. Mood is an especially strong standout. The coming together of audio, graphics, mechanics and level design to really sell the effect of the depths of your subconscious.

We came into this jam with the same goal as always. Make something awesome. And I think we achieved that. Somnium is one of our most ambitious games yet, being fully 3D and free roam. There were moments where we thought we might not finish in time but the finished game is very close to our vision. However there are some areas we weren't able to implement and things to improve.

The field are standouts for going beyond my expectations and being truly beautiful, big shoutout to @Ruslana here for her art and animation work on the horses. She also did a great job with environemental story telling and I hope those who played it were able to find some of the easter eggs she placed in the world.

The music is also another area that we got good feedback on and really helps sell the uncanny dream like nature of the game.

The Bad:

There are several areas where we could've done better and most of them come down to running out of time. Running out of time is inevitable in a game jam but it's how we use the limited time we have that can be improved. While the feedback has been very positive there are a few consistent weak points people have highlighted.

Firstly is that the audio did not have fading. That was actually something we intended to implement but ran out of time. I have since implemented it while working on a post dare version and this has been a useful learning experience to learn more about Unity's Coroutine system and the intricacies of AudioSources and AudioClips.

The second is that the ending is a bit abrupt and doesn't make sense. Now to some extent that is intentional. Dreams are often nonsensical. But there was one aspect of the final area we didn't get time to implement. That is a voice with 3D audio calling out to you to wake up that would've come from the correct door. This would've then reinforced the theme of depth with your depth perception of audio and also made the ending more natural as you waking up from the dream. Unfortunately due to time we scrapped this and just ended with a fade to black instead. This is something I am also working on for a post dare version.

Another area is the amount of bugs. Most have been fixed but this too is partly due to running out of time. We prioritised new areas and puzzles and while I don't regret that decision it definitely did lead to a few players getting stuck and missing out on experiencing the entire game, which always hurts a lot to see. Part of this is down to the game being ambitious and 3D being fairly new to me and @Pegasys. We've learnt a lot and hopefully next time there won't be as many bugs. Alas as a developer I know that is wishful thinking. Colliders especially were an area that is far more fiddly to get right in 3D than in 2D.

Lastly is the topic of getting lost and the game being hard to figure out what to do next. This is an interesting area because it is a fundamental aspect of the genre with similar games like Superliminal not holding your hand. Our philosphy here was to let players figure out for themselves what is going on and piece together the world and puzzles however certain areas such as the Infinite Hallway could've been choreographed better. I don't think having a tutorial or hints would be a good idea as it would detract from the mood and dream like nature however perhaps audio cues or other less explicit environmental hints could've been used and that is something we want to explore in future.

The Ugly:

So from this feedback how can we improve things for next time? There are 4 ways we plan to learn from our mistakes and improve

*1) Implement audio fading into audio manager *

This one is already done as I mentioned above and should allow us to have improved audio transitions in future games.

*2) Focus on building a MVP by end of day 2. The game should be playable from start to finish. Doesn't have to be final art, music or level design but it should be playable *

This is something we have tried before to middling success. Back when it was us two the last day was often spent with @Pegasys creating art and me on features. However now we can focus purely on programming I think this is something that we can do without worrying about the other elements of the game.

3) Start each day with a Prioritisation session

Using something like MoSCoW to prioritise the various features and assets is something we have done in the past but haven't been as on top of in recent dares. This would greatly help us to decide which aspects are vital to the game and which are nice to have. So this will be a bigger focus next time.

4) Having friends and family playtest our game

Partly due to the time constraints we didn't have time to give a start to finish version of the game to friends till right near the end. This meant we missed out on bugs and other potential flaws that we could've caught. As such doing more regular playtesting, at a minimum once per day, will be something we do going forward.

Conclusion:

We really enjoyed making Somnium and exploring new techniques and art styles and it was a pleasure working with @Ruslana and @theoconfidor. We will be back in October and looking forward to what we can make.

If you're interested in trying it out you can play it here: https://pegasys.itch.io/somnium

I can’t shake off a very unpleasant feeling after the contest results, and I can’t stay silent about it. All I want to understand is what formula was used to determine the winner?
The contest rules stated that we needed to rate, play, and comment on other people’s games to boost our own rating. That’s exactly what our team did until the results were announced, but it turned out that this harmed our score, as the number of ratings our game received led to a lower average score.

For example: Participant James got 50 ratings, all 5 points, while participant John got 51 ratings, all 5 points except one, which was 4 points. So, James has a higher average score, even though John has one more rating, and that single 4 ruins everything—this feels unfair.

I just want to understand for myself: what was the equation, how was it calculated? Please help me get rid of this unpleasant feeling, give a "transparent" answer so I can clearly understand.

Why it feels unfair: - Punishment for greater activity: Actively participating (rating, commenting, etc.) led to more ratings, but it also increased the chance of getting a lower score (like John’s 4), which lowered the average. - No consideration for the number of votes: The system doesn’t reward participants for having more votes, which contradicts the rules encouraging engagement. - Impact of a single rating: A single low rating has a big impact when the number of votes is high, making the system sensitive to outliers.

What exact calculation method was used? @pov

And I want to add, we didn’t artificially inflate votes and acted strictly within the rules with respect for all contest participants!

This was my first Ludum Dare game jam. I made a simple game and it was fun getting to just be a part of ludum dare finally after years of lurking and not making an entry. I think it gave me a better idea of what to consider next jam and how to better approach it, so hopefully I improve as I keep on entering! :D

For this jam, I made Fathom Pond, a classic text adventure about finding your glasses in an increasingly surreal underwater world. And hiding in that description is perhaps the biggest error I've made in all of my 20+ jams: deciding to make a text adventure. However, before we get into that, let's start from the beginning.

Before the Jam

For this Ludum Dare, I knew I would be short on time before I even began. I've recently started a new job in which I work weekend mornings, and didn't bother taking time off for LD. This led to me considering some alternative options which would require a little less time than normal while still maintaining the level of scope I like to have in my jam games. Eventually, I landed on interactive fiction. I've been meaning to make a text adventure for quite some time, and this seemed like the perfect time to finally bite the bullet. I figured it would probably be a little more inaccessible than the average entry, but that I would have fun making it, and that it was worth the tradeoff. So off we go to Ludum Dare weekend.

A Brand New Engine

Fathom Pond was made in Inform 7, a natural language-based tool designed around the traditional style of text adventures (think Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, etc.). It really is a great and deeply powerful tool, but it ended up being a bit more complex than I was prepared for. I had dabbled in the basics here and there, but had never actually made a full game this way, and ended up doing a lot of learning on the fly. This is nothing new for me, back in LD48 I opened Godot for the first time and ended up making depths of dreams, all things considered one of my better games. However, it does still present some struggles considering the time pressure I was under. Lots of functions that would be second nature to someone experienced in the tool took more time to sort out than I would have preferred, and I did start hitting some time snags near the end of Sunday. I finished everything I intended in time, but had a few major issues.

Immediate Reflection

As soon as I had submitted the game, I took a second to consider how the process had gone and what I wish I would have done differently. The big thing was the presence of a few pretty major bugs that hadn't come up in my testing but were found pretty immediately by non-LD playtesters. I would have liked to have gotten that feedback prior to the end of the jam, but the time ultimately didn't allow that to happen. The most major of these (one of which affected literally the final room in the game) were patched the next day, but a few minor-but-annoying ones still persisted. I was also a little nervous about the potential obscurity of many of the puzzles. Coming from an IF background they all seemed relatively doable to me, but I knew the majority of the players of the game wouldn't be as experienced in the genre as I am. This turned out to be a massive understatement, as we'll soon get to. However, ultimately, I was pretty happy with how it turned out! I thought all but the very final puzzles were really fun and interesting, and even now I'm shocked by just how much actual content I managed to squeeze into this given all of the constraints I've mentioned. Unfortunately, most of these puzzles were never cracked by the overwhelming majority of people.

The First Ratings

When I woke up the morning after the Jam had ended and people began rating games, I had 2 comments on the game page. Both of them were extremely lost and unable to progress beyond the first few rooms. Immediately I went into damage control mode, adding an additional disclaimer to the game page and additional helpful information (namely a common commands document and a full walkthrough) as attachments on Itch. I do think these were ultimately good additions, and mitigated the worst of the confusion, but it was still a rude awakening. Frankly, at this point I had done all I could do and just had to let the comments come in.

Complete Confusion

Most of the comments I received were ultimately pretty uninformative (good writing, but I got stuck). A couple people who explicitly mentioned they were text adventure fans mentioned they really enjoyed it and made some more substantial progress. However, there was an overwhelming opinion: pretty much everyone wanted in-game help. Whether this was just a list of possible commands, more specific hints in particularly challenging rooms, or more in-universe guidance from the NPCs, it would have gone a long way. Something like the Inform postcard is useful, but ultimately doesn't help with custom commands for this game like "lure" or "attach". I suppose in my mind simply trying things that could work is much of the point of playing a text adventure, and being given a list of commands would ruin a lot of the immersion and discovery of the experience. But this is also a Ludum Dare entry, which requires some level of mainstream appeal, and so it perhaps would have been more useful to include more explicit help.

One real missed opportunity is a lack of dialogue options from the Eel, an NPC accessible as soon as you enter the pond. He has dialogue relating to a few objects, but it's mostly funny and doesn't lead you in any particular direction. This would have probably struck the best balance between extra help and maintaining the total atmosphere. There was also a pretty big problem with some intended actions not being recognized by the parser. The most egregious example is in the altar, where "place" doesn't work but "put" does. While experimentation with phrases is at the core of IF, intending the right thing but the specific phrasing not being recognized is a pretty major issue.

The Good

Not everything was bad! Those who did make more significant progress said they found the puzzles really engaging and well designed, and the sheer amount of content was very impressive given the compo restrictions. This is one of the things I'm most proud of with the game as well, I have 8 major puzzles in the game and none of them are repeats. Given the relatively limited number of puzzle options in the genre, coming up with novel ideas was tricky but super satisfying.

There was also pretty much universal praise for the writing. I don't tend to get much space to showcase my writing within my jam entries given the nature of compo scope, so having an opportunity to make a game that fully showcased the way I could create mood was really exciting for me. I loved designing this weird, surreal underwater world, and was thrilled by the number of narrative twists and turns I could sneak in without really having an explicit story. Ending the game inside a giant kraken in pitch darkness is a particular highlight.

Results

There ultimately isn't much to say about the final results. They're some of my lowest scores in a while, and I fully expected that going in. This was never going to be one of my best performing games, and I had to accept that before I even started working on it. I am still very proud of my Mood score, considering that was probably the aspect I was targeting the hardest. A complete lack of graphics and audio probably also skewed my scores, but I didn't have much choice in the matter. There are ways to add them to Inform projects, but it's not supported by every interpreter and was just generally more trouble than it was worth. Basically, I did just about exactly as well as I was expecting.

What Next?

I've begun to notice a pretty distinct dichotomy within my Ludum Dare entries. Either I make a game that scores well, or I make a game that I find more enjoyable to create. I've had a few jams where this overlapped, but for the most part it's one or the other. Stork Serenity is still my best scoring LD entry, but it was a pretty mechanically plain game to work on. On the other hand, my most recent games, Gull and Ray and Fathom Pond, were much more mechanically interesting and fun to make, but were inaccessible and didn't score particularly well. There definitely is a balance to find here, but I still appreciate making something like Fathom Pond every once in a while. If I just made the kinds of games I think would score well, I would have burnt out of LD a long time ago. We'll see if I strike a better balance for my 20th(!) Ludum Dare this October.

Is there a list somewhere that would have the top 20 games.

It would be good to know what genre of games received the top scores. Next jam perhaps make a game in the genre that the audience here prefers. Something more enjoyable for the players.

Secondly, of the top 20, how many were either originally web games or converted to web games and how many had to be downloaded and played. That would also be something to look at for scoring as well as how many times the game was played.

Finally, on a game by game basis how each player scored the game. It is not necessary to know the players handle, but just a list of the scoring. Were there a lot who gave it a 5 star rating and a lot that gave it a 1 star rating? Were the ratings about the same? We have an average sure, but that does not speak to any type of min/max differentiation which can be helpful in making the game better.

All of the data is there, it would just be a matter of releasing it and allowing the participants access to it.

It would be interesting also to allow for an in depth look at how each of our games were scored. I don't want any formula, I just want to see the raw data and then come up with my own conclusions.

Ultimately we want the best game we can make in just a few days. However, we are still human and want the best score. Everyone likes to win. These numbers could help us achieve that.

Hi everyone, right after releasing my AI based point and click adventure generator for LD57, I already started on a new project: a shooter authoring tool with AI generated enemy behaviour. The first playable prototype is here!

You can generate enemies by describing their behaviour in natural language. The AI then codes Javascript files for the enemies, and generates sprites as well. The result can be immediately viewed in the browser. You can enable and configure the enemies through the web-based UI, so you can create suitable levels with the available material. The AI supplies additional behaviour parameters with each enemy (these are the options that start with "extra_"), so you can tweak the enemies further.

It can handle prompts that describe multiple enemies and shooting behaviour. Example prompts:

zig zags randomly, periodically spawning minions that circle around it. The minions shoot bullets that explodes into a spray of shrapnel when they are close to the player.

dashes randomly, either in random direction or towards the player. Fires a single arc of bullets when it dashes towards the player.

alternatively stands still and moves quickly in a random direction. Is invisible when standing still. Shoots a bullet when it starts moving. Bullets explode after some time into a spray of shrapnel.

It's still a prototype, you can define only one level that starts playing immediately, and load/save options are limited. You can create an URL to demonstrate your playable level. No unit testing is done on the AI generated code yet, so you will find some malfunctioning enemies. Some planned features are:

• each user can create, modify and delete their own enemies
• multiple levels
• configurable player, background, and sounds
• download full game (as a zip containing all the generated code).

Check out the tool here

Play an example game here

LD57 was my first game jam and it was quite cool! I first heard about this about decade ago, or even further back than that. Recently I saw a friend making games here which made me want to do it again, but I didn't feel I had the required skills to do so. That changed however, when about a year ago another friend showed me a site to make music with, which was the last thing preventing me from doing a game jam, as I didn't want to do one if there were to be no music in the game. I wasn't in the zone to do one in October last year though, so I did this one as my first. It was just me so I decided to do the compo format, so note that when I say "jam" here, I mean the compo part of the overall game jam. I knew it'd be harder to do the compo format, but I'd rather do the one that requires you to be a single person if I were to do it as a single person!

Info and Pre-Jam:

Tools I Used:

Before anything, I knew what tools I'd use for the game jam.
For Programming/Coding/etc. I'd use Godot 4.3. I didn't use 4.4 as I've never used it before, just in case there was something that changed that confused me and took a while to figure out that it's different to 4.3.
For Music I'd use Beepbox, it's quite easy to use and I hadn't used any of the enhanced versions much so I kept to the base one.
For Sound Effects I mainly made the noises with my mouth and applied effects to them via DaVinci Resolve (which was new to me but I did it as I had time and it made them better), but I did use scrunching up a medicine bag too. I also had to use Audacity to convert some files from .wav to .ogg because they wouldn't work for some reason (maybe due to short length? I still don't know).
For Art/Graphics I used Paint.net, it's quite easy to use and I've used it for ages. I use the laptop touchpad to draw on it because I don't have a drawing tablet or anything and using the mouse for it is awkward to me.

Theme Voting and Reveal:

For the theme voting, I knew that I wanted to use Camer the Dragon in some way (Camer rhyming with Hammer for those wondering), because I think being able to play as a dragon with 2 legs, arms, and wings in a game is really cool and that there aren't enough that do that! With that in mind, some themes were easier to envision how to make a game around than others. The theme that was ultimately picked was depths, which worked out decently as a dragon UFO game was something I was thinking about making in the lead-up to the event. I had a few different possibilities in my head on how to make a dragon UFO game, with the depths of space being close enough to the theme such that I didn't feel like I was just completely ignoring it.

Making the Game:

Here I will split days in terms of when I went to bed, so even though it says 3 days this was still over a 48 hour period.

Day 1:

Day 1 was when I got the fundamentals of the game down and I made some very basic placeholder images for the player and obstacles. I didn't want to overscope the project, so I decided to make a basic obstacle avoidance game in an arcade style. I thought briefly about having a win condition, but that'd require a lot more balancing without it being too boring or impossible, so I kept with the infinite arcade-style. I decided to use circular hitboxes, as rotation would not cause any extra trouble and could be used to make the game look nicer, such as having the UFO rotate a bit when moving and having the asteroids rotate around as they move.
Some limitations were that I don't know how to make a clear path, although I could've probably added a shooting mechanic in a decently short time which was a good bit of feedback I got from some people, I thought of a cool way to do it afterwards when I was reading the feedback. I worked about 5 hours on day 1.

Day 2:

Day 2 was when I finished the gameplay and started the work on the graphics. The game was pretty much done decently early into the day, after around 2 hours. The graphics take me a long time because I'm very particular about them in terms of pixel placement which means it takes me a while to do. I also had to go get a covid jab on this day because I get too ill easily so I have to have those sometimes. I got the player character, background, and asteroids drawn on this day. I worked about 10 hours on day 2.

Day 3:

The first half of day 3 I couldn't really do anything because of jab side-effects (much better than the real thing though, I got it in 2022 it's not nice, every time I coughed I was honking like a goose for a week! Alongside stuff like temporary lessening of taste). After I decently recovered, I resumed the graphics work and it probably took me 14-ish hours in all. I'm not lying when I say I'm very particular about pixel placement, because of the way I draw, any rotation (such as on the opening title screen) and I basically redraw the entire thing, or at least comb over the entire thing adding and removing pixels. I decided to make the ending screen a bit funny with the UFO tow service because we cannot have Camer the Dragon dying (too sad!) so I made it something funny like that with the doodle.
I then made a song over the course of about an hour and took another half hour or so to make the sound effects, I learnt some funny audio filters in DaVinci Resolve for this. After making the sounds I had to add those to the game which took a short bit, but not too long. I then made the images for the icon, this is a pain to do because I use GIMP which is only on my old laptop (I can't be bothered to get it on my newer one). I had to get the old laptop, transfer the images to it, make the icon on it, then send the icon back to the main laptop. Fortunately making the icon worked the first time, so it was decently quick. Because the icon has a lot of sizes and such, I was not as particular on the pixels since this was about 4 hours from the deadline too.
I finished the build of the game about 3 hours before the deadline, but my custom font would not work on web (it'd just show as black rectangles) and I still have no idea why. Godot 4.3 is weird with fade-in/out music during scene transitions on web anyway though so after roughly 2 hours of trying to get the web text to work, I had to settle for just the download version. As I was trying to go so fast during the web testing, I accidentally deleted my other game off itch! Fortunately I still had the files on the computer, so I fixed that easily after I'd submitted for Ludum Dare. I worked about 10 hours on day 3.

Overall I worked about 24-25 hours over the 48 hour period, meaning I was a lot more focussed on this than I usually am, which was good. I'm glad to have completed it because I wanna make cool dragon games and show people them, because I find them really cool and awesome, that's my goal!

Post-Jam:

Feedback:

After the submission of the games, the feedback period began. There were some really good ideas for expanding on the idea, which I will likely implement into the game post-jam as an updated version (although the LD57 version would still be available), there was also no feedback I found unreasonable or unjust which was good and nice to see. There were a decent amount of comments liking the dragon character which was awesome! I also got to play quite a few cool games myself when doing the ratings and I can definitely see how this game jam creates popular games.

Rating Reveal:

Before the reveal I didn't particularly mind what I got for a variety of reasons, with about 20 ratings there's a lot of variation on who may rate your game and their average rating given. I also found the feedback quite valuable and the experience of making the game in a short time, planning time effectively, and getting to play a lot of cool games was good enough for me.
The only thing that I was really wanting out of the ratings was for the graphics to be the best rated out of my categories (or near to it) as that's what I spent the majority of the time on. The graphics did indeed get rated the highest and I was glad about that.

The Future:

I'll probably make a video with roughly the contents of this post, as videos are good to have for these and I want to make some different types of videos.
I'll also likely do another Ludum Dare in the future, maybe the jam format depending on if other people I know are doing it and want to work on it with me. I'll try to get a cool playable dragon character in there somehow though, as I have to help make more games with those in, showing how cool they are!

One of the things I love most about here is that people actually play our strange little games.

Anywhere else, I'd have to ask friends (or beg strangers) to even try clicking "Start" and even if I succeeded, I'd need hundreds of plays just to maybe get a few comments.

Here you dive into our broken builds, forgive our weird UIs, mash every key on the keyboard trying to figure out how to jump and still leave feedback!

That's amazing, and why I keep coming back.

So, thank you to everyone who played, rated, commented, cared.

See you next time.

Hi everyone!

I want to start by being honest - seeing my game’s placement was a bit of a surprise, especially compared to the amazing reviews I received. It even made me question if my game was worth playing (imposter syndrome much😅). But like many wise folks have said here, the scores really aren’t everything—and looking back, I can see just how much I gained from this event.

Over 220 people played and reviewed Pogo Dwarf, which is absolutely mind-blowing to me. I got tons of kind words, thoughtful feedback, and learned a lot just by playing, reviewing, and connecting with others.
And hey, I even got my first speedrunner (Looking at you @bossusuprem)!

So yeah, no more crying over scores. I’m incredibly grateful for the experience.

What’s next?

I’m continuing development on Pogo Dwarf!
I'm currently rewriting the core mechanics to support:

• Customizable controls
• Better precision and polish
• Modular systems for new features
• Multiplayer (!)

Once it's ready, I plan to release it on Steam.
In the meantime, I’d love for you to join the Discord server to stay in touch, follow dev updates, and take part in future playtests.

https://discord.gg/FAUPSbB6

I’d also really appreciate any feature ideas or bug reports - your input will genuinely helps make the game better.

Thanks again for an amazing event.
Much love, Till next time! ❤️

Could you wishlist my game on Steam? https://store.steampowered.com/app/3024370/NebuLeet 👉 👈

What else could you expect from an indie game developer? :D

Here are my results:

Overall I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish with this entry! ABSEIL

I do have one question, since I submitted for the Compo, are these scores only compared against others who submitted for the Compo, or are they also compared against those who submitted for the Jam?

I was very happy to participate in Ludum Dare and I am very pleased with the result I received. Therefore, I will continue to work on Depth of Mind. I just updated the game yesterday, bringing it to the alpha state.https://funbanan.itch.io/ld57

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6YEypAf4pU

Now that the results are in, I wanted to share my experience in my first Ludum Dare. I love how supportive and welcoming this community has been, and I'm already looking forward to the next one. Thank you, everyone!

May the 4th be with you :smile_cat:

https://www.twitch.tv/sarajayess

If you EVER feel bad about yourself, as a software developer (or a wannabe game designer), look no further:

This must be true.. or false

An actual book

Commit messages??

This is from the most honest Youtube channel I have ever seen. Accidentally stumbled upon while re searching unrelated stuff. DAMN is this good! :rofl: Plus the guy is actually discussing pretty on-point stuff while memeing it all :laughing:

Watch on 1.25 speed for best effect. Satire 12/5.

Thoughts on Agile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0bgSuGf5HE

Modern codebases...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiFM9bcLGn0

Thoughts on LinkedIn.....: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf5mJgDwLkM

Thoughts on how a guy broke the Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssFh7FB5xAY

Thoughts on JavaScript.. XD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W3iXmAtctY

Thoughts on.. your personality based on your editor/IDE :))): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw1FAQeNYS4

Did you just deploy to production?!?!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPjN7GQhcL4

The tech rant playlist itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTwEvK0VBUg&list=PLdsRgmqmJWvneaVV-ZdSD17H1m0nbnEZJ

Crazy to think the jam happened a month ago! Here's the devlog I made of me making my game for the compo! See you next time!

https://youtu.be/0Iw3lTaYim0

https://youtu.be/qH2NTgMH2ck

Itch: https://kittycreampuff.itch.io/sheris-room

NG: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/978098

Hey everyone!

After LD55, I kept working on the prototype I made during the jam, and it’s now grown into a complete game called Polygon Survivors.

You’ll find a large selection of weapons, supers, and summons that interact in all kinds of ways to create fast, chaotic combat. Throughout a run, you collect power-ups, unlock passive effects, and boost your stats to shape your playstyle as you go. With all the different systems at play, there’s a huge number of possible builds and synergies to discover.

If you enjoyed the jam version, or if you’re into games like Vampire Survivors, Brotato etc... feel free to check it out and wishlist it on Steam: 👉 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2904560/Polygon_Survivors

Thanks for reading — and good luck to everyone still building cool things post-jam!

Hello! Don't want to fill the feed with a huge message. It was amazing being a part of my 12th LD. Me and my team wrote up a bit of a post mortem for those who are interested. One of our best outcomes to-date. 33rd overall

https://bluepinstudio.com/blog/2025-05-15-Antz-vs-Plantz-Post-Mortem/

Intro

I made a cute and crazy golfing game for the Ludum Dare 57! I think I managed to build pretty cool game ideas and mechanics, based on the "depths" theme. This was over a month ago. Yeah… it took me a month of procrastination to finally sit down and write this. But better late than never, here we go!

Game jam

I couldn't sleep well the night before the Ludum Dare began, so I had some time to think about what kind of game I wanted to make for the theme. I usually spend about the first half of the first day thinking about game ideas. But this time it was actually quite quick. Of course, the first ideas that came to my mind were games about caves, mining, and fishing. While I love these kinds of games (Minecraft, Terraria ❤️‍🔥), I wanted to do something more original.

I got the idea to make a golfing game, but each hole would lead into the next level. I had never made a golfing game before, so this was… seductive! It would also be about platforming since the player would always have to get to the ball physically, and also get to the hole in the end to progress to the next level. I love platformers, so another plus point for this idea.

BTW, if you're interested in caves and mining just like I am, here's one amazing video I recently saw about a mining game made for this Ludum Dare. I love how it looks, works, and feels! Check it out: How I made a procedural cave game in 48 hours | Ludum Dare 57 Devlog

I immediately jumped into making the game in the morning. I prototyped the golfing physics and having the player hit the ball. I drew a (quite nice, IMO) sprite and animations for the player and the ball. The first level is just on the ground, so I focused on making it work on the first day. I made a tree, implemented the golfing mechanics like hitting the pole and going to the next level. I also made a simple system for the camera, which tries to keep the player, the ball, and the current pole in view, while the player always gets priority. In the evening, I added the first sound effects (more about those later).

On the second day, I finished the second level and worked a lot on the systems of chaining levels in the game. ⛳ I polished the first level, made a few more levels, added some juice and effects, better aiming, more sounds, and improved the physics. I added a scoring system and a simple menu. Finally, I added the last "end" level, packed everything, and submitted it to the compo version of Ludum Dare. Phew!

Planning

There’s usually not much time, nor point, for planning during a game jam. I just drew a couple of my ideas and kept a simple checklist of things I wanted for the game. I usually do it like this for game jams. Here’s how it all looked for Down Golf:

Tech

I made this game, as usual, in Godot. 🤖 I used Aseprite to draw the sprites and I recorded my own sound effects for the very first time. It was a lot of fun! No special microphone or anything, just my iPhone.

I originally wanted to also include some music and I would have used Ableton for that. But as usual, I did not have enough time. I always put sounds and music as the last priority and then almost never get to them. 🔇

Other than that, Git as usual, and I used Itch.io’s Butler to publish new builds easily and often.

Constructing levels

Okay, let's start with the game levels. The game works like this — when the player gets the ball to the hole, it opens up and lets the player pass through, going down into the next level. That means that all of the levels are connected (chained) in one big "main" scene.

In Godot, this is actually pretty easy to do. I have one big scene called "main" which contains all the levels, the player character, the ball, and the camera. The levels are positioned in a way so they connect correctly.

Each level is a separate scene so I could work on them separately. I also needed a way to run and test each level independently, so I would not have to rerun the whole game to get to the level I’m currently working on. I constructed each level from smaller objects or components which are all independent on the rest of the game. I heavily use Godot’s signals, too. Here’s how a level looks:

Here we go a little into the technical details. If you are not interested in the implementation, you can skip ahead. You can see that each level is sort of made from small LEGO pieces. 📦 The spawner is what ensures that each level works correctly when it is run either in the main scene or separately on its own. When it loads, it checks whether there is a player in the game, and when not — which is only when the level is run on its own — it spawns the player and the ball at its position. In the main scene with all the levels, the player and ball are already there, so the spawner does nothing.

Other LEGO pieces work similarly. I won’t go into too many details here. The pole tracks whether it is “active”, and when it is, it counts how many shots the player takes in the current level. It does this by hooking into the player’s signal ball_hit.

You can see that I rely heavily on groups and @export variables. I love writing scripts this way, it keeps them independent of each other and the scene structure. You will see a similar theme with the game objects (described below). 👀

If you are curious, check out the full source code of the game on GitHub: https://github.com/martindzejky/down-golf

You may be curious how all this connects in the "main" scene, the game. Well, it's actually very simple. Essentially, when a level is completed, it emits signals ball_entered_hole and player_entered_hole. I connect these signals between the levels in the editor, which means that when one level emits these signals, it calls the "activate" function in the next level.

What I could have done better here is that, instead of placing and connecting the levels manually in the editor myself, I could have created a "manager" object with an array of levels. It would place and connect the levels automatically based on their "enter" and "exit" points, so they would be chained nicely. This would have also allowed me to load one level at a time and to allow the player to restart only the current level, instead of the whole game like it is right now.

All in all, I'm really proud of how I structured the levels. They are flexible, independent, and easily testable on their own. 🎉

Game objects

In Godot, all game objects are just scenes — trees of nodes. I think the best practice is to try to use as many small nodes to implement object behavior as possible, instead of doing everything in script. This is called "declarative" programming, rather than "imperative". Using nodes, you "describe" the behavior of the game object and configure and connect the nodes to do that, instead of coding everything yourself.

For example, this means using Timer nodes to implement waiting a fixed time, instead of doing that in code; or heavily using the AnimationPlayer node to control all animations and scripted behaviors. Did you know that an animation in Godot can control any other parameter of any other node, as well as call any function during the animation? 🤯 Very powerful!

Here's the player object as an example. Notice how many nodes it consists of.

I also needed to have a simple state machine for the player, because the player can be moving around, aiming, or shooting the ball. These states are mutually exclusive. I would usually also do this with nodes, but here for simplicity I just used a single enum and a variable current_state in the script, along with a fairly small match (switch) statement.

The ball is similarly very simple. It's basically a rigid-body physics object that displays particles and plays sounds when it collides with anything.

One last example. Here's the pole and its nodes. ⛳ Its script is also fairly simple, it just detects when the ball or the player enters the hole, and emits appropriate signals. It plays an animation, displays particles, and plays sounds. That's all.

Notice that all the objects are independent of each other. For example, the ball object does not use any external state or other objects. The pole is detecting collisions using its area colliders and collision groups. It does need to know when the player hits the ball, and I'm using groups and signals for these kinds of soft dependencies. It works very well and I don't have to connect the objects in any way in the editor.

Using groups is an excellent way to work with game objects in Godot. For example, I always have a "player" group and there's usually just a single player in the game, so it is easy to get access to it from anywhere using get_tree().get_first_node_in_group('player'). Similarly, all poles in the game are in the "pole" group, and it is very easy to look up or even deactivate all poles in the game at once using get_tree().call_group('pole', 'make_inactive').

Using signals is another Godot way of hooking up game objects. 📣 It ensures that, for instance in my game, the pole game object does not have to care how ball hitting is made in the player object. It just uses the ball_hit signal, that's all it cares about, and then it is the responsibility of the player object to implement and emit the signal. Simple inputs and outputs, which I always like to work with!

Again, I won't go into more detail here, but if you are interested, check out the full source code of the game: https://github.com/martindzejky/down-golf

Graphics

As I've mentioned, I drew the sprite and animations of the player character first. I also drew the ball, the pole with the flag, and the tree in the very first level. It took me a lot of time, actually, but I think the first level in the game is the best. It is close to the style that I envisioned for the game. I'm proud of what I achieved here. 🌳

The other levels, unfortunately, did not receive as much attention, and as a result, they look very blank and boring. I was focusing on implementing the game mechanics pretty much for the whole time, so I did not have much time (nor ideas) for how I would like the underground levels to look. All the levels pretty much look the same. 😵‍💫

I learned once again during this game jam that I’m a great programmer but not a great artist. I can implement game mechanics quite quickly and efficiently, but I spend way too much time on art, and the result is not that amazing. 🎨 Others have also noticed this:

What can I do about this next time? Well, I can either team up with an artist — which I’ve never done before so that would be an interesting new experience! 🎨 — or really focus on making games with great mechanics and super simple graphics. It can be done and there are a lot of successful indie games out there with very simple graphics.

I also recently watched a video about using vector art instead of pixel art for games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKt95peINyk It got me really curious! I’ve never really tried that and it might be worth it for some future game jam as an experiment. In general, I’ve always defaulted to pixel art for my games. I would like to try some other simple styles of visuals, too.

Audio

For the very first time, I did not use Bfxr/Sfxr or anything similar for generating sound effects! I instead used… a microphone and my own mouth. 🎙️ I recorded hilarious sound effects for hitting the ball, steps, jumping, the trampoline… The sounds in this game add so much charm to it and honestly make it what it is.

I had a lot of fun recording these. We laughed so much with my girlfriend when I was making weird hit sounds into my mobile phone! 😆 This was honestly one of the best parts of this game jam for me.

That's where it ends, though, for audio. I wish I had recorded and added some small ambience sounds. That would have added a lot of depth to the levels. There's also no music — I just did not have the time and I did not want to just slap in some AI-generated track (which isn't even allowed in Ludum Dare AFAIK).

Posting videos

Another "first time!" While I was working on the game, I made and posted several short-form videos about the game and my time in the jam. This was an entirely new experience for me — I've never really made videos before, especially ones where I talk to the camera! This was a very valuable experience, and I will make sure to do this for all of my future jams since it was so amazing. It also brought a lot more visibility to the game, and some of my friends were following the development closely. Some are still poking me today about where the next video and the next game are… 😬 Again, such a great experience!

Check out all the videos about the game over here:

Down Golf ⛳️

Lessons learned

Okay, so what did I learn on this project? Well, I really think I have a good game idea here. Lots of people played the game and liked it, and I got a ton of positive feedback about it. I think it's a unique idea and a good mash of genres. It could be worth making it into a "full" game — what do you think?

Sound effects were a big win in this project. This was the very first time I tried making and recording my own sounds, and it paid off big time. It actually defines the game, IMO! If I ever turn this into a "full" version, it still has to use these sound effects! 😆

Graphics were a fail, I think. I spent a lot of time on the few important sprites in the first level and the main character and ball sprites. They look good, but the rest of the game then looks terrible. I could have instead focused on using very simple, even primitive graphics, so I could focus more on the other parts of the game. That being said, the main player character does have charm, so perhaps it wasn't a waste of time.

What caught me by surprise is that the physics are inconsistent. I have no idea whether this is Godot's problem or I'm doing something wrong in my own code. The ball is basically using the built-in Godot 2D physics — nothing special. I'm just applying an impulse when the player hits the ball — the impulse is always applied at the center of the ball. And yet, sometimes the ball seems to fly in a different direction than the player was aiming for. This happens especially often when the ball is on a slope. I will have to do more experimentation here (an upcoming video? 😏)… Although to be fair, I don't have that much experience with 2D physics.

Another big fail is that I did not leave myself enough time for adding more mechanics. The platforming aspect of the game is especially dry; there's not much to do aside from just jumping. I did manage to implement trampolines into the game and they are so much fun. But I had a lot more ideas for how to make the golfing levels more interesting.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed working with Godot again and using "clean" systems to implement the mechanics. I love that the levels are self-contained and isolated from each other, and I love how objects are made from simple components. It was very enjoyable to work with and easy to tweak and change when I needed. 😌

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this project. I enjoyed what I'm good at — programming and development of game systems — and I added 2 new things which I truly enjoyed — my own sounds and making videos. At the same time, I struggled with the same things I usually struggle with — no music, wasting time with not great graphics, and focusing too much on pretty and clean code rather than implementing a lot more game mechanics which would make the game more interesting.

Outro

Thank you very much for reading this retrospective! It was great for me to finally sit down and write this, even though I was procrastinating on it for a month. 😶‍🌫️

If you haven’t yet played the game, check it out here: https://martindzejky.itch.io/down-golf The Ludum Dare submission page with comments is right here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/down-golf

Please let me know if anything interested you in this article, or if you have any comments or questions. I’ll be happy to reply!

My next step is to make a long-form YouTube video out of this retrospective. 📽️ Wish me luck — I’ve never made this before. Then, I’m eager to jump into a new game project. Or, who knows, continue working on this one and exploring more ideas? Let me know if you would be interested.

Rare for me to touch a game after the jam but this time I decided to "finish" my jam game downclimber. I wrote little more on the itch update: https://prunuspadis.itch.io/downclimber/devlog/944411/full-release

I decided to keep my page as a "time capsule" in this site.

I finally finished post jam version of Doom Scrolling, finishing everything I was planning for compo.

The best illustration of me overestimating myself is this - it took me around a month to work 2-3 hours a day to implement all the features, balance it and fix all the bugs (well, not all of them, but only critical ones).

It even involved building paper prototype of the game, as it was much faster to iterate on game balance with real cards, rather than fixing everything in Unity.

I can write another post on the paper prototype, how I came to it and how it was useful, if you want to, please like the post :)

I'd also appreciate if you play the game and leave any feedback under the post: even if you opened, didn't understand how to play and closed, that would be an awesome feedback already.

Check out the game on itch

Happy Doom Scrolling :)

I'm going to be doing a live premiere of a special video I've been working on for quite a while. It's my full Game Jam Anthology, Vol. 1 album, which is a compilation album of tracks from a dozen game jam titles I've worked on. Most of them Ludum Dare games!

The video will also include gameplay from each game as well as little pop-up facts about each game, the jam it was a part of, and the music I made for it. I think it's a pretty unique experience!

Anyway, I'd love for you to join me in chat for the premiere!

https://youtu.be/J15earRVfY0

For those who are interested in platformer, please try my game for the Pixel Game Jam 2025, the theme is “From the dead”.

Kill the Cat: https://celeste314.itch.io/kill-the-cat

(I really hope it’s fine to advertise the game in other Jams)

After the jam some little features were missing (tutorial tips, showing items on UI, proper fullscreen, some info, one level etc.) and some bugs present. Today I had the idea to polish it a little and release a new version.

Here is my jam game plus 3h of extra polish: https://lazyanttu.itch.io/cthonic-depths-full

Thanks to great advice here, I decided to keep my original jam game intact (it's also hosted on itch io).