No particularly high placings, but I did get my best ever scores for Graphics and Audio, and my best scores for Theme and Innovation since LD46! I'm thoroughly pleased with that.
As I've mentioned before, LD52 is scheduled to begin on my birthday, so I'm unsure whether I'll actually be taking part in it, but I'll continue honing my skills regardless and I'll definitely be back for LD53, with my sights set on even better results. See you all then!
For my first game jam and second attempt at making a game in general, I'm pretty pleased with these results!
It's pretty much average across the board (besides innovation, although I did not expect high marks there ngl :laughing:) and I think that's solid for this attempt. I like to think I could maybe have got slightly better marks with more reviews, but sadly I've spent the last week bedridden, so I actually just feel lucky I got the minimum 20 reviews lol.
I've also learnt a lot in making this game and received some very solid advice and feedback which I appreciate immensely. Looking forward to the next one for sure :smile:.
are extra games all supposed to be 0 average? i understand being N/Ath place because i know it's not supposed to be ranked against the other extra games since it's the casual format but it's wild to not see the average of the ratings on your own entry when it's still possible for extra games to be rated in the first place, like i've seen some entries with 100 ratings but it just says 0 average like why have it be functionally possible to opt in to ratings if it does nothing? :thinking: all those opinions going into the void lol
Edit: Forgot that Jam and Compo have different rating categories! :face_palm:
@pov, I'll check back in a little bit to see if this fixes itself automatically, but at the moment the grades appear to be off for the similarly rated entries! :sweat_smile:
The left side is rated lower in every category (other than the theme), but the right side has a lower grade by a *substantial amount in each and every one of them...*
Good luck on figuring this out, and thank you for another great Ludum Dare! :beers:
Here are our ratings. We are a little disappointed with the result. We got a lot of good feedback on our game in the comments, but we got an average rating of 3 in all categories. So we don't understand if people liked the game or not. And now we don't know whether to start developing a full version of the game or it will be a waste of time.
Every ld my results are overall better than the year before, I was afraid that this one will be different but I somehow still nailed it lol. this was a lot of fun, thanks everyone!
Pretty disappointed with everything but Audio/Humor/Mood. But that only fuels my drive to make a better text adventure next time >:D
(With those percentages 100% = first place, more details here)
Nice! Wish the overall rating was better but there was a lot of jank and a lot of people seemed to think the graphics looked outdated. Still it seems like people really enjoyed it!
Play the world's 22nd funniest jam game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/growth-spurt
Thanks to everyone that played and provided feedback for Weirdo Words. I was very happy with my result and I think these are the best scores I've received on an entry to date.
Weirdo Words isn't over, you can still play it today and get a new set of jumbles every day. I'll leave it up for a while but will be taking it down in the near future when I do the actual game release.
The new version will have a new name, some interface updates, an expanded dictionary, support for anagrams, and several new play modes and difficulty settings. The thing that has really surprised me is the number of visitors that my dashboard says I'm getting to the game. Far more individuals are playing than rated and lots of repeat visitors. I honestly didn't expect so I think it is definitely worth putting some effort into a full release.
Again, thanks to everyone! I got to play some really cool games this round. Looking forward to the LD52!
This was our first Jam, and we never expect to even finish! I think this is a great score tho
Still gunning for that top ten! I'll get there at some point.
Scores over time ->
First time ever top 10! Feels especially nice since everyone kept bitching about theme being bad haha
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-we-switch
So after a long, long wait for final results I finally see what I have. Don’t know if I’m happy with that, but I guess for first entry and even in Compo this is pretty good. Thank you, LD, for the opportunity to create something that I want to finalise and show to world. See you in LD52 and devlogs of Switcheroo!
I really, REALLY, didn't care for the theme "every 10 seconds". Which is at least partially why I ended up making the kind of game that I did. It was just intended to make fun of the theme and make fun of how inspiration less it made me feel.
At least most people thought it was funny too, which is honestly just primary school all over again. If you can't make something brilliant then make something that makes people laugh. I can't really say that I disagree with the score, the game ended up getting.
It was certainly a very juvenile and cynical game, it was basically me doing this:
And to some extent I think I need to outgrow this, it's not conducive to become a better artist and developer, or just as a person in general, if I just continue to make mean spirited and pessimistic art. At the same time I don't know where else to go?
Am I just an angry old fucking idiot? Can I change? should I change? isn't there plenty of reason to be fucking angry?... Definitely questions I need to work on.
ON A POSITIVE NOTE:
It was really interesting learning Godot during the weekend as well, it has a really interesting approach, though I'm not sure that it's actually THAT fundamentally different. Like it seems that the scenes are just another word for a composition class and so on... either way, it won't be the last time I work in Godot, especially since yoyogames has gone over to the subscription model and the CEO of Unity has revealed himself to be a massive dickhead. (I do not hold it against other developers who use these engines btw. this is just my principled stance).
I do like a lot of the built in features in Godot, especially the text handling using bbcode to do animation and effects and so on. Definitely looking forward to 4.0!
Also, see ya all in January for LD52!
It was the December of 2014, and a Unicode snowman almost won the theme vote. A friend of mine who has been around since Ludum Dare 25 was showing me a game they created for Ludum Dare 31. At the time I had been wanting to get into game development for a while. I've downloaded Unity and followed some tutorials, so I had a grasp on what I was doing. My friend introduced me to Ludum Dare, and I gave it a go.
The theme was An Unconventional Weapon. After spending the first day on an idea that I eventually dropped, I came up with a better idea. My weapon shall be planets! With my incredibly limited knowledge of unity, I made an endless survival game about throwing planets into asteroids to prevent asteroids from crashing into the sun. I wrote the music in LittleBigPlanet 2's Midi Sequencer, and all the graphics were just default spheres with some poorly made unity materials.
Having never completed a game before this, the deadline was incredibly exciting! Before this point I had never made a title screen before, and I know it sounds goofy to say it, but after adding a title screen, it felt like a complete game. I still have incredibly fond memories of showing this game to all my friends, and them all competing for the high score. In the end, I scored 41st in innovation for the compo, and I was hooked.
I'll keep these short and sweet. Reflecting on my previous Ludum Dare, I was going to need a lot of extra time programming to fix things, so I spent exactly 20 minutes on the art for the entire game. You can imagine how well that turned out.
To avoid giving the main character a walk animation, he has Heely's so he can just slide around. HA!
At this point, I have moved on from LittleBigPlanet 2's sequencer, and upgraded to LMMS. In hindsight, I should've done that before the jam started. The music I wrote for LD 34 is bar none the worst sound you could ever experience.
This uninspiring endless runner about being a ninja pair of pants was a disaster, and the comments seemed to reflect it. Despite that, one comment really stood out:
The joy of reading their first sentence left a huge impact on me. My game sucked, sure, but it was enjoyable in its own stupid absurd way.
This was when I seriously started reflecting on the feedback I was given from the previous games, though it took a little longer to really understand the notes on difficulty. Looking back, it feels like I was trying to beat the players, which is stupid. My Ludum Dare 35 game even says "I didn't really expect anyone to get this far" in the victory screen, just to show how bad that mindset had become.
Ludum Dare 36 wasn't judged due to website maintenance, but I wrote some real good music that jam, and I always wished I could've got a score for that just to see how much I had improved.
Ludum Dare 37 was the first game I made that got a better score than my first Ludum Dare. 34th in Theme, and 39th in innovation. For "One Room", I made a game about running around a pillar in the center of the room, and behind the shadow the pillar casts, a new procedurally generated room is created. Despite the game doing great in innovation, it had the least memorable main character of any game I have ever made.
Looking back, I was making too many endless games, and nowadays I'm simply not a fan of the genre.
The current website has arrived! At this point I've decided "I know all there is to know. Now I can screw around and make whatever I come up with". A bold statement. It definitely is the time where I became more ambitious with my LD games. I was no longer getting comments about the games being impossibly difficult, I was now getting comments about the game being impossibly confusing. All around, these games were creative, yet terribly explained. An era where my ideas far exceeded my execution, resulting in some real big messes. In one of the games, as an effort to prevent it from being confusing, there's a "Things you should know before playing" option on the title screen, leading to a stupid-sized wall of text. Great work, buddy.
So I was starting to understand that my games needed better direction and tutorials, but I wasn't quite figuring out how to do it. On a related note, this is where I started finding my art style. I played around with it a lot in these games, and I really enjoyed cute characters with no outlines.
Oh- and LD41's "Combine Two Incompatible Genres" is still the best theme I've participated in. Every game that jam was unique and amazing!
Okay, yeah. I have really found my art style.
These are games that I really look back on fondly. I think the game I made for Ludum Dare 43 was my first "Good game". It was actually fun! I made a game where you play as Mary, who had a little lamb, and you throw your lamb at enemies to kill them, Steal their money, and buy more lambs. Its like absurd Pikmin, and has a synth-heavy rendition of Mary Had A Little Lamb playing the whole time, and ah! It's this kind of absurdism that I fell in love with.
What about a game where you mine for money and spend it all on a bunch of ladders? Sure! Why not? I also learned a lot about mixing audio, and found some more cool synths. My music was starting to get better, and I wanted to show off.
This was also my first game to include a speedrun timer at the end, and wow let me tell you it's the best idea I've had yet. Not only do people enjoy winning games, people enjoy bragging about how fast they beat the game. Why would I ever want to make another endless game ever again? Every time someone posts a screenshot of their speedrun time, I want to give them a hug.
My first top ten in graphics was my LD45 game, "Ultra Quest". I spent a lot of time on the music as well, trying to incorporate a leitmotif. This game is about going on an adventure, nonsensically killing everything in your path, becoming king, and slaying a dragon. At the end of level one, you start a forest fire, and the fire is visible on the map used for selecting levels. After level two, the fire on the map is bigger. It's one of my favorite visual gags.
Overconfidence? What's that? Okay yeah so this was the first Ludum Dare I ever submitted where I don't think the game was complete. If Ludum Dare 34 was my first failure, then this was my second. I created a super edgy gardening simulator with turn based combat, dialogue, cutscenes, a unique crafting system, and a final boss. All within 48 hours. And none of it was polished. It didn't even follow the theme! I think maybe two or three people actually beat the game, due to the insane amount of softlocks. That said, I learned my limits.
It's definitely one of the game's that I don't tend to replay. I usually avoid showing this game to any new friends, ha!
Second place in Innovation. This game hits different. Ribbon was the game I created for the theme "Stuck in a loop".
It's my first top 3 score, and in innovation, no less! If Ludum Dare 46 was a complete flop, then Ludum Dare 47 was a complete 180. I had a lot to reflect on from LD46, and I wanted to show that I learned my lesson. The music slaps, the artwork slaps, no softlocks, (it's not unreasonably edgy), and I paced myself. I had plans for more content, but scrapped it so I could polish the main mechanic. The steering mechanic was incredibly buggy until the last hour. It's a lot of math that, looking back, I have honestly no idea how I made work. The end result however, is a game that didn't have a single negative comment, except for wanting more content.
So how do you follow that up? Well, before Ludum Dare 48, I participated in Discord jam! Outside of game development, I was playing around with the concept of Arbitrary Code Execution in Super Mario Bros. 3, and thought it would be fun to make a game about lining up bytes in the game's memory and "Executing" them.
Still being in the mood to make a game about memory manipulation, I had an idea for a game where data will get cleared if it's not written to within 3 seconds. For instance, if you are running on a flat floor for 3 seconds, your Y position hasn't been changed, so you snap vertically to a Y position of zero. I called it RAMnesia.
Something I wanted to focus on was making the music very long. This is a puzzle platformer, and if a player is stuck, you want to avoid repetitive music. It wasn't high-energy, but it was more than a 3 minute loop, and I was proud of it. That being said, the game didn't follow the theme at all, so uh- whoops!
Between this and the next Ludum Dare, I once again participated in Discord Jam, this time coming in first place overall!
I parodied Donkey Kong! I really struggled to come up with an idea during this jam, so it doesn't quite fit the theme, but I enjoyed the concept of dodging barrels while building the scaffolding to reach him yourself. And oh yeah, the music goes hard. It's one of my best original songs, and halfway through I incorporated a NES audio chip emulator and added the iconic donkey kong loop as another instrument. (as well as some 8 bit noise channel for some "snares")
My second time scoring second place, this time in Humor. Also 4th overall! At this point I have taken the absurdism of my games to a new height. It's a game about managing a blockbuster video store, but you also need to murder dinosaurs and netflix employees by shooting lasers at them so you can harvest their bones and use them as scaffolding to prevent your video store from sinking into the ground.
I picked up a bunch of 80s synths, and wrote the most bangin' music for this one. I had over twenty comments compliment my music, and it's no surprise it was the best I had ever done in the Audio category. I mean, it slaps.
Then I participated in Discord Jam again, but whatever.
With this being my most recent game, I have lots to say.
Once more, 4th Overall!
Reflecting on the success of Ribbon, I wanted to try my hand at another 3D game. Despite having very little experience making them, this game really came together and significantly faster than I expected. I had way too much time for polishing this one, and I used every minute I had to fill this game to the brim with details. Looking at my previous games, I had yet to score a top ten in audio, despite how great I perceive my own music to be. I asked around for some tips, and was suggested to add voice acting. Now, VA is great and all, but why not take it a step further? That's right, baby! I added an acapella track to my Ludum Dare game!
Recording all the layers for the acapella track was the most awkward I've ever felt. It felt cringy and bad, and I was nervously shaking the entire time, wondering if I could've been spending this time to make a better song, ha! Somehow it really came together though! Don't get me wrong, it's a disaster full of flat notes and awkward nervousness, but wow I had fun! And I finally met my goal of Top Ten in Audio!
I also wanted to go all out on accessibility. My previous game, which scored 4th Overall, didn't even have a volume slider, so this game has one for the music and one for the VA. I have a colorblind friendly mode, and you can enable/disable subtitles for the VA. It also came in 4th, so I must be doing something right.
I was joking with some friends that I'll have to do acapella every single jam now, and in 20 more jams I'll be some sort of acapella master. I probably won't do that, but it's fun to think about.
Oh snap, 20 down. I haven't missed one yet, and I sure don't plan on missing any in the future. It's honestly pretty great looking at the old games compared to where I am now. Especially how much I have grown as an artist and composer. I mean, you can see the screenshots, and with how bad my music was in the first few jams, perhaps it's a good thing I can't share that here, ha! I've certainly done a lot better than I could've ever hoped for, and I'm only planning on getting even better.
Onward to the next 20. It's gonna be a wild ride.
I was pretty happy with ETERNARC, but certainly wasn't expecting it to hit Compo top16 overall and top8 fun. Man, what a shock!
This is by far my best jam. From my games dwelling around top 10% in these categories, to removing that modulo altogether... The dopamine rush isn't calming down anytime soon!
And not just dopamine; motivation, too! Like putting a whole can of gasoline in my gamedev flame! An irresistible urge!
So before I go and drown in Unity again, here is my game:
-> ETERNARC <-
Oh by the way, do you think I should write a post-mortem?
Congratulations to you all and see you in 6 months! I promise I'll make music in time for a change :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:
Nice! Honestly I didn't thought this thing would make the top 500 taking into account it was my lowest effort so far. But with that said, this was also my highest score yet for LD. Let's see if I can beat it next time. See you in January.
If you haven't had a chance to catch a wizard yet (or if that boss fight was just too dang hard), there is a much more polished post-jam version now available!
to highlight a few of the changes;
the lava shield now has a fancy shader
Torches now have some fancy lighting effects
*There's also a new easter egg to find... :musical_note: *
Special thanks to @Brainoid for creating the new music in the post-jam version!
Phew! And Ludum Dare 51 has ended.
Thank you everyone that joined us over on Twitter and my sincere apologies for the results schedule mix-up! :sweat_smile:
The results for each category can be found here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/results
You can check your game page for your individual results (via the My Game link up top).
Congratulations everyone! You made a game!
We're trying something new next year. We've added an early January event and adjusted the other dates accordingly.
I like the end-of year events to be as early in October as possible, but lol, we again have a year where October 1st is on the weekend. Gee thanks calendar. :sweat_smile:
A Ludum Dare in January?
That's right! I was curious how early we could realistically run a Ludum Dare event. Then one thing lead to another and ... :sweat_smile:
I am a "new years resolution" person, and I'm also well aware how common it is to abandon resolutions by the end of January. I don't yet know how practical January 6th is so close to the holidays, but it sounded like a fun experiment, and we wont know until we try it.
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Big thanks to our sponsor Akamai Technologies, and especially a big thanks for their help adding uploading to Ludum Dare.
I learned so much about securely embedding games, and I really appreciate everyone's patience, especially the Godot users. I'll have this cleaned up and streamlined for January's event. :construction_worker:
Phew! In hindsight, I definitely bit off more than I could chew this time around. Who knew getting married, having your car die, and "health stuff" would eat up so much time? :sweat_smile:
Personally, I feel I missed too many of my goals for Ludum Dare this year, but the year isn't over and I'm excited to take another stab at that.
See you in January!