https://youtu.be/1CYe-mjd5gM
Featuring
Da Eg Hatcha https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/da-eg-hatcha By @itsboats
Medic Mayhem++ https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/medic-mayhem by @wdc1913 @seppo-saamaki and @martta
Bug Squad https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/bug-squad by @civmaniac and @fabula-rasa
Thank you to everyone who played Dr. Shrink and the Horrors of the Infinite during the jam! I'm absolutely thrilled with my results and I can't thank everyone that played and reviewed it enough.
I know I'm late to the post-jam-blog-post-train, but especially since this was my first game jam, I thought I would take some time to reflect on my experience, and give the game the post-mortem treatment.
Now that the jam is over, I've gone through each the major bugs that people encountered in the game, and fixed them all. The new post-jam version is available on my itch.io to play right now! (There's a devlog post over there with all the listed bug fixes)
Play the post-jam version here!
Overall, I am extremely pleased with the results. This was my first game jam, and I completed it all solo, so scoring sub-35 in both Innovation and Theme has made me absolutely over the moon! I'm also very pleased with the rest of the results. I reckon 268th overall is a pretty respectible result, but at the end of the day, the rankings honestly haven't been as important to me as the immediate feedback from people who played the game.
I think my biggest takeaway from this whole thing has been that feedback is absolutely critical for creating an enjoyable experience for your players. I found both the positive and negative feedback extremely satisfying and enlightening, and I genuinely think it will make me into a better game developer.
The most consistant piece of constructive criticism that I got for Dr. Shrink (other than the music not looping :face_palm:) was that the game was missing a few quality-of-life features that make platformers feel better to play - namely Coyote Time and Jump Buffering. I was aware of these features before I embarked on this jam, but given that it was my first time making a platformer, I was mostly just attempting to get the game out the door, and didn't think those sort of "fancy" platformer features would make enough of a difference that people would notice. Well, they noticed, so I will for sure be adding these things to future platformers in future jams (and they've been added to the post-jam version :grin:).
I think that ultimately, Dr. Shrink's strongest feature is its idea. Any time a streamer or one of my friends played the game in front of me for the first time, their first comment was almost always "Oh, this is a cool idea!" I think the game's results pretty clearly reflect this, as I scored very well on both Innovation and Theme.
The game actually scored quite well in Humor, being 24 places shy of the top 100 in that category. This is obviously great to hear, and can mostly be credited to my derranged brain at 2am on the night before submission implementing all the dialogue in one hour on very little sleep (this includes the unhinged title that I gave the game).
In the end, I'm actually quite pleased with the level of challenge that the game seems to present people. I was worried that it might be a bit too easy, but people genuinely seemed to struggle getting to the end of the game. This is a double-edged sword, as I will mention in the next section, but I think there's a positive to be gleaned from making a genuinely challenging experience that completionists feel like they have to beat.
Conversely to what I just mentioned, although the game was indeed challenging - which can be fun - much of the challenge that the jam version of Dr. Shrink poses is through tricky platforming with ungraceful controls (see Feedback section above), and enemies that are unavoidable in certain parts of the game. These two factors aren't the end of the world, and the game is definitely beatable, but the challenge can definitely feel unfair, and a decent number of players that played the game infront of me got frustrated and put the game down without reaching the end.
The other major thing that went kind of wrong is that my prioritising of tasks was definitely a bit out of wack when I was creating the game. I spent some time early creating sprites for things that could have just used placeholders while I created the actual gameplay itself. The final build of the game was also the first build of the game that actually played like a game from start to finish. This was stressful, and lead to a lot of sleep deprevation.
The biggest thing that I have learned is that I absolutely love game jams. It seems like it is indeed true what they say - Game Jams are the best thing for learning game development, and motivating you to Just Make Games :tm:. I am absolutely going to be back for Ludum Dare in the future, and I'm already planning on participating in the GitHub Game Off starting tomorrow :slight_smile:
Otherwise, I think I have a decent idea as to what kind of things you need to prioritise when you're jamming. Gameplay needs to take top priority, and if there's a way to make the controls smoother, you should try to make time to add them. Additionally, having a submitable version of the game at the end of each day sounds like a good idea that would reduce stress a decent amount.
I think that next time, I'm not going to get quite so hung up on the purity of preserving the game in the exact state that it was in at time of submission. I saw a lot of other jammers link to a post-jam version while voting was still happening. I was reluctant to do this myself because I had assumed that it wasn't within the spirit of the Jam, but I see now that I was overthinking it, and giving the players a post-jam version is just simply a good idea to portray your vision for the game more accurately.
Finally, I'd really like to try my hand at creating entirely my own assets for future jams (either solo, or working with an artist). I ended up going with a mixture of self-made assets (mostly the background and level art), and some licenced / open-source sprites that I found on the web. This worked for Dr. Shrink since I was learning a whole lot during the Jam and was low on time, but I really like the idea of having a complete vision presented at the end of the jam.
When all is said and done, I am just absolutely thrilled with how this experience went. I loved making the game, I loved having others play the game, and I LOVED playing all the other games that you all created with your incredible talents.
As for Dr. Shrink, now that the major bugs have been fixed, I am happy to put him up on the shelf and leave him floating as a singularity in the vast emptiness of the infinite, at least for a while. I think it's likely that I may come back and make some changes, but if I do that it'll definitely be a "Version 2" that I'd like to take some time with (and fix up the code. It's a god damn mess). That being said, if I decide never to do that, that's okay too :smile:.
With that, I think the post-mortem is complete, so thank you anyone who read this (seriously, this is very long), and see you all in April for LD57 :v:
[One final shameless link to the post-jam version of the game]
https://mrbeast20242.blogspot.com/2024/10/30-18.html
Well, might as well give my thoughts on where we're going next. There's certainly plans to make an improved version of We Love the Boys though both of us particularly our artist want to be quite a bit more ambitious with it. Particularly harnessing 3D. Meanwhile we have another project in the works in the background, which serves more as a tool than a game but should be interesting in my opinion. It's still early days though and our projects aren't really in a state they can be shown off.
https://youtu.be/U3oUCkpUDAQ
Thank you to everyone who rated or played Tossed and Found! We wanted to fix up a few issues, mostly collision issues, weird interactions and some leaderboard formatting issues.
We've loved seeing all the speed runners optimise their scores, congrats to everyone in the top 10!
On the backend, we used Talo to build our leaderboards. It made adding leaderboards during the jam super easy, and we can see all the players and entries in our dashboard too.
You can play Tossed and Found on itch.io here.
So, I've written up a Post Mortem for the first time in my life and honestly, it's been pretty fun. I might do that again for the next one.
If you want to read about my super epic journey of switching to Godot with basically no prior experience and a time limit of 48 hours (and some stuff about the game I made I suppose), click THESE SUSPICIOUSLY COLORED LETTERS.
Hi,
I am posting cuts of the best parts of all of my livestreams from Ludum Dare 56
You can use link below to check out some of the great moments that I had playing the fantastic games.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsi31W-raUDA2dhmyYDSpcQbBUn0jx_rW&si=vRWVOqa7BFa9hl9Q
more videos are on their way. ❤️
Thanks, as always. -TigerJ
(if you have a good time throw me a couple likes on the videos that would be amazing)
Very pleased to announce that our latest Ludum Dare entry, ‘Chumini: Tiny Army’, will be released on Steam around March 2025! It's a short survivor's game featuring tiny cute creatures instead of spells or weapons. Stay tuned!
I made a video about my time creating Last Rollbug for the Ludum Dare 56! How it originally started as one idea and made its way into something else, dealing a lot of the weird issues that I encountered throughout the process, and some other cool games I played during the rating period! Give it a watch if you want and let me know what you think! (: https://youtu.be/sODLkiO-4Og
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUM6bgl62IM
Hello my friends. I would like to share with you some news about my biggest project - StarDust - which is an exploration game with an unusual aesthetic using colors as depth. I made many changes according to the first release which got some good ratings in the categories #Mood and #Graphics for the 54th LudumDare (respectively 4th and 6th). If you want to test it, there is a technical demo on Itch.io and I will appreciate any comment or feedback. I wish you the best. Thank you for your help ++
https://geckoo1337.itch.io/stardust
Ludum Dare 53 was a first gamejam for me and my "studio" (which is basically me and my wife). During it we've made a game DETOUR which surprisingly got 8th place in Innovation and 25th in Overall, so we decided to make a full game out of it!
So, after 1.5 years, x10 length of the game, x10 mechanics, x100 fun and x1000 polish, we finally released full version: Robot Detour!
I hope it will be as fun to play as it was fun making it ❤️
In anticipation of its release on Steam, we've put together a trailer for our LD56 entry Chumini: Tiny Army! It's a chaotic minion-based survivor-like, to be released on Steam in early 2025!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvrzSesN6ik
We enjoy working on this game a lot!
2.0 is OUT NOW!
Added sounds to the game, with some bugfixes. I am currently working on the mobile port for it. Go, check it out on itch.io: https://appreacher-games.itch.io/ld56
Hi! I try to do a postmortem for each of my Ludum Dare creations, but I've been super depressed lately so this took longer than intended.
Despite that, the piece was really powerful for me, and I came to learn a lot about my priorities as a designer. I hope you can learn from it too, even though it's coming from an analog tabletop creator's point of view.
You can read the post here - it's a Patreon post but our Patreon posts are free :D
I mentioned it in my LD56 post-mortem, but I'm developing a full game for commercial release!
Moonsigil Atlas is a deckbuilding roguelike with tile-based mana. Cards have shapes you have to position onto a board of triangular tiles, and can get bonuses for adjacency and overlap. Here's the trailer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC3mk43oOpg
It looks quite a bit different, but it uses the main mechanic of my LD52 entry, Fallowtide - deckbuilding with a grid of triangles as a resource system. If you're interested in this kind of game, feel free to check out the Steam page or join the Discord server to get updates on development, playtesting/demos, and release!
Thanks, and hope to see everybody for LD57!
Wow, 11th on innovation!
The rest of the ratings suck, unsurprisingly. My goal was to make a game where you can solve problems by defining object behaviours through cellular automata rules. I didn't really have enough time that weekend to make it into something really playable.
My goal was to turn this into a super low code game maker. You can create games by defining tile pattern transform rules with a point and click interface. The last few weeks I've been working on finalising this. It's currently focused on quickly creating one-level minigames that you can share via a data URL or even a QR code. Multiple levels and more features are planned. So hereby I proudly present:
Check out this QR code which contains an entire game! Use this QR generator with error correction set to low, to create QR codes up to 2953 bytes.
this time i was not able make a team in time, thankfully i met dev Empyreans (@empyreans) he is very detail oriented and you can see how much thougth goes into his games, we couldt finish this before the time limit but its done now, you should try it before getting spoiled https://ldj.am/$398441 (you should also check "Death Beckons" his previous game)
this time i had to work on a game that was already started, it was fun having to adapt to someone elses proyect instead of starting from 0, tho i made a small mistake when i made a colonial pirate ship for the protagonist, i didnt realize this was in modern times
the ships took most of the first days, i was instructed to make them ships instead of boats, i didnt knew the diference then, but now im certain this are mostly boats, i guess its ambiguous since you see them from pretty far away, yhes
after the ships was made, i focused on making props and tyles, and then the 16 ending screens (those where after the jam) i cant really show them all cause that would be a very long post, and over the weigth limit, but you can check the endings playing the game or in my portfolio (for cowards) this are my favorite bad endigs
yhes, there is an ending where you romance the witch, peace
Like I did for Ludum Dare 55,
I released a video about our Ludum Dare 56 experience.
Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/@HelperWesley/videos
