Really excited about the results! Top 50 Overall and 25th Place in the fun category. By far the best results I've ever gotten in a LD Compo.

It's also the first time I didn't feel much time pressure. Probably because I chose a really simple concept and stuck to it. Spent the first day building the main mechanics and the second creating the graphics and music/sound. This also allowed me to create the 15 levels and clean up remaining bugs "in-between", spread over the second day.

In previous jams I always tried to add more features until the last second which often enough produced last minute bugs that made it into the final version. I guess I've at least improved in scope- and time-management 😀

Thanks to everyone that played, rated and commented on my game!

Hello!

I was expecting a decent score, but I was definitively not expecting to get the fist place, especially considering how basic my game is compared to other entries like Trauma or Brimstone for example.

My goal for this compo was to make a game that was as complete as possible. I tend to overscope, as everyone does, and none of my previous jam entries were even remotely close to be a finished game.

So I decided to try a minimalist approach, in every aspect of the game (mecanics, graphics, sounds etc.). It saved me a lot of time. I spent this time on leveldesign and polishing instead. And apparently it was a good idea!

Thank you everyone!

I could begin to complain about the ratings system, the jam theme, the fact that I got really low ratings, but it's not why I'm writing this. I love Ludum Dare, and I do this even with its mistakes and its funky weirdness. I have been here since Ludum Dare 32, where I made the game "Love Sheriff" a game you can still find and try here https://gamejolt.com/games/love-sheriff/67418 (it's properly only the download version that still works). And from that Ludum Dare I really felt in love with game jams.

I have since the first Ludum Dare been in total 14 Ludum Dares and 2 mini LDs. And even though I have been here many times, I have never been really close to winning anything. But it does not change anything, because I like the community, and even as important as making my games, I really love playing your games. I have over the years played so many of your lovely, strange, buggy and wonderful games. And thank you all for making them, and even more important sharing them with us all.

But my interest for game jams is not only for Ludum Dare. So I have now made 54 small, weird and properly pretty bad games for different game jams, and my love for the jams is still the same. I have made all of my jam games alone and with the LD's strict compo rules, but I have allowed myself to use the time the different jams has allowed me to use on making them.

To celebrate making 50 jam games, I have for fun taken an old game jam game and made it into a small celebration game. I am sorry it's not a LD game, but I found a game that I could make into a funny little museum/puzzle game. The game is called "Where are all the aliens". I would really like if some you tryed to play the game, and it would perhaps also be fun for you, especially if you have tried to play some of my jam games.

I have tried to make you play the game some times now, and it had not really happened, so I decided to make a better version of the game. In this version I have turned the idea around, so it's definitely much better now. You can find this version of the game here https://gamejolt.com/games/WhereareallthealiensTheBetterVersion/656490

If you don't like that version of the game, it's also okay to play the normal and "boring" version. You find can it here https://gamejolt.com/games/Whereareallthealiens/654316

Again I really hope you will give the game a chance. And yes I now the game is weird, and you might not like the humor in it. But take your time with it, interact with the different things (and please don't only interact with the things one time).

So that was it. Thank you for reading this and I hope to see a lot of you out there in game jam land. And I really hope to see many of you in the magical LD50.

11 Ludum Dares down, ∞ to go

Alrighty! The responses are done, and the jam is done. Thanks to everyone who left feedback, played the game, streamed the game!

A special thanks to the team that made it possible. You can find their links and credits in game and linked on my jam page. This time around i decided to work with 3 complete strangers found on short notice and i think it was a great success. Of course, like many of you, i wish i could've added more to the game and there was a lot of stuff planned and not implemented but i guess thats what you sign up for during a weekend game jam! I'm excited to see you all back again for the big LD 50! ###

In the meantime, i will be working on my LD 48 game "Explory Story" which is getting a commercial steam release sometime early 2022. If you are interested in supporting me or my previous team during that, check out Explory Story on Steam. Thank you very much, see you next time!

Me! That's why I made Interstellar Highway Robbery, hehe

In all seriousness though, I'm so surprised that I got such high ratings - I've never reached single digits before. It's so surreal! Thanks to everyone who decided to play the game, and stay tuned if you're interested where I take the idea next! <3

clue: I'm thinking of making a new game which combines IHR with my LD48 entry, Megadrill

Firstly, we want to say thank you to Ludum Dare – the jam is fantastic with a lot of great entries! :star:

Secondly, thanks to everyone for playing our game during the jam!

The game got a lot of positive feedback and some love from the speedrun community. Our team decided to continue development and eventually release the game on Steam! :floppy_disk:

We'd like to ask anyone who enjoyed our game to participate in the closed alpha test we are planning soon.

<<< Sign up for Closed Alpha Test >>>

View the game

Your feedback is a crucial part of it! :heart:
See you at LD50! :hand_splayed:

As you can see there is a big increase in "fun" over the last quarter. We like this developement and want to expand on that market.

Please also notice the steady increase of "graphics" over the last years - our customers demand AAA standards and we wisely invested our resources into great improvement there.

But yes my dear colleagues and/or friends we also have to address the elephant in the room. Our recent developement in "theme" leaves much to be desired. Maybe our creative group lacks strong leadership? Personal restructuring will be initiated around christmas...

But lets not bother ourselves to much with those issues. This company should look forward to what will be coming the next years! I heard from some of our plebs in programming that code readability is on a better level than ever. And "overall" and "innovation" are on an all-time-high.

The future for [bland tech company name (probably something with blockchain in it)] is brighter than ever!

Thank you for listening - if there are no further questions this meeting is closed.

Here are my results for the last 7 Ludum Dares in stars:

And since the number of participants varies greatly between events and even more in between jam and compo, here are my relative places for the same period (lower is better):

Anyway, it seems like doing my art with colored pencils and a scanner improved my graphics a lot. However, that took way too much time and together with halving my available time by switching to Compo and not having time for half of the first day prevented me from really polishing the gameplay and adding more polygonal animals to stack and thus made some impact on the other scores.

AI music seems less good than music made by my musically talented friend, but much better than what I could come up with myself (see my audio score for my first jam).

Is it just me, or are the last 3 Compo winners all French?

LD47 Winner: ZakAmana. According to his Twitter, he is French.

LD48 Winner: thegreenworm aka Pierre Vandermaesen. He is French according to his LD profile.

LD49 Winner: thetatautau aka Olivier Guillaume (name can be found in his game). I am guessing he is French because of the name, but correct me if I am wrong.

Just, uhh, don't look at the other ratings

edit: nevermind, found it - 2939

Well that was very unexpected if I'm going to be honest. There was so many fantastic games out there that any one of them could of deserved that spot and I would of been equally happy.

Honestly though the best thing about coming back to the jam was the sheer amount of fun (and a smattering of stress) I had creating this little game. I forgot how it was like to not sleep, consume your body weight in coffee and have a meltdown when your program crashes and you lose about a hour of work.

I posted up post jam breakdown as I often used to do on the old site, you can read it 'ere:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-wip/burning-ravager-post-jam-breakdown-1

If anyone fancies to have a blast through me little game then 'ere is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-wip

<3

What a jam! Had an incredible (and sleep-deprived) journey playing everyone's games, congratulations everybody!!

Can't express how much I appreciate all the feedback for Crazy Cauldron, we put a lot of love into it :smile_cat: 67th is a huge step up from our LD48 204th overall ranking, and I'm glad people liked the graphics!

It's crazy to think we first got into game jamming almost 11 months ago, and even crazier how much we've learned along the way. We're even more fired up now for the next one :fire:

And I guess that's the end of the story for our jam game . . .

But wait, what's this???

That's right! We are hard at work on a Crazy Cauldron full release on all platforms :-O*

*mobile, web, windows, mac, maybe even linux ??

We had a ton of ideas for things we wanted to add but weren't able to because of the time constraints. So we are releasing a post-jam release with a bunch of added features, including:

• New mystery monsters
• Leaderboards
• New and improved visuals
• Re-balanced gameplay

and much more..

If you wanna stay in the loop about development, we have a Discord and Twitter where we post stuff that we're working on and chat with other game devs.

See you next jam~

:fish: :frog: :sunflower: :apple:

I managed to play the games of everyone who left a comment, I was very low on time throughout this LD though, so I wasn't able to do much else.

I'm very happy with my game and ratings. I think I'll be able to put up a good show for LD50.

(Tool credit: https://github.com/LoneWolfHT/ld-results-history) (Windows Users: I'm working on porting it to Rust so you don't have to spend 3 days getting lua and luarocks to work)

My best Overall placement ever!!! Thank you so much to all who played!

Best theme since I started back on LD 45! Super unique games!

Very proud of my game this time, managed to fit all the story I wanted in a very simple base. I absolutely loved all the people making theories!

For context, the game was about exploring the abandoned projects of a failed game dev.

Finally made a platformer, got it out of my system, no more platformers on jams for me.

Using some pre-made assets is a must for now on, really sped things up.

As for post-jam, I updated my game once for some control improvements. Won't be making a full game out of it.

This jam I did a lot better than last time, I got over 500 places higher! Thanks to everyone who played my game and thankyou for all the support! Also, so hyped for Ludum Dare 50 in April! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/renegade

But i find this so enjoyable, never had it as beautiful as that.

Nothing to see here!

I've just released a post-jam update for my LD49 entry (one of the 3 actual NES/Famicom games on the event)

It's available - both as a NES rom and on a WebGL emulator - here: https://wendelscardua.itch.io/improbability-fighter

Main changes from the LD version: - better performance - new HUD - moving enemies - apples and blocks now deal more damage - cleaner screen transitions