Also rate my game pretty please :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/friend-friend

so, 4 days left. it's been a long ride, but we're almost done! before we sum up our results, we want you to play our game and give it some attention before the end! we're always open to receiving feedback from you guys! you can send your games as well, remember it

(these pics came out straight from the depths of the internet i think i've somehow developed my photoshop skills lol)

PLAY AND RATE HERE BEFORE THE END <3

Check out our math puzzle game for LD! Add up monsters to the correct sum in the rows and columns!

You will be addicted, and if you need more puzzles there is a post jam version with 10 more puzzles!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/sum-monsters

Play Diner Dash and become the fastest waiter the world has ever seen!

Hey Everyone,

This is my nth game jam... I sort of stopped keeping track unfortunately. The Ludum dare is always my favorite and I've participated in an LD event every year for 11 years. Ah, so many good, stressed out memories. Over the years, there have been things that have stood out: I usually don't need a full 48 hours, I always end up with more work than expected, and my "Fun" rating is always one of the lowest... 🥲 I never admitted to being good at making jam games, but I am experienced.

In my experience, there are 5 learnings that I wanted to share. These can help in places outside of jams, especially in the context of the professional world.

1. You don't actually need 48 hours. Get sleep. Live your life. Find a balance, don't celebrate burnout.

Jams are a great time to practice a lot of skills. Time management and work/life balance can be skills to practice as well. Learning to manage time can be just as beneficial as learning a programming/art skill.

2. Scope to one singular game mechanic/feature, and prioritize off of that. Never take more than twice as long as you initially expected. It's better to abandon one aspect than run out of time with no finished game.

If you get stuck on something, zoom out and check your priorities. You might need to just move on. Make and update a to-do list periodically, and when you get stuck, check back with the list and make sure you always have the full view of the project in the back of your mind.

3. Practice with your tools. Don't learn a new tool the weekend of.

Game jams are a great playground to learn. But I would recommend at the very least doing intro tutorials for all of the tools you plan on using ahead of time. You don't want to get stuck on export settings with 20 minutes left to go.

4. Develop a personal asset library

That list of unfinished projects you have? use it. Organize it, use it for inspiration. IF you have a texture that you like, or a model that fits well with anything, keep it in a safe place and make note of it.

5. It may be boring, but do a retro.

You don't need to share it but for your own sake, write what you did well, what you could improve for next time. Game Jams are an opportunity for learning.

6. BONUS TIP

If your goal is to get the most people possible to play your game, please please please export to a web GL build. I don't like downloading random people's executables onto my machine. All computers have a web browser too. You can read my tutorial here. How To Host your Jam Game on the Web - The Byte Bistro

I hope these tips help anyone who is new, and looking for ways to improve their jamming. I am by no means an expert, but I have progressively gotten more out of these jams over the years, even with less time and energy.

If you haven't had the chance yet, I'd love for you to try my game, SOME-MAN: Play Here.

Also comment on this post and I'll check your games out!

And also good luck for when the ratings release (only 3 days ahhh)!

Hey hey, I'm playing your LD games on stream! Come join the stream and send me your game link through twitch chat. It'll be quiet, so I should be able to play your game right away! It'll probably be a short one today, but still a good one, I look forward to having you there! :heart:

https://www.twitch.tv/justcamh

We kinda knew opting in humor was not super clear, but there are a few jokes / funny answers in our narrative game. And most of the people actually rated us (maybe poorly but that's ok) in humor. However 10% of the people didnt rate us in humor and so it got me wondering what do you guys consider a game that can be rated in humor ?

(I have a theory that 10% of the raters actually didnt really played the game, and that would be confirmed by some really ellusive comments -> which also for me brings back a problem that occurs at every jam, the ability to give more karma to real good feedbacks)

Also, special mention to the guy who rated us only in graphics, like...what ?

My compo game Summoner's Pit still needs a few more ratings. Check it out :)

Summoner’s Pit is a fast paced old school survival FPS. Collect scrolls, summon helpful creatures and survive for as long as you can.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-pit

New video about how Manku came to be in Ludum Dare 55! All the behind-the-scene, everything during 3 days! also, we are 1 rating away from reaching 100 ratings! So, Play NOW!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqzMsl7P4ek

"Ratings received" metric on my game is above 20 but there are less than 20 votes in each category.

Perhaps, that's because I've opted out of one of categories after receiving few votes there.

I'm a bit worried if I will be able to get a final results, despite not spending much effort on the game this time.

Maybe you already played Ludum Darons's :crown: last game Blood Sweat And Seals

The game is an Age of War like where you have to draw different ~~sigils~~ seals to summon different types of creatures.
The idea is that you can mix the 5 different seals models to get combinations of summons.
For example, if you draw a seal that is halfway the seal summoning the tank and the one summoning the archer, you would summon... a tanky archer

However the pain point about our game was the weakness of our shape recognition algorithm.

Jam algorithm: Hu's moments

To compute the likelyhood between a drawing and a model, we first calculated the drawing's image Hu's moments, which conceptually capture the shape of the drawing.
We then applied and euclidian distance to each of the model seals, and applied a softmax function.

While this worked quite well with some specific model seals, some of them were very hard to obtain.

We estimated the accuracy of our first algorithm to roughly 37%.
Note that this is fairly better than pure randomness (20% accuracy).

Postjam algorithm: DNN

As postjam, we decided to improve the recognition system.
We knew image recognition was a task that a deep neural network could easily deal with. However, it was inconceivable to build and train such model during the jam.

First, we built a fancy web tool to constitute a dataset.
Using this tool, we created a dataset containing ~800 drawings.

We then designed a small deep neural network using pytorch.

This DNN takes the image moments as inputs, and outputs the score for each of the five model seals.

The full dimensions of the neural network is:
24 (moments) :arrowright: 64 *(hidden layer)* :arrowright: 5 (model seals)

(We also applied some regularization methods such as dropout)

After a quick training of 190 epoch, we could achieve an accuracy of 93%!

We then implemented the deep neural network directly in godot, imported the training weights and... tada! :v:
Happily, our neural network implemented in godot is really quick to process an input (approximately 50ms).

Feel free to test the brand new postjam version of our game :wink:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/blood-sweat-and-seals

Will you help me get qualified with enough rating?

[1] YES https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/hton (WebGL)

[2] NO

After I finished the compo, I really haven't got any time to rate and play other games due to the horrible timing of my school finals.

My school finals ends next week, but considering tomorrow is May Day, I will finally have some time to play and rate some games! Yay!

Hm... what else should I say... Oh right! I have to plug my own game, right friends?
So, while you're here, why don't you check out my submission, Sum On! ;)?

play Sum On! here!

Hehe, Thank you very much <3

And again, I must thank you too for reading this blog post!
Stay safe, everyone! :D

Sincerely,
Altaf

For y'all metal folks out there, give it a listen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLsx0PDZqxI

... here is where you can see which games you've rated & given feedback on: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/my/grades

:D

Play game here: Summon the Waiter

Hi. Thanks to everyone who played and left feedback! Thanks to your comments I'm already working on a future update! Unfortunately my game still needs to be rated and I would appreciate it if you could take the time to rate it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-dungeon-1

Please, leave a comment if you also need to get your game rated. I promise to play it and leave a review within the remaining days.

Hey, I missed yesterday's livestream since I had some stuff to do, but I'm back today to do some more!

https://www.twitch.tv/gabrimer

PS: I plan on streaming me drawing a character in this exact stream a few hours later, so beyond that point I will NOT be playing any more games, but still feel free to come back Thursday for the FINAL stream of playing your games!

We just wanted to let you that we have a post-jam build out! We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it.

We were careful to take as much feedback into account as possible while making this patch;
We've improved visibility and distinguishability of objects, implemented a tutorial for new players, and added more sound effects to match the gameplay.
The troops have been rebalanced and there are also a few new enemies to check out!

Do let us know if you have any feedback on this version or encounter any bugs, and we will be more than happy to take a look!

You can try our game here!