Hello!
Just wanted to ask anyone who comes across this post if you want to test and review my game? I would really like to come up to 20 ratings and I am very close.
It would be very appreciated!
Thanks! :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/cauldron-crafters
Hi! Guys! I'm finally on vacation! I will play a lot of games today. Please leave a message below and attach a link if you want to be played first.
Hey everyone! I’ve been analyzing game data from Turret Queen (from players that didn't opt-out) and wanted to share:
I plotted where and when players tend to lose their lives. It’s interesting to try to make sense of it!
Here is where people die the first, second, and third times:
Here I broke it down into the time of death as well:
This one is a bit weird, but I ranked the top 5 moments of the game where people lost, by grouping every death timer into 5-second splits, counted, ranked, then cross-referenced it with the positions, and got this:
(Now I notice it is kind of hard to see the colors here, I'm sensing a pattern with me :confused:)
It turns out that enemy shots are a bigger threat than running into them.
Total deaths caused by enemy shots: 102.0
Total deaths caused by collisions with enemies: 70.0
I found out which powerups are grabbed the most (which is basically a tie). That kind of confirms the fact that they are hard to see and identify. But also that I was able to balance the powerups that appeared without using any random function.
Total of Powerup 1: 427
Total of Powerup 2: 432
Total of Powerup 3: 406
The strongest turret ever built had a total sequence of 22 Powerups!!!
Specifically:
Powerup1: 3, Powerup2: 15, Powerup3: 4
Worthy of note, the ship only holds 10 powerups at once, and the game only counts the same consecutive powerup
But if you are fast enough, you can grab more powerups during the turret assembly.
Top 5 constructed turrets:
| powerup1| powerup2 | powerup3 | how many | | -------- | ------- | -------- | -------- | | 1 | 1 | 1 | 195 | | 1 | 2 | 1 | 32 | | 1 | 1 | 2 | 25 | | 2 | 1 | 1 | 23 | | 3 | 1 | 1 | 17 |
I looked at how many times players die before they decide to quit or restart.
| Deaths | Session Count | |---|---| | 3 | 22 | | 1 | 15 | | 2 | 8 | | 6 | 3 | | 21 | 1 | | 10 | 1 | | 13 | 1 |
Average deaths per session: 3.057
Average victories per session: 0.076
The game was only beat 4 times.
Maaaybe I need to fix something. (sarcasm)
Cool heatmaps:
Game over man, game over
A bit on how this was done: - Data was sent via a AWS lambda - Saved on a dynamoDB instance - Exported the whole thing to a few csv files - Used some magic python libs on jupyter to plot these graphs
Anyway, from the data and feedback, it is apparent that the moment the first enemy shot appears is way too punitive. Also the time between losing the first life and then the 3rd is way to short, also confirming the feedback of multiple players, that the game becomes very hard after the first life is lost.
Thanks for playing. I hope you all enjoy looking at tables and graphs as much as I do! If anyone wants to know more, let me know, I would love to share.
PS: I was writing this and inadvertently closed the tab and lost the whole thing, had to write it all over again (its 2AM) so please forgive any weirdness. (I could not find the draft on my user page even thought I saved it)
We've made some updates to our entry and smoothed some of the rough edges. Things like: - Options/Remapping keys - Cooldown indicators - More intuitive abilities - Performance fixes for HTML builds - A new intro level - Secrets
Go play our Ludum Dare game Crypt Decrypt before it's too late! It's a platformer puzzle game where you must summon various types of skeles to solve puzzles. It's a bit buggy but I hope you enjoy the effort my team and I put into it! Read the description for controls.
Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/crypt-decrypt
Our game Neon Citadel, a Scifi Summoning Tower Defense just hit 20 ratings today! And If you haven't played ours yet yet we'd love to get more ratings so Check It Out!
Now we should help people get their games rated! Anyone still needing ratings should comment their game below with a quick description and then go and play and rate everyone else in the comments games!
Reaching the end of the jam, guys! Should you play my game? If you want to, here's the LINK:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/danger-zone-ld-2o24
Hey we would really enjoy a little feedback on our game
So if you like the idea of summoning a snake with your voice (needs microphone input) maybe give it a try :)
First, thanks to everyone who played our game and provided feedback, also congratulations for any participant who finished a game this jam!
You may know this but you can customize the built-in loading screen for Godot. While I appreciate the minimal look of the default one, I always wanted to make something custom for our browser-based games. The summoning theme lent itself well for some magic using the 2D CanvasAPI in JS, which I used to create this little animation for the post-jam build of our game The Culling.
Next I'd try adding a "hint slideshow" of some sort and make this html shell a bit more complete (to cover errors better and the "indeterminate loading state") and reusable so it can be plugged into future games more easily.
If you also have some custom loading screen please comment below (could be for webgames outside this LD too) :)
I woke up early on Saturday to get at least an hour of PC time in before leaving. With the fact of only having one day to implement everything in my mind (totally not), I started typing the following ideas:
I can definitely tell that I just converted the experience of the first few minutes after waking up to these great ideas 😄
So I left and had the entire rest of the day to build on them.
Somehow my brain almost immediately discarded the "Cats sit in the way" and "avoid getting summoned" ideas, so I just kept building on the first one.
At the end of the day, I had the following bullet points I wanted to implement:
What a solid game design, what could go wrong?
Let’s go!
I started by setting up a general to-do list for all assets that I need: art, SFX, music. Then I jumped into Figma and created these masterpieces.
Now with the art ready, I created my coding to-dos and started hacking away.
Solid start, I got every entity and building set up and I'm ready to implement the mining.
Quick breakfast and more hacking.
Ok, I got them moving, but something doesn’t seem right.
[mining_0.mp4] -> Imagine a video showing miners moving in a zick zack movement between mine and storage. (If you don't have enough imagination you can read the post with videos here -> kana.games)
Time for a break. The weather is nice, so let's take the bike for a spin.
Oh look, I found the issue.
[mining0fix.mp4] -> Imagine a video showing how I click the "one shot" checkbox on the timer node.
This is the mining timer that starts once the miner enters a mine, so as soon as they entered the mine, they got a piece of dry food every second and felt the need to bring it back to the storage.
Ok, mining is kind of working now, they still get stuck sometimes, but whatever, I can fix that later. Time to get some food.
Sooo let's take a look at the to-do list.. Ohh. Ok, it got to me during the time when I got stuck on the timer issue that there is no way I will get this out in the COMPO time, so I already was prepared to move to the JAM where I had a full 24 hours of additional time to work with 🤯
At this moment, all I have is 3 cat-like blobs walking to a mine waiting there for a couple of seconds and moving back to the storage. Oh, and this animation:
![chair.mp4] -> Imagine a video showing a 2 spheres jumping on a chair.
Not much more happened this day. I got the miners kind of working better by adding a target counter to the mine so the miners don’t have to race each other to the next mine. That leaves:
No problem. Except I have to spend 8 to 9 hours working in the office on Mondays.
Ok, so I survived the day in the office, got some food in my body, rocking a bit of a headache, but nothing an energy drink and some painkillers can’t fix.
Wow ok, it’s a mess but somehow I managed to get everything in. As is tradition in my jam games, I spend 30 minutes on sound effects and 15 minutes on creating music. Had no time for proper playtesting and just prayed that the export and upload will work. Just slam everything up on itch and call it a day.
The art is definitely something I want to do in
the next game jams, the highly lo-fi vector art leaves a lot to the imagination of the player without looking distractingly bad. I just have to focus on making it remotely recognizable.
Timer problem. Maybe I manage to find someone stupid enough to join a team next time 😄The Game has some very obvious issues even for a little jam game.
Adding a way to win the game would have mitigated the risk of a defender game where it’s totally possible that the player just can’t lose. So adding maybe some mother ships for the aliens that have to be destroyed, or a final boss wave would have been great to not leave player guessing if the game is finished or not.
I added a couple of alien clusters between mines that attack the closest mine to them if a warrior gets close to them. The issue is the player has no incentive to move the warriors anywhere but around the storage to defend that. If I continue this project I would probably add some fog of war, that has to be cleared off by the warriors, so the miner only move to mines that have been cleared. Maybe the aliens then also attack the warriors instead of the mines (maybe the aliens even hide in the mine!) so there is a risk of losing them. I would love some outpost or upgrades that are hidden in the fog, so the player is not only incentivized to explore to expand the economy but also some fun roguelike upgrade for mining speed / movement speed / fire rate.
I really enjoyed my time working on this and will be back on it probably the next jam will be MFGJ 24. There is just something magical about starting with a blank page and having something playable after a short amount of time.
Regarding the future of Summoner's Cat Defense, I will most likely leave it as is. I currently want to focus on getting the Mod Loader to work with Godot 4 and getting Circle Pusher out there.
This is my personal list of my favourite entries based on how fun or cool I think the concept is! I'd like to share them with you in case any of them need some love in the final days of rating!
Repeater - A well executed and cool premise. It feels like it could be a test straight from Aperture Labs! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/repeater
Grishnek Legacy - A challenging rhythm game with that "just one more game" energy. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/grishnek-legacy
Salmoning - I just love the play on theme and the cozy environment. Cutting around on the bike is fun as hell! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/salmoning-1
Faemori - A cute auto monster battler with a solid retro aesthetic and feel! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/faemori
Necrotyper - A very polished and surprisingly addictive typing battler! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/necrotyper
~DISCLAIMER~ I have only had time to play 50 entries. So if your game rocks but didn't make the list, don't worry about it - I'm a nobody!
Are you able to get out of the dungeon? Be careful, the dragon is protected!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBG_4yz1Ru8
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-seven-crystals
72 games are very close to getting the 20 ratings needed to get a score.
Help get them over the line here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/games/danger/all
Only rule: I don't play horror games.
https://www.twitch.tv/yellowkamel
➡️ If Tenacious D can sing it (yes they did and very well by the way, I can also quote it).😎
Only 2 days left, and we still believe we can gather more votes and it's only up to you. Our belief stems from all the comments we've received and the patches we've made in the past few days. Yes our team was able to improve performance and remove a few small bugs.🛠️
So if you want to summon Sheep Norris our red hair biggest sheep, go for it !
In the mid time, here's a gif of the best rock band of all time.
There's not much time left until the end of the jam! If you haven't had a taste of the rabbit arena yet, now is the time!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-arena
Before watching the video I recommend you spend 5-10 minutes playing bergs and experience it for yourself first.
https://youtu.be/jDyqu_xiPzs
When watching people play bergs, I noticed many of them abuse bugs and glitches to cheese their way through the levels. I think that this is awesome, and fully encourage it, but some people were confused on the actual solution to the levels. So for those curious, I made a short gameplay video showing the intended solutions to each level.
If you haven't played our little puzzle game, bergs yet, you can do so here.
The Rating Marathon is almost over!
Life has been busy, but we managed to finish a post-jam version of our game!
The Jam version fell way short of what we envisioned, but it was… educational. Now that we were able to complete the vision of what we would have loved to push out, we’re quite happy!
What we made initially was buggy and empty, but even in this initial state, we think you can see what we were going for, and in particular, our drive to find a clever take on the theme!
What changed? - Squashed most of the bugs 🐛 - Ported to GDScript so we can web export - Fail state and win state (NOW IT'S A GAME!) - Pause menu and endgame menu - Finished adding the quests we wrote but never added - Added the rest of the items we drew during the jam - Cool effects and animations (you get speared now! ☠️) - Tweaked balancing and timing - More UX feedback (while keeping it simple like a jam game should)
If you haven’t played it yet, go check out the Jam version and see what we mean, then gib ratings pls! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/servant-of-lord-doof
Now that you’ve done that, check out our post jam version and see how we progressed: https://rainybyte.itch.io/servant-of-lord-doof-post-jam
I hope you hear the bells in your dreams 🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔🔔
