It's always a pleasure being a part of this community and seeing how many talented people are out there.

I saw some really unique, fun, hilarious, and impressive games this LD, as usual! Congrats to all the winners!

Thanks to those people that played, rated, and left feedback on my game "Arcane Outlaw" -- it always means a lot! Have a great summer and we'll see y'all in October!!

Thank you everyone for your ratings ++

While waiting for ludum dare results I hacked together a little tool to see graphs of your past participations, it only works on this website (so since ld38 I think) https://nusan.fr/ldstats/ And if you want to take a look at my satanic programming game, that got 18th place in jam, check it out here: Path of Aratron

Here's a fancy chart representing the average ranks of my Ludum Dare games. Thanks to my team and the players for an awesome Ludum Dare!

Well, what can I say? Even though I've cut some corners, it seems people are warming up to my game more. Well, what else do you expect from the intended grand finale to a saga? And yes, I don't mind the rankings, since it's a natural consequence of having more entrants than before.

And as for how I've fared in the LDs I've participated so far...

(via https://nusan.fr/ldstats/)

I knew I would be getting better and better, and my skills definitely didn't rust at all, if the overall reception to my games is anything to go by.

So, you're most likely asking what will be the direction for Project Missionary. Now that LD55 is over, I can now feel free to make an enhanced edition, with all the stuff I've had to leave out, including Joseph Craig's sprites and extras such as author's notes and a music room, reintegrated. And in the near future, I will compile all five games in The Hizzokahpolis Chronicles (Bittersweet Harvest, Occhiolism, Project Missionary, Sunday at the Memories, and The Classiest Act) into one game, with additional plots, reworked sprites, and voice acting. I just have to pitch the idea to someone who can fund all of these, of course.

Until next time.

Results are in... We did.. surprisingly well?? Top 14.2% overall? Woah! Thanks for enjoying our game :D

It was tough but really fun and had a load of enjoyment participating alongside some friends. Play our game if you'd like: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/hells-on-hold

For now though... here's a totally real ritual

next time

WOW, I am so blown away. I never make it into the top 10% for anything, let alone within the top 20. I made The Summoned, a collection of 13 dice games, and I just... wow! I've loved LD for many years now; I used to make flash games but have made analog tabletop games for the last several. I always figured that put me in some weird space that was outside of most LD players, understandably at that: it's so much easier to just play a game in a browser or download and play than to print two pages, find 12 dice, and read a bunch of instructions and stuff.

I cannot tell you how much this means to me, I'm so freaking ecstatic and just OMG OMG OMG.

I'll be celebrating later tonight and tomorrow after I get some stuff done, I just can't believe it!

The post-jam edition is still free on Itch through the weekend too 🥳

Ooof. Almost got to top 15. Next time... Next time...

Pretty satisfied with how well I did this time in the compo. I first joined in LD52 where I got 66th overall and 15th in innovation, and my scores have never been that good since. I was hoping to beat my previous innovation score but I'm happy I at least tied it and got a pretty good score for theme as well. Getting a better overall score will by my goal for future LD's.

I think I'll probably stick with 2d for future jams, unless I have a really good idea that needs to be 3d. I had just learned vulkan a couples weeks before the jam and set up a 3d framework using it, so I wanted to try it out. I don't think I lost too much time to doing things in 3d or with vulkan, but it could have looked a lot nicer in 2d for the same effort.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/name-is-the-game

Game design teacher here! I was pretty pleased with my Wannabe Warlock's overall performance here in this competition - a very nice 34th place in Humor, and a serviceable 244th in Fun and 204th Overall. Not bad for just my second LD, eh?

And then I saw the results for GLORBLE BRAWL... https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/$385075 ...which was, in fact, made by a current (soon to be graduated) high school student of mine.

Seeing it get 30th in Humor admittedly stung a bit. Young man out-funnied the emcee. It happens. But what's this? 11th in Fun?! 35th Overall?! :skull: :skull: :skull: It seems the student has become the master. I think we might all be playing this kid's games in a few years.

Thank you so much to everyone who played my game! I couldn't be happier with the results of my first ludum dare.

a trophy for my silly little game, what an honor 😭

Thanks again to

Funklord_Earl for the music (https://www.youtube.com/@FunklordEarl/),

Kenney for being them

And everyone at RVA game jams for all the help B)

Thank you to everyone who played our game!

Given that my previous games I didn't bother getting rated as I wasn't too happy with how they turned out myself, I'm pretty happy with the results this time. I think there were a few misses in terms of not leaving myself enough time to implement AI or sound effects, but I also spent like... 8 hours on stuff that can basically be classified as "learning Godot", so that bodes well for the next jam I participate in.

Here's our results for seance. We got 3 golds (nice to get the Mood gold since I never targeted it before and may never again)

Post mortem:

Overall my feelings are - I'm generally disappointed in my performance. Getting the best spread of any entry in the jam but still losing in 'Overall', seems like my fault - fun was the deciding category and we were only 24th. There were design choices that I could've made to improve our fun - better onboarding - but I didn't have enough time to tutorialise.

Jam was to the wire, I spent almost 2 days just writing the dialogue and making it connect, directing the voice actors, animating everything and coding the core mechanic. Then on day 3 I had to write my first visual novel system from scratch, which left very little room for onboarding, unfortunately. I realised the major problems we made from watching streams later but no one playtested it pre release so by then it was too late.

Either way it gives a reason to keep trying I guess. My congratulations of course to the jam (and compo) winners though - good job gang, keep on jamming.

To be quite honest I had low expectations for this one! I felt like every aspect of the game had something kinda off about it. Every feature was a bit undercooked, and every gameplay mechanic a bit underthought. Though honestly, I'm really happy that people managed to find charm in my messy lil game!! ^D^ Ninth in humor is a pleasant surprise as well since I pushed harder for that this time! Thank you very much to all who played and gave me valuable feedback!! You are all my new best friends in the world now. :love_letter:

Honestly, it's a bit disappointing. The feedback was pretty good and the overall result is solid - definitely not The Best Game, but still. Well, next time will be better :-)

Lets start with the fan art! I drew a doodle of a character from every game I played this event:

Featuring: - Midnight Cheese Quest by @archaeognathus - Demon Delivery Center by @yanakill-lullanita, @rocio-michi-ojeda, @emiliano-martel, @alexasl, @malcontento, @nicol3, @rodrijsolar, @briansuhit, @sofisofix, @franco-farallo - Void Beast by @azure-drake - Ancistroides Folus by @othervoyceowl, @retcongreg, @soundgnome - To do magic, please dance by @syudzius, @owly, @shishandr, @yngvarr - Throes of the Javelin by @idan9000, @justin-ma-wav, @skransow, @matterlinx - Raising the Bread by @exteegi, @kevin-joseph, @fengfuru, @olsonexi, @zuhairghias - Demon Well by @100th-coin - Druid Island by @bwalter - Summoning Song by @paul-nadan - Protect the Realm by @nnnnneeeedddd - Stars Align by @cassowary - Tiny Summons by me

Congrats to everybody here! Lots of great entries this time around, and as always, I wish I had the time to play more (but it certainly goes slower when you're drawing everybody).

Onto the post-mortem!

Choosing an idea

The theme always sucks

The night of the theme reveal for "Summoning," I was not finding a lot of inspiration. After some brewing, I didn't have a lot of ideas, but I did have a goal:

• The core gameplay should be the summoning. I didn't want to tack summoning as a mechanic onto a game where you're primarily shooting, or racing, or platforming. The core gameplay should be around choosing what to summon, or how.

Ultimately, I went to sleep on Friday without a firm direction.

When I woke up, I decided to make a multiplayer Twitch-plays auto-battler.

Multiplayer isn't that bad, right?

So normally, it would be.

On game jam timelines, networked multiplayer is really tough. For a relatively simple game, you usually need: - A dedicated server to run the game logic on - The client code that shows your graphics to the player, which you somehow need to keep in sync with the other clients - A way to get the information from each client to the server, and then out to the other clients - If you don't want the game to be super laggy and unresponsive, some kind of literal time travel so the client can anticipate what it thinks the game will be like before running it past the server

Fortunately, I had a strategy that would require much less work for me. And that is to let the fine programmers at Twitch.tv write my networking stack for me.

By making my game a Twitch plays, I can get a lot for free.

• The game can play an arbitrary number of players
• Players can play on a variety of devices
• There is one authoritative game state (the video stream) so multiple clients don't need to stay in sync
• Best of all, I only need to program one "direction" of information flow (reading chat messages). The streaming platform handles getting the game to the players!

Even better, I had some base code from my Github Game Off entry a few years ago to jumpstart the process.

It does have some limitations:

• Players can only use text commands
• There's a several-second delay, so nothing can be realtime
• Players can see everyone's chat messages, so no secret roles/information

What went well

Lots of things!

• The visuals: I'm happy with how the game looks this time, with the bouncy animations, clean UI, and cute character designs. For better or for worse, I tend to experiment with art and make games that look very different from one another, but this one "worked."
• The Twitch integration: Everything went smoothly with integrating the Twitch chat. I hosted the game in a Microsoft Azure VM (with some free sign-up computing credit) so it could run 24/7 despite my spotty internet.

What could have gone better

• The hosting: I spent about five hours Saturday night setting up hosting with Digital Ocean, only to run into performance problems that I couldn't seem to fix. Only after wasting that time did I try to set up Azure, which took under an hour.
• The scope: Partially due to wasting half of Saturday, and the extra programming overhead for the Twitch integration, I didn't get as much content into the game as I'd hoped. A few cut feature ideas include:
  • Round modifiers that present more challenge or diversity
  • Better feedback for chat commands, including showing who is on what team
  • A more equitable way to split team funds, rather than first-come-first serve
• The enemy AI: Due to an unfortunate radians-to-degrees math mixup, ranged units don't try to circle foes from a distance; they always try to go directly to their right (awkwardly giving the team that starts on the right an advantage).

Takeaways

I'm very happy with my results this time around, including 3rd place in Graphics and 3rd place in Innovation. Thanks so much everybody who played my game, and to the additional support I've gotten from the streaming community in the form of random raids (almost always when I'm not actively in the stream!).

Some takeaways from this event:

Try new things, but prepare to scope down

I don't regret trying something different for this jam, and I liked the game I made. But particularly in the Compo, being ambitious in one area means making sacrifices in others.

For networking and integrations, do your setup before the jam

I came partially prepared with some base code, but I probably should have been confident with a cloud hosting platform if I wanted to do this for a 48-hour jam. Even an hour of extra setup you could have done beforehand is painful when it's 2% of your jam window.

Study frog anatomy

Eh, close enough.

If you still want to play Tiny Summons, do it soon! The 24/7 stream will go down next Saturday before Microsoft decides to start charging me real money.

Here's to a great LD55, and an even better LD56 this October! ☃︎

a post mortem:

what we did right: we made a game about worms 🪱

what we did wrong: nothing because we won

what we learned: make games about worms

We‘re very thankful for all of you peeps voting and pushing us to get even a better game out. Even though it’s the end to ludumdare 55 it’s the beginning of polishing and finishing BloodRite. Wanna follow our path to a full release? Join us here:

https://dekisenpaitm.itch.io/bloodrite

Wanna see all the little details happening:

https://instagram.com/dekisenpaitm

See you on the 4th of October!