PS. Sory for my English. I hope everyone understand what I want to tell you.

Hi everybody!

I wrote a short post-mortem of my game which I made on LD26, I hope that anyone read it and don’t die from boredom. On beginning I need do some explanation. The main purpose in my game is to reach yellow square to the green square. In reaching this purpose hinder us wall-squares. Red squares “kill us”, other color only block us. To increase difficult, in one moment we see squares in only one color, nonetheless there are STILL THERE. It also doing with them, one color on one moment – minimalism J I explain it, because some people wrote in coments that the game is buggy, I think it stemmed misunderstanding of the concept, and I very sorry for this L it’s only my fault. Let’s get start whit post-mortem:

GOOD THINGS:

1. Humor – some people wrote that the game is very funny, I’m veeeeeeery happy of this

2. Simply gameplay – I implement gameplay very quickly and I could engage in graphics, sounds, itp.

3. Unity – nonetheless game is in 2D I used unity 3D, this allowed me to do prototype very quickly, with unity we can export game to web whit one click, it’s very import, because in those days people don’t have time to download and unzip/install games, the sooner they can start playing our game the more people do it.

4. free sound site – I used sound and music from site whit free sound, I must spend time to search for right sounds, but I think it worth it, because I don’t have any skills with doing it by myself.

5. Have time for polish – because game is very simply, a have time for perfecting details, like “graphics”, sounds and balance. Balance is very imported thing, it depends on if people will play 30 s or 10 min

6. Sleep J – sleeping during game jam is very imported, it’s be my first LD, but earlier I participated at GGJ 2012 and 2013, in both editions I sleeping less then 4h during  weekend!!! On 4am your productive fall below zero,  It would not work, you need sleep!!!

BAD THINGS:

1. Paradoxically too simple gameplay – gameplay was so simple that I can invent more features to improved game fun.

2. Little original gameplay – nonetheless use technique that I read earlier, “when you hear theme, write five thing which first came to your mind, and toss then, probably the most people think about it too”, a large amount of games was based on the colors, I see also some “maze” games

3. Zero graphics skill – I have no artistic or aesthetic sense, I’m just a programmer J also I’m very beginner in graphics program I’m used (GIMP, Paint.NET), my game is ugly…

4. More time for LD – I have spent little time for this LD edition, gamplay a have finished on Saturday before noon, you can check it on TimeLapse J then I eat diner, get some sleep and go on party with my girlfriend (real life > LD, sorry :P), I think I spend less then 20h for LD

5. Don’t implement highscore table – I can’t explain why I had not thought about it that weekend…

PROVISIONS FOR NEXT LD:

1. Still put emphasis on humor

2. Make more original gameplay

3. Unity, still learnig this pawerfull engine

4. Improve graphic skills, or do some beautiful procedural graphics

5. Spend more time on LD – send girlfriend on weekend trip to Caribbean Islands either though to her mother

Thank you for reading, I hope someone has survived so far J

Please try my game and leave some comment. Any feedback is worth more than gold and diamonds

My Entry! Enjoy!

I made a cool graph thing showing how I did in all 7 LDs I participated:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ar-33qvLZBHXdHgtV3RmTUFtTGxPV3dQbXZfa0dXc0E&usp=sharing

And here’s a summary of them all. If you’re new to LD, I hope you can find some kind of wisdom somewhere in there.

My first LD, #19: Worked my ass off, and my game was really buggy and unbalanced. The graphics were very tiny pixel art, but I’m glad people liked it. Here I learned that having a clear goal is important, and that the main mechanics should be worked on first (as obvious as this might sound)

LD#20: Remembering how I got tired after LD#19, I said I wouldn’t work as much and do something simpler, so I made a puzzle. It holds most of my worse scores… That’s what going into LD with no enthusiasm looks like.

LD#22: Now trying to find a middle ground, I decided to take part in the Jam and just get my game polished and not buggy. I was really satisfied by the end product and the ratings. I don’t take pride on the audio score since I used free music for it (which is what I usually do)

LD#23: This time I worked in a group. It was as fun as it was stressful, me being the project coordinator and the programmer. We aimed a bit higher than we should, so the game lacked in the level design department, and there were a few glitches.

LD#24: Again with the same team, we decided to go with an idea that didn’t involve intricate puzzles or graphics. The game was simple enough to work on, and the team did a great job working on the assets. Only problem was a lack of decision-making, resulting in a lot of confusion and last minute rush.

LD#25: Working by myself again, I decided to try different ideas (no platformers or shooters).  I enjoyed making the game, and take pride in the end result. Problem is, there was a lack of good documentation making planning and debugging a mess in the long run, and resulting in the game being confusing, with unclear goals and feedback.

LD#26: Zero hour hit, and people were mad about the theme. I wasn’t. To me it was a great opportunity to try to think outside of the box. I remember explicitly saying “with this theme, few good ideas with shine” (and they did!). And some of the games were amazing.

So I had my idea of making an interactive adventure where you could switch between two worlds to solve puzzles. I quickly saw a need to simplify this idea, so I made it a point and click game, which would have simpler graphics and mechanics.
The idea of having two game windows that connected to each other came when I went to bed (like most ideas :P) but I was not sure it would be possible.

So I spent pretty much the whole first day making sure it worked, and the entire time praying it wouldn’t break the last minute >_<
I’m glad I could figure something out that was unique and fun to do, even if I didn’t work as much in it as I wanted (had to cut a good 1/3 of the game…)

Then results are out and I see a golden medal next to one of the scores. It took 7 LDs (and a couple MiniLDs) and I couldn’t be happier!

See you in august 😉

Tags: postmortem

I got in the top 100 for humor! I got #76. This is a lot better than my last LD. Below I have shown my rating improvements. However, there are things that made me mad about the ratings. Not so much my ratings but just ratings in general. So I have some tips for those who haven’t been here very long.

Use “n/a”. Very often people will rate as one star when they should really rate as “n/a”. For example, this text adventure. It got rated better in graphics than my game. It is a text adventure, graphics don’t matter in a text adventure. If it doesn’t have sound, rate it as “n/a”. Same goes for graphics.

Read the entire description. It seems as some people don’t read the entire description. There is sometimes some important info in there. For example, people didn’t seem to realize there were only two levels in my game. Or they said restarting was annoying even though I showed a way to restart faster. Please, JUST READ THE WHOLE THING.

Leave a comment. There is nothing more annoying than people who don’t leave comments. I like to hear what you think. How am I supposed to know how I’m doing if you don’t leave a comment. Please, LEAVE COMMENTS.

Also, here is a rating comparison:

LD26 ratings

LD24 Ratings

And here is a timelapse:

Just a couple of minutes to finish the voting period I wanted to post my favorite 4 games.

For all this time I didn’t know which to choose because I really loved many of the games on this ludum dare. Some just screamed GENIUS. Now I can choose because my mind is filled with beer and everything it’s more clear.

Anyway I’ll start the list with

Gods Will Be Watching

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11045

I guess this is the favorite of many, but this one caught the eye of my girl friend. So I am putting this one for her. She really loved this game. She played about 20 times, only lost 2 the rest she just kept playing. She was amazed with it so great game!

The second game on my list is:

Fractured

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13960

This is a crazy and difficult game. The puzzle will probably destroy you brain, I don’t know if it’s because I am not smart enough for this or what, but I wasn’t able to finish it. Even though it was a very hard game it really kept me going.

Next on the list is:

(Follow the) Line

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17883

Another popular game on LD26. I really loved how simple it is. It’s simple but not easy and doesn’t get boring after a while. This is a game I really want to keep playing. Please port this to phones and tablets. I read you made this with haxe, so you MUST!.

And last but not least:

Somsnosa

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18575

I really felt like I was on a surreal painting. The art  was just great! and I really loved the battles. Something about this game just makes me feel like I am on a dream.

If you have a minute left you could play & rate my game  “SHON” ( whoring  )

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13148

Just updated my version with latest fixes and improvements.. Oh and an ice stage

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22219

If you’re bored, and waiting for the winners to be announced, heart this post and be entertained for 2 seconds

Alright, I think I’ll do my obligatory look back at the competition.

I’m going to look at it in percentiles because the numbers aren’t impressive.

Categories I care about:

Overall: 967, 41%

Fun: 864, 37%

Ok, not the best scores, but technically, above average! This was my first major game competition, and I’m proud I did it!

My game was Left vs. Right – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16998

Ludum Dare results are in, even without any audio my game ranked #416 overall out of 2346 games 😀 Not bad at all. My highest category was #408 in graphics, also somehow I managed to get #1069 in audio, even though my game has none? lol. With #595 in fun I think I did pretty well, and it will only get better next LD!

Hey everyone,

Now that three weeks have passed and the judging is over, it’s probably time for me to get around to my post-mortem for LD26. Let me start off by saying that it was an absolute blast! I’ve been a teaching assistant in the Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University for a year now, and during that time I have taught and been part of the development of two game design classes. Yet, I had not made a game to date despite guiding several student groups through the process. So I set off to challenge myself with ludum dare 26.

What went well

• I was fairly confident in my ability to have a functional game. I’m relatively familiar with C# scripting in Unity so that’s what I went with. Though there were a few bugs, and some HORRIBLY formatted code due to time constraints + feature creep, everything managed to function the way I intended it to.
• The art style was a success. I even managed to score #100 overall in the graphics division! I haven’t ever done pixel art before, so I was pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback I got from it. I spent probably 60%-70% of my time on the graphics since that was the part that intrigued me the most. I knew that pixel art alone wouldn’t stand out – the minimalism theme was going to make sure of that. I added shadowing to every sprite, which made the implementation take a little longer but Photoshop actions helped tremendously.
• 3 Character sprite sheets. About 3-4 hours before the competition ended (time lost all meaning somewhere around 8am that morning), I decided that I wanted the character to get his color sucked out – requiring a greyscale and full black/white sprite sheet to be made. Not terribly difficult but my sprite code wasn’t the greatest and it was quite a rush to get this finished. I’m also not the strongest animator so adding wings at the end really pushed me. Luckily I was able to pull through as that last burst of energy carried me across the finish line
• Skype! I know this is a bit odd, but I had the longest Skype conversation of my life with Sakuyan and jgnilka (look up their entries, they did a great job!) I think it ended up being 27 hours long at the end. Chatting with friends who were also working on their own Ludum Dare games really helped when we started getting tired or frustrated. I attribute the relative success of this project to them as much as myself for being supportive and keeping me (mostly) sane.

What didn’t go so well

• Everyone complained about the theme enough, so I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that I found it hard to be inspired.
• I didn’t really focus on gameplay, sound, or story. Nearly all of my efforts went into having pixel art that actually looked decent. It was my first attempt so in the future I know that my art speed will improve – leaving me more time to make my game more of a game.
• About that story – I threw in incoherent thoughts in the background as text to give some semblance of a story/deeper meaning. I really wanted to try to come up with something good but I just kept drawing blanks.
• I would have loved to incorporate 3D graphics somehow, but there’s simply not enough time for me to to model/rig/animate a character. I’m a lighting/shading/rendering guy so anything that doesn’t come at the end of the pipeline goes pretty slow for me.
• Bugs. But hey, they weren’t too noticeable. Lots of people seemed to have lost the long elevator platform but I haven’t been able to reproduce it.
• The ending – or lack thereof. It left a lot of people wondering if the game had ended, which is a bit of a sour note to hit right before your audience is about to rate the game.

Things for the future

• I’ll definitely think about sound for the next competition. While I believe it should really be the last thing priority-wise, it can be the extra finishing touch that really makes a game stand out.
• No more Unity for 2D games. It’s doable, but the engine isn’t really made for it and it shows when you’re trying to work with it. The lack of a built-in 2D character controller seems really strange to me with all of the other wonderful features it has, and using 3D assets in a 2D environment lends itself to another host of problems. I’m working on a project in Construct2 now, so I intend to be fluent in that before the next competition starts.

Thanks everyone who played and rated my game, and thanks to everyone that keeps the competition running smoothly!

—

Andrew Kennedy

Almost in the top 100 for humor (#106), and in the top 500 for Audio. Seeing as this was my very first LD, I enjoyed it, and did better than I expected :D. Super fun, cannot wait for the next one.

For those who want to play my super awesome game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20256

Because I like it. And I’m willing to make it.

Either that or it’s got something to do with the fact that I only rated about 7 games.

But lulzfish_4 rated many more games than I did yet performed bloody awfully. Maybe people are vicious when they see someone’s made a few mistakes. Or maybe they just can’t cope with 8 enemies firing targetted shots at them. I don’t know. (It’s pretty easy to dodge once you know your hit region.)

And he got 1.33 for audio? His game doesn’t even HAVE audio! DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO PRESS THE N/A BUTTON (obviously I had better people voting for mine because they knew how to press the N/A button for humour even though there was a bit in the game itself)

His game wasn’t even terrible. It was just a bit incomplete, and a bit rough around the edges. I’ve seen worse games that deserve worse scores, most notably a particular game which involved going around a huge-ass cavern picking up 50 identical things. It was not fun at all. I am neither naming this game nor this author, as everyone does duds every now and then and he doesn’t need to be remembered for such a dud.

Hell, his worst placing was in the theme department. I feel this is complete horseshit. If anything, this needed MORE things.

Come to think of it, if his game were some Unity hackjob, he’d get a much higher score because shitny*. I really don’t like that.

(* typo’d that, corrected that, decided to leave it in. It’s a new word, guys!)

If it’s any compensation, I at least did well in the audio department, and somehow did alright in the fun department.

MiniLD #42 is coming up. Provided my coursework doesn’t suddenly start kicking me in the crotch, I might take this time to learn how to use LÖVE, and then make a bullet hell shooter with it.

Alternatively, if emscripten decides to work, I might be able to make an asm.js port of my LD26 entry, and then I can gut the engine out and use that as base code. Hell, I might even stick in a few #define macros just to save my sanity (getting the texcoords right was somewhat tedious, lots of copy paste, thank you vim for being awesome).

And then I will make a bullet hell shooter.

Because I like bullet hell shooters.

And, to be quite honest, there are other people who do.—Maybe I’ll have enough time to stick in a few difficulty levels. I for one am not particularly good at my own game, but I can get a no-death run every now and then.At least I still find my game challenging.

Well, my first LD has come to an end, and it was a blast! Participated in the jam and quite happy with our results:

Super happy to break top 10 in a category!!

Would still love any feedback people have on our game as we plan to continue working on it, bringing it to both iPhone and Android soon! If you havent played it yet, give it a shot, and please leave comments!

Also, if you would like to be notified when the mobile version is ready, sign up here.

Cant wait until next LD!

The first thing I said to myself before the start of the Jam was this : “I will do my best to respect the theme in every aspect of interpretation or development.” Then the theme was announced : “Minimalism“. I was very frustrated because I knew that obeying THAT theme would kill almost every fragment of creativity I have could put into it my game. I wasn’t creating a personal game anymore, but a thing resulting of the maximum extrapolation of an invasive theme.

My thoughts are a battlefield with Conformism (C) against Anticonformism (A).
I do hate the C part, but it’s keeping me sane. This is how I proceed, talking to myself :

• A : What is the Minimal in a Game?
  C : Interactivity. Without interactivity, it’s just a show.
  A : But is a show a real game with unconscious inputs and inexplicit outputs?
  C : Don’t mix show and game or people won’t understand.
• A : What is the Minimal in Interactivity?
  C : An input, an output.
  A : It seems to be true with 2 people (considering Player and Game).
• A : What is the Minimal Input or Output?
  C : A click and displaying a pixel I think.
  A : Where are your arguments?
  C : In common games you just have to click and pixels are small and light.
  C : Remember, people need to understand.
  A : MAN, stop attacking your liberty of thinking by using understandability as a filter.
  C : Do a game for your yourself if you want BUT UNDERSTAND that shareability is primordial in LD.
  A : Go **** ******** C!

— Cerebral Meltdown —
I’m not going to show you everything, because it took hours.
And my head hurts.

• A : So… what’s the minimal game engine?
  C : Notepad.
  A : LOL, are you trying to mimic me? You’re bad at this, you know.C : It was a serious answer.
  A : It was unoriginal originality, around 10 people will have the same idea.
  C : So what’s your idea?
  A : No game engine.
  C : WHAT???!! We are NOT going to make a game??
  C : GOOD JOB, YOU’RE RIGHT : 0 octets, that’s Minimal!
  C : Who won? Everyone who did NOT submit a game.
  C : You’re going to be hated for that.

— Conformism ragequit — Long wait — Conformism comeback —

• A : Bro, try to understand me,
  A : I was saying : no “standard” game engine.
  A : Let’s use Ludum Dare website as a game engine.
  A : One possibility : Title = Question ; Download links = Answers.
  A : Let’s minimize everything
  C : Wow, you’re a genius, no kiddin, but can we?
  A : It’s not forbidden, I think. Let’s submit in “Jam”. In case of.

• C : So, what’s the minimal question for you?A : “How are you?”
  C : Answer links : “Fine, thank you” and “Not so well”?
  A : I don’t like this, the question must be more challenging.
  A : What about “X = 3 – 1“, btw : weird name, easy to see.
  C : That’s not challenging at all.
  A : Well, it looks challenging so people UNDERSTAND where the game is.
  A : Remember, there’s no downloadable game, no Flash, no HTML5!
  C : Why not “48÷2(9+3) = ?“, we will get more points in fun.
  A : Too hard, and minimalism has a difficulty interpretation.
  A : Note : We must do minimalism in the most diverse field of interpretations!
• C : Where the “download” links are going to redirect?
  A : Maybe to wikipedia, to the true or false page.
  C : I like the “true” or “false” idea, it’s very “game-like”.
  C : However, some people will not understand that wikipedia is a part of the game.
  C : They will say “the link is broken” or something else.
  C : I will write “you need a web browser” so people don’t search a “physical” game.
  C : And it’s funny at the same time.
• A : Good idea, hhmm, for the links I will write true or false in images.
  A : I will then upload the images and use their direct links.
  A : It’s important to lure people into thinking we spent minimal time and skill.
  C : I think you’re right.
  A : Haha.
  C : Be careful, some people will look at the URL, so upload the false image several times.

And that’s roughly how I got this :

Tags: bipolar, bronze, disorder, gold, humor, jam, ludum26, postmortem, theme, x=3-1

Our first Ludum Dare, and I think we did pretty well!

Go and give it a play!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18307

The reactions to the ratings are flowing in, and I noticed there are some misunderstandings on how to interpret the ratings, and how to calculate a percentile.  First of all, the ranking is based on the category.  That is, if your game is in “48h compo” it is ranked within a total of 1610 games, if it’s “jam”, within 736 entries.  But that is not the whole story.  A number of games have not been rated because the number of ratings fall below the threshold (which I believe is 12 or 14 ratings or some such).  Without knowing how many games were not rated, you can’t calculate your percentile.  As a first attempt to solve this problem, I took a random sample out of all games, and noted the percentages that were and weren’t rated. Figures calculated from all games would be nice to have, but these aren’t available afaik.

Percentage of 48h games rated: 88.9% (32 out of 36 in my sample)
Percentage of Jam games rated: 64.5% (20 out of 31 in my sample)

Note that the percentage for Jam games is much lower for some reason.  Anyway, this means the total number of rated games in each category is approximately:

48h: 1431 (1610*0.889)
Jam: 474 (736*0.645)

UPDATE: thanks to ashdnazg, we now have accurate numbers!

48h: 1357
Jam: 566

To get your percentile, divide your ranking by one of the numbers above and multiply by 100.

Also it makes sense to look at the absolute ratings (the number of stars) and to know something about the relationship between absolute and relative ratings.  In some cases, a 0.1 star change can drop or raise your ranking by 100 or so.  I’d also like to see a graph of this relationship.  Maybe I’ll make one myself.

Mighty pleased with the 9th placing in the jam humor ratings, the fact the game was made as a satire joke makes it feel like a big win for us. Thanks to everyone who played our game. Roll on the next jam!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=19384

 Scores

  PLAY GURU

We got our first medal – in ‘Graphics’!! And as the artist I know how competitive that category is so I’m extra amazed at the result! If you just look at the scores around ours, 0.01 of a star could have tipped us over the edge into silver territory or knocked us out of the running for the bronze. So tight!

Thanks to everyone who voted on our entry!

We also beat all of our previous records apart from in the fun category (understandable, it was a very hard/cryptic point and click puzzle game), and almost came in the top 50 for everything!

And we trashed our previous scores for Humor, Theme and Mood.

Spreadsheet of our past 4 Ludum Dares + Graphs

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgqMypAQnKEYdGhUcXZLWjZ4MEtTazZjdV9hdDhtbWc&usp=sharing

Linux

We’ve also got our game working on Linux! – Does anyone have any idea if it’s possible to update the entry page with a new download link now that the contest is over? If not we’ll just post it with the timelapse that’s coming soon!

Social Networking

Join us on Facebook and Twitter! (I just made the accounts the other day so they’re looking pretty lonely)

I love Ludum Dare.

Top 100 Finish?

#77 overall?

I couldn’t BE more astonished.  I’m so happy people enjoyed my game that much, and there’s nothing more encouraging than that.  I think I’ve got all the motivation I need to work on the post-compo version now.

Congratulations to all of the compo and jammers that finished their entries, and thank you to everyone who rated my game.

You’re all awesome.

My entry to LD #24 : Tiny World seems to be mostly better, except in terms of graphics..

As my first LD, I wasn’t expecting much, and with so so so many entries I’m glad to have finished at least in the top 10%.

Check out Proxy here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22132

I must add that I am a bit disappointed to see the ratings look a bit wonky. As an example, I’ve seen some games that are little more than moving a square with the arrows keys in the top 100 of innovation. Don’t get me wrong, simplicity can be fun, such games can still look polished and make for an overall great game experience, but perhaps innovation should not be where they’re scoring highest.

I also saw a user share an anecdote about his game being bested on graphics by a text adventure.

Nevertheless, the overall top 100 certainly look like entries that deserved to be there. Congratulations to the winners, and all the best to all the game devs that took part, and good luck to anyone who will be continuing there game post compo!

Cheers,

Dan M.