Hi there.

These are my last words before the end. I was very happy to contribute to this great 30th Ludum Dare experience. I would like to thank the 114 people who have rated my game ‘GET Connected‘. For my part, I rated 84 games!

To conclude this awesome adventure, I drew a piece of digital paiting to illustrate the ending of my post-Ludum game.

If you are interested by my game (or my work), I centralized my Ludum Dare contents on my website.

Big-up to all of you. See you next time!
End of transmission!

Sephy.

And with that, our 30th event has ended. Here are the results:

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

My Results: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=me

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 100 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

Compo Top 100: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=top
Jam Top 100: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=top&cat=Overall(Jam)

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Category Winners

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best overall game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

Categorical Top 25’s: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 100 lists per category.

Survey!

Sorceress organized a survey! You can check out the results here.

Ludum Dare 31 – Coming December 5th-8th 2014!

We’ve got one more event left this year, our big Winter event in December! Follow us on Twitter or join the mailing list to stay informed.

The Future of Ludum Dare

If you were linked directly here, you missed out on a VERY IMPORTANT VIDEO from me, talking about the future of Ludum Dare. Go check it out! Only two minutes of your time (plus 30 seconds). Thanks!

Thanks again everyone for making Ludum Dare great!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

First things first: my English is not too good, so i hope this will be clear enough.

I didn’t want to wrote a whole post-mortem. Since, while thinking about it and try to find stuff to put in it, my mind stop at one thing that, I think, was my principal “revelation”. Astroz turns out to be a kind of action-puzzle game. I define Action Puzzle to be a puzzle (game with a dominant strategy) with an execution difficulty. Portal is probably the best known (and made) kind of action-puzzle game.

I’m not a level designer. So when I first realize that my game turn out to be a puzzle game, my thought was : “Ouch, I need to make at least one level per mechanic in my game, plus some other here and there to let the player practice the mechanic. And, one or two final levels, the icing on the cake.

I made 15 levels. I think some people made it through the twelfth. In the last hour of the LD, I just create a last level, put everything in it, try it, and thought” mey… that should be feasible”…

After all this, my approach of dividing each mechanic in a separate level, I think, was good. But since it’s an action-puzzle, I think it’s also important to create level just for understanding one puzzle mechaninc, but then, there must be another level just to practice execution.

So, in a way, if your solution is hard to find, it should not be difficult to execute. And, if it’s hard to execute, it should not be hard to find. Except maybe the last level (or last chapter, or last level in a chapter… well you see the logic here). What’s important is to isolate the resolution component from the execution component most of the time. And, combining both should be only to test the player in the end of a series, like an exam or midterm exam, to make sure that your player is competent enough to the next chapter, series or what ever you want to call it

In the end, it seems obvious. But I think it’s still a good rule of thumb when you’re in the final rush and you have the wonderful idea to make a action-puzzle game.

Hi All,

I made a tool for downloading the LD30 raw data.  I’ve posted it as CSV and JSON on my website here:

https://smashware.com/articles/2014/09/15/everyones-ludum-dare-30-results

I also made a tool for analyzing results, which you can access here:

https://smashware.com/articles/2014/09/15/results.html

Here’s a screenshot:

Happy analyzing!  Let me know if you find any bugs…

~voidqk

Hello, In addition to creating Games, I also record YouTube Videos. For the voting period following Ludum Dare 30, in addition to rating games, I also recorded videos of 20 games. I released five videos each Monday, below you can find Week 4 videos embedded, and links to the videos for weeks 1-3. The finale video is a 10 second compilation of all 20 games.

Youtube Playlist

Week 4:

And the Finale

Week 1:

Introduction

Connected we Run by Sandcrawler

Alter Axis by sylarisbest

Shadows by apiotrw

They Were Just Pixels by Ohems

Taxi Space by DrCicero

Week 2:

Provider Bob by Cryunreal

Pilgrimage by Follett

Groups of Seven by 7Soul

Intergalactic Delivery Services Corporation by sP0CkEr2

This Way! by Accidental Rebel

Week 3:

Warp Paint by zatyka

Dear Sister by Robinerd

Matters of Perspective by nesis

NOODLE FEELINGS by Magdev

Swich! by swich

Tags: 10s videos, Videos

I’ve been doing Ludum Dare for a couple of years now, but this is my first post mortem, so bear with me. Oh, and why not play the game while you’re at it

The Good:

• The marble sounds! They were almost an afterthought, but are now definitely my favourite feature of the game. I recorded the sounds using glass marbles on a wooden table, with an iPad mic. After some touching-up in Ableton Live, I was really pleased with how good they sounded, considering they were captured with such an awful mic.
• The difficulty. I tried quite hard to make a gradual progression, and introduce more marbles and holes over time, and it seems to have paid off. A lot of commenters have expressed how the game is challenging in a good way, which I’m very pleased with – especially since it’s not something I’ve been great at getting right in the past!

The Bad:

• Lack of music. I originally wanted some kind of background music, at least for the title screen. In the end I decided it would have been too difficult to compose something that didn’t ruin the aesthetic, so I just left the marble sounds by themselves.
• Marble physics. Thanks to a lack of Flashpunk support for collision circles and a lack of time to implement it, the physics were a very accurate representation of a axis-aligned hitbox sliding around on a block of ice. Unfortunately, marbles are not square; they are round.

The Ugly:

• The graphics. The aesthetic turned out quite nice in the end, but it’s still no where near as flashy as some of my previous games.
• Developing a game without internet access. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Roy, Gee, Biv was a 48-hour compo game that involved three characters meeting up and attempting to free themselves from the world they’ve been constrained in. I had a lot of fun developing it, though it has plenty of issues that would need fixed if I were to ever release this as a completed game.

So let’s get right to it!

Unless you haven’t played the game yet, in which case I’d highly recommend doing so to avoid spoilers!

Play Roy, Gee, Biv Here!

What Worked

This is one I’m definitely proud of! After releasing a dozen+ games I’ve finally started to embrace the idea of a narrow scope. Getting out of the “Oh, but wouldn’t it be cool if I did this too?” mindset is tricky, and there are times where it can actually be beneficial. Overall for situations like this I try to steer away from this mindset, unless I feel the idea can be easily implemented and will complete the game idea rather than bloat it.

I realized recently that proper endings are something that my games tend to lack. Sometimes I’ll do something involving a few lines of text, or player will enter a sandbox room that might say something along the lines of “You Win” or “Have Fun,” but often my games will have no endings at all and just go to the title screen.

I think this has definitely disappointed some of my players in the past, so I’ve been trying to think of ways to create more interesting endings. For this game I wanted to try again with the sandbox theme but add a bit of a twist to it.

Obvious spoilers ahead! If you’d rather see the ending yourself first, please play the game (link is at the top).

I noticed that early in the game’s development I had a lot of fun playing with a random bug that turn into a mechanic: instead of picking up an object, one character would hop on top of it and “ride” it, sometimes even projecting he character upwards in the sky depending on the object’s size. I realized that one thing I love about games is when they break, and how rewarding it can be breaking a game because of how surprising it is. Since this also often means completely altering the previously established rules of the game, it can also give the player more of the game to experience. So for the ending I decided to slightly alter the rules of the game to give the option to break it (more than it already is broken, that is) for the player.

Basically what happens is the characters “share” their abilities and can all do what the others can. As a result they can all fly or ride out of the roofless area they are constrained in and exit the playable game world. Outside there is a big party room with lots of particle effects. There are some rideable platforms and an underground area which is just a 3×5 grid (trying and failing to be clever since the game’s song was written in 15s). The player is free to roam the world or just fall of the edge or whatever.

The sound could’ve definitely used more time, but for what I was trying to accomplish it got the job done. Each character had their own part to the song, there is a bass track tying the other tracks together. If I had more time I probably would’ve added more nuance in the music overall, and maybe have more audio cues to character abilities, doors opening, etc.

What Didn’t Work

I told myself to go really minimal for this game, I wanted more time to troubleshoot any scripting issues since this was my first time using Unity for a short gamejam. While I enjoyed the idea of this, the game just looked a bit sloppy and incomplete overall, and I would’ve liked to spend more time considering the overall aesthetic of the game. Also some really lazy amateur mistakes in my animation (animating the root, the worst part is I knew I wasn’t supposed to do it and I did it anyway) led to floating or sinking characters, which led to me desperately trying to patch up mistakes in scripts before I had to upload the game in time. Overall the game was messy, and that seems to show pretty well in the art.

The game was confusing to many people, and overall I think I did a pretty poor job in teaching the player what the game is about. If I did this again I would have put more time into designing a smoother learning curve. This is definitely one of the biggest challenges for me in game design, since many of my games have very limited tutorials, text-based tutorials or none at all.

I wanted the climax of the game to be around the time the characters could all see each other, but because of this I didn’t feel like I had enough time to really use the characters’ abilities to their fullest and fully flesh out their interaction.  A lot of this was because of how opening doors worked: Instead of using switches to open them, I made them one-way doors that could only be opened by one character. This meant that in order for the characters to get through doors of a different color, they have to wait for that character to open in for them, forcing them to meet very early. In order to fix this I would have to change the doors to open with distant switches, or have players teleport somewhere when they open a door, or something else.

While I’m glad I included the ending, I definitely felt like it wasn’t terribly successful. There wasn’t exactly anything to “do” after the game was won other than wander around, and I didn’t even do much to indicate that the players have gained each other’s abilities. Overall it could have used a lot more substance.

The Wrap-up:

I’m glad I finished the game and achieved all of the basic mechanics that I planned on. However it needs a lot of polish and some reworking of the basic gameplay. I’d like to come back to this again sometime, but it may not happen for a bit. I also didn’t get a chance to play and rate that many games (school keept me busy), which is especially disappointing because that is one of my favorite parts of Ludum Dare. Overall I learned a lot about my current strengths and weaknesses. I have quite a ways to go but jams like this are helping me learn!

See y’all next time!

The results will be out tomorrow in a few hours, and I’ve yet to write my post mortem… >_< Ok, let’s do this!

(also, here’s my timelapse for this LD’s entry!)

Since there are a quite few gifs and images (which add up to almost 2MB), I thought it was best to not keep everything on the main page…

Reason for the delay

On my first compo I used Flixel. It was so easy to use and so similar to the way I wanted to think about games that I’ve pretty much only used it since them. I’ve tried to use Unity a few times, but I always tried to go about it in a structured way (which didn’t quite work out).

Though I’ve already toyed with SDL and OpenGL, since Flixel was enough to me I kept using it. But, when I made the post compo for my LD#28 I started to think Flash isn’t good enough, anymore. My implementation is probably also faulty, but there are a lot of missed inputs in that game, when trying to run it at 60 FPS. Also, rendering is quite slow (since I added an overlay to the whole screen).

I switch to Air or to a newer Flash version with another library (like Axl, which already has GPU support). Or I could even switch to Unity… but this idea isn’t much to my liking.

Well, since I’m a coder and I’ve been meaning to do that for some time, I decided to finally write my own framework in C. I wanted to use SDL2, so I could easily port games to Android and maybe even web (with the Chrome Native Client). Also, it would enable me to work with OpenGL and shaders (which would allow me to do overlays without actually having to render a square over the screen).

Some two months ago, I started to develop that Framework. Unfortunately, by the time of the compo, I was no where near finishing it. It wasn’t even on a usable state. So I had to fall back to Flixel. As soon as the compo ended, though, I went back to work on my framework and on a test game I’d been doing to test it.

I tried to play a few game each day, but I couldn’t quite manage my time. Since I try to write a comment to every game I play, I ended up spending too much time thinking about what to write than actually playing games. As time went by, I stopped playing entries and focused solely on my framework.

At least, now it’s on a usable state (though it’s still missing many features) and I’ve finished that game! I’ll talk about it on a later post. For now, know that I’ll most likely use it on the next LD! =D

On to talk about the actual compo…

Theme and game idea

For some time, “Connected Worlds” has been one of my least favorite themes. As usual, I was kind of disappointed with the theme… but when I started to actually give it some thought, I saw that it’s actually a great theme.

Getting over that small hurdle, I was able to create a nice lil’ story (that barely made into the final game) and how I wanted it to play.

The game was to be able three races from different planets, two of those being sentient and always at war. The other one was to be of creatures that from time to time attacked either of them. The story would move toward either reaching a agreement with the other people or waging war and wiping (or getting wiped) them.

I, for some stupid reason, thought it would be a nice idea to make it a “side scrolling RTS” kinda game. I quickly drew a few sprites and implemented the base of the menu and of the movement…

Then, I decided to add platforms and gravity. Prior to that, you would have to micro manage every unit and use a jump button to actually make it go over platforms.

And this is when everything went down the hole.

Writing a 2D path finder

The idea of implementing a path finder wasn’t all that intimidating. I knew that I was risking wasting too much time on something that could not work, but I thought it was worth it. All I needed was to transform the tilemap into a graph and traverse it. Then I would have to deal with the problem of making an entity actually traverse that path.

I wrote it in a really straight forward way. If I’m not wrong, I traversed the tilemap iteratively and every time I reached a solid tile I would check if it was part of a already found node and, if not, recursively search for its bounding rectangle. I also modified it’s actual height and vertical position to make it take all the vertical space possible, so I would be able to click above a platform and select it. Even thought my implementation worked, I later found out that it was really buggy and had to redo some parts.

For the path finder, I first listed every possible path, that is, every two nodes that were reachable, even if by jumping. To simplify things, I made them bi-directional (which ignored the fact that a character could fall from a platform to the floor below it). Then, when trying to trace a path, I would check from the current node every other node recursively, in a depth-first search, while maintaining a list of visited nodes and the current shortest path and distance, to avoid cyclic paths and to be able to travel the “shortest” (in a kinda random meaning) path. Finally, I simply had to make an entity follow that path.

Pretty simple, right? Well…

yeah, not, it wasn’t. I made lots of typos and small logic errors (like incrementing the loop counter on the while statement [ while (++i < nodes.length)] and at the end). I broke and “fixed” the code a lot of times before I found those stupid mistakes… Just then I was able to make it somewhat working (after some actual fixing).

By then, I had already spent some 9~10 hours on that single problem and had to finish the game on my Sunday afternoon. I also hard coded a few things (like every character speed) into the path find code, so I couldn’t change that without potentially breaking everything. And for some stupid reason, I kept the bullet speed the same as every character speed… yeah… lots of great ideas.

Finishing the game

Time wasn’t quite on my side (totally my own fault, I know). So I kinda rushed things to a complete state. Those drafty drawings I did for the animations are a reflect to that. I draw everything on paper and tried to simply pass it to the computer. Since I wouldn’t have time to make it into proper pixel art, I tried to make it somewhat nice and interesting.

The waves were also decided at random. I made three enemy types and put a few of each every stage. I didn’t test it as a whole, but I (thought I) was sure that every state would properly switch to the next one. Later, I found out that a single typo broke every stage transition, but I fixed it a few minutes (I think) after submitting the game.

And that’s pretty much it.

Conclusion

Well, I had tons of fun. I was able to ignore trying to make the best possible game I potentially could, going for a platformer and avoiding some choices because they would be too hard to implement or too time consuming, and to embraced simply trying to make the game I wanted to. This is why, even thought “The Nether” is one of the worst and most unpolished of my entries, I’m really happy with it.

At the same time, I feel bad for not playing all that many games, not even playing back the games of everyone who commented on my game. This was necessary, though, because I really needed to focus on developing that framework.

I may try to fix the game’s bugs and make a post compo… but there are a few games that I want to make first. So, yeah… that might never happen…

Thanks for reading! =D

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

I just like to thank everyone who involved in this competitions, and i like to say that this was a big challenge to me, and i so happy to have done, independently from the results.

Was awesome to play several games.

this is the Planet Escape.

See you all in the next time.

I think this is pretty amazing, just based on the fact that some guy is making a game jam based on “Weird Al” Yankovic’s UHF movie. (link: http://jams.gamejolt.io/uhf )

Seeing as Mike has problems keeping his RL while working countless hours on LD, maybe Notch would like to step in as an angel-investor and help in developing LD while keeping it as free and open as possible?!

A new feature that might then be added could be the setup of a pseudonym account which gets merged with a persons real account after the voting period (to prevent ppl like said Notch being trolled while still adding to their ‘portfolio’ after the jam has concluded).

Thinking about it, the whole thing should then probably be done behind the scenes to prevent minecraft fangirls and -boys flooding LD.

So, here is the secret formula then:

Notch + PoV => LD++

Pick up the phone mr. persson, mr. kasprzak needs your help

p.s.: Almost forgot: Goeth forth and codeth

Alright, i reached my goal.

Top 25 Graphics. Done.

Was hoping for it last time already (was #76 in the end), but got it now. 22nd place in graphics. Thats cool.

The rest of the numbers are pretty average to bad. None of my three entries so far have managed to get over an average of 3.0 in the Fun-category. Hm.

Its alright though, not complaining at all. I am not one to fixate on these ratings, or give them too great significance. Disagreeing with your own ratings is easy anyway, disagreeing with ratings on other games probably a bit rarer, even though we will all find games we liked underrated and games we found lacking on the top of some lists. No, the essence of a LD is what you take away from it:

I loved that i managed to pull off my Low-Poly artstyle again. I love that style and plan to continue using it.

I loved that i was able to come up with a concept for a puzzler that actually worked out well. I always love encountering well made puzzlers in LD, they can often represent that brilliant idea people sometimes have in game jams better than any other genre. My concept had one or two minor flaws, but overall i pulled off exactly what i had in my head, and it played just as it played in my head. Thats great.

And when talking about puzzlers, Jeru’s Tower  was my favorite puzzler of this LD, and it ranked #19 Overall. Loved that one. You can give it a play if you are not tired of LD-games at this point.

Lastly, i hope i will be able to catch the december-LD this year, but that is always a hectic time of the year, isn’t it?

However it will be, there definitely will be a next time.

See you then everyone!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40863

This is my first Ludum Dare so I got terrible ratings.

This morning I woke up and found this :

I wondered what was that weird pink round next to overall. I right clicked on it, save it to my desktop and realized it was entitled “bronze.gif”…

This is so awesome guys, thanks a lot!

We plan to work on a post jam version which would include 50 levels and more features, first for the web then on mobile. Anyway, thanks Ludum Dare for the inspiration and the fun, see you next time 😉

Anyone know when the results are posted or where i got to view them

Me and two friends went into this Game Jam with absolutely no idea what to expect and then BAM!
Out of 1045 entries into the “Jam” category we got:
#3 in the Audio category! (Holy shit, well done Kelton! and thanks Matt for helping edit the voice acting clips)
#27 in Humour! (People enjoyed our voice acting, thanks Kelton, Matt, and James)
#43 in Innovation! (I am so blown away right now.)
#60 in Mood! (Hot damn)

This is definitely my most succesful game jam, and I hope to make a newer and much bigger version of this game!
Thanks guys that worked on it with me, and thanks to all of you amazing LD’ers for being there along the way!
Hopefully you will hear more from a better and bigger version of O.R.B in future! 😀
If you haven’t already, check the LD page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28661

#107 Mood(Jam) 3.70
#165 Audio(Jam) 3.52
#295 Graphics(Jam) 3.58
#445 Humor(Jam) 2.27
#554 Innovation(Jam) 2.73
#663 Overall(Jam) 2.76
#677 Theme(Jam) 2.23
#747 Fun(Jam) 2.04

Now that ive had time to reflect on those scores… Im shocked. This was my teams first attempt at ludum dare. I expected our score to be significantly lower, and for some strange reason i still expect them to be lower. Honestly… thank you all who rated us above what I would’ve rated myself. That all said lets do the usual stuff.

What went wrong:
Ok, so interesting thing… alot went wrong. Like insanely wrong.
Time Management – 72 hours is a long time. I didnt realize just how long we had until that last day. now how is this something that went wrong? i was exhausted by the last day to the point i couldnt really do anymore work. Its an incredibly long time to drag out your sleep schedule. I actually wish we only had 48 hours as a team. we may have made a better product.

Art- Our art is beautiful… dont get me wrong on that. but we fell behind on it and had to call in some help the night before to get it finished. I would’ve helped myself but my art skills dont even compare when im well rested(and i was far from that)… unfortunately nobody else on the team could make comparable art either, we had to get backup help. Actually, even though im just a programmer with no art talent… i did animate the last cutscene.

Communication as a team- This is quite possibly the biggest blunder to the project. I figured irritability would eventually cause some issues between us. but i had no idea the team would fight as much as we did. I made us a stronger team i think for the next LD though. and we have ideas on how to prevent such issues next time around.

The Theme – This was literally the one theme i did not want. I refused to do some portal-esque thing. i needed something more abstract and so did the team. we spent almost the whole first night discussing ideas. but the one thing we didn’t want was some portal mechanic or the idea of going between worlds. We eventually had something that sorta fit the theme… in an abstract way. And ultimately we did make the concept we came up with, in full.

Lack of Game elements- Its hard for even me to call our submission a game. during development we discussed this issue. but ultimately we decided any gamey elements would lessen the projects value… something i still stand by. But based on comments… people understood it despite the lack of us telling anything.so despite the lack of a fun score… im happy with it.

Technical issues – this was compounded by all the other issues we had in some form or another. we got some of the art last minute… and because the code base wasn’t automatic… we had to readjust the positions of things like chat bubbles per character. by the time i received the art to do so… i was way too tired. i remember barely keeping my eyes open to finish it off. and it was far from perfect. i needed to adjust certain hit boxes as well afterword… but was too tired to even think about. The lack of good communication also resulted in separate transition screens being handled differently and looking off. But it runs from start to end, so i call it a success.

What went Right:

Art- It looks fantastic. need i say more?
Concept- We finished the concept in full, even if it is rough.
The Last Scene- This was perhaps my most substantial contribution to this. We didnt have to explain it… people just seemed to get it.
Growth- The main reason i pushed for the team to enter LD was so my artist would gain valuable experience making something from concept to a playable alpha. In that regard it did wonders. As a team we learned just how rough LD is, and how many things can just go wrong. Personally, i learned alot in my programming skillset. I had never animated sprites in unity before. I also got to play with the new Unity GUI(which is wonderful btw, try the beta). I also learned alot regard transform child/parents… and a plethora more.

Summary:
Thank you all. I cant wait for December where we are totally going to up our game. Hopefully the theme is something more approachable. lol.

If anybody would like to play our first LD entry… here’s a link

In the three weeks since the Ludum Dare challenge ended, all participants (me included) got the chance to vote on one another’s games. Now, the die has been cast, and the results were in this morning (GMT +8):

The scores somewhat sucked, which I owe to two factors. First, the contention that visual novels aren’t games (which was pointed out by another visual novel maker, Traumendes Madchen, who also participated in the Dare) — little interaction and game play involved and stuff like that. Second, the minimalist graphics and the NVL-style structuring were intended to induce a sense of imagination. The colors aren’t just for show. If any one of you didn’t notice, the blue background represents the boy’s perspective, the pink background represents the girl’s perspective, and the white-gray background represents the climax of the story.

But then, there are some upsides. First, the coolness rating. I got a 100% coolness rating due to the fact that I have rated an estimated 180 games during the voting period. Second, the highest-rated criteria were the theme and the audio. For the former criterion, I promised that I would make so much melodrama out of the theme, and I delivered. For the latter criterion, I did my best in picking the best royalty-free music I could ever find. Music is an integral part of visual novels, anyway.

So there. With that, I look forward to the 31st season.

(Cross-post: http://jollysword.livejournal.com/139900.html)

Yay, i am slightly better than before!

(that colorful numbers are for comparison with the previous LD)

Results are out for my compo game Two Must Become One. This game is my first LD ever, and I have to say, didn’t expect this AT ALL:

Holy bananas! 130th place on the first try!? Yay! Thanks a lot to everyone who voted and commented! I got a lot of very helpful feedback too, and I’ll try to better myself and future LD entries.

What’s interesting is that people’s impression of my game was apparently good enough to make them rate it +3 stars (in other words, most could have felt bad if they gave me 1-2 stars for it).  Audio got the highest rating, despite the fact I added some music literally in the last minute. The song itself I composed ages ago too, but it fit this game perfectly. I am pretty sure my game has gotten much better ratings than it would otherwise have because of the audio.

What also fascinates me is that most ratings are between 3 and 4 stars, and additionally are pretty close together (3.32 Graphics, 3.35 Fun and so on). I guess it made a solid first impression.

The fact that theme only got a 3 star rating is not surprising at all. I was not able to add all features I wanted to add, which could have made a connection to the theme more obvious. This also means I need to tune down on game scale next time, because this game here as is, is pretty in-depth for being made in only 48 hours. Looking back, I’m wondering how the fridge I got it done in time in the first place. But well, I did it! Weee!

The coolness rating came out pretty bad. I admit I didn’t play too many other games this time because I was happy just to be done with it and to have my first LD entry finished. “Winning” or “getting ratings” wasn’t exactly my aim here. This will change next LD competition, though!

Overall, taking part in this competition was a very positive experience, and the only thing I would improve next time was decreasing the scale of the LD entries. And maybe stop recreating things that already exist! I need better ideaass!

Tags: gamedev, GameJam, LD30, ld48