This Ludum Dare:
Overall - Top 23%
Fun - Top 23%
Innovation - Top 25%
Theme - Top 38%
Graphics - Top 16%
Audio - Top 17%
Humor - Top 32%
Mood - Top 15%
Ludum Dare #37:
Overall – Top 33%
Fun – Top 29%
Innovation – Top 8%
Theme – Top 28%
Graphics – Top 38%
Audio – Top 43%
Humor – Top 40%
Mood – Top 38%
In general, I did way better this time. :P
My results! Out of 1104 Compo entries, I placed in the top 20% for everything except overall (26%) and fun (39%, due to the difficulty I assume). This being the second complete game I've ever created, I'm super proud of it and I want to thank you all again for your honest feedback!
Thanks to @pov and his little elves for getting the website going, and for running this awesome event!
Results are in! If these are final! Top 100 in Humor! :smile:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
Well based on the comments, the game was too short in length which I agree with. I spent most of the time designing new levels post-jam and thinking of new obstacles to implement. Around 2 people in the comments said graphics were poor and judging by the ratings they were right, I scored in bottom %20 of games in graphics. It was mostly squares after all I thought the various animations would help my score and maybe they did, not sure.
Many complained of the controls and I agree. Post-jam I made them more tight. I used a control scheme that was not appropriate for this particular game. I also made the stupid mistake of activating the rotating and elevator platforms with a mouseclick while you were standing over the button zone, post-jam I changed it to a keyboard button but now I am thinking that the elevators and rotators should just activate when you move over the small white spaces.
The difficulty was also said to be incredible easy and truthfully I always struggled with adding challenge to any of the games I made. One guy found the game too hard but it was 1 out of 20, an outlier but I suspect it was because of the games controls.
The instructions of what to do were not clear and confused some people, I should have included them ingame but I feel since it's a jam it was probably not number 1 priority and I forgot to put it in. In non jam games I should definitely make an ingame tutorial and list the controls.
Another complaint was restarting from the beginning of the level after death, I feel that was the only complaint that was wrong. The levels were short(10-30secs usually), but if I ever design long levels, a checkpoint system might be a good idea.
Results
Final results
Overall: 705 (2.697 average in 35 ratings)
Fun: 542 (2.875 average in 34 ratings)
Innovation: 603 (2.697 average in 35 ratings)
Theme: 752 (2.152 average in 35 ratings)
Graphics: 677 (2.455 average in 35 ratings)
Audio: 501 (1.852 average in 29 ratings)
Mood: 695 (2.464 average in 30 ratings)
Now lets look at the rating in comparison to my previous games(I made 6 ludum dare games now). 705 is my best ever placing but considering only 800 games got rated this time(huge drop from recent years) it probably means nothing, I am in bottom 10 percent of rated games. Also my overall rating is worse than almost all other categories, remember the saying greater than sum of its parts well this game is opposite of the saying, depressing.
Fun was my best category which is good but still 542nd out of 800 is okish and fun in general is my strongest category in every ludum dare i've been in.
Innovation was better than almost all previous games I made which took me by surprise, only good spot this ludum dare.
Theme was terrible score but at the end of the day this game didn't follow theme and I deserved nothing here really.
Graphics rating were the worst in any game I have done so far, I guess it makes sense, I need to improve my art a lot.
Audio 501st place, sounds good but considering majority of games don't have audio I wouldn't be surprised if I was close to last overall, my only audio was the movement.
Mood I don't even know what this category means.
And now to address my title, according to the ratings my game was in the bottom 10% of all rated games, everyone in comments was saying, cool game, nice game, good game, ending all sentences with exclamation marks. Then these guys proceeded to rate the game 2/5 sometimes less on each category, why? Why lie in comments? I really don't get it. Is it cause the devs feelings or you fear backlash on your own game if you critisize too much? Anyway...
Now a shoutout to most truthful and constructive commentators. @pkenney @rubyleehs @g12345 @spacedoubt You guys laid out the games flaws pretty nicely, plus gave me advice on how to improve the game. I appreciate above all else your honesty and helpfulness. Your opinions closely matched the ratings I recieved.
And now shoutout to the rest of the commentators.
@kabalatrance @scornz @samurai-spark @bram-ve @mutfak-studios @nilead @camilo @tdennist @steve @meenners @pecolyte @jk5000 @mcjammydodger @noddingtortoise @tuomo
You'd think after doing this nine times I'd do a better job :neutral_face: Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun, and came away with a lot of ideas for how improve my game post-Jam.
I'll just take solace in the fact that last I checked I took 6th place for Feedback Karma. Woo!
Ayy, that's pretty good! 
Top 15% over all, and top 7% for theme (which is insane btw thank you all so much!).
Ratings! A lot better than expetced and an awesome * 11th place in innovation *. My first LD ever, so i'm really really happy. I expected to be in the lower third, seeing the game was hardly finished and quite unintuitive. :)
Still working on the game, this is it currently. Still looking as before, quite ;)
so the results are in, but i know there are some issues with a DoS attack. are these correct? there is a 2 in humor. does that mean 2nd place?! that cant mean 2nd place can it??
.. and everybody seems to try get on the site right now :D Been refreshing myself the whole day already xD
Anyway, here are my results (Jam):
For me it was really hard to see how the places compare to everything sent in, so I converted it to percent % (from 1840 entries in the "Jam" category):
Overall: 13,09%
Fun/Humor: 27,34%
Innovation: 23,75%
Theme: 4,84%
Graphics: 8,26%
Audio: 3,2%
Mood: 1,25%
I'm especially happy about the mood category. It's sth I actually love about games the most, the atmosphere, the feel. I made most of the game myself, with help for the music (TrisNQuads) and the monster voice-over (AsmoGrimae). The Audio category is really the team category for us - I added the water sound. And I think they both did a pretty good job :) Thanks to everyone who played the game & left a comment! I always learn so much reading them :)
Enjoy a graph of my 3 Ludum Dare scores:
I've scraped the results from the site API and put them in a spreadsheet for easier browsing:
Happy to see littleBLASTplanet get into the Top 100 in at least one of the categories. Let's hope next time I can get into the Top 50 or Top 25 of a category (I got close on Ludum Dare 37 with a #27 in humour).
I gotta say, this is definitely the best Ludum Dare I've participated in so far, ratings wise. Thank you to all that voted on my game and gave feedback. I'm glad you all enjoyed my game!
This was the first event where I tried to create music (which is not the easiest thing in the world), and that got me way up in the top 100 for audio, so I'm satisfied about that. I also was able to create much better looking graphics thanks to my practice in creating some custom sprites for a Kirby fangame I've been working on. However, my goal this time was to create a game that made people laugh, so I directed all my efforts into making one big joke game that no one can actually lose, and it definitely seemed to work, considering that my game placed #4 in humor!
If you haven't already, check out my game:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/super-plumber-man-vs-the-evil-elf-king
So I thought this ld was a god one. Awesome theme. I'd actually been waiting for a theme like this for a while and here it is. And I guess you guys thought my game was fun, which is pretty important to me because the fun category is always the category I care about most. Well, besides perhaps the overall category. Which I didn't do to shabby in either. Either way, GG everyone!
Sorry that I didn't end up rating very many games though /: I tried for the first few days and then forgot about it until a little while ago. Good job on the games I played though!!
Thanks everyone who play and rated! And congrats to the winners!
Give Space Hummus a try here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-hummus
BTW these are not much worse than my previous LD entry, levelone:
Which you can play here https://dietzribi.itch.io/levelone
We didn't do nearly as well as we'd hoped. We're all divided on "What happened?" with a few categories.
Congrats to all the medalists, and thanks for giving our game a shot!
1286 Ranked Games / 1840 Total Games
Category: Result: Percentile Ranked: Percentile Total
Overall: 311 : 24.18% / 16.9%
Fun: 504 : 39.19% / 27.39%
Innovation: 223 : 17.34% / 12.11%
Theme: 304 : 23.64% / 16.52%
Graphics: 247 : 19.2% / 13.42%
Audio: 164 : 12.75% / 8.91 %
Mood: 156 : 12.13% / 8.48 %
My first ever game jam of any kind and I finished 20th in fun and 68th overall, and I couldn't be prouder!!! Thanks everyone for your generous ratings, I've had an absolute blast doing this and will 100% be doing more in the future! Now, to turn this game into a mobile app and then take it from there, wish me luck!
Thanks again everyone, well done to all who entered!!
So, here's what I got from you guys on my first little jam game. * Mood: #279 (top 16%). This makes sense. I didn't spend a ton of time checking the mood after all. The game had a nice board-game vibe though which I think some people appreciated. * Humor: #530 (top 29%). Well, to be fair 100% of my humor was trying to come up with silly names for cards. I'm not a super funny person, so I absolutely think judges were right on this. * Audio: #66 (top 4%). Aww, that's disappointing, I was hoping to do a bit better on this one. One or two people mentioned fitting the music better to my theme and there was one sound effect I never got around to making. Still though my goal was to be in the top-50 of all jam games, and I do think my game deserves to be there. * Graphics: #528 (top 29%). This one, on the other hand, I agree with. I know I have a long way to go with making graphics! I'm learning and I'm far from perfect at the moment. * Theme: #598 (top 33%). I'm a bit puzzled by this one. Not 100% sure why my score is so low... will need to reflect more on that. Maybe there was too much freedom of movement? * Innovation: #130 (top 8%). Cool! This is an ok result for me, and something I always try to build on. * Fun: #175 (top 10%). A lack of a tutorial probably hurt me a lot here. I want to improve on this and I can definitely see what was missing, which is always nice because that's how you learn. * Overall: #154 (top 9%). This is better than the average of the rest of my scores so I'm glad I made an impression!
Some thoughts: * Even though this was a jam entry, I did everything without a team. Maybe if I had a team I'd have scored higher on a few of these points. For example I spent a lot of time making graphics that sucked anyway. Seems like all the best jam entries were made by teams! * So nice to have meaningful constructive feedback on a lot of these points! Some reviewers really put in a lot of effort! * I am still going ahead with making an awesome version of the game that I hope to release soon. * And I hope to do this all again later!
Thanks everyone for an AMAZING experience!
Thank you for your support and ratings. This LudumDare was great - as usual. I noticed a good average for mood, fun and graphics - but unfortunately nothing in the top 100 (almost for the mood). Also I am continuing the development of Abaddon so as to create a full game. This is not my best score - not the least ...
See you later for the next event. I wish you the best - my dear fellows ++
Дорогие друзья, я почувствовал огромную радость и гордость участвуя с вами в этом LD событии. Я поздравляю вас за то, что вы сделали, независимо от того, какой был результат. Надеюсь вас увидеть в недалеком будущем. Вам желаю успехов. До свидания ++
Voila - comme dit la chanson - c'est fini. Merci à tous pour votre soutien et votre participation. Il y a tant de choses à dire. Bravo (et quel que fût votre résultat final). Dans l'ensemble, ce fut très bien - comme d'habitude. Je vous souhaite le meilleur pour l'avenir. On se revoit pour le prochain LudumDare. Ciao ++
