Hello there! Maybe this function is already existing - or just in plans - but will it ever be possible to see the whole list of LD games from 1st place to the last place?

The team behind Super Metroario say thank you for all the nice comments. Our Results are I created this 100% run to show you all the secrets and also a difficulty jump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKZW25H-Mdk

We don't know why but it was our worst entry from all Ludumdare game we have created.

We thought it was one of our best and we have improved. Very disappointing!

I you have some ideas please let us know!

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Well, I had a conversation with Dr. Blackcraft and he agreed to an extended version of A Relatively Small World! This new version will still be fairly short, but will have some new mechanics, new levels, new characters, and a lot of new stuff!
As to the old stuff, I'll really spend time on the puzzles to make them a little more understandable (the old ones are pretty hard).
Thank you all for giving me feedback on my entry, and I look forward to competing again in Ludum Dare 40 (I won't be doing 39)!

If you are converting your ranks into percentages, please state the number you are using as a base (for example: number of JAM entries, 1840) or your computed percentages are completely useless. :)

Woooooo! We've reached the collective finish line everybody!

To celebrate we released an optimized sandbox version of Little Fortune Planet (HTML5) for you to play around with!

Look! Look how much fun I'm having!

Play it here and send us your amazing planets!

:mailboxwithmail: Dear planet ower,

We acknowledge receipt of the survey's results you have been asked to fill after your contract term. In the interests of improving the quality of our services, our company will take into consideration all of your remarks and suggestions. We are glad to see that your satisfaction grew up since the last time you called upon our services :

We would like to thank you once again for the time you spent on our planet owning system : Place Them All

Best regards,

The Universe Rental Agency

Never thought my game would do this well, thank you to everyone that rated :)

10th in fun?!

If you're curious:

Play here (Direct link to GameJolt)

Link to Ludum Dare game page (Ludum Dare site is slow atm)

:astonished: I am amazed. I am so suprised at this result, and I am just speechless. I've only been taking part in Ludum Dare for barely any time now, and I never expected to get within the top 100 for any category, let alone top 50. Thank you so much to everyone who rated my game I have also decided to create a full length post-compo version, however progress will be slow, so if you want, follow my updates on the game on my facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PorcusPie/

Overall: 463 (2.805 average in 43 ratings) Fun: 384 (2.85 average in 42 ratings) Innovation: 531 (1.925 average in 42 ratings) Theme: 530 (2.175 average in 42 ratings) Graphics: 398 (2.854 average in 43 ratings) Humor: 262 (2.548 average in 33 ratings) Mood: 450 (2.556 average in 38 ratings)

I have mixed feelings about my ratings. On one hand I feel they are pretty average across the board, and on the other I feel that I did really well with what I made for a compo entry. While platformer may not be innovative this is my first time doing one even after several LDs. I also got the feeling from the comments that very few who rated actually finished the game.

One biggest complaint I have is Theme. The overall theme of my game was a kid in a small town doing things for the people in the town to be rewarded by his mother with cookies. But to him the world is big, thus the tall trees and larger than life platforming arena. A small town to a child is as big as a small world, or at least that's what I tried to convey.

Probably go back to simple arcade style games for the next one. Overall, it seemed to be a decent entry, but not good enough.

So over most of my Ludum Dare participation history, I've never gotten much for ratings. After all, my projects are usually woefully unfinished, for one reason or another. Being as this time was no different in that department, I didn't expect any difference in ratings, either.

And by and large, I got what I expected. A three, mostly twos, nothing too huge.

Then I saw that.

For me, that is huge. I have never done that well in any category at all in any of my previous entries. Even without that score, this entry did a better than a good half of my previous attempts at minimum.

I thought of this idea within the first two hours. It was my backup plan; I was trying to think of something better. I expected 3 at best. A four? I don't think "color me surprised" does it justice.

Huge thanks to everyone who played my game, by the way — not just for the ratings, but the comments. Plenty of them, and almost every one had plenty of excellent feedback. A post-compo is still coming, and I've kept what you all have said in mind!

I'm super excited to see that my ultra-minimalist Space Snake graphics came in 3rd. I'd love to see lists of rankings so I can play the games that came in above me - anybody know where such a thing is at? (does it exist in this new version of ludum dare?)

This came as a huge shock to me but it looks like my team's game, Honey Home, came first in the Overall, Fun, and Mood categories among the jam games. After 2 years of doing Ludum Dare, this is the first I've gotten first in any category (let alone three). I'm really proud of my team and my game!

My teammates and I are concerned that we're overshadowing really, really awesome games because we just barely had enough votes to qualify for a ranking. School started for us recently so we've been terribly busy - we're also all Mac users and couldn't play a bunch of Windows games. So we didn't get around to ranking nearly as many games as we would've liked. I'm holding back on celebration until the results are officially announced, but we wanted to thank everyone who got around to giving our game a shot, and everyone who submitted a game for inspiring us to make what we made!

Final results:

Overall: 467 (3.242 average in 68 ratings)

Fun: 426 (3.076 average in 68 ratings)

Innovation: 515 (2.879 average in 68 ratings)

Theme: 704 (2.515 average in 68 ratings)

Graphics: 553 (2.955 average in 68 ratings)

Audio: 199 (3.448 average in 60 ratings)

Humor: 75 (3.723 average in 67 ratings)

Mood: 355 (3.279 average in 63 ratings)

I was considering writing some post-LD thoughts up earlier, but now that ratings are up, I should probably get it done now. So, without further ado:

Overall: 118 (3.714 average in 23 ratings)
Fun: 157 (3.476 average in 23 ratings)
Innovation: 230 (3.238 average in 23 ratings)
Theme: 134 (3.762 average in 23 ratings)
Graphics: 108 (3.905 average in 23 ratings)
Audio: 76 (3.65 average in 22 ratings)
Humor: 272 (2.5 average in 16 ratings)
Mood: 247 (3.167 average in 20 ratings)

Here's the game, but I'll try to explain things so you don't have to play it.

What Went Right

I was really lucky to find a good idea for a game fairly quickly, and I could start building right away. Previous jam projects have either had me floundering for something solid, requiring time for brainstorming, or salvaging an old game idea. I think I was inspired by one of the losing themes, "Island," and wanted to make something like Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. I've never actually played it, but I know the core concept is just moving your character from point A to point B in a small, self-contained level, and that's what I lifted. Instead of per-level puzzle elements, though, I decided to set it on a grid and add a Minecraft-like gimmick of destructible terrain.

For some reason, I also knew I wanted to focus on polish early. One of the first things I did was make character movement feel good. After all, that's the primary means of interaction. Once I had level loading in place, I also spent some time to add an interesting transition animation. Normally I wouldn't think that polish is really something to worry about in a prototype (and, actually, it shows - the level transition animations still have a few janky frames), but for a competition judged by internet strangers, I think it paid off.

This game jam turned out to be a test of my level design skills. Or rather, lack of them. Despite not having enough time nor any interesting gameplay mechanics, I spent lots of time making tutorial levels that I tried to make teach you how to play, without telling you how to play. And apparently that worked; very few players had trouble grasping the basic mechanics. I'm also really proud how few words are actually used in the whole thing since I used symbolic control descriptions. Maybe someone who doesn't know English could play it.

Graphics. Having control restricted to a grid doesn't actually do much for the gameplay, it just made it easier to program and to control. But it does easily lend itself to a block-y art style, which is great because I'm a programmer who can't do sophisticated art. I like the blue color that I eventually settled on for the ocean. I'm not really sure where I was going with the main character, but at least it's vaguely humanoid. I think I was inspired by Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora that also has a monolithic main character. When developing the movement mechanics (especially turning), I realized I was having a really hard time telling which way was front. I didn't want to add a face or other detail, because everything else in the game is untextured. So, that's where the backpack came in! It lets you intuit your direction, and fits in with the adventuring archeologist narrative that started to develop.

Audio, apparently‽ The score isn't as high as the other categories but it ranked well somehow. I was definitely happy how well just putting an envelope over some pink noise worked for an ocean wave swell. The jump and dig sounds were made in bfxr. The level complete jingle is just a sine wave with a soft envelope climbing up fifths and octaves. I put less effort into the main menu music than the music in any of my other jam games. In fact I even disabled it for the main gameplay, since I thought it might be too distracting. That plus the fact that the melody doesn't start for two bars leaves me wondering if people who rated it actually listened to the whole 30 seconds. I wanted a "tropical" feeling of course, but I couldn't decide between bongos and shaker for the percussion--so I used both! And saxophone, for the lead, apparently? It doesn't make much sense but it sounded good. No bass or accompaniment because I didn't want it to be too complicated for a "small" game. The main theme used the SGM soundfont, and both it and the level-complete jingle were made in LMMS (yuck).

What Went Wrong

The theme. Somehow I kept confusing the theme with the older one, "tiny worlds," and one of the losing themes, "island." Really the only thing keeping the game in theme is the title and narrative that I threw on top--there's nothing inherent that makes the world small, other than I guess the number of blocks on the islands. No part of the gameplay other than the self-contained level design really ties into the theme either. Finally, what I created was multiple small worlds, when the jam theme was singular. Regardless of all this it (somehow) didn't score too poorly in the Theme category.

Multi-platform testing. I developed the whole thing in Windows, and since I knew moving diagonally would be confusing on digital keyboard cursor keys, I intended it to be played with a gamepad with joysticks. So, because of that, the mouse camera control is way too sensitive, and I definitely got docked for that. I could have even added a sensitivity slider to the main menu to give it some purpose. And because I used Unity, I was able to publish a web version along with the Windows build, and builds for Mac and Linux. I didn't have time to boot into those systems to try them out, though, and I suspect they don't actually work at all because Windows doesn't have an executable bit flag and Unity exported them directly to the filesystem instead of an archive or something. And while the HTML export worked well (way better than the junk Unreal gave me last time), it didn't support my joystick (at least in Firefox). Because I used the default Unity keybindings, one of the controls is ALT, which actually takes away focus in the browser. That's annoying.

Is it really even a puzzle game? I thought I had come up with a good game idea that could lead to some interesting levels. I even had a feeling some cool emergent design could come out of the tree blocks, which have the unique ability of not being able to climbed on top of (and they're unbreakable). Unfortunately, I also didn't want to have any failure states, and that meant to enemies or hurtful obstacles, and no undo's or resets. And that means every puzzle has to be designed to be impossible to lose, which in turn means a level has to be playable with all of the blocks missing, which finally means there isn't actually a puzzle mechanic if you just remove all of the blocks. Opportunities to improve here would be to either include a non-destructive action, or going ahead and allowing undo's, resets, or hazards.

No reset. Related to that, I never tested thoroughly to make sure the levels have to stuck spots. An early tester got stuck on one level, which is when I had the realization above. I fixed some levels to make sure they were playable with all of the blocks removed, and also added a reset button just in case, but this was all after the deadline. I probably should have kept the earlier version but I had already deleted the old builds (though I could have still gone back in version control).

Invisible mechanics. There are two ways of digging: below the character, and in front of the character. The problem with that is, which way your character is facing is not nearly as obvious an indicator as which grid cell your character is standing on. You can turn your character, but only if they can't move in the direction you tell them to go. It isn't obvious you need to do that, or how to do that. On the other hand, I thought it was going to be a real puzzle element, where in some places you wouldn't be able to face the right direction. That falls apart because if you can't face a direction you can go that direction and dig below you. Since it's not a puzzle element it works out alright, but if I were to make that a problem it would need some more thought.

What is and isn't tutorial-ized. This I think is something small that could have been fixed with some playtesting. I had one or two levels to teach the player that they can fall down multiple blocks without trouble (that is, no fall damage), but there's no need to introduce the lack of a mechanic, especially since there are no ways to get hurt at all. On the other side of things I forgot to tell the player which blocks can be dug and which can't (stone, trees, and layer-1 blocks can't; sand, dirt, and grass can). I guess I was relying on some Minecraft knowledge, but even that game lets you break stone and trees with ease. Really, the distinction is arbitrary, there's no difference between the dig-able blocks, and color-coding that way is not an accessible-friendly design choice, anyway.

Optimization. Okay, so it's really not a priority in a game jam, and I got away with it pretty easily, but I still felt pretty gross making a GameObject (with pointless collider) for every single block, and destroying and re-creating the whole level any time a single block changed.

Levels. There really aren't many of them, even though I left myself plenty of time to make them. Probably related to the poor puzzle mechanics. One player also pointed out that they expected the final level to be a final accumulation of all of the mechanics taught so far, but it was just a big dig search (just like real archeology, I guess). The levels with lots of digging and one shaped like an inverted cone also hurt from the limited camera movement.

Graphics. I think the graphics turned out okay, but I could have done better with the color scheme. I wanted a carefree cartoon look (I think, plus the turn-based grid mechanics, inspired by Snakebird's Island levels), but some of the colors are very desaturated. The whole thing is very chaotic, palette-wise. Also the trees look like something you'd find in a cold forest, not on an island. I could have gone with palm trees, but they're not as block-y. I think just upping the saturation again would have helped. Finally for the title screen I just chose some tropical-looking font ("Hanalei") and put the title in objective-gold color on top of some representative vignette. The title that I ended up with doesn't really look good with that font though, and as I already mentioned, the main menu doesn't really serve any purpose.

Playing games and feedback. I think I only got enough ratings to qualify because I got a spot high up in the "danger" sorting. I would have liked to have played and rated more games but a combination of the late voting window and me getting sick in the middle of it prevented that.

Level building. I thought the easiest way to make levels would be to have a simple text file format, with a grid made of characters and separated by paragraph breaks for vertical layers. Unfortunately, not only is that format very hard to parse, but it actually turned out very unintuitive to build with, and some levels took multiple iterations just to get the blocks to go where I expected them to be. I'm not sure what a better solution would have been.

Streaming. For this jam, I live-streamed the first day, but not the second, and didn't make a timelapse like I have before. Streaming makes me way nervous but it keeps me on task. I feel like there is a balance that I haven't found yet.

Learning experience. I really wanted to use this opportunity to learn Phaser, but alas the idea I came up with was 3D, and there was no time to find anything else, so I went with what I knew.

Conclusion

WOW I was not expecting to write that much, heh. Maybe I'll come back to this game someday if I can come up with more refined puzzle mechanics, but I think some other ideas probably have more value. I hope some people enjoyed playing it. Special thanks to modernmodron for suggesting the title and for getting stuck while playing it. (fun fact about the title: it was originally spelled "mini-ana jones", but change the spelling to MiniAnna, and ta-da, the main character is female now.) (oh, and the original project name was MiniDigger, hence the post title).

SPOILER: None of them are mine *runs away crying*

I'm pretty disappointed in how our game did, not going to lie. From our comments I thought we'd place way higher.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cosmic-cleaner

• Overall: 151 (3.798 average in 106 ratings)
• Fun: 93 (3.825 average in 105 ratings)
• Innovation: 265 (3.363 average in 104 ratings)
• Theme: 316 (3.559 average in 104 ratings)
• Graphics: 266 (3.827 average in 106 ratings)
• Audio: 139 (3.663 average in 103 ratings)
• Humor: 155 (3.347 average in 103 ratings)
• Mood: 319 (3.343 average in 101 ratings)

It was our first Ludum Dare, and we had a great time participating. We seemed to have way more ratings than comments which was strange, having gotten 10-15 comment-less ratings in the last few hours. I hope when the final page is done we can see what our rating distribution was.

Our game wasn't as intuitive as it should have been, and I know this hurt us. It was so hard to not update it with better instructions as the event went on, but we held fast to the rules and went with what he had. This is the result of that!

Thanks everyone who rated us and commented - we learned a lot! It just seems that the comments didn't actually reflect the ratings - which is kind if disappointing. =)

Happy LD38, maybe we'll see you at the next one.

The results are out, and here are the ones for my game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/supernova):

I got in the top 100 for mood, and in the top 50 overall and for audio! Thanks to everyone who played, rated, and commented on my game. I supposedly got #38 overall, but I looked at the spreadsheet and saw that a bunch of other people also got that rank:

I assume this ranking will be combined with the other categories to generate a final ranking. Until then, congratulations to the other members of the #38 club.

I'm kind of overwhelmed honestly. I'm 15 years old, and this is my 3rd (technically 4th) Ludum Dare. My first game got about 250th place, followed by around 500th in the Jam, but this time I did so much better than I could have possibly expected!

Thank you to everyone who played and commented. It meant the world to me! I'll be back for LD39, and in the meantime, I'm gonna start thinking about a possible post-compo full game. I had a great experience with this Ludum Dare, and I'm so glad that I participated!

Well after embarrassing myself again by forgetting the distinction between Compo and Jam, here's the updated list with Jam and Compo games separated. Cheers!