Guys, i really apreciate all your votes here! i am happy to say that my compo project got a satisfying result here at this ludum dare!! here it is! ^^

Overall: 85 (3.818 average in 35 ratings) Fun: 22 (4.063 average in 34 ratings) Innovation: 37 (3.97 average in 35 ratings) Theme: 246 (3.471 average in 36 ratings) Humor: 154 (3.033 average in 32 ratings) Mood: 210 (3.267 average in 32 ratings)

I am really surprised to got to 22o position in Fun category and 37o position in Inovation and 85o at overall category! Thanks again everyone who voted at my game and found it really good!

Here is my game page one more time, in case youw want to know more about it or just try to break your old score record there! ;D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/anthills-multitask

I am simply amazed by the performance of my first LD compo entry. I got into top 100 overall and top 50 in fun. the results were beyond expected. It was a great experience rating and leaving feedback on the games. I hope that I can beat my score on the next Ludum dare. Thanks for the feedback and ratings, also congrats to whomever participated in this LD. :slight_smile:

Well, at the end of the day, this is what came of everything. I'm over the moon about it. :smile: Sure, they may not be the best numbers you've ever seen, and I didn't have a ton of reviews or comments on my game, but I was trying something brand new this time and am ecstatic with how it turned out. The feedback I received was immensely helpful and I learned a ton moving forward. Considering that the game wasn't completely panned is a major positive. I have continued work on the game with full intention to release it as a mobile idle game and the feedback has pointed out everything I needed to focus on and fix. I could not continue my work in the right direction without this LDJAM going exactly the way it did. I am very happy with my numbers. Thank you all again!

Wowza! I didn't expect to score even close to the top 100 ANYTHING, much less top 20! :D

Although, do folks happen to know how ratings are weighted, based on how many votes were counted for a particular game? I know there are games that have gotten twice my number of votes AT LEAST, and if it's just an average of (# stars / total votes), it seems like it would kind of disadvantage the more popular games...

Regardless, I'm SUPER happy that folks seemed to enjoy my silly little toy with terrible audio samples and beat synchronization...Thanks to everyone who took the time to play it! I really appreciated all of the honest feedback, and I plan to use it to improve on this project in the future (bookmark the link to the Web Build if you're interested!).

It's been real, guys! See ya next LD!

I know some(including myself) may not be too satisfied with their ratings, but just remember that regardless of rating you had at least 20 people playing and leaving feedback about a game YOU made. How awesome is that? Exposure and getting feedback is one of the hardest parts when making a game, but also the most rewarding and Ludum Dare + everyone who entered made that possible. Thanks for creating! :grin:

Everybody's doing these, and even though no one cares about me, I'm doing one too. :-)

When getting scored, I'm most interested in seeing if the balance of my effort was well-spent. On one level, a game either works or it doesn't; in 48 hours, you get on a path early and it's hard to get off it if something isn't working, and that's at least 50% luck no matter how good you are! So ultimately, scores are most useful as measuring sticks of your relative effort in each category, rather than as a global rank.

Here's my commentary for Rogue Basement. (Compo game, so rank and percentile are out of 549 games with scores.)

Category | Rank | Percentile | Score | # ratings ---------- | ---- | ---------- | ----- | --------- Overall | 135 | 75.4 | 3.667 | 47 Fun | 179 | 67.4 | 3.409 | 46 Innovation | 379 | 31.0 | 2.841 | 46 Theme | 398 | 25.5 | 2.977 | 46 Graphics | 374 | 31.9 | 2.932 | 46 Audio | 24 | 95.7 | 4.000 | 44 Humor | 157 | 71.5 | 3.000 | 42 Mood | 94 | 82.9 | 3.659 | 43

Overall: 135 / 3.667

Not top 100, but about what I was hoping for. I made sure to make something "finished" and put thought into every category.

Fun: 179 / 3.409

I've got some real mechanics and good loops, so from an academic game design perspective I call it a success, but other games are definitely more fun than mine.

Innovation: 379 / 2.841

I made a very by-the-book roguelike with some very minor innovations. Frankly I'm surprised this isn't lower.

It's my lowest score but not my lowest rank, so I'm guessing the innovation category skews low in general for Ludum Dare.

My last LD entry (LD26, We Dreamers) got 6th overall in innovation, so I know I can do this category well! I just chose not to this time.

Theme: 398 / 2.977

My lowest rank but not my lowest score. I will admit to not worrying too much about the theme, because (a) it wasn't a great theme, and (b) themes are really just for inspiration anyway. Going into the compo, I knew I was going to make some kind of roguelike, because that was just what I was in the mood for, and the theme was just a framing device for that.

Graphics: 374 / 2.932

I don't care at all what I got in this category. I've always hated worrying about graphics for LD. Seriously, this is what I did last time. So players will either say "you did ASCII pretty well" in the 3-4 range, or "ASCII sucks" in the 1-2 range.

Audio: 24 / 4.000

WOO WOO OH YEAAAAAAH

The audio for this game is a 15-minute original soundtrack I wrote between midnight and 1:30am the second night of the compo. I guess people liked it!

I'll be putting more thought and energy into audio for my next LD game. It looks like this can be my superpower.

Humor: 157 / 3.000

Humor in my games has always been about covering for a lack of content or unbelievable set of mechanics. "I only have one level for my roguelike. Why? Because...oh, it's some idiot wizard's basement." I am pleased that people liked that aspect of it, but I put in essentially no effort.

Some of the humor scores might have been because it's possible to punch flying rocks out of the air, and some of the flavor text is not correct English...

Mood: 94 / 3.659

I would attribute this good score to music, consistent decent ASCII feel, and title screen art. I've always thought of this category as "how much does this game feel like the game it is trying to be?" and on that axis I was happy with how Rogue Basement turned out.

I just wanted to say thank you all for playing and rating STACK! Not only was it my first LD game, but it was also a compo submission. While I am surprised that humor is my highest placing rank, I am none-the-less happy with my results. :)

Again thanks for playing, but most importantly, THANK YOU FOR SUBMITTING SUCH BAD-ASS GAMES! No matter what your ratings are, you have come closer to reaching the stars than many others have... ;D

The results are in!

Wow, this is better than I could have ever expected! I've been doing Ludum Dare for four years now and not only is this my highest overall placement, but this is my first four star rating in any category (graphics). Looks like spending all that time animating the mouse's tail really did pay off! This also marks my highest placement in any category, with my previous bests being 88th in innovation and 87th in humor. 71st in graphics is going to be hard to beat, but I'll try. I'm so glad that everyone enjoyed my game so much and I hope you'll all enjoy the next one even more!

Let me first thank everyone who has played and rated and commented for my game, it was very insightful.

Now that LD 38 is finally over, I should write a post mortem for what went well and what went wrong for me:

• I've started my game on Sunday instead of Monday, but i still didn't had any inspiration for the theme and instead I just started on Sunday doing "whatever".
• I finished the game, but there was a lot of last minute stuff, like "programmer graphics" because I really ran out of time. No sound or time for testing too; would have ironed out some bugs.
• I think I got rank 150+ for fun, but the rest was way worse.
• I've played and rated a lot of games (about 50), but this time voting doesn't really gives anything but bad scores.

In the end, this Ludum took me 3 weeks of playing/rating/commenting and 1 week of preparation.

For what? for a 500+ place overall???

Also, the site worked against me... uploading images was a mess (and probably still impossible unless i install a new browser), couldn't really opt out for categories until many people voted (which affected overall score...)

For me, the conclusion is that I might make games during LD for fun, but this rating part is so not worth it... for me at least. I won't spend 3 weeks playing LD games and rating and commenting on them... it feels just a waste of time. (And I know I'm not very good at making games under pressure.)

Don't worry, I will still make games (probably), just not in 72 hours (but, never say never)... This format doesn't work for me. And I will still play LD games by other people, but it won't feel like work any more.

PS. Well done everyone! and Thanks for the comments!

Thank for everyone who played and rated my game, that was definitely a huge surprise to me, since i was failed to complete my compo on last jam, this is definitely my first completed compo game! And i got my first top 10 rate of ld jam in my whole life!

I'll start writing my ld postmortem after i finished my hand job, hopefully every failed moment i met will bring me go further! C you guys on next LD39

The results for my entry, Nucleu, found here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/nucleu/

• Overall: 110 (3.739 average in 25 ratings)
• Fun: 283 (3.13 average in 25 ratings)
• Innovation: 244 (3.217 average in 25 ratings)
• Theme: 16 (4.304 average in 25 ratings)
• Graphics: 145 (3.783 average in 25 ratings)
• Audio: 8 (4.348 average in 25 ratings)
• Mood: 2 (4.455 average in 24 ratings)

Once again, Mood is my top category; I got second place! I was also very pleased with my scores for Audio and Theme; those categories in addition to Mood were my focus for the entry. Thank you to everyone who voted, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

If you're interested in some more in-depth information about where your game ranked, have a look at these bar charts:

The above graph is only for Compo games. You can get Jam games and all other categories here:

https://infogr.am/ld38resulthistograms

How to read them: These so-called histogram charts group games with similar ratings together, so all games with a rating between 3.5 and 3.6 go together in a bin. The higher the bar, the more games are in that bin.

You can use these charts to check out where you are in the distribution of the entries. The highest bar can be (more or less) seen as the average score, and the further out your bar is the more unique (for good or bad) your score is. You can also see that getting a very high score is really hard, as only a select few have reached that score.

Edit: I used this scraped table as a basis, but it appears to contain some errors: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PkQfN3QQ2Gk6-IcJI9je28SHvPUnLCEfTDEUjUF-o/edit#gid=0

I'll be back when I got those charts fixed with the correct values.

Edit 2: Turns out the scrape was correct, but I read it wrong: A lot of entries were empty so I figured that would be the unranked games, but apparently the unranked games also appeared with scores in the table. Long story short: I fixed my filter and the values should now be correct (updated the picture above and the linked graphs accordingly)

This was our first jam and first Unity game.

We didn't expect that much!

First of all we are amazed by the number of ratings * and by your *great feedback.

9th position in humor means a lot to us, and 98th in music is an awesome result too.

We discovered the most incredible community of game developers here.

Meeting you guys was definitely the best part and it pushes us to go on *, learn more and come back with some new crazy game for *LD39 ;)

play Spermicorn here

Well, here we are, at the end of the race. This has been quite the experience for me, it's made me think about a lot of things. To cut to the chase, here's are my thoughts and reflections.

During The Jam

I had a very rocky start, because I just didn't like the theme very much. I spent a lot of time just trying to come up with a good idea, but everything I came up with at first was stuff I felt sure a lot of other people would do as well. So I wasted pretty much the first half of the first day just sitting around being frustrated at my lack of ideas, and I even spent four hours making a prototype for a game idea which I ended up just completely scrapping. At the end, I took a good hard look at Floppy McFloppyface and I decided that I just really didn't care much for what I'd made at all.

Results

Then suddenly, people started giving feedback. Which has been pretty overwhelming for me, because I've gotten almost nothing but positive feedback. To my great suprise, it seems people actually enjoyed my game.

Understandably, Audio and Graphics are my weakest categories. I'm not an artist, so shitty programmer art was all I could do. And heavens forbid me from ever touching FL studio again. This was the first time I ever tried using a DAW to make music, and it should clearly be the last as well!

However, my game has been ranked 137th in "fun". I've been looking at a lot of my favorites from when I was judging, and the "fun" department is where a lot of the high ranked games are lacking. Given that observation, I'm really happy with getting such a high rank in the fun category. It doesn't matter that much to me that my graphics and audio weren't too amazing, because despite that people actually enjoyed playing my game. Which is something I never expected.

Then there's the big kicker. I got 9th place in Humor!! This is utterly mindblowing to me, but holy hell did it make my day! Obviously I did try to make it funny, but even in that regard I felt like I'd failed. Y'all are making me blush, I don't deserve this! :smile:

Conclusion

Clearly, I'm not a very good at judging myself. I've had people dislike the things I've felt good about before, but now I've also experienced having people like what I've felt bad about. I think I need to take a good look at myself again, and I also need to brush up on my game design knowledge. There's obviously still much for me to learn when it comes to understanding what people actually enjoy in games.

All in all, I can't begin to express how surprised I am by the rank I got in humor, but I'm also just really thankful to everyone who voted for me. I'm really happy you all liked what I did so much, you all liked it a lot better than I did myself, and that means something to me. I hope to see you all again for the next one, I'm gonna do my best to improve my skills (especially my art and audio skills) and see if I can do even better next time.

Peace out!

Hi guys! It's been a wonderful jam. I didn't able to play games as much as I hoped because of my final exams. But I'll definitely attend the next jam. I had so much fun. I saw some people saying their game doesn't "deserve" the ratings. But they're missing the point. Jam is about have fun and learn stuff.I just hope they'll get it someday.

I'm pretty happy with the results. I usually inclined the programming part of gamedev but this time, I stepped out my comfort zone and made a really simple game with high graphical variety. That's why you see a lot programmer art in this game :smile: So that was new for me and I learned my capabilities. Maybe I'll polish my jam game and release for android if there is enough demand. There is something bugging me. How many compo games out there with more than 20 ratings? Could someone answer that?

Thanks to @sgstair and @avavt for making all this cool data accessible! I'm a statistician, so this is super interesting to me. :heart_eyes::nerd:

I just noticed there are a bunch of ranked games that didn't hit their required 20 ratings mark on this list. The website has them ranked (but also marked red) and still says that a minimum score of about 20 is required. Plus, the "Danger"-Filter had us all play games that were close to 20.

Was the low 20 ratings mark lowered even further to around 12 at some point? Or is this just a display error?

The last Ludum Dare I participated in was Ludum Dare 34. That was the one with Double Themes: Growing and "Two Button Controls".

I thought my entry was terrible but the numbers seemed to disagree. It was my second-highest rated game. So I wanted to figure out why.

I compared it to my Highest rated game, I am Sigma, for Ludum Dare 31.

So, the question I keep asking myself after these Jams is - "Am I improving?"

After LD34 I took a 'break' - Not intentionally. I ended up having other things to do on those weekends. Instead, I did some other Jams. So asking, after a year of crunching 10 game jams in 12 months, should yield some interesting results.

Ludum Dare 31 had 1364 48hr Compo entries, Ludum Dare 38 had 1104 Compo entries, so a higher ranking in 38 is actually worth significantly more than in 31.

Mood

My main point of contention with this category is that what it means is really really subjective. Especially with Humour existing. It's not a category I try and target. Still, Sigma hit rank 341 with a score of 3.18 and Mallow hit rank 227 with a score of 3.214. So apparently a globetrotting Marshmallow has a better mood than a tortured robot in a space-based Argos.

Humour

Humour was a category I was targeting. The game is about a Marshmallow who goes around the world, trying to save his brother trapped in a block of ice, discovering the topographical map of Sri Lanka looks like an avocado and giving his pet Guinea Pig to someone who wants to eat it.

Mallow ranked 155 with a score of 3.028, beating Sigma's 313/2.88 significantly. So yes, Mallow is funnier.

Audio

I've always tried to set aside time to work on the soundtrack for my Jam games. While Sound Effects are generally just made with BFXR, I do try and hand-craft the music.

I am Sigma had a multi-layered sound track that added more instruments the further you got in the game (Link).

Mallow ended up with 4 30 second loops for each area type (Link).

Personally I prefer Mallow's over Sigmas, mostly because Sigma's was a very simple loop that added instruments, wheras Mallow's added more to the atmosphere of each area and aided with the players navigation of the world.

Sigma's experimental layered approach hit rank 201 with a score of 3.32, Mallow beat it, coming in at rank 111 with a score of 3.471.

Graphics

I've definitely improved my artwork over the course of these Jams. It's one of the easiest things to ignore and half-arse for a programmer like me, but also the place I can improve on significantly.

Sigma's graphics came in at rank 637 with a score of 2.96. Mallow came in at 309 with as core of 3.11. The score itself wasn't much better, but its rank was. Being around the 3-score I'd assume (though without the figures of everyone I can't be sure) that both games are near the middle of the bell curve, where a small increase in score equates to a much higher rank.

Even so I do think my graphics have improved, but Mallow is not my best work. For that I'd probably say one of my non-LD games, such as The Ninjas Garden where I had a bit more time to work on it.

Theme

I am Sigma was in the top 50 for the theme "Entire Game on One Screen" with a 4.30 rating. This is the highest rating I've ever had on any category, and is such a statistical outlier I don't think I'll ever top it. Mallow's World Adventure was at rank 257 with a 3.431 rating. Considering the theme of "A Small World" was incredibly limiting (half the games took the word 'small' and half took the word 'world' and it was rare to find a game that fulfilled both. By trying to actually take the phrase 'A small world' and apply it to the whole game I think it gave me a nice boost, but my absurdist implementation of it may not have been obvious to some.

Innovation

As with Mood, this is an incredibly subjective category. It's rare that I try and make any kind of innovative game mechanics, but Sigma's zoomy-fly-through-previous-rooms thing seemed to have boosted my Innovation score, coming in at rank 127 with a 3.86 score. Mallow is probably the opposite of Innovation, being, as it is, a Dizzy throwback. Mallow came in at rank 418 with a score of 2.6667. I think perhaps next time I should attempt something other than a platform game.

Fun

Games should be fun. In one way or another you should be entertained by a game. While both Sigma and Mallow were platformers, Mallow was designed to be a chill, easy experience while Sigma was a balls-hard death-filled platformer. While Sigma ranked lower, at 355 vs 311, it scored better 3.31 vs 3.068. I think it's hard to compare the two, as they appeal to different types of people. It's hard to say if I've improved the fun aspect of my games, but I believe that people found Sigma significantly more fun than the too-easy Mallow. if anything it's indicative that LD38 games weren't really that fun.

Overall

Sigma ranked 124, with a score of 3.71 while Mallow ranked 295, with a score of 3.264.

From the comments on Mallow people seemed to get frustrated and confused with some of the puzzles, and still ended up getting lost despite the small size of the world. This frustration likely affected the overall score and navigation is definitely something I'm working on addressing in the sequel.

Sigma was clearly a simpler game, with the goals more obvious and the only obstacles being the players platforming skill. I think people were more willing to rate it higher because - while they may have died a lot - they didn't give up because the game wasn't helping them.

Perhaps next time I don't make puzzle the core of the game.

First of all this was an awesome Jam! It was also my first Jam ever. I learned a lot and I'm very surprised about the results. The ratings are overall pretty awesome but I'm amazed about the Theme category! Thank you guys so much for voting and obviously playing my game! Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planet-spin

Overall: 78 (3.958 average in 50 ratings) - Top 4%

Fun: 23 (4.083 average in 50 ratings) - Top 1%

Innovation: 285 (3.313 average in 50 ratings) - Top 15%

Theme: 207 (3.755 average in 51 ratings) - Top 11%

Graphics: 23 (4.64 average in 52 ratings) - Top 1%

Audio: 90 (3.837 average in 51 ratings) - Top 5%

Mood: 202 (3.609 average in 48 ratings) - Top 11%

Thanks :)

I know I've been spamming you people a lot about my game, but this is my last post for this Ludum Dare - I promise! So, I'm really satisfied with the results and therefore I would like to thank everybody who game my game a chance! This was my first Ludum Dare and my first time going solo; and I'm very happy with how it turned out!

The results are as follows:

Lately I've been on a never-ending quest to find out what makes a game "fun". So, seeing that I did so well with Leucos really made me believe that I am on the right track. Maybe if the controls were a bit better and the camera was not so suckish, it could be even better! But either way, I'm really happy it turned out as well as it did.

Overall this has been a really great experience. Not just because I had the chance to participate in a jam and make something in 2 days (which I always enjoy), but because I also got to see really clever and innovative games along the way. Whether the game jams are online or in a physical space, I love them because of the people participating and the amount of creativity they bring.

Whether it's going to be a compo or a jam, you'll definitely see me in the next LD! Congratulations to all who participated; regardless of the rating, you put an effort to create something, and that's the most important thing.

See y'all in the next one!