Good Luck To Everyone on 40

@pov Hey, just letting you know the calendar for us Kiwis still shows the start date etc of America (I assume). Over here we actually kick off on the Saturday the 2nd (as highlighted with the "Starts Saturday" line :).

I know you guys must be insanly busy, but can I request a tweek to the cal and "coming up" sections to use the users local date, not the server date.

For me this is going to be revenge on Ludum Dare 39 since I did not end up finishing that one.

I will be streaming live on twitch.tv/sniperninja564

I will be using: - Engine: Gamemaker Studio 2 - Art: paint.net & aseprite - Sound: bfxr.net - Music (if time): Bosca Ceoil

2nd Ludum Dare, not done much coding since the last one, though, so don't know how it's gonna go. Using MonoGame, Paint.net, bxfr, and Bosca Ceoil

Hi guys, this is my first ludum dare and my first Combo too. I'm very excited for this challenge and I hope to finish the game on time.

I will work with blender, gimp and unity to try to make something cool or at least fun.

Good luck everyone and enjoy this weekend!!!

My first solo jam!

This time I've decided to make a game solo and with new technology for me which is Unreal Engine! 1. Engine - UE 4.18 2. SFXs and music - Reaper with some virtual instruments and couple of mics 3. Art: 2d Aesprite / 3d Blender

I’m in. Hopefully the theme is inspiring this time around.

Will be using GM: Studio 1.4

Good luck everyone.

Its been a while since I've actually made a game so I feel commited to make something worthwhile.

I'll be using:

• Haxe with HaxeFlixel
• GIMP for making sprites, maybe Pyxel Edit if I can go through the hell that is installing the newest version on Linux
• SFXR, maybe BFXR for making sounds & maybe Bosca Ceoil for music if I get time
• Arch Linux because no messing about with PPAs

I'd livestream as I work on it but my graphics card is too old to use any streaming tools I've tried.

This is going to be my first ludum dare.

I am doing jam.

I am going to use unity. Hope theme will be inspiring.

If you are at RIT come hang out and jam with us, even for a team! All skill levels are welcome

https://www.facebook.com/events/150836262339444/

This is now my 4th time doing this, hopefully I can finish my game in time to submit to the compo instead of the jam this time. I'll be using Unity, Photoshop, Bfxr, and Blender if my game is in 3d. Good luck everyone!

I see a lot of people trying Ludum Dare for their first try. It's amazing how such event is so popular amoung rookie devs (like me for example, i've started coding 11 months ago by now).

I see people use popular engines like Unity, UE, Gogot, HaxeFlixel, different languages and even bringing their OWN game engines. I wonder if somewhere there are people who try to develop their own language or something?

Anyhow i will be using Unity 2017, i will be streaming after the initial submition and will try to help anyone who is interested in Unity and C# coding even though i'm just a rookie dev.

My twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/dioinecail1

And you can probably find me in Discord by "Dioinecail", contact me if you need any help with Unity (mostly 2D).

Good luck everyone, and don't forget to check for Null :D

2nd Jam here o/ Risu and me, but Calli couldn't unfortunately be with us, we'll try finding someone else for music this time or do it by ourself ahah

I'm in for the first time, though I've been planning to join for years.

I'll be using my engine Abysmal engine.

Ludum Dare 40 is this weekend.

For this jam, they've made a minor change to the ratings system: to allow half-star increments. I don't see the point of this. Apparently people were torn between giving a 4 and 5, so we're giving them 4.5. I'm sure there was popular demand for it, but I still don't see what benefit this will bring.

Simple is better

These days, I like simple, and I like quick.

If I asked you to pick your favorite color crayon out of a box of 8 crayons, you're going to have an easier time doing that than if I give you a box of 64 crayons. 

With the 8-color box, you pick whichever color is closest to your favorite, and you don't think about in-between shades all that much, because they're not there, and because every color is very distinct from the others.

It's blue, isn't it?

With the 64-color box, you still pick whichever color is closest to your favorite, and maybe now there is a color that is closer to your actual favorite, but the trade-off is that you now have to do a lot more thinking, because there are a few shades that are really close, and it's harder to choose between them all.

But which blue?

I'm willing to bet you could rank an 8-pack of crayons in order of favorite to least favorite color in about a minute, maybe less.  With the 64 pack, if you can do it at all, it'll probably take you way more than 8 times as long to sort 8 times as many colors.

Numbers and perception

For theme voting, we get a 3-position scale:

-1 | 0 | 1

And it works. It's fine. You either like it, or you don't. Make a decision and move on.

You wouldn't "improve" this system by adding a "kindof like it" and "kindof don't like it". There would be no point, other than to muddle the theme voting and make it more complicated.

For game rankings, LD has always (as far as I know) used a 5-star system. Which has just been changed to allow half-star ratings. So, if you count the number of actual steps, you don't get 6 anymore, but now 11:

Then - 6 gradations: n/a | ★ | ★★ | ★★★ | ★★★★ | ★★★★★

Now - 11 gradations: n/a | ½ | ★ | ★½ | ★★ | ★★½ | ★★★ | ★★★½ | ★★★★ | ★★★★½ | ★★★★★

My thinking is that from a mathematical standpoint, all we've done is switch from a 5-point scale to a 10-point scale.  Calling them "half stars" is just semantics.

But, from a psychological standpoint, there's more to it than that.

With the three-position scale, -1 implies that you do not like it, 0 implies that you are neutral, and 1 implies that you like it.

With a 5-star scale, many people assume that 3-stars is "neutral" or "OK", while 1- and 2- star rankings are "bad" and 4- and 5- star ratings are "good".  People who think this way tend to use 3 stars as their default rating, and "reward" good things with a 4- or 5- star rating, and "punish" bad things with a 1- or 2- star rating.  The result of this is that the 1-2 ratings are seldom used.  Some raters will also take the position that 5-stars should be  ultra-rare, as it is a signifier of the highest standards, of perfection, and so they're really constrained to using 3 and 4 star ratings for almost everything, the occasional rare 5-star for something that is truly outsanding, and withholding 1-2 star ratings most of the time.

The implication is that there is a spectrum of quality, and that the scale represents the entire spectrum, but that the vast majority of things are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and thus the middle of the scale.  The ends of the scale don't get used, other than to show the range of the scale. And this, I conjecture, is why some people feel like they need half-stars: having sacrificed the bottom end and sometimes the very top of the scale, they need to slice up what's left in order to have "enough" meaningful gradations between 3 and 4.5 stars.

This is similar to the loudness wars in audio formats, where dynamic range is sacrificed in order to make every song as loud as all the others, because being loud is what gets you noticed.

So, to restore the lost dynamic range, people want to cram in extra numbers somehow, e.g. to add in half-stars.

I would prefer to see a ratings system with a wide dynamic range, so I recommend using the entire scale.  Hand out those 1- and 2- star ratings.  Don't feel bad about it.  1 > 0, so 1 star is better than nothing.  It's like a score: more is better, but you can still win with just one point.

The thing is, it's difficult to remove the psychological stigma associated with 1-2 stars.  Like fighting against the loudness wars, advocating that people change the way we think about the meaning of <3 stars, so that we can use the entire available spectrum is an uphill battle.  It's easier to just slice up the stars and let people have their 6-point range (5 stars plus n/a), and label the points n/a, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5.

But it also feels dumb.  I keep thinking about the scene from Spinal Tap, "Why not make 10 louder?"

Instead of using fractions, why not switch to a 10-point scale?  We could even eliminate the stigma scores, and have still have a 5-point scale, but labeled so that they're values from the 10-point scale that people would actually use:

6 (3 stars) | 7 (3.5 stars) | 8 (4 stars) | 9 (4.5 stars) | |10 (5 stars)

I look at it like a way to fool people into having the 5 points they really need without having to think that they're handing out "negative" ratings when they rate something with only 1-2 stars.

Two graphs: in one, the same scores are inflated with 5 "vanity" or "participation trophy" points, in order to signify the reluctance of judges to give "negative" ratings by rating below 5, which is very common in 10-point ratings systems. We feel better about handing out those scores than we do the lower scores, but the difference between a 10 and a 7 looks like less than the difference between a 5 and a 2, even though the difference in both cases is 3.

The only problem with that approach, as I see it, is that you can keep slicing stars arbitrarily thin, and eventually you end up with a big box of crayons problem.  We could use a 5-star scale, a 1-10 scale, or a 100 point scale.  But it's harder to decide if something is closer to 80% or 82% than it is to decide if something is closer to 80% or 90%. And you don't actually gain anything, just more complexity and more muddle.

I can tell quickly if I want to give something a 4-star or a 5-star rating, but if I start asking myself does it deserve 4 stars, or 4.5 stars, I have to slow down and think about it too much.  As a result, I think I would spend more time on fewer games.

What was the point of all this, again? Oh yeah, to rate games

Ranking things like games is subjective, full of gut instinct and arbitrary taste. But with quantifying a gut reaction, there's a point at which additional granularity isn't really useful, and actually becomes counter-productive, because it makes people more indecisive.

It's already somewhat laughable to think that these are things that can be quantified, but we do it, because you can't really compare and rank things otherwise.  Picking a number is way quicker, and easier, than writing a paragraph or an essay.  And it's way more feasible compare numbers than it is to convey subjective full-text reviews.  That's the reason we use number ratings.  Like, that's literally the only reason to do it.

I want to rate quickly and decisively and move on, so I can play and rate the most games. Precision and accuracy aren't the most important thing, here.

Consistency is far more important.  If I can rate a lot of games, and apply my personal, subjective approach to rating consistently across all of them, it's possible to compare those scores against each other.  This is true even if "my three" is very different from "your three" -- as long as we're both consistent in how we rate.  We get precision and accuracy from the weight of averages.  If you can get a few dozen reviews of your game, average the ratings numbers, you get pretty good confidence that the numbers are about right, even if you don't really know what a "3" or a "4" actually means, and even if any N individual judges can't agree on what "3" or "4" means.  The math of averages end up giving us decimals anyway.

Conclusion

To get better ratings(1), we need more ratings, not more gradations. This is true even when the quality of individual reviews is low, (so long as the quality of reviews is consistent from game to game by any particular reviewer.) 

Thus, simplifying and streamlining the process of rating games, so that we can rate more games, would be better than giving individuals the means to assign ratings with finer granularity.

__

(1) I'm talking about better quantitative ratings, obviously; better qualitative ratings would be nice, too -- but that's another topic.

nice, i like make game, i look into forward ludomm dare 40

This will be my 4th Ludum Dare, but my first one doing the Compo, and I'm kinda nervous. Any tips for from more experience Compo jammers?

So, mandatory "I'm in" post here :sweat_smile:

I spent a looooong time wondering if I should do my game with classic HTML5 languages I'm very confortable with, or if I should use big CASE software I already know by heart... like I did when I was a (more-)beginner dev back in 24th and 26th Ludum Dare.

I really wanted to change things, and to be able to tell "look, I programmed this game from scratch!"... But after thinking about it (and watching my warm-up week get spent on working for school), I think enjoying making my game is more important than having something nice to put on my CV. So here I am, heading into this Ludum Dare seeking to have a good time, and not to invest my week-end showcasing my awesome new 'engineer' skillset.

So I'll be using my beloved ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 (french softs are the best! <3), coupled with maybe GraphicsGale, maybe PhotoFiltre, maybe SFXR, maybe Audacity, but certainly a lot of tea.

Enjoy your Ludum Dare too, xoxo :heart:

I've done lots of LDs in the past (5? 6?) and have had great success. Hopefully I can do the same. If my internet (and mental state) holds up, I'll livestream on my twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ebernerd

Hope to see what you guys have in store!