Should i do a post jam version of my game?

Some of us had become attached to the 'old' manner in which the results where displayed, despite the (increasing) awesomeness of the new site :slight_smile:

I've tried to put the 'small' overview in this blog post, but the way this version of Markdown displays tables, is --let's say-- rather spacious, which is probably totally fine if you do something different with it than what I was to attempt.

So, therefore, instead of taking up approximately a bazillion screens of real-estate here, some links to another site: - overview of all 'podium places' - all top-20s Compo-edition - all top-20s Jam-edition - top-100 Overall Compo-edition - top-100 Overall Jam-editon - coolness: 'feedback hearts'

All mistakes herein are extremely my own and do not reflect upon the site-devs!

Shout-out to @joror, whose idea this originally was, but has been moving today! Also shout-out to @jod who was totally in the chat-room as well :yum:

I managed to be in top 50% in most categories and scored whopping (at least for me) 88th place in Graphics! Thank you for all of your ratings and I hope you scored as high as you desired!

I feel kind of silly doing a postemortem as if my game warranted one, but I find others quite interesting, so what the heck. It's also quite cathartic.

This is my 3rd Ludum Dare, and I think it's safe to say that I have been steadily improving. I am quite happy with how my game turned out and very happy with the ranking results. My workflow has improved dramatically. However, there is still room for a lot of improvement, and there are several key things that could have gone better.

Initial Design and the Theme

Although I've been able to manage scope reasonably well, most of my entries so far have not exactly nailed the theme as squarely as I would have liked. I think the problem is two fold:

Firstly, I have a lot of game ideas in my head that I want to use, and there's the temptation to shoehorn the theme into an already existing idea.

Secondly, I tend to get experimental with my game design which can cause the design to veer away from a central theme.

Although my designs haven't disastrously missed the mark so far, I'd like to focus more on the theme in the future and use it as a launchpad instead of an inconvenience.

Procedural Levels

I really enjoy learning about and implementing procedural generation. I also haven't dabbled a lot in manual level design, and I find it tedious. As a result, I tend to try to find a way to offload level design to procedural generation. This is good in some cases, but ends up being more work with a lower quality result in a lot of other cases.

I had already made a few prototypes beforehand for a similar cave-structure procedural level design, and so using that code as reference I was able to build a decent level generator during the jam. However it still took a huge chunk of my time and had me messing with all sorts of weird corner cases later on. There's no way I could have done this without previous experience. The whole story on the headaches of the procedural algorithms could warrant a postmortem all to itself.

While it is cool that the levels are procedural, the quality was just hit-or-miss (with odd stuff happening sometimes like items spawning right on the landing zone).

Most importantly, most players didn't seem to notice it was procedural.

Hand-crafted levels would have fit better with this project, at least for the game jam.

Game Balance

This goes hand-in-hand with procedural level generation. I got incredibly mixed feedback on game balance. Some people praised how the difficulty ramped up and how it always "felt fair". Others complained that either the whole game was too easy or that they hit a difficulty spike.

The simple explanation is that enemy spawning was semi-randomized, designed to get more intense as the danger level increased, but still unpredictable. The problem is that some levels just happened to have more difficult layouts than others due to the procedural level generator, and sometimes harder enemies spawned multiple times or enemies spawned faster just out of bad luck. On top of all that, the upgrades were all random and even the number of upgrades in each level wasn't consistent (and not all the upgrades were created equal).

Because of all of this layered randomness, players would have drastically different experiences with the game. And like I said before, I'm not sure that many of the players realized the levels were procedural at all, so they saw all of this wonkiness as hand-crafted.

Lesson learned: don't leave your game balance up to chance (unless you are designing something sadistic like NetHack). Use random elements wisely and keep control over your game.

Music

All three of my entries so far have had original composed music, but this was the first time I used Bosca Ceoil and tried to make a rich score (eh, as rich as it could be in the allotted time). I have a strong belief that audio is mandatory for all games because it adds so much to the experience.

I wanted to get a working feature-complete prototype done by Saturday night so that I could compose music and make sound effects on Sunday. That plan actually worked out pretty well, and I was pretty happy with the results.

I had issues finding the right voices in Bosca Ceoil and just using the application in general. The chiptune percussion was especially weird, and the cymbal crashes sounded very messed up over twitch which was unfortunate. Next time I'd like to have done more poking around with importing better voices to use in Bosca Ceoil, and I'd definitely like to be able to do some warm-up before the next game jam.

Audio/Visual Feedback

I got some feedback on this and it's definitely something I need to address in most of my games. I need to work on making my games more "gamey". The noise and visuals that occur when you land a hit on an enemy were too subtle.

I thought it would look cool and somewhat "realistic" if particles flew away from an enemy when it got struck by a bullet as if bits of it were getting blasted off. While it does look neat, it gets lost in the chaos when there's a lot going on in the game. The audio for a bullet hit was not very impactful as well.

Some people suggested that the enemies should flash a solid color or flicker. Those were good suggestions and I will try to take them to heart next time.

Story

I got really mixed feedback for the story. Some people loved that the story even existed, others complained it wasn't complex enough or that the ending felt bad. I can understand the complaints; the story feels like it's going in an interesting direction but then cuts off before much of a payoff.

Honestly the story was written as I built the game, and not a lot of forethought was put into it. I didn't think people would pay much attention to it, so I didn't put a ton of effort into it.

Lesson learned: people like stories. Next time I'm hoping to set time aside for story design and integrate it more into the gameplay.

The Results

Like I said earlier, I'm extremely happy with the results. I never thought I'd place so high, I couldn't have asked for more.

I was not surprised by two of my weaker categories, graphics and theme. I have never been much of an artist and usually go with the NES look to sort of mask it, and not everyone likes that look. And as I said earlier, I didn't nail the theme down as much as I could have.

I am a bit surprised at the low innovation score. I thought my game was off the beaten path and dabbled in new ideas. That being said, though, even my low scores were higher than I expected, so I'm not complaining!

I'd like to thank everyone that played my game and gave feedback. I had so much fun with this project and experiencing so much creativity while playing other games. Until next time!

Here are the results from our first LD game. Thanks for playing and giving feedback.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/space-defender

https://timco.itch.io/space-defender

We started with some brainstorming for a good game concept which match this ludum dare topic. It was hard for us to find something what we can create in the given time (we are 2 guys). We also haven't much experience to create a game in such a short time so it ended in some time problems on day 3 :) We focused on Android and got some issues with building apk so we decided to create a web player version too.

But it was a really good experience for us. It motivates us to watch your progress and play your games. We will definitly take part on the next ludum dare and hopefully improve ourselfes.

Meanwhile we will implement some ideas from your feedback and from our storyboard. Follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/TimcoApp if you want to see the progress.

Overall: 675th (2.033 average from 32 ratings)

Fun: 675th (1.817 average from 32 ratings)

Innovation: 675th (1.7 average from 32 ratings)

Theme: 673rd (2.052 average from 31 ratings)

Graphics: 642nd (2.133 average from 32 ratings)

Humor: 522nd (1.917 average from 32 ratings)

Third LD submission, third top 100 overall finish. Hell yes! Thank you all for the kind reviews and excellent feedback!

Lacking an artist, we're especially happy this time to be in the top 30 of graphics.

You should play RE-SANTA while still in the holiday season and some Christmas feelings remain: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/re-santa

As a programmer I would be happy to be 256th. NEVERMIND : ) I'm still polishing the game created for LD entry and you can check out progress by far : LINK

I highly appreciate any feedback and suggestions about the game! I've ended up making it with beat em up elements and removed mouse/aiming mechanics. Thanks everyone who voted, created awesome games and see ya in the new year : )

https://youtu.be/9dTCse0YpE4

Hello and thanks to everyone who rated and commented on my entry!

Impressions from my first Ludum Dare experience:

• Great to see many like-minded people going thru the same processes
• There are way too many entries! I played almost 50 games and missed almost all the top games. Where do you find the time to play?
• Some entries are so polished and with such well thought-out levels, it's hard to believe they were made in such a short time

BTW my results are decidedly average and I have mixed feelings about that. I really want to improve my creativity and development skills to a much higher level, but there's still some ways to go...

My final takeaway is:

Congrats to everyone who completed, no matter how well/badly you got rated. Ranking is not as important as getting honest feedback to become better at your craft! Keep making games and enjoy! ^^

Development on my game continues as does my learning process:

Wow! Thank you so much to everyone who played and rated our two games, Samurai Shaver and Goodnight Sheep! We managed to take 1st place in the jam division, in Overall, Fun, and Audio!

Here were our final results:

Samurai Shaver:
Overall: 1st (4.545 average from 68 ratings)
Fun: 1st (4.538 average from 68 ratings)
Innovation: 47th (4.038 average from 67 ratings)
Theme: 377th (3.659 average from 68 ratings)
Graphics: 24th (4.652 average from 68 ratings)
Audio: 1st (4.817 average from 65 ratings)
Humor: 6th (4.438 average from 67 ratings)
Mood: 9th (4.476 average from 65 ratings)

Goodnight Sheep:
Overall: 79th (4 average from 57 ratings)
Fun: 534th (3.361 average from 56 ratings)
Innovation: 106th (3.868 average from 55 ratings)
Theme: 89th (4.136 average from 57 ratings)
Graphics: 152nd (4.227 average from 57 ratings)
Audio: 5th (4.426 average from 56 ratings)
Mood: 5th (4.546 average from 56 ratings)

I really didn't expect that we would take 1st place overall in the jam, especially because we split our efforts between TWO different games this time (both were fully made in the 72 hour timeframe). This was my 17th time participating in Ludum Dare and it was an absolute blast...I really couldn't have asked for more.

I'm also really happy to see that Goodnight Sheep was so well-received, despite being an unorthodox/atypical game experience. It made us really happy seeing that people really understood what we were trying to portray and related to the experience personally as well. It seems that video playthroughs of Samurai Shaver are starting to pop up too! It's been really fun watching people do their best at being a flawless samurai barber (sometimes failing hilariously in the process).

Huge thanks to @xellaya, the other half of Cocoa Moss, as well as @littlecloudflower who joined us this time around and handled the narrative and design for Goodnight Sheep.

I've been hard at work this week putting in a bunch of new features for Samurai Shaver, including tighter audio sync, gamepad support, and even a mobile port! All of that will be coming soon in the next update, so look forward to that! And of course, I hope to add some more levels for those of you who thought that the first 4 levels weren't difficult enough! We'll also be releasing Goodnight Sheep for mobile too :)

I also hope to post a full post-mortem writeup of our LD experience and our two games, so stay tuned for that as well. (Let me know if there are any questions I should answer in that report)

And to the rest of you, congrats on your games and I hope to see you all back again in April!

Overall: 420th (3.591 average from 68 ratings)

Fun: 738th (3.119 average from 69 ratings)

Innovation: 808th (2.903 average from 69 ratings)

Theme: 1000th (2.776 average from 69 ratings)

Graphics: 565th (3.522 average from 70 ratings)

Audio: 345th (3.405 average from 60 ratings)

Mood: 72nd (4.022 average from 69 ratings)

Opened the site up to this... counting the days!

I thought I would do a quick post-mortem on my game for LD 40 (The Exploding Factory).

The game concept was derived from an old classic, the "I Love Lucy" scene where they are trying to package chocolates coming down a factory line, and it ends up malfunctioning and spitting out a bunch of candies. And in order to combat this, they eat the chocolates to try and keep up. It felt like a pretty solid idea, and from the comments I was getting, sounds like I wasn't alone on that, as it fit the theme pretty well.

With my still somewhat limited visual and game design abilities, the execution was still somewhat lacking in quality, admittedly. The game play was very simple, where all you do is click on an item and click on the box to deposit it. This is fine at the start, but it quickly ramps up in difficulty to the point of where it becomes impossible to keep up. That was the source of most of the complaints in the comments, where the feeling was that the difficulty ramps up too quickly. I wanted to give the game a finish state, but it might have gotten there a bit too early. I think some more play-testing of the game play probably would have been better too.

Graphics-wise, I am still pretty weak at that. I did actually put in some animations this time around, which I haven't really done much of on my past entries, so I'm pretty happy about that. But I think that is probably where I need to work on things the most. I hope to work on a slightly larger scale project here to hopefully work on graphics a bit more, but we'll see.

The music and sound effects were more or less an after thought, but were serviceable... so nothing to write home about there.

The good news is that the actual mechanical execution (i.e. scripting) was still pretty solid and relatively bug free, so I think, if I were to say a strong suit, would be that. I just need to work on game design and graphics to help push me up higher in the quality department.

The ranking I got was about average, mostly the same rankings I've gotten on every entry I have put out. I still wish that the ranking process was a little bit more, but I think I've gotten over that and can enjoy the game making process more so than the ranking. I guess with that said, I will probably be back for the next one, and hopefully with some improvements to my game design abilities!

Thank you so much everybody for your feedback and criticisms of my game, Armed Descent! Considering this is my first Ludum Dare, I feel like I can't complain about how I did:

Overall: 255th (3.762 average from 44 ratings)

Fun: 74th (3.976 average from 44 ratings)

Innovation: 698th (3.037 average from 43 ratings)

Theme: 664th (3.326 average from 45 ratings)

Graphics: 581st (3.488 average from 44 ratings)

Audio: 273rd (3.538 average from 41 ratings)

Mood: 395th (3.5 average from 42 ratings)

Congratulations everybody on your games! I may continue to develop this if I have time to; I'm already working on a level editor for it. If other people get interested then I may see this through and finish it! Once again, thank you all!

I am very happy with the results of my game. - 52nd place overall - 30th place on humor and audio!

If you want to play it - you can do it in browser (Believe me, your ears will love it) https://gamejolt.com/games/greedy_coco/301358

Before any activity on this site inevitably dies down, I guess it's time to publish a somewhat updated (and probably final) version of my Compo entry, Leader's Guidance. I tried to address most of the issues raised in all the invaluable feedback I got during the past few weeks.

New features include : - A title screen - New rules, for additional ways to express your deference to your Benevolent Leader - Quite a bit of tweaking, for a fairer (but somehow still more difficult) experience - More than one level - Sound effects (you asked for it !) - An actual ending, for the most dedicated workers

https://exnihilo-ld.itch.io/leaders-guidance

Mandatory results overview :

• Overall: 295th (3.456 average from 47 ratings)
• Fun: 297th (3.378 average from 47 ratings)
• Innovation: 180th (3.5 average from 46 ratings)
• Theme: 186th (3.761 average from 46 ratings)
• Graphics: 306th (3.389 average from 47 ratings)
• Humor: 251st (2.989 average from 46 ratings)
• Mood: 151st (3.466 average from 46 ratings)

Nothing to rave about, even for a first-timer, but overall this jam made for quite an enlightening experience. I'm definitely in awe of the level of polish so many of you were able to put in their games over such a short time period.

My deepest thanks to everyone who took the time to test and provide feedback on my game. See you in a few months for Ludum Dare 41 !

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/placeholder

Thanks for the votes, I really enjoyed it, and reading the feedback, playing your games and leaving feedback. See you all in LD41

Discord or gitter for example?

I'm just wondering, because it's hard getting the updates sometimes. We missed LD39 because I forgot to check the website.