Fellow apprentices!
We did great so far!
The final hour is coming! The Ancient Ones are almost here!
They need a few more sacrifices! Let's unite together and push it to the end!
The world shall DROWN IN RAIN!
The final chapter of Gods and Rain is nigh!
SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE, BROTHERS AND SISTERS!
Hi @Everyone
We just uploaded a post-jam version of PURITY on Itch.io which overhauls the entire audio of the game.
Music and SFX were remade by Thor Myrdal, who has worked on games such as Wolfenstein II - The New Colossus. You can follow him here:
https://myrdalthor.wixsite.com
https://soundcloud.com/thormyrdal
https://www.youtube.com/user/thormyrdalofficial
DISCLAIMER
If you already played the game, be sure to check out the post-jam version and give us feedback.
If you haven't played yet, we ask you play the jam version and rate it, as voting ends in 9 hours.
IMPORTANT
PLEASE, do not rate the post-jam version, as this would be unfair to other participants.
LINKS
Ludum Dare Entry | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/carne
Itch.io Files | https://jantunes.itch.io/purity
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-lords-shepherd
Due to popular demand keyboard controls have now been added to my silly little game.
Press A and D to control the arm, the left and right keys to move the forearm and hold the space button to close the claw.
If you are wondering did I make the keyboard controls somewhat crappy on purpose in order to prove myself right. Subconsciously that might be true.
Enjoy! And thanks to all the gamepad users for getting me to 20 ratings.
Have you see just delete them? A game where by deleting files you make the assets disappear!
And if you're not interested in that, then just look at the character.
CUTE AS FUUUUUUnctioning society.
Check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them
Check out my HTML5 game They are coming: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/they-are-coming
I'm also happy to help if somebody needs ratings. I would prefer HTML5 games. So just comment below with a link.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-lords-shepherd
It's time for me to leave the LD43. One month of testing (our team has given 125 ratings) and this week I tried to rate the most projects below 20 evaluations. Good luck for everyone. P.S: perhaps my team member will continue to rate your entries before the end :smiley:
Hi there,
If you havn't tried our game yet we will be glad if you could take a look at it and rate/comment it if you want to!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/bottomless-god
Enjoy your new year's eve!
Hello, everyone! Feel free to try out our game, if you haven't already! Also give us feedback so we can do better next time :)
LINK : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/unseen
HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS, see you during next Ludum Dare, we love you!
With mechanics inspired by Celeste and an Undertale inspired narrative, this cozy story-based platformer will see you give up the skills you learn to support your mother as you help her through her golden years.
Your last chance to play Ursa and share your opinion with us, beloved by many people with over 120 ratings and played by many streamers, super cute graphics and story that will make you cry followed by amazing music.
PLAY AND RATE HERE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ursa
COOLtits is a story driven game about leading your cult to your only goal - to be summoned and seize the control over the world! We lack about 5 votes at the moment, so if you have some spare time, try and rate it!
It's a game about running, dodging, and PANIC! (Good panic, of course.) The faster you go, the more chaotic it gets, but a higher score awaits you.
You can play battery blitz here: A rating and some feedback would be much appreciated. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/battery-blitz
I made another storytelling puzzle game for this LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/little-red (HTML5 playable)
The story goes with puzzles, and your choices influence the difficulty. You can choose to sacrifice or not, but remember: sacrifices must be made.
It was challenging to design levels, and make the audio fit it. If more time given, I would improve the animation and key controls.
Hope you enjoy it, and... HAPPY NEW YEAR!
We still need a few more votes on our web game, Sacrificial Run! Try to get to the deity at the end and let us know how many people you ended up with! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-run
You can try Tribu 43: An ode to betrayal here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/no-title-yet
The tribelings need your help! :(
Yes, I am, actually probably slightly desperate a bit, but still, I do need just a little bit more votes to get a rating this year, so just gonna shamelessly promote:
Perfectly Normal Inc. is a comedy management game about stealing people and sacrificing them to the Satan
When dogs get close to fireworks they get really scare. Some die in a car accident and some die of a hard attack. If you have dogs, don't go with them outside today.
Hi everyone! We'd appreciate a lot if you give us some feedback and rate our game! Only three hours to go!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/not-so-arigato-mr-roboto
I have just finished update for my LD43 game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/cross-the-hell) so if you want to try you can play here: https://oxygenium.itch.io/cross-the-hell-full-version :)
Some changes / updates: - 9 levels, - Added boxes and triggers for some puzzle mechanics, - Added enemies, - Player now can attack with dagger (3x "combo"), - Added some additional visual effects, - Level with "mini" boss, - Level with boss - Necromancer (don't jump on his head :D), - Added main menu, - You can now pause game when you press the "Escape" button, - You can restart or skip the level, - The second dimension now is shrinking faster, - Added some new sounds, - If you will stuck in wall then after while you will explode, - Mini cutscene after last level.
I'm a bit short from 20 ratings and would appropriate if you would check out my little game :v:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/mutajelly
Thanks for playing, and i hope your new year is full of joy and games! :fireworks:
Hello! The Play+Rate time is nearing its emd and I could really use some help if you have a few minutes to spare. My LD 43 entry is very close to having enough ratings to get a score at the end. Could you perhaps concider trying it out?
You can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/colony
Thank you so much! :heart:
I'm going through some of the danger zone games and have a question to people who are trying to gather up 20 ratings in the last day AND with less than 20 ratings given:
Why did it happen? Was it that you were not aware about the rating system? Hoped to slip? Never got enough time? Couldn't force yourself play and rate 20-25 games? I don't want to offend anybody, just sincerely interested.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/graveyard-gladiator
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/graveyard-gladiator
Just working on some extra-difficult levels for the new "challenge" difficulty, which will be introduced in the next update of Colors of Your World.
I had hoped to get all of these done before the rating period ended, but it looks like that's not going to happen. Oh well!
Are you all excited for results? Remember to take all of your scores with a grain of salt, because your finished game is your prize!
Two weeks ago, our team met and discussed what went good and where we need to improve. I finally managed to edit the remaining footage we had left and talked about the lessons we learned. I hope you enjoy it :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIGiFxCt5-M
Ludum Dare 43 is about to wrap up, along with year! Get cosy, comfy and cuddled up. And while the clock’s a-ticking, take a chance to rate some of the games in the danger zone. A few votes can make the whole difference and get people pumped up to receive the new year.
As we leave the year behind and as the jam ends, as per tradition, we’ve got our largest piece of insight with the post-mortem of our very own superhero themed runner Super Sellout! Sit back and relax, as we take you through our journey to sacrifice integrity for the sake of profit!
Super Sellout is a high-score based runner game where, at the start of the game, the player gets to select as many sponsors as they want. While in game, the playable character has to jump from building to building, as to avoid falling in any gaps in-between, all-in-all while interacting with people who need rescuing as to get a higher score and extra time as to continue saving people and ranking sponsor money.
Each sponsor selected at the beginning of a game affects the playthrough in a variety of ways, such as by adding obstacles, slowing down the player or distorting the screen. Sponsors, however, also add score multipliers, forcing the player to sacrifice mobility for a chance at a higher score. Or, as we like to call it, sacrificing integrity for profit!
As a variation to our previous team structures, one of the goals for this edition of the game jam was to perform an exercise with as many team members of the Whales And Games group as possible. Instead of relying on our old tested formula of only having three team members, all with different roles, we instead wanted to brute-test our synergy as a full team and understand how having more than one person in the same role would affect our workflow.
That being said, our formation ended up involving five out of the six members of the Whales And Games team, being structured as following:
Super Sellout, in similarity to its predecessors, was also created and developed with the field-tested trusty tools and programs that the Whales And Games team uses in day-to-day development. Some of these programs, in case of the engine and programming side, also utilize plugins in order to smooth-out rough corners in development. The list is quite extensive and is as following:
In addition to these existing tools, we also experimented on using our internal Whales And Games toolset, Shipyard, during the development of the jam. These include a variety of different utilities that aid us with mostly the deployment of the game, such as being able to build and upload multiple game versions directly to itch.io directly from the Unity editor, as well as pre-setup site-locking systems for the web versions (which were re-hosted on unauthorized sites almost immediately after the game went up). We are planning to release this toolchain as an open-source package at a later date.
As a team of five, we wanted to approach brainstorming in a way where everyone could pitch in, discuss their ideas, and then opt for the best ones to implement into a game. When the theme of Sacrifice was announced, we made a document - visible to all of us - and started writing our ideas on different pages. After all of us felt we had a decent dosage of ideas down, we started to discuss them pretty much one by one.
Oddly enough, we ended up going with a Superhero theme despite it not having been originally suggested or written by anyone in the brainstorming document. There were some ideas of the likes of “save someone over another one” (including one where it’d involve Animal Crossing-esque animals), but we also expected a lot of the entries to be serious and outright macabre. As such we opted for a more light-hearted setting, with vibrant colours and funny characters.
When we settled with the superhero setting, we spent some-time testing implementations, attempting to create a cohesive design. We needed to think of how gameplay, art direction and audio would all tie together. Some of the early aspects of the game involved a hero with an extremely big chin, rescuing grandmas from a tree on a park and jumping over fences, as well as the overall idea of “sacrificing mobility for more rewards”.
After going back and forth with more ideas, we ended up with a similar yet practically different concept. A timed runner that took place over rooftops, where the player would be incentivized to make the game harder for themselves in exchange for the chance at a higher score.
As part of an ongoing effort to improve the quality of our games and making sure we tackle the most important issues of their design, a few months prior to the jam, we set up a community programme seeking for community playtesters to join us and give us feedback about certain points we could improve on our projects to ensure they feel tighter and more rewarding.
One of the aspects we always found lacking in our previous jams was the lack of practical feedback during the development of the game that we could immediately sort out and improve on the moment. While feedback during the judging phase is helpful to figure out aspects that we could improve in the game at a later point, feedback from playtesters during the jam allow us to improve situations and work on issues that would certainly be deteriorating for first impressions of the game during its judging phase, where the game is exposed to the majority of players that will play it during its lifetime.
Thanks to our playtesters, we were able to iron out several aspects of Super Sellout that needed refinement. Some of these tweaks, obtained through their feedback, included communicating what the different sponsors do during the sponsor selection screen, improving the overall readability of menus, and making the impact of certain hazards and sound cues more clear and noticeable to the player.
We also need to take this occasion to thank our existing community playtesters for all the feedback and helping us making the game better!
Since Ludum Dare is an event with very limited time, it’s necessary to find ways to save it during the actual event and during the game’s development. While the actual labour division was not exactly perfect, the preparation of the team and the way we’ve got our tools sorted out prior to the jam allowed each team member to quickly jump into development and catch-up at any time.
Previous methods of project collaboration involved each of the roles sending their files back and forth, working separately and leaving the task to the programmer to combine all of the files alone. While this may have worked in the past with smaller projects and teams, it was not efficient.
Starting with Jazzy Beats last year and carrying it on to future editions, the non-technical team members have been practicing working on Unity, while at the same time getting the hang of committing, pushing and pulling their own project updates, allowing every individual team member to work in almost real-time on the project. Through enough coordination, the process of making and receiving files, giving feedback and tweaking on the go has speed up significantly, and each member has been learning more and more about how to bridge their work with the others.
In addition to standard Git management, there’s also other workflows that we’ve already long embedded into our team, including using Discord to voice chat during the jam and using the aforementioned Google Office Suite for sharing brainstorming and design documents. Finally, there’s also the previously mentioned Shipyard toolchain that has been in-development in parallel with another project of ours that we’re developing an update for, and which proved to be a crucial helper during the game’s deployment.
Like with all of our previous jam entries, our team was divided into the usual roles of programmers, artists and audio composers. While that was all great in theory, the actual practice made it clear that the lines of what each had to do ended up being blurrier than what they originally seemed to be. The programmers had their own styles and methods to approach situations which sometimes lead to stun-locks at times where another programmer was unable to continue their task as it depended on another programmer’s tasks. On the other hand, there were some ideas about design and art were sometimes not properly communicated or discussed beforehand.
One situation where we ended up feeling this the most was during the early phases of brainstorming, where we spent several hours throwing several ideas and concepts attempting to find an idea that everyone was comfortable to begin development with. Unfortunately, because this was a larger team, this led to an never-ending loop of conversation trying to figure out where we were headed. In the end, we went with an idea that was not in the list of anyone, but rather, was made on the spot.
However, even with an established idea, we were too quick to judge it, and with some programmers starting their day earlier than others, it became apparent that the tasks and mechanics that need to be added in weren’t properly made clear between team members, with several gaps of the original idea not filled in with clear mechanics.
One way to improve this aspect in a future edition of the jam would be to clearly elect one or more team members to hold the role of game designers and making sure the whole systematic design of the game is done in advance, or, alternatively, to only allow each team member to pitch-in a limited set of ideas and then refine those until proper systems are achieved.
Not having proper mechanics written down also lead to initiative-related problems, where a team member, unknowing of the tasks that needed to be achieved next, would experiment with different implementations, leading to some conflicts in terms of coding and even overlapping tasks.
Although we might have been able to make the game seem like it features a multitude of sponsors due to the different modifiers that provide similar situations, one point that several jammers have featured in their feedback was the how the sponsor selection felt lacking in regard to the different modifiers that can be equipped.
In our original game design ideas for the game, there were several concepts for sponsors that weren’t able to make the cut into the game, including sponsors that would invert the player’s controls, add more overlays on top of the game, between many others that unfortunately met the cutting room floor, as described in an earlier development insight.
While it has certainly became an internal joke given that all of our post-mortems mention this one issue in our games, it is one that is likely bound to repeat itself every time we experiment with a different genre or try a different team setup. Trying a new genre whilst trying to achieve the same polish that the team always aims for has proven to be a tough challenge, and normally results in the actual juice of the game to feel underwhelming as we try to figure out what makes those games enjoyable.
However, experimenting with different genres isn’t really a passable excuse. Instead, getting the scope and mechanics right is something that we will keep training as we continue to develop games (and update them, given the chance). In this jam, we have underestimated the time that it’d take to develop the different systems for the different mechanics, both due the given work stack, as well as a result of labour structure issues mentioned in the previous points.
Given the status of our previous entries that got updated or refined designs, it's possible that all our entries will only really meet their full potential when given a second look, when more feedback has been taken into consideration, and when the development of the systems has reached a point where we are comfortable and fast in iterating them. We hope to get the chance in a future jam to tackle a simpler design we can get more mechanics into.
Despite the fact that Super Sellout had a rocky development at time, it was still very well received by both the Ludum Dare and Whales And Games communities. However, for us internally as a team, it taught us several lessons that we must take attention too when developing our next projects, most notably, when it comes to team management and working with larger teams.
Like previous team exercises, there are several takeaways and lessons we can make from our overall experience during the jam, that we’ll be taking into consideration not only on future editions, but that we hope are also useful and for the benefit of other jammers:
Beyond the actual lessons of development, we have also received several cues of feedback about how we could improve the game if we were to pick on it again and iterate on it. Some of the things we could think off to improve include the following:
While we still don’t have any specific plans to develop or create a new content update for the game as it is, we are planning to start an internal programme next year focused on revisiting and updating some of our older games, namely Ludum Dare entries that haven’t really gotten much attention outside of the time-frame they were developed at. Given that we will be deciding which entries to update based on public voting, there’s a likelihood that Super Sellout will be revisited sooner than we expected!
We also want to start working towards longer-term projects with the turn of the year focusing on delivering games that can easily be iterated on with regular content and meant for expansion over time. We are planning to work on one of these projects starting early next year and we think that it's going to be a doozy!
And that pretty much wraps everything up, doesn’t it? Super Sellout, Ludum Dare 43 and even the freakin’ year, comrades. 2018 surely went fast, and the next year seems oh so very bright. If you want to sail with us on 2019, you’re welcome to board our Discord Server or if you prefer somewhere more quiet, on Twitter! And hang tight, because as you’ve read earlier, we’re planning on going places!
Get the kazoos, heat the chocolate, wear your best suit, and toast! For a new and bigger year for game development! :whale: :confetti_ball:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/documentia
Hey everyone ! When we made Documentia for LD43 we wanted the game to have a real breathing world inside. But due to time constraints we couldn't manage to animate all the different characters. Today, a few hours before the ratings are over, Documentia gets an update !
Click here to see the animated town center !
The wheat field has always been there but it's still really satisfying
Come and grab the update and tell us what you think of all these new animations !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/documentia
Can I get a little more feedback before the end?
Play and review: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/friends-or-food
Please play Just delete them. By deleting files you make the assets disappear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRk38sGu9I
Check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/just-delete-them
Good news! My game is specifically engineered for this purpose. 5 minute playtime, rate, move on. All categories rateable. Get your game to the frontpage to-hour by rating Sacrus.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrus
Also the music is REALLY good.
It's your last chance to play Journey of Sacrifice! Manage your resources and crew to get your ship to it's destination without it sinking, also watch out for giant squid that will try to attack your ship!
Hey! Please rate my game I'm so goddamn close >.< https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/you-warlock
4 hours and 2 minutes away...
You know the drill
Game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/2305-new-generation
Less than 4 hours to play games before knowing the results.
You can cook healthy food in our game and also make a game on Ludum Dare.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/how-to-ruin-your-life-in-48-hours
Ludum Dare 43 has ended.
The results for each category can be found here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/results
You can check your game page for your individual results (via the My Game link up top).
Congratulations everyone! You made a game!
As 2018 comes to a close on this New Years eve (for some of you it already has), it's time to announce our next event: Friday April 26th to Monday April 29th (local timezones pending)! Usually we schedule April events more mid-month, but Easter 2019 landed on a funny weekend.
See you in April!
Just a reminder: starting in 2019 Ludum Dare events will take place twice per year: Every April and October (i.e. now every 6 months instead of every 4).
Keeping up Ludum Dare's 3-events-per-year schedule has been an incredible challenge for me. It's something that should have changed years ago, but sometimes it can take a while to figure things like this out. Plus I like nice round numbers, and doing 3-events-per-year for exactly 10 years sounded like the perfect time to end it.
But that said! We're still here! I bet folks are still going to be surprised it's already time for Ludum Dare (as it's been for the past 10 years :wink:).
Want to be reminded of the upcoming event?
Sign up for our mailing list here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-mailing-list/
Or follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ludumdare
And with 2018's end comes another end: Christer "McFunkypants" Kaitila's One Game a Month event.
1GAM celebrated its final event on December 1st. A solid 6 year adventure that saw many thousands of games and game careers made. Awesome work man! :smile:
Best wishes to Christer in his future endeavours.
That's it for me. We'll see you in April! Happy New Year everyone!
So I was super proud of my Ludum Dare 43 Entry, Behead, and had a number of comments asking to have in on Mobile. I was so pleased with the responses that I figured, "Heck yeah, let's devote a month to this thing," Three weeks later, and Behead was ready for iOS and Android release. I breathed a sigh of relief, because I JUST finished it by the end of the judging period, my original goal. Then I got this lovely email in my inbox.
Google Play, rejected my game, due to, "Gratuitous Violence," 😐
Let me just take a second here. THIS is Behead...
Well it's a real bummer. I appealed the rejection, but I have no idea if that will do anything. If nothing else, I can resubmit it with a reskin. Make them zombies or something. But that is seriously stupid. If anybody else has suggestions for things I can do to fix this, much love.
At the very least, the App Store accepted it, which you can play at the link below if you're interested.
I am blown away with how well our game has been rated. The feedback had been very positive, so I had fairly high hopes, but to be in the top 100 in all categories with only Innovation dipping just under a 4.0 score I did not expect. Thanks to everyone who played and rated AS OF YET UNNAMED, you've given us a great send-off into 2019!
It's been a while since I've achieved a ranking such as this, Tank Gauntlet reaching the top 100 in a ranking.
Particulary happy with the results, thank you everyone who played and have s happy new year!
Omelettes came 17th in the compo portion of Ludum Dare 43!
Thanks to everyone who played and rated (I got a ridiculous amount of ratings this time around)!
If you haven't tried it yet, or tried it and wanted more, now is the perfect time to give the updated version a try.
Omelettes Eggstended offers even more eggs to break and elevators that (attempt to) mimic the player's height.
Both versions are available for download here: https://steven-miller.itch.io/omelettes
The results can be seen here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/omelettes
I figured this is probably useful to more then just me. ```
compoOverall : 506 Fun : 506 Inovation : 507 Theme : 507 Graphics : 494 Audio : 393 Humor : 403 Mood : 480
jamOverall : 1044 Fun : 1045 Inovation : 1045 Theme : 1043 Graphics : 962 Audio : 662 Humor : 871 Mood : 985 ```
My ninth game jam nothing imrpoved, I guess I just make garbage games every time.
Not that great in some areas but 43rd in fun is pretty good I think! And 102nd Overall ain't bad either, thanks guys!
Results
Overall: 102nd (3.735 average from 36 ratings)
Fun: 43rd (3.926 average from 36 ratings)
Innovation: 295th (3.074 average from 36 ratings)
Theme: 287th (3.368 average from 36 ratings)
Graphics: 151st (3.662 average from 36 ratings)
Audio: 230th (3.059 average from 36 ratings)
Humor: 97th (3.391 average from 34 ratings)
Mood: 177th (3.344 average from 34 ratings)
Geta Game Jam is an online event occuring between January 5th and January 8th. * Create a game in three days * Work either individually or as a team * Share your progress with our wonderful discord community * Vote for which theme you would like to be chosen
I always have plenty of room for improvement, but this is my best performance yet!
Thanks so much :grin:
Check out Necroprancer:
Thanks to everyone who voted! Mood was definitely something I strived for!
Geta Game Jam is an online event occuring between January 5th and January 8th. * Create a game in three days * Work either individually or as a team * Share your progress with our wonderful discord community * Vote for which theme you would like to be chosen
Yeah this seems about right for us.
I thought I did pretty well for my first Ludum Dare. Other games had more effort invested in them, but I think my game mechanics were pretty original. Maybe I didn't get enough overall votes and the score was lower than it could be.
How can I get 400 votes like other games did? Seems like I mostly get votes from playing other people's games, and if I don't have time to play 400 games, I couldn't get a lot of votes?
I got 24 ratings with only 22 downloads, some of the downloads were made by people I know that couldn't vote :/
To be honest they're a little lower than what I was expecting but at least I have a benchmark set for future game jams. I do think these ratings are fair though as the game had many problems upon launch. Hopefully I can improve and beat these results in April!
Thank you everyone! It was a blast to make it and just as fun to play everyone elses. Cheers!
I'm at a loss for words, I actually made it into the top 10 and got my first trophy (3rd place in Theme). This is so surreal.
Thanks to everyone who played The Omicron Fleet and thank you all for your encouraging feedback.
Some people suggested that I should keep working on the game and I was a bit torn, not sure if it would be good enough to maybe make a full game out of it. But with a final rank like this, I am seriously considering it. I'll post an update in a few days, so if you're interested to keep in touch, let me know and I'll keep you in the loop.
Results of the Shrining:
These were the results of my first game:
It seems like my second game did better than the first in a lot of ways-- but then you'll notice that the actual ratings are a bit lower. This is not surprising, though. The Shrining focused on story to the point of sacrificing gameplay and was full of inside jokes, so I didn't expect other people to enjoy as much as I did.
Regardless of the results, I thoroughly enjoyed participating in this Ludum Dare! I got to make a quirky game that never would've existed otherwise, which is awesome!
Didn't expect to get that high in graphics, guess I should draw more. Thanks people.
Lesson learned: don't make the game too hard for the jam, even if it would become too easy for you.
:cow2: Check out da game if you're curious, but download the rebalanced version, it's better. :ram:
:sheep: And Happy New Year :goat:
Looks like our game Downgradius narrowly scored in the bottom 25% (out of 1044 total Jam participants). I was hoping for a rating around the upper-middle, but I have to admit I saw you all submitting A LOT of very good games :openmouth: and coming up with creative game ideas, considering that game-making is hard™. So y'all definitely deserve a pat on the back :thumbsup::blueheart:
By category:
I guess low scores for Innovation were expected, but I'm actually sad our Graphics rating was so low. I thought the parallax star background was a really good idea. I'm actually proud of the assets Mason created and my own "programmer art" would've looked MUCH worse :sweat_smile:
Humor: I guess nobody knows what an "Option" is in the game Gradius? And the pun title was literally 90% of the reason we even made this game :laughing:
The Fun and Audio ratings were the highest which I agree were the strong points of our game.
Common criticism:
Check out the game page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/total-party-kill
Results are in and Total Party Kill reached the 1st place in Overall AND Theme! Plus 2nd place in Fun. This was my first LD in ages and I didn't expect it to go this well! Thank you so much everybody!
If you still haven't played it, an extended version with more levels and bugfixes is available at Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/722211
This was my second Ludum Dare (my first one was LD42 with the game Pyramidion), and both times I had a really awesome time with the jam!
This time was definitely more stressful for me, but also much more rewarding. I wanted to write a short post with my results and my conclusions from this jam.
I'm super happy with the results this time! I got top 100 in 'fun', which is the most important category IMO (other than overall), and top 100 in 'innovation'. Also, a great improvement in overall score over my last LD - up by 0.3 points over the 3.525 I got for Pyramidion last time. The only score that took a big hit over last time is graphics. Last time, I got a score of around 3.5, and this time it's down to less than 3.
I think the main thing that worked for me last time is that I had a very clear "ancient egypt" theme which made my graphics very consistent, but it was also an artistic style that was kind of easy to draw in a way that looked pretty decent:
This time, I didn't have such a clear theme for my graphics, and the graphics ended up being pretty inconsistent, with more realistic textures used for the backgrounds, but more "cartoonish" style used for characters and items:
The other thing that worked for me last time is that the game was much simpler, so I was left with much more time for improving the graphics. This time around, I had only around ~0.5 day for drawing all the animations, and much more time was spent on designing levels and improving gameplay.
This time, I really feel motivated to try and publish a post-jam version. Mainly as an exercise for myself to try and polish the game more, making it a bit more pleasant to look at, but also just because I have many more ideas for improving the mechanics and adding more levels and I want to try them out. I hope to publish a slightly improved version that's also playable on mobile before the next Ludum Dare.
As for my last game, watching and interacting with streamers playing my game was the most insightful part of the experience. I strongly encourage anyone who hasn't done this to try going to some twitch channels and submitting your games. I learned so much from this experience about what worked and what didn't work in my game.
I don't think I'll manage to become an artist by the next jam, but I want to study the more polished-looking games in this jam and try to understand how I can get a more aesthetically pleasing game next time. There were many games I played that used very simple "programmer art" but still looked great.
That’s all. I had a lot of fun and I can't wait for the next Ludum Dare. Thank you to everyone who played my game! Even though the jam is over, I'm still happy for more feedback, so if you're feeling bored and like solving puzzles, please play my game and let me know what you think.
Got my placement for F R I E N D G U N! #2 overall (congrats to Total Party Kill!) #1 in the jam category!
This Ludum Dare was a delightful experience, and I really enjoyed seeing everyone else's interpretations of the theme.
If you're interested in my future work, I'm working on a long term tactics RPG project- I make development tweets here: www.twitter.com/hydezeke
Happy new year everyone!
Results are out, which means another cycle of improvement and reflection before LD44 in April!
Puzzle games are fun to make!
Tutorial levels and hints do a lot to improve the experience.
I am capable of making a decent game. My strong areas have been graphics and audio in the past, with the actual game design falling to the wayside. This time around, I put much more focus on the actual gameplay, and was able to get 21st in Fun, instead of the usual 200th or so.
I'm really glad that Fishy Rescue got such nice score! At first I hated this theme but eventually I had a nice idea and managed to make something somewhat fun. It was simple, but I'm pretty happy with the results. Thank you so much to everyone that played it and I'm glad that you enjoyed it. This really made my new year's eve feel much better :)
Well here it is finally, the new year and the results. And both of them were amazing. Thank you everyone for having played Suicidal Knights and for whose who rated it. It was a blast! Hope you had a great new years eve and we wish you the best for 2019 ! See you for the next LD !
This is my best Ludum Dare result so far, and my first-ever top 100 rating! Delighted with those Audio and Graphics ratings as well, especially Audio since I'd convinced myself the sound effects sucked again. (2.33/5 for Innovation though, oof)
I'll have to check the statistics, but it feels like there were fewer entries this year? For some of these categories, I scored lower than LD42 but got a higher overall ranking. Takes the shine off things a little, but overall I'm still really proud of my performance this time round.
Looking forward to even better things in LD44, and I hope you all have a wonderful 2019!
I had a ton of fun making Astronaut's Journey, and now the holidays are over I'm looking forward to making a version 2.
Results are in, and they came out golden!
Considering I ran out of time to add sound, and there's a known instability at the final rocket stage, I think 33rd overall / 18th fun is bloody excellent. It also leaves me wishing I'd had just that little extra time to fix those problems!
If you're looking to follow along with updates, y'all can find me at Twitter, my terribly interesting blog, or Itch.
Geta Game Jam is an online event occuring between January 5th and January 8th. * Create a game in three days * Work either individually or as a team * Share your progress with our wonderful discord community * Vote for which theme you would like to be chosen
I was going to post this a bit later in the week, included with my Post-Mortem (which I'm still writing) but with these results I HAD to do a premature celebration.
The trend continues I see. Once again the best results I've ever had in the Compo and this time by a WIDE margin. Making it into Top 50 for Fun is an amazing thought knowing that out of all, the game succeeds most at being fun. That is truly awesome :).
Here's a fun (pun possibly intended) progress chart as is tradition.
Here's a sneaky little tidbit at 2.0 ;)
(Yeah I've been working on a dialogue system)
As you can see I'm still in the process of re-designing the visuals. UI got a complete overhaul (Crew part hasn't been added yet which is why there's a little guy peeking in at the bottom), actual backgrounds are being added and soon I'll be reworking the particles. Also trails and lighting (so the lazors are more like lazors) will also be added. ALSO, all current sprites are going to be re-drawn, potentially with a new colour pallete as well (The current one is pretty limiting).
... Basically... I probably won't be done until Mid - Late Februrary; right around Birthday Time :D
Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game. The Post-Mortem is coming soon, but for now. Have a good day Commander!
WE WERE NOT EXPECTING THESE RESULTS! THANK YOU EVERYONE!!!
Happy new Year to everyone. With the end of 2018 the results for "Hyper Skater" were released.
I am not fully satisfied with it (but this is okay :)) as i expected some better votes in some categories - but if i look further and compare they are still great.
The Graphics and Audio are best values i ever had (also i don't make often audio for my games lol but i did this time again :)).
Overall they are okay.
What i really liked this times was the feedback (your comments) for the game. Many liked the game and there wasn't too much bugs as the last time :D
Nevertheless i plan to make a full game out of it. I know - I said this everytime but i think this time it is a great idea to do it.
I performed worse in most categories with this game - and ironically enough it seems that the less time I spend on a game during LD the better it scores =)
The speedrun competition finished at the same time as the LD43 voting and it was a very useful approach for bug testing. Four players in particular played between 100 - 400 runs each to set the fastest time during the past 3 weeks and when they found a multi-jump glitch they cut the time down to do sub-minute runs. This was the winning speedrun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P971qaGI3tc
This winning run made use of the multi-jump glitch, the suicide glitch (press R to go rag-doll, that I used during development for testing), the resource reset glitch (I forgot to reset resources to zero if you pressed "quit" instead of "continue".
Thanks to everyone for playing and rating Blót!
So my second complete Jam game, and first complete solo project has been rated. The results are middeling:
I'll be the first to admit that I agree that this solo entry didn't end up as good as last year's game, which was rated better too. That game, done with the help of a LD veteran, was more or less done after 2 days, with the third dedicated to polish. This year I was still working on the game late into the third day. I guess that's a lesson to take away for next time: Take that polishing time. I also noticed that even small bits of polish in terms of menu's or an intro of some kind can make an amazing amount of difference.
That said, even ignoring the polishing aspect, I'll also admit that this game felt less fun to play than my previous entry. As this game is based on an idea I have for the first "real" game I want to make, this is something to keep in mind. I may have to spend some more time working out how to implement this movement & fighting scheme to be more entertaining. That, or leave the game as a MVP that I'll just use as a practice run and give away for free.
So I don't really disagree with the ratings. I would have liked to see my Theme rating a bit higher, both because I overhauled my original idea for a game to better fit the sacrifice theme and because I kinda like it myself. That said, my subesequent rating spree has shown me that my "choose which skills to level down" idea wasn't exactly unique this jam.
Still, even with a mediocre end result, I am happy that I did manage to deliver a game within the deadline. My previous solo attempt for a last-minute compo entry was a failure. And since it appears increasingly likely that when I start working on my first big game project I'll have to work mostly alone, it's good to know that I can at least get some work done. I hope to get better work done in the future.
PS: Does anyone know where I can find the total number of rated games for comparison?
It has truly been an amazing jam, thanks to everyone who played and rated our game!
Here is a gameplay video:
http://youtu.be/JG6OZa0TRzY
A making-of video will follow - subscribe to the youtube channel if that's your kind of stuff!
http://youtube.com/Nyck0s
http://twitter.com/NyckosTweet
And Food Chainz did... Wait, 1st in Audio?!!
Seriously I never expected anything like this. My goal this time was just to finish a game. It's been about 6 years since I last completed a game jam without being at a real world gathering full of people to keep my butt motivated.
So that was really enough. I honestly never expected I would top rankings in Ludum Dare for anything.
The graphics score is of particular pride to me. Back when I started game jamming, my art was atrocious. It's been a long journey trying to improve it, so it's heartening to see... well, as solid number, saying people liked my art.
I'm rambling. Still kinda buzzing at the result. Thank you everyone who played and rated Food Chainz, and congratulations to everyone who took part!
thank's every one! one more time!
Thanks all for voting!
I haven't been able to play and rate many of the Ludum Dare games this time, so didn't think I would reach the 20+ required ratings, and yet I check and to my surprise I have! I'm so happy with these results! Thank you all, and see you next Ludum Dare! If you want to check out my game, it's called Ultimate Sacrifice.
I assume everyone shooting fireworks into the sky last night was out celebrating that AS OF YET UNNAMED ended up getting the best results we have gotten so far. :fireworks::champagne_glass:
Following up on the comparison chart trend, I figured compare the scores of our last seven entries since LD37. @DaanVanyperen had already taken part a bunch of times before in LD26 through to LD30 and LD33 (Oh my, that makes this 14 LDs in total. He's a grizzled veteran!), but I figured it makes most sense to only compare our collaborative efforts, and my first Ludum Dare was LD36 which didn't have ratings.
Direct link here.
As you can see, AS OF YET UNNAMED scored well in all categories. Innovation and Mood scored better in LD38/LD41 and LD39 respectively, but the numbers for this jam are putting a big smile on my face.
Not visible in this chart is how our average score for LD43 is a 4.247. Previously, our best average was a 3.976 for LD37's I CLEAN TOILET, so breaking through the 4-star barrier there definitely feels good.
Since we performed well across the board, I figure AS OF YET UNNAMED feels like a strong package overall, which may have elevated individual scores. We took a pretty obvious direction for the theme by having to protect the president, which is probably why Innovation is the lowest score this time, but I expected the rating there to actually be be lower. I think the over-the-top patriotism with red-white-and-blue confetti, balloons and balds eagles affected how our Innovation category was rated.
So I suppose the conclusion there is to make sure you shape all things in your game around the central theme as best as you can. We didn't opt for random arcade game music, but got an American-sounding marching tune. We implemented red-and-white striped transitions between rounds. If you have character customization in a game about sorcery, make sure your hat options are wizard's and witches' hats, you don't need baseball caps.
Next April I will definitely make sure to ask myself if the things I am adding onto our spritesheet reflect the core theme of the game. See you then!
Okay, so results are here. :smile:
And to be hones I am a bit surprised. Some scores scores ended up being lower than I expected, but some (if only marginally) better than my previous result even though I expected them to tank. So I will try to do some reflection on each individual score.
Overall 3.11 (vs 3.0 in LD42). This is the one result I expected to decrease, but it ended up improving. It's not like I though that the game was bad, but I got quite a handful of comments of people who got confused and didn't figure out how to play the game, and I didn't expect to get high overall scores. Also there were some things that I didn't finish, which would have made the game more playable - like an arrow being drawn when you select an attack and select target. Or a UI counter to show your current number of mana available as stacks of tokens were not always easy to read.
Fun 2.88 (vs 2.77 in LD39). Again - an unexpected increase, as a lot of people ended up not having fun, unfortunatelly. But I am still glad it is here. Most likely this and Overall encrease is due to some polish - like particle effects, and animations (which were simply lerping, but looked great).
Innovation 3.27 (same as LD39). At a glance I felt like this score was low, but apparently it was about the same as my best score so far. So it was Ok, i guess. Still the Innovation (and theme) are my Target scores, so I was hoping for more. :rolling_eyes:
Theme 3.5 (vs 4.08 in LD42) Again - I was hoping for a better score here. And in fact put of last 5 entries this score would be second to lowest, but on the other hand the score is also the highest of all categories so... I don't know. Guess this is just an indication that my games are becoming more consistent across the board, so this one aspect no longer stands out that much. So I will count it as a good sign.
Graphics 2.85 (vs 3.26 in LD42) This score is my most disappointing one. I put quite a lot of effort into making visuals for the game, but got the result way worse than last time. Then again while I have developed some pretty nice things, some aspects were missing (like the floor under the table). And the card design was not pretty. But at least I have learned some pretty important things while working on those graphics and next time I will likely do even better.
Audio 1.71 (vs 1.42 in LD42) Well, it looks like I managed to pull off a better quality of lack of sounds this time :sweat_smile: But yeah, there were no sounds created for the game and the only reason I didn't opt out of this category is to let people get more "coolness"points for their games by giving me a rating here. Even if it's just 1.
Humour 2.29 (vs 2.34 in LD39) Considering the only entry that beat my current score was the only one I actually did put effort into adding "funniness"into in form of pop-culture references, this score wasn't bad at all. Still the only reason I kept it on was same as Audio. So moving on.
Mood 2.44 (vs 2.58 in LD42) Again this is a perry low score compared with other game, but that was to be expected as I didn't go for any specific mood. Except for being confused by game not being obvious to jump into apparently. :smile:
So all in all - I am content with the results. For about half of the categories I got the best result to date. So this is definitely a sign of improvement, but still there are way to improve. A lot.
Anyway - I hope to see you all next LD, and make an even better game then. :smiley:
(My entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/protect-him)
For my first Ludum Dare, I'm pretty happy with the results. Most of the ratings are about what I expected, but 35th for fun was way higher than I thought I'd get for anything. I'm glad It's my highest though, I put the most effort into gameplay, and not a lot into graphics or presentation (my lowest rank).
Next time I'd like to try to balance things out more. Making good graphics has never been one of my strengths, so working more on that might be a good idea.
And ofc, there were a lot of really amazing entries. I'll put my favorites here, they deserve more attention: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/blueberry-bounce https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/impatient-patients https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/glow-it-alone https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/reactor-overdrive
One more time, Discorc is unbeatable
For my first LD game the votes are very positive! Thank you for playing, rating and great feedback! :muscle:
So. Ring of Sacrifice didn't do too well, but that was... somewhat expected seeing how it was both my first Jam and also based on my final product there. It could've been better, I could've spent more time on it. But, after all, sacrifices must be made. And unfortunately, time for polish had to be sacrificed.
There was a growing love interest in my life. And as much as I tried to say "Hey, I need this time with no distractions.", I ended being the one pulling myself away from working to talk to them. Sacrifices were made, and it was well worth it. Because during the rating process, I ended up in a relationship with said person, and I couldn't be happier. :two_hearts:
But now that things are stable... Hey, I just might be ready for a round two!
Overall: 343rd (3.622 average from 43 ratings)
Fun: 311th (3.524 average from 43 ratings)
Innovation: 319th (3.415 average from 43 ratings)
Theme: 194th (3.963 average from 42 ratings)
Graphics: 676th (3.195 average from 43 ratings)
Humor: 86th (3.89 average from 43 ratings)
Mood: 287th (3.61 average from 43 ratings)
I am honestly pretty happy with my results from my first Ludum Dare and am motivated to participate in the next one! Thank you to everyone who played and rated Ethical Smoothies Co!
This was the first time I participated in the compo. I joined some jams before with a team but somehow this was a completely different experience! By joining the compo I interacted a lot more with the community. I loved it. Thanks everyone! I got some good feedback and I loved reading the post-mortems!
I learned a lot in past jams and games I worked on. This one was no different. At the beginning of this compo I was not even sure if I would be able to even finish the game in 48 hours but once it started I went all in! It went really well and I managed to polish the game quite a bit. It seems all the polishing paid off and I am really happy with the scores! These are really great!
22nd overall, 14th on graphics, 40th on fun. Even the innovation, mood and theme scores are really good. I should probably have opted out of "Humor" though, meh... Thanks everyone for voting!
Looking at the ranking, the games above me and also the ones that ended up below me in the ranking are really really really good and I think I will try and play some of those still. :thumbsup: It is always good to get some inspiration. :smiley:
Beating these scores next time will be a serious challenge, but I am up for it! Happy New Year everyone and see you next Ludum Dare! :smile:
Hi everyone!
We got our results!
Nevertheless, it is a good result, it is one of the worst rated games by us (usually we are around 100 or somewhere near). At the same time, all the commentaries are pretty positive...
It would be great if you can show us our mistakes, so the next time we will make our next game much better. So don't be shy, write as much negative stuff as you can! Here is the link:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/hamster-druma
I got my results back, and they were a little disheartening. I thought my game this year was at least as good as in past years, and a really good fit for the theme, but my ratings were way, way lower than usual, especially in the "Overall" category. In my previous six entries, I've always been between 76th and 95th percentile in Overall, and this time I was 58th, despite the comments on the entry nearly all being more positive than in past years and the game being (I thought) better. Compounding that, I did significantly better than my average on the categories I'm usually worst in, i.e. graphics and sound.
It's almost like I got somebody else's ratings. Anybody else see this going on? I'm wondering what's up. Below is a graph of my ratings for the seven compos I've done, LD43 in the thick brown line.
Hi everybody !
We're really happy to have been placed 4th place overall. This game jam was really enjoyable for us. We felt like we expressed ourselves and made a game with a message; which was really important for us.
So we're glad that it resonated with people !
To celebrate, we've released a graphical update with new animations and some quality changes !
Click here to see the animated town center !
The wheat field has always been there but it's still really satisfying
Come and grab the update and tell us what you think of all these new animations !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/documentia
Hi all, Just had a look at my ratings.. actually pleased seeing as my first goal was to actually deliver a game - second was to not finish last... and I don't think I did - but are there any way of telling out of how many 482nd is? And yes I know it's probably a horrible rank :smile:
As you can see there are two different sets of results above. The top one is my game, the bottom is someone else's. As you can see in most of the categories he got a lower average star rating them me yet he placed better in the rankings. Eg. Overall I got 3.144 average stars and he got 2.714 yet I placed 748th in that category and he placed 456th. Am I missing something here? How come he placed better than me? If you know why, please could you say something in the comments. I'd be very greatful :smile:
Finally reached top 10 for once. Too bad LD will now only be twice a year. :slight_frown:
It has truly been an amazing jam, thanks to everyone who played and rated our game!
Here is a gameplay video:
http://youtu.be/JG6OZa0TRzY
A making-of video will follow - subscribe to the youtube channel if that’s your kind of stuff!
http://youtube.com/Nyck0s
http://twitter.com/NyckosTweet
Hey folks, how are you doing?
First of all, I would like to wish you a happy new year! I am pretty sure that we are going to have a very productive year, and I hope to see you on the next Ludum Dare(s ?)
Also, as always, I would like to give some short thoughts about my placement, and look a bit more coldly into I have created this Ludum Dare. So, for those of you who haven't seen my game, it is Raining Blood
So, this time I decided to go for a super ambitious project, an attempt to create a minimalistic management game about religious devotion!
I was definitely not going to create another platform this time, so I took the risk of creating something that probably would not fit in 48 hours alone hehe!
After twelve times taking place in Ludum Dare, it would never occur to me that this time I would get nervous. Given my last classification, with the game Dunk Em Up, where I ended up at first place in Compo, I was extremely afraid of not getting a higher performance this time, as I always did in the previous events.
I was not feeling confident enough and did not manage to play and more than a game this time. I also haven't posted about my game in the past three weeks. Which of course, lead me to get just a few ratings in my game. (of course, the low number of ranting may have distorted the results.)
I ended up not classifying for an actual position this time, but I am thankful for the average score I've got! Those are even higher than the ones that classified me into first place!
I just feel sorry that I haven't played and rated enough games this time.
Besides all that, I also would like to share with you a timelapse video that I've made and unfortunately haven't shown yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUuZpjnpEsA
It shows the entire development process of Raining Blood.
I hope you guys enjoy it! And thank you for another amazing year of great Ludum Dare competitions.
Thank you all for playing Love is Sacrifice. I will try to improve this title in next months. It was my first Ludum Dare game, so I think it's not that bad! :smiley:
I will surely participate in the next Ludum Dare jam! See you next time guys!
Ain't no bad results for a first try, isn't it ? :)
Proud to have participated in this event with this great community, thanks for all of your reviews !
See you next one !
You have 48 hours of adventuring time in a country you've never been to, and may never return. By random chance, There is a 48 hour game jam happening simultaneously. A sacrifice must be made: the game or the experience? Choose wisely.
...
Trick question! You can do both, poorly! Welcome to my Ludum Dare 43 entry for the theme "Sacrifices must be made". My game - Farm To Table - has you training your workers, breeding them to improve, and possibly grinding them up to make the tastiest burgers in the business!
The gameplay centers around selecting the lil' workers from the queue and assigning them to different tasks: farming, cooking, breeding, and, well, getting crushed into mince meat.
Through careful breeding you can create better cooks and farmers. But here's the rub: Thanks to their superior breeding, the best workers are also the tastiest! Naturally, the people in charge - the "steakholders" - require profit$ (and therefore burger quality) to be continually on the rise. Your business must maintain its status as a viable investment target.
("Here's the rub" is a thing people say, right? Sounds weird.) Anyway, that was supposed to be the idea. A difficult-but-enjoyable balance of inputs, transformations, and outputs.
In practice I ran out of time for the vital "balancing of the systems" part. So you are able to transform the inputs, but the outputs have exactly zero impact on the next round of inputs when they feedback. You can't actually make better burgers. In fact, your profits-from-sales aren't even tracked at all. Oops.
Still, I was pretty happy with the result. In Ludum Dare there are thousands of games for the players to rate. I figured that as long as it was fun-ish for players to try and figure out the controls (and the rules of the game) then it would still be ok. And really, most people won't play long enough to realise that there is no goal anyway!
...It was late Friday afternoon when I learned that LD would be commencing shortly. That was tempting - but there was no way I could justify wasting the entire weekend holed-up in my hotel room, instead of exploring my new surroundings in a beautiful new country... Could I?
Then the theme was announced. It was a good one. Plus, it was dark and cold outside. Certainly not a night for exploring. I'd just tinker on something for the evening, then start my outside-adventuring in the morning.
By the time morning rolled around I had yet to go to sleep. It seemed wise to put off adventuring - at least until the afternoon.
My Ludum Dare plan was to build a simple "economy game" because it's something I'd never done before. The thematic inspirations emerged from one of my favourite movies (Soylent Green), and one of my favourite Commodore 64 games (Mad Doctor).
Economy games need "sources", "syncs", and a way to transform them. In my economy, the sources are people and the syncs are the conveyor belts that create the burgers. You can transform the statistics of the inputs by breeding the best "outputs" to make even better "inputs".
To stop an uncontrolled positive feedback loop, it's required you sacrifice your best workers in order to create the tastiest burgers.
Although it wasn't all implemented, the final product turned out pretty close to my back-of-the-napkin sketch: so I'd say that was an achievement earned!
The build process began with a rough mock-up of the playfield in Aesprite. This was just a horribly rushed effort that would be replaced with real graphics later (spoiler: in Ludum Dare there is no "later". The graphics remained unchanged).
I liked the Mad Doctor style, and I also liked that it wouldn't be Yet Another Grid-based Game like nearly all my past Ludum Dare entries.
To turn the image into something playable I decided to go with Phaser3. Normally I like to use my own engine, or even start from scratch - but I'd been wanting to see what's new in Phaser and this seemed like a good way to find out.
Phaser takes a PHP-style kitchen-sink approach to API design: just add every feature you could possibly think of. Before you bother building something be sure to search the docs and see if it isn't already included out of the box. It might seem a bit in-elegant at times, but at 4am in the middle of the jam I was glad I didn't have to roll my own Phaser.GameObjects.RetroFont routine again.
Using unfamiliar tech in a Ludum Dare is usually asking for trouble, but in this case I kind of knew Phaser2 - and my game wasn't doing anything too crazy - so it turned out fine (frequent grumbling about documentation and mystery-meat factory methods aside).
I also wanted to make this game using plain ol' JavaScript. Well, plain new JavaScript at least. No build tools, no compile step, no traspilation, no npm, no dot files... just some HTML, a bit of CSS, and a bunch of JavaScript files.
This isn't as stupid as it sounds anymore, now that JavaScript Native Modules are supported nearly everywhere (even iOS and Android browsers). My only issue was that I only had Phaser3 as an old-school script file that would normally be included via a script tag, and be available as window.Phaser. To make it a bit nicer in my project I exported the object from another file:
import "./phaser.min.js";
export default window.Phaser;
Which allowed me to use it in my project like a regular import:
import Phaser from "./lib/phaser.js"
There's something I really like about the simplicity of a "plain-old-project". I love knowing that I will be able to run (and tinker with) this project in 10, 20 years time (like my first ever browser game, Some Adventure Guy, from 14 1/2 years ago!) - without having to try and resurrect some long-dead build tools and dependencies.
Thanks to an extended nap on Saturday (coupled with the crazy-early setting of a northern-hemisphere winter sun) I missed out on any real-life day-time adventuring. I did, however, get a system working for clicking and dragging my lil' peeps to the various sections of the world. I decided to write off Saturday as a no-tourist day - I'd get outside tomorrow. For sure.
In the mean time, I had a passable version of "conveyor belts" working... this was achieved by assigning a conveyor-belt-ish animation to a sprite after it was created. There's absolutely no logic - just an animation that moves it to its correct spot if nothing else is removed. So multiple items will often overlap and look bad. This bug was then placed on the "fix later" pile (spoiler: never fixed).
After adding the meat-grinder mechanic (and successfully pushing out a few cooked burgers) I decided to take a break from coding and do 15 minutes of sound effects. This turned out to be my favourite part of my LD entry.
Normally I make the sound effects and music on my home studio setup: some midi gear, Ableton Live, and all of my plugins. Being on the road I had none of my usual sound-making arsenal, so some improvisation was necessary!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsIcRauR3ZM
A hotel shower, an apple, and a good old-fashion mouth-pop resulted in the horrifically-perfect and unsettling sound effect. The rest of the audio: music and sound effects - were done under extreme time pressure, moments before I submitted - and were crap. But the bone-crushing grinder sound effect was perfect!
By Sunday I'd all but given up on sight-seeing and had gone all-in on Ludum Dare. But there was an issue: less than 6 hours remaining and the project was in a bad state. The controls were completely un-learnable, the burger-making progression system was overly complex and opaque, there were no instructions, and everything was absolutely confusing to anybody who wasn't me.
Sensing the train-wreck ahead, it was time for a sharp detour.
I would sacrifice the entire point of the game in order to have something that might possibly be "confusing-but-in-a-good-way" for new players. As long as it was kind of fun to figure out the controls - the player would feel a bit clever, and hopefully not notice there was no actual game. That was the new plan.
Ruthlessly I ripped out the mechanic that defined the game: being able to manually adjust a worker's stats using XP points you earned by cooking tastier burgers. By doing this, I could greatly simplify the control system. Now "hover" would display stats and single-left-click'n'drag would move workers. That was it.
I asked a stranger at the hotel cafe if they would kindly test a game where you mince up people into meat patties. They were surprisingly happy to help out, and they fairly quickly figured out they needed to drag and drop the little people around. The simplification had worked, and I had something passable!
And there was still two hours remaining in the competition. Plenty of time to re-balance the game by tweaking the breeding system, and reworking the burger-ranking system I tore out earlier. I could see exactly what I needed to do to make the game playable!
But sacrifices must be made.
Although it pained me to stop so close to the finish line, I made a tough executive decision. I would use the last two hours of weekend daylight - sacrificing the last two hours of Ludum Dare #43 - to traverse a breathtaking suspension bridge, that crossed a giant ravine, leading into the heart of a wonderland rain-forest. I'd be tourist.
I submitted the game, pushed my code to GitHub, and jumped in cab...
The final product was not really a game, it wasn't very polished, it didn't have good music, it wasn't particularly fun to play... but it was one of my favourite Ludum Dare entries so far.
I loved the weird graphical style, the hand-made sound effects, and the general "oddness" of it. I had an idea of what I wanted it to be, and it turned out pretty close to what was in my head. In the end it was the gamedev equivalent of jazz music: I had more fun creating it than others will have consuming it. I'm fine with that.
So, was my sacrifice (giving up a once-in-a-lifetime weekend of adventuring) worth the stress and panic of trying to make a bad game vaguely playable at the zero-hour? Who can say... but see you for Ludum Dare #44!
