Hey hey :) This has been honestly unexpected, but this was our best entry so far!

The timing was really close for this one, since we had to work on Monday. Props to Utho for rating so many games while I was sick in bed afterwards, lol. This also was Mailus' first time doing a Ludum Dare and he really gave the characters and weapons great character.

There were a couple of things we could have done better for sure. For example not just spending 50 minutes on the actual level creation. Having some better ball physics, better enemy distribution etc... there was some actually funny stuff planned beforehand that didn't make it in. Some mechanics had also to be cut...

Thanks to everybody who participated, hope to see you next time with even better games!

• Utho, Mailus, Saiodin

Thanks for the votes on my game, got my highest score yet!

I updated my game for windows (not HTML yet)

Try the game here: https://jiri-one.itch.io/daunting-dungeons

Devlog: https://jiri-one.itch.io/daunting-dungeons/devlog/34273/update-out-on-windows

The results are in.

Thanks so much for all of the ratings, we never thought we'd get ratings this high! Thanks for all of the feedback and nice comments you fellas have left.

We'll also use this post to mention we have a full version in the works coming soon to the Itch.io page, with some of the most requested features, including:

Tower descriptions and stats viewable in game!

Visible attack ranges for towers when placing them!

An option to swap the camera to the top down view at any point in game!

The full version will be released here: https://newhia.itch.io/toppen-ultimate-anime-defense

And if you haven't yet, feel free to check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/toppen-ultimate-anime-defence

(both the Ludum Dare version and full version will be available to download from the Itch.io page upon the full version's release.)

Ludum Dare 41 has come and gone and the results are in! While there is definitely a lot of room for improvement, I'm happy that my first game jam resulted in a playable game that people enjoyed overall!

Postmortem

The theme of this jam was "Combine 2 Incompatible Genres". Participants were given 72 hours to create a game incorporating this theme. My initial ideas for genre combinations and basic mechanics were:

• Typing/Runner: Typing letters/words correctly makes the player run
• Typing/Racing: Typing makes the car accelerate
• Puzzle/Shooter: Clearing blocks kills enemies
• Memory/Shooter: Matching cards earns ammo

I opted for my fourth idea and adapted it to be a Memory Card/Zombie Survival game.

What Went Right

• The game was completed and submitted on time
• The genre combination worked well
• Core mechanics were implemented, fully functional, and provided a challenging gaming experience

What Went Wrong

• The scope had to be dialed way back to finish on time
• Omission of in-game controls/instructions left some players unsure of how to play
• A couple of nasty bugs slipped through testing (patched post-release)

Conclusion

This was a great learning experience! Being my first game jam, I didn't have a solid idea of how much I could accomplish in such a limited time frame. I had planned on adding many things such as multiple enemy types, weapons, animations, a scrolling level, etc., that ultimately didn't make it into the submission. In my haste, I also forgot to include in-game controls and instructions. I thought the user interface was intuitive enough for players to grasp the mechanics but a few reviews reinforced to me the importance of explicitly presenting these details.

I plan to make Deck of the Dead into a fully featured release after I wrap up my current project, Bud Blitz. I'll likely target mobile platforms as I think they would be best suited for this type of game. The knowledge gained and feedback received from this game jam are invaluable and will help to make the next iteration of Deck of the Dead an even more entertaining and challenging experience.

I'd like to thank everyone that played and rated Deck of the Dead and tip my hat to all my fellow indie developers that participated in LD41. I look forward to seeing you all in LD42 in August!

Postmortem source

Play Deck of the Dead

Read it!

The Results and thruth are in - i made a comparsation from my recent LD's Results.

Well this was the first time i made it for the Compo (as i had enough time - i thought :).

Comparing to the results: First to everyone : try to be positive and see the positive. There are many games submitted and the feedback is respectful from developer to developer.

Second: it is not so good as Wonderland (which i will still working on it ;)) but i had some points where i got better (and even some points where i made big mistakes).

What was good

• I got better in Graphics in the results
• I reached 400 in Audio ..this is reaaaally good as it was the very first time i made music for a game (or generally made a small music track for it)

What was bad

• Gameplay Mechanics was too bad - the cause for this was that i used a player control which i didnt tried out before.
• Didn't playtest it really much
• The "open world" which was too big and the game was too hard to beat.
• I had too much to cancel from the feature list to make the really good
• Aaaand the theme sucked really hard this time ;)

Conclusion

There are some things which i really learned from it. - I draw my first anime character in my life :) - I made a compo game in under 48h - But i dont plan to make PostJAM Updates to the game (which doesnt mean that i do it - i just dont plan it currently)

I still love Ludum Dare Game Jams (and its a pitty that i'am probably in holiday for LD42 - so i probably cannot make a game then).

This is a reflection on the results of my LD41 submission War Maker:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/war-maker

Results

Final results

Overall: 842nd (3.197 average from 35 ratings)

Fun: 820th (3.045 average from 35 ratings)

Innovation: 813th (3.091 average from 35 ratings)

Theme: 1007th (2.924 average from 35 ratings)

Graphics: 1056th (2.297 average from 34 ratings)

Humor: 467th (3.081 average from 33 ratings)

Mood: 744th (3.094 average from 34 ratings)

Honestly, when I saw these results, I was a bit shocked. They're not bad, considering the very large number of submissions. But they're not what I was hoping. More importantly than the rankings themselves, the actual average ratings were much lower than I anticipated. Almost all 3.0, with one 2.3 in there acting like salt in the wound.

To be fair, I don't actually care about many of the categories. I expected to do worse in theme, not because my game didn't adhere to the theme, but because due to the changes I made during development, my game doesn't really feel like 2 separate genres, and I never explicitly told players which genres I was mixing. It was supposed to be tower defense mixed with an arcade mode where you control both sides and try to maintain the balance as long as possible for a high score. Unfortunately, I had to cut a lot of features due to annoying bugs which really reduced the feel of tower defense. This also hurt innovation. I opted out of audio, because I used licensed background music. Mood is already a vague category. My graphics, although nicer than I originally anticipated thanks to JavaFX's wonderful effects, were still very "primitive" (pun intended, as I used actual shape primitives exclusively). Obviously, all these categories were going to drag down my overall score.

But when it came to fun and humor specifically, I felt I nailed it out of the park. Despite the visual bugs and other problems with the game (it's easily the most hideous code I've ever written; please DO NOT look at the game's source code on GitHub, lol), early reviewers were praising the game for being fun and encouraging them to compete for high scores. I had some pretty hardcore players who were putting in the time and effort to beat my developer high score. And everyone said the story made them laugh. The music choice was so good and tied everything together. I even hooked myself on my own game. I found myself wanting to play my own game instead of rating other people's games quite often. Compared to my previous jam game, this game was far less polished/complete, but far more fun and humorous.

So how did it score only a 3.0 in fun and humor? Well, I think this game is a perfect cautionary tale about survivor bias. It's very easy to look at winners and assume that if you copy them, you will win, and if you don't, you will lose. But sometimes, you have to dig deeper to find the truth. After everything I've heard from players and experienced in my own play testing, I truly believe I have a hidden gem on my hands, and I definitely plan to return to War Maker and turn this into a franchise. There is so much more I could do with this concept, and it has the potential to result in some great games that I believe can be commercially viable. However, if I were to consider only the ratings, I'd probably be discouraged and walk away.

I think the truth is, I did not get the right people to play my game. I don't mean I should have paid for fake reviews or anything like that. However, every game has a target market. Very few if any games will appeal to ALL players. Flappy Bird and Grand Theft Auto have very different target markets, and you can find gamers who hate either of those games, yet they are both massive success stories. In the case of War Maker, it's very clear that there was a massive gap in ratings between the hardcore fans and other players. While I will likely never know the exact distribution of scores individual players gave, I know some gave really encouraging praise, and I'm fairly certain they rated the game 4+ on at least those 2 categories, fun and humor. So there must have been a good number of people also scoring the game 2- in those categories.

Now, I don't want to list names or sound like a sore loser, but I did get to see firsthand what happens when you put your games into the wrong hands. There was a streamer who was offering to play games, and I put my game on this streamer's list. Unfortunately, they were selecting games randomly rather than in order of submission, so I ended up waiting an entire day to get my game played. When they finally played it, they barely gave it the time of day, let alone the attention it deserved. They spent all of maybe 4 minutes in the game, but only about 45 seconds of that was actually spent playing the game, and they had no idea how to play. It was embarrassingly bad coverage, and the streamer was clearly not enjoying my game. Which is fine, they're absolutely not obligated to enjoy every game I make. But it was just such a sharp contrast when compared to the hardcore fans.

Unfortunately, I think this is just a case of the game getting in the wrong people's hands. I know the game deserved better. But I didn't promote it at all. I just rated other people's games and hoped they would rate mine. This works for getting enough ratings to be ranked, but just like in the real games industry, you're so much better off marketing to a core target audience. Trying to market your children's educational game to an elderly man who plays action games just isn't going to cut it in the grand scheme of things. That's not to say there aren't areas I could have improved in. With another couple of hours, the most important next step on my list would have been a proper tutorial, because a lot of people struggled to learn how to play my game, despite it being as simple as they come. That was my fault, and I recognize that completely. I really wanted to make a tutorial, but ran out of time. But even considering that, I know my written and verbal feedback suggested more than a 3.0, and there's a valuable lesson in marketing to be learned from that.

The theme was my big surprise! Overall I am really happy with the results.

Thanks to every one who played and rated my game.

Now it is time to make a post-Jam version.

If you haven’t yet, you can check out my game here. Any feedback is still much appreciated!

Also you can check my others games here. And follow me on twitter, there is not much there yet tho. :smile:

Hello everyone. Based on the very good and insightful feedback I got during the rating period, I made a small post jam update: - All bugs (that I am aware of) are fixed - Added a title screen - Press X changed to > Press any key - Added various visual effects (particles, +150 score, etc) - You no longer loose life when moving on empty cells - At the start of the level you get +1 life (before that, the amount of life at the start of the level was calculated like this: 11-level) - You get +1 life for each cell matched above 3. (ex. match 3: +1, match 4: +2, etc) - Unmovable blocks are occasionally spawning.

* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/pretty-crowded-dungeon *

The gameplay modifications are making giving more freedom for the players, and it makes the unsolvable levels less frequent. I didn't change the way the level are generated yet, because that's a big part and I need more time to work on it. The game probably need to get some new mechanics to spice up the difficulty, because now it's almost endless...

Didn't expect it to do so well! Thank you!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchcraft

This LD is maybe finished, but we are continuing to develop Poker-Man !

3D environment creation is completed ! UI is adapted to this new perspective. Now creating new 3d models for the character and enemies ! Tonight and tomorrow : shop and power-ups

For more updates :
Twitter

Gamedev Blog

Facebook

I've heard about Ludum Dare for years. I always heard it was a really inclusive community that emphasized making new and interesting games. Unfortunately, today has proven to me that although most participants still follow that philosophy and just want to make awesome games, there is an unfortunately non-negligible portion of the community around LD that is in it for some misunderstood glory, they're salty, and willing to play dirty to get it.

2 weeks prior to LD41, I joined a game development community because they were hosting a game jam open to beginners. I had dabbled in game development for years, but never actually finished a project, so I decided to take the leap. I joined, participated, and made my first game. It was fantastic. I felt amazing. Such a sense of accomplishment. So when LD41 came around 2 weeks later, I decided to try my hand at the jam again. This was my first LD, and I'm officially vowing never to participate again.

That community has been very supportive. It's posted advice videos online daily for over a year. It's done feedback streams. It's hosted interviews and conferences. All kinds of great information and resources to help a newbie like me finally make the leap into game development. Naturally, we play and rate a lot of each other's games. I mean, there were like over 3k submissions to LD41 after all. You have to start somewhere! As far as I can tell, people ask for ratings from friends all the time. They even ask in blog posts on the LD home page. Asking for ratings is very much normal behavior. You have to market your game if you want it to stand out from the crowd.

Surprisingly, one of our fellow members won in several categories, and did exceptionally well. It was a fantastic game that I loved and gave a perfect score. I should have never mentioned that I gave it a perfect score, because that information would later be twisted out of context to be used as evidence of cheating. Apparently, many people are upset that the game won in several categories. Players are going out of their way to ask streamers and content creators to talk bad about the game and accuse the developer of cheating. Does it look suspicious? Sure, the game snuck into the rankings with only 20 ratings. And I did post that I gave the game a perfect score despite its primitive nature. But to be suspicious of somebody and to outright accuse them of cheating and insult them in front of others are entirely different things.

I gave 5 games perfect scores. All 5 of those were from our community. Pretty good evidence, right? Wrong. Consider that maybe 25 out of the 30 games I reviewed were also from our members, and I did not give most perfect scores. Also consider that the 5 games I gave perfect scores ranked very highly with the LD41 community at large, so there is a strong correlation between my ratings and the results. This is what happens when you put all your faith in stats without understanding the underlying mechanisms. You extrapolate false truths. Which is bad enough as it is, but then to have the gall to go on some with hunt crusade attacking innocent community members who didn't even participate? Inexcusable.

Somehow, me liking a game has brought into question the integrity of lots of good fellow game developers, many of whom didn't even participate in this event, because people can't fathom why I would disagree with their ratings. Maybe because games are entertainment media, which appeal to people differently?

In my opinion, the loud minority of salty people who are angry they didn't win and can't accept that people have different opinions have soured this otherwise great event for me, and I can no longer agree to participate. Maybe once upon a time, Ludum Dare was about making games. Heck, it might've been that as recently as LD40. But LD41 is not that. It's not the score system which has been corrupted. It's people's dark hearts.

Hi Folks!

Firstly, congratulations on all your games. The ones I played and the streams I watched showed some pretty amazing diversity and imagination. Love it.

As for my results, I'm pretty happy and a little surprised.

I knew before I even started that the weakest areas of my game would be the art assets. I'm not an artist and I always have intentions of setting aside time to do decent assets/music/UI but I never seem to do it. In fact, I'm surprised my graphics, audio and mood got anywhere near the mid-2s. People were also very generous in the humor (that's humour for us Australians) given that the only funny thing in the game was a lame Math.floor() joke.

I'm surprised to come in 149th in the Theme category - I honestly felt like people wouldn't consider "maths game" to be a genre.

I'm really happy to get 225th and 310th for Innovation and Fun respectively. Given the lack of mood and graphical shenanigans to support the game, it shows me that the core gameplay had something going for it.

Overall, I'm really happy with my LD41 experience. I learned a lot, "finished" a game and got excited to make more games in the future. What more can you ask for?!

Team Whales and Games is, once again, very happy for the reception that we got with Wizsnooks, our game of pool with extra steps. It's our second game to make it to 100 Overall ratings, and I'd say that we got very encouraging results!

Our highlight this time around was Innovation. Based on ratings, it's by far out most innovative game! Who knew that there were things yet to add to an old classic genre of games. There's still things we can improve, like always, and we'll continue to strive to do bigger and new games as time goes by.

We're glad that so many talented people made it through the rating period. We played some amazing games, like @sebastianscaini and co's Super Slime Slasher Ultra, which actually got me to draw a bit of crossover fanart of sorts.

On a more personal note, I'd like to thank the team for being a team at working as a team! Go, team, go! Game couldn't have been possible without @kroltan's vision and programming, along with @RobinHoodPT's headbangeriffic tracks and design support. I'd like to also extend my thanks to @JorgeGameDev for additional management support, and @PonchoGuy for emotional support.

This was an excellent jam, and we're hoping to seeing more of you in the future. If you'd like to chat, come check our Discord server. And if you'd like to read our post-mortem or other articles of interests, I'll link to them below. But for now, this will be it. Whales And Games wishes you the best! Kudos! :whale:

Learn more about Wizsnooks' development by checking our Whales and Games' posts!

• Wizsnooks - The Wizardly World of Post-mortening, by @Moski
• A knight in a wizard's snooker game, by @Moski
• Snooker your way into the Music of Wizsnooks!, by @RobinHoodPT
• Getting the Ball Rolling in Wizsnooks: Hopefully a Success Story, by @Kroltan
• My role as the artist of Wizsnooks, by @Moski
• About making assets and bad guys, by @Moski
• A wordcloud, brought to you by ~~the collective histeria of the Ludum Dare community~~ @RobinHoodPT
• A Star Wars May the 4th post by @Moski. Not exactly informative either, but might be interesting.

want to ask you. what kind of my prototypes is more interesting for you! try them and rate them on this link, please! Thank you for attention. Hope for understanding :)

https://goo.gl/forms/Gmai1mcDsnLQo6XW2

My ratings say that the game is, say, 480th in humor. Which, by the way, makes absolutely zero sense to me because it's a goddamn Tetris variant. The concept of humor doesn't even apply here, not any more than ranks in (imaginary) categories like "Helps against malaria" or "Important for the middle eastern politics".

But anyway, it's 480th out of how many? All ~3k games in LD41? ~1k games in LD41 Compo? However many of those were rated (I guess something 700-ish)?

I wrote a postmortem article for my LD41 game, Monster Stew. It's on my web site, and I was going to crosspost it here... but it's 11,000 characters long, which is much longer than anything else I've seen in this blog. I don't want to spam it up, so I'll put my conclusion here and link to the rest of the post at the bottom. IMO, this is the most interesting part of the article anyway.

I think one of the most interesting psychological aspects to creating art is that we always come up with different criticisms of our own work depending on what phase of creation we’re in. Putting it in front of an audience triggers deeper examination and, if it’s still possible, fine-tuning, for instance.

I decided to wait until LD41 ended and scores were made public before writing this postmortem. And, well, I was disappointed with my scores. But that also made me think hard about what my goals were, and to try to remember that the main goals are to just build something and have fun!

So, by that criteria, it was a complete success.

But… seeing the scores, seeing which games did well, really made me think about how to treat a game jam as a game design exercise. The winning games are generally very simple from a technology perspective, so all the cleverness is in the game design itself.

One reason I decided to use a lot of new stuff for LD41 was that I don’t feel proficient enough in Unity’s 2D toolset (which I’ve been using to build my longer-term project Moustachevania) or in any other game engine for it to be too much of a time advantage to use that, so I figured I might as well learn something new anyway. A lot of the people who enter Ludum Dare seem to be seasoned developers who are very comfortable with the technology they use so LD is, for them, almost entirely an exercise in design and execution, with little to no part of it being about struggling with the tools or tech.

I don’t have a prescriptive takeaway from that. My advice is to just know what your goals and limitations are, and to try to build a game that fits within both. It’s just fine to fumble around in something new and build something you barely consider a game, and it’s also fine to pick up a technology you know incredibly well and can be productive with.

I won’t be able to enter the next Ludum Dare because it overlaps with the Outside Lands music festival, which I attend every year with my awesome wife. But LD41 will definitely not be my last game jam. It was a great experience, and I recommend it to anyone who builds or wants to build games.

And here's the full article: http://www.aaronnemoyten.com/2018/05/17/ld41-postmortem-part-2-building-and-reflecting/

Thanks to everyone who rated and gave feedback, and thanks to everyone who made the awesome games I played and rated, and to all of you who made games that I didn't get to rate but were awesome anyway. It was really inspiring to be a part of this.

Following LD41 my mind has been totally sold on low-poly so I couldn't help but boot up Blender again and make a car and a racetrack. For 25 years (no joke) I've been considering making a top down racer and I got close with my old project CTCC, later renamed to Performa Cars, which I finally released as a freeware due to not finishing before technology outran my 2D implementation of the time.

I will continue to mess around with this prototype and see if inspiration and time allows it to become a proper game =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq90lN1VnV8

In this video clip I am just doing a lap and a half and I do manual shifting - I like how that gives you the ability to downshift before corners and "scandi flick" the tail end out.

I am Swedish... and 42 years old... so I had to model a Volvo 242 Turbo to be true to my old Swedish roots!

https://youtu.be/WA7FO-6hrHg

Seems the result is not bad, but I hope I can make it better.

Play it here

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ld41-life-jumper-text-adventure3d-platformer

Post-Compo Version

I have replaced the LD version of Dear Clicker with a post-compo version with significantly cheaper upgrades (less clicking) and a speedrun timer (more replayability)

Play here: https://blubberquark.itch.io/dear-clicker

As you can see, you can now comfortably beat this game in under 10 minutes and with under 2000 clicks.

Rating Results

I was somewhat happy with my Ludum Dare 41 results, because this game is kind of obscure: Riffing on two other games, not fun, comedic but not laugh-out-loud funny, deliberately bare-bones. I made lot of things bad and weird on purpose: Invisible walls, jumping, empty areas. I felt that the slow walking speed, sparseness of the level layout and the absence of meaningful interactions called attention to the linear, gamified structure of Dear Esther, and I wanted to replicate that in an exaggerated way. If you don't know Dear Esther, this game is just weird and slow.

Nonetheless, this is the best I have ever hit the theme, and a good overall score. I was expecting far worse for such a meta, high-context joke game.

Postmortem

On the morning of day 1, I thought about themes. My first idea was to cross a social sim with a metroidvania, like in Persona, but you have to hang out with friends to get the double jump. I had thought about this idea before (somebody please make this!), but it was too ambitious.

Instead, I went with walk sim and clicker, two genres with lots of free time and waiting, and an emphasis on subtext and slow discovery. I generated an island with my trusty lowpoly-island-generation script, loaded the island into Wings3D, and sculpted a path. Then I re-sculpted the mountains around the path until it looked nothing like what my script had produced in the first place.

I had a sore throat (it's better now) and a German accent (still there), so I sent out a "casting call" to my internet friends to record poems, and researched poems that fit the theme of the game.

On the afternoon of day 1, I loaded the island into Unity3D and started coding up the clicker game part. At first I added clickable buttons to the UI layer, but my first hacky prototype that used keyboard keys for buying upgrades looked better and was easier to use than having a split-screen where the mouse is used for looking around on one half of the screen and for buying things on the other.

On the morning of day 2, I added the first poems recorded by my voice-actors to the game, and uploaded an in-progress prototype for feedback. I played through the game several times to get the costs of the upgrades right, but it turns out I aimed much too high. I modelled some clicker game paraphernalia, and put them into the game.

On the evening of the second day, I integrated the last bits of voice acting, uploaded the finished game, and went to bed on my usual schedule.

What went right:

• Scope If anything, this idea was too small. I could accomplish everything I set out to do.
• Game Idea It fit the theme really well, and nobody else had the same idea!
• Tools I used Wings3D to edit the static meshes, Emacs to edit the code, and Audacity to cut up the sound files. Unity3D fit my game idea. Unity3D can be overkill for jam games, and the data structures of Unity can get in the way of just drawing stuff on the screen (use Löve or PyGame instead), but for a first-person exploration game, it was perfect.

What went wrong:

• Audio Quality I had talked to the voice actors on Discord and didn't think it was a problem at first, but a couple of them had really bad audio quality in comparison and had to be cut from the final game. One of the poems in the compo version sounded much too quiet.
• No background music/ambiance I didn't want the poems, which can be triggered at any time in the game, to be overshadowed by chirping bird or the sound of waves. I didn't add background music because I didn't know how much poems I would get in the end. The compo version has a lot of silence. The result is too sterile.

What could have gone better:

• Game Balance The game definitely required too many clicks.
• Visual Style Not enough going on, no exciting vistas.
• Game Idea I vastly overestimated how many of you have played Dear Esther.

Call For Participation

Dear Clicker is not quite done. The next version will address the sound issues. I would like to add more poetry to the game, a bit of randominsation and scatter more weird 3D artefacts in the landscape. If would like to read a poem for the next post-compo version of Dear Clicker, please comment below!