I'm happy with these scores - I still have much to learn, so 588th is higher than I had expected :)

I'll keep working on this game on my free time, because I really liked the idea.

I've uploaded the current version on Gamejolt and Itch.io

Before

Now

P.S: I'm glad at least one of the other FPS Match 3 games, Dyeswap, managed to be at the top: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dyeswap (overall 19th)

Pretty happy with my results. Thanks to those who played and rated my game, I am Tree; the feedback was awesome. :) Hopefully I'll continue my upward trend in the next LD!

So my overall rank is 940th-ish and I was just wondering if I made my goal to be in the top 50%.

Congratulations to all of the submissions! This LD was amazing, We have shared an amazing experience together We tried our best to make the most incompatible game genres that we could ever imagine and had fun improving ourselves!

I hope to see you guys again Next Ludum Dare!

Thanks to all the Support on Incompatible Rally

Final Results:

Incompatible Rally Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2coMUolMWmo

LD Link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/incompatible-rally

Official Website : https://IncompatibleRally.JanaGamesStudios.com

Keep in touch

My Twitter : https://twitter.com/Seifeddine_H

Jana Games Studios Twitter : https://twitter.com/JanaGamesStudio

Jana Games Studios E-Mail : Contact@JanaGamesStudios.com

Jana Games Studios Website : https://www.JanaGamesStudios.com

Omg, I was totally expecting to score low 3s in most categories with my game, but to get 41st overall, 14th in theme and 4TH IN INNOVATION!?!? I'm kinda blown away! I never thought I'd do this well, especially for my first LD. I was just happy to finish a game and be proud of it, but the feedback, both positive and constructive, from the wonderful community and getting a chance to see what others created made LD just a whole other level of cool! Now seeing these results? I'm ecstatic! This was a wonderful ride and I can't wait to do it again in August!

Thanks to all who gave me feedback and congrats to everyone for all the cool entries!

We are honestly, genuinely surprised at how well this went, especially since this is our first Ludum Dare entry, for everyone on the team.

Thanks everyone for your support and for trying this game out. We're definitely making plans to make something bigger out of this, even if just as a simple extension of the original game.

If you haven't had a chance to try it out, here's the link to the game itself.

https://davidsheadgames.itch.io/helsing

And here's a link to the Ludum Dare entry. Feedback is still much appreciated, especially as we start to set our eyes on making something larger than the original concept.

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

The stakes are high!

Thanks to you all for my first Ludum Dare experience and your feedback!!!

Final results

Overall: 520th (3.5 average from 31 ratings)

Fun: 647th (3.259 average from 31 ratings)

Innovation: 259th (3.714 average from 30 ratings)

Theme: 493rd (3.714 average from 30 ratings)

Graphics: 640th (3.393 average from 30 ratings)

Audio: 408th (3.308 average from 28 ratings)

Humor: 207th (3.607 average from 30 ratings)

Mood: 481st (3.407 average from 29 ratings)

I would like to refactor the game a bit now that Ludum dare is over (e.g. make controls easier to make it more fun to play) so if you still want to play and comment your feedback you are very welcome!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bridging-the-gap

I'm super happy, 38 in audio, 51 in graphics, 72 in overall!

I know that it's always a worry that people have severely bent or broken the rules to rise to the top of compo. But when people straight up admit to breaking the rules, should we not do something about it?

Respect to the creator of "YOU LEFT ME" I'm sure they worked hard on the game. But I have to point out, it was submitted to compo despite the itch description stating that the music was not original.

They opted out of the audio category, but that applies to the jam, the compo rules state

"Your game, all your content (i.e. Art, Music, Sound, etc) must be created in 48 hours."

I don't mean to single out this game, there may be others like this. It's just that this game was at the top for mood and graphics, so I noticed it.

I know that ludum dare isn't taken incredibly seriously by everyone, but rules should still be followed for the sake of sportsmanship.

Should games like this not be disqualified from being submitted into compo?

It's already disheartening to wonder if the top games really followed the rules and deserve to be there. It's even more disheartening to know for sure that some games are not following the rules.

In an ideal world, it would be nice to look at the top games and feel inspired, rather than skeptical.

I did better than last time (except graphics where I last time got place 32, but that's understandable since this time I did not focus on graphics). My goal was to get score better than 50% in every genre, and I guess I did (I don't know how many compo entries there were this time, but last time it was over a thousand, so I guess it was about the same amount this time, too EDIT: 1,031).

I still have some room for improvement in innovation and theme, but hey, I got much better score in those than the last time! My goal for next Ludum Dare: get in top 200 in both theme and innovation (probably won't happen, but that's a good goal!)

(I was supposed to opt out the humor, but apparently I forgot)

The most important lesson I learned in this Ludum Dare:

It does not matter what engine/programming language you use as long as you know your tool better than your pockets.

I first thought that I cannot compete Unity and Game Maker developers because they can create content so fast. I wrote my game in C using a self-written 2D software renderer, but since I had a lot of experience in C and I knew my engine very well, I managed to make a game that did pretty well.

So, I'll be using C next time, too!

I can't believe I'm in the top 50 in four categories! ;;

Leaving the scores apart, I'm extremely happy with what I've done in this jam. Not only the game, but all the interaction with the community and their projects. It's been wonderful.

I'd like to post a list of my fav games of this LD, so if you still want me to play yours, it's not too late!

So... Those lines are trying to go up, just like that snake.

Looks like theme is my best category in general, but my last entry lacked some key features, so the relation to the theme wasn't very clear.

Puzz Snake gave me the best results so far in every category and top 100 in fun! But I've just checked the comments of my LD31 entry again and... You know what? I'm really glad there was people who enjoyed it! There were things that clearly should be improved though.

Anyway, surviving and learning, that's Ludum Dare. But don't forget to enjoy it! :smile:

When you consider that over 3,000 games were submitted, and around 1,900 got ranked, that's a phenomenal result for my first-ever Ludum Dare. Thank you so much to everyone who played and rated my game - and congratulations, as well! Everyone worked so hard, and submitted such amazing games.

My results in full:

(you guys really did hate that shooting sound effect, huh?)

I'm aiming to release Love is a Battlefield DX before the end of the month. Look forward to it - and look forward to LD42! I know I am.

Not bad for my first LD jam, and for a game that I completed quickly in 2 hours. (I had paid work to do) :P

I got a lot of great feedback from the users, so I'm satisfied, and looking forward to finish the new version.

I saw a couple of users that got 1st position overall, it gave me a lot of light on the quality of the games. Also I noticed that many submissions were for Windows users, so I couldn't test them. :(

It has been a wonderful jam and results are my best so far

Thank to anyone who played and voted The Long Walk!

Making Rhythm Overdrive was a really fantastic adventure, and bring it even further is what we want to do now, with all your awesome feedback !

Thanks you all, and see you in a few months with a revamped, better, more complete version of the game ;p !

> Rhythm Overdrive page

Overall: 495th (3.152 average from 35 ratings) Fun: 487th (3.03 average from 35 ratings) Innovation: 185th (3.662 average from 36 ratings) Theme: 264th (3.765 average from 36 ratings) Graphics: 628th (2.455 average from 35 ratings) Audio: 473rd (2.328 average from 34 ratings) Humor: 502nd (2.121 average from 31 ratings) Mood: 553rd (2.578 average from 34 ratings)

With my highest rated category falling in the top ~9.7%, and my worst in the top ~33.1% I'm quite happy with the results. It was quite fun participating in my first game jam, and for the time I had free to work on it I came away feeling satisfied and excited to continue work independent of jams as well as a feeling of anticipation for the next Ludum Dare!

Thanks to everyone who played my game and left feedback!

The results are here, and I see that my skills are getting so much better from my last LDs! My graphical skills and audio making skills upgraded so much from my last jam, which is so cool!(I had * 3 average in graphics * and * 2.5 in audio *, last time)

And I can't believe I am from the top 100 hundred in a category(HUMOR)!

Very happy with them, hope you are so and that you learned somthing from this jam!

So the results are in and the lights are fading LD 41 into history as we start to look forward to LD42 in August. This was my 6th consecutive Ludum Dare but LD36 was not scored so I have five entries with results to reflect upon.

I didn't by any means make any top scores in individual categories but all categories combined I see a slight improvement. I was hoping for a better score in graphics as my Robot Power game made #9 in LD39.

The most disappointing trend I see is that my entries are becoming increasingly more boring as the "Fun"-category is dropping - that must be addressed as that is arguably the most important category for a successful game =)

I value the feedback that I received and I look forward to applying lessons learned to LD42 :) Have a great summer everyone and see you all in August!

Thanks for playing and rating Golf N' Grenades!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epsdrbSEAp4

Very glad you like our little project! We definitely try to go further with this concept between symbols matching and shoot'em up. :D

Thanks everyone and for those who didn't already play => Line'em up is still available HERE!

Thank you very much for playing my game

And the results are...

No clear trends?

At least I'm not clearly getting worse, but I don't seem to be getting better either...

Just barely made it to the Top 100, but hey, this is a pretty good result for a first LD entry I guess. :)

I'm especially glad about the high scores in the audio and mood categories. That hour in SunVox towards the end of the compo really did pay off I guess. Anyway, until next time! :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/litur-teningur

I normally have a sleep paralysis once every 3 months but ever since I started working on the post-jam of my game last week, I woke up having sleep paralysis from five out of the eight days I worked in the post-jam.

I don't know what is actually causing me this. It's probably because i never created a horror game before and i'm having a hard time with the AI of a new enemy, a ghost, forcing me to look at the face of the ghost(which I found in the internet) every time I play test it. The ghost wasn't really that scary since I didn't put a lot of effort making it look terrifying, but considering that I get scared easily and I normally work on the game from eight pm to 2 am, where everybody in the house is asleep since it makes it easier to develop the game.

I also think that it might be caused by stress. I'm really rushing the post-jam since I still have another game to develop. But my developing of games was delayed due to a windows update that rendered Unity unopenable for 4 days, in which I reverted the windows update to fix it. And also I only have 3 weeks until school starts again. I have lots of work to do in this summer vacation. I hope the sleep paralysis stop after I finished developing the game. Any advice?

And btw whenever I experience sleep paralysis, I always close my eyes before I can feel the paralysis starting so I wouldn't see the scary shadow hallucination, then my whole body shakes and I'll hear a deep woman voice mumbling behind me (I sleep on my side because I red on the internet that it helps prevent sleep paralysis),. During the sleep paralysis I always think that the paralysis only takes a minute and will soon pass.

This LD I received way more ratings than the last ones, and it's great because it seems overall I improved. Somes caterogies like humor, innovation and mood are lower, but this was predictable as I focused more on delivering a fully functionnal gameplay than writing and comedy.

I tried to vary from my usual adventures games and experiment on RPG mechanics and balance. Maybe I'll find a balance between the gameplay and the writing in the next game jam, because yes I'll definitely do it again.

I make weird javascript games in my spare time, if you want to stay tuned on what I do you can follow my website : http://touloutoumou.com, or my twitter : https://twitter.com/Le_Toulousaing (mostly in french but sometime in english).

See ya for the next LD ! Toulou

( My game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dungeon-of-high-school-romance )

The results for Flong! are in and what can we say. In comparison to many others it doesn't look amazing but to be honest we are very proud of it.

It was our first Ludum Dare and it was our first try to actually make a game. We are very positively surprised to be in the top 1000.

Thanks to the organizers and to all participants! We will be part of the next Ludum Dare for sure!

Hey! So the results are in and I've somehow managed to score top 10% in the fun category by reaching 86th place out of 1031!

This is my first LD (however not my first jam) and my second solo jam. I am really happy with how this one went overall, received great feedback and had a lot of fun! I wish I could've reached top100 overall but the lack of music made it that much harder. I'll be sure to make an awesome soundtrack next time! ;D

Hope you've had a blast as much as I did during this jam! You can play my compo game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/danmakoid-bullet-hell-metroidvania

Woah! I didn't expect to be in the first page of the games for a category (Theme)!

Thanks to everyone that rated my game!

If you are curious and you didn't play it yet here is Type Away: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/type-away-a-fast-paced-text-based-endless-runner-with-zombies

Let me know what you think about it, I'm seriously thinking about making a post jam version.

See you next LD :wink:

Are there any judges or are we the judges for all the game?

Hello All! I made a video talking about the results for my LD Game "Email Fishing: A Tower Defense Fishing Simulator." I am feeling pretty good about the results (especially for one category in particular!)

https://youtu.be/Nj-ujeSIB8Y

Also if you want a deep dive into how I came up with the idea for "Email Fishing" and the overall development process, check out my postmortem.

https://youtu.be/h7akfjJv3cw

And of course here is the link to the game if you would like to play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/email-fishing-a-tower-defense-fishing-simulator

Hope you all had a great Ludum Dare and you are happy with your results! Enjoy!

The old domain, ludumdare.com, now redirects to ldjam.com. Is there a way to access the old site, still? I'd like to be able to get at my old project pages there.

The results are here and im feeling pretty good about it.

I am 241st on innovation.

This is my third jam(second ldjam) but my last game is much better. It got 22nd on Audio(I dont think i deserve that :D)

Anyways, its a lot fun and i will be waiting for the next one (only 86 days left) :)

love you all~ and if you want play my game here is the link :https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/about-love

I normally publish a Post-Mortem of my Ludum Dare game while the review phase is still underway, but this time I purposely decided to post this after judging is over. I didn't want to influence the ratings given to me by people playing my game (in fact, I didn't post a "play my game" message either). Since voting is now over, this post will be a combination Post-Mortem and review of my results.

Post-Mortem

This LD was probably the most difficult one for me... so much discouragement. I had a very difficult time deciding on an game to develop. Once I decided on my game, the development was such a chore.

Day Prior to Theme Announcement

I like to review the possible themes and put together a short list of games I would develop if that theme were chosen. I was dreading this theme, Combine 2 Incompatible Genres, because I could not think of anything I really wanted to develop.

Day 1

Of course, this theme is announced and looking at my sheet of ideas, there are none. I usually give myself about an hour to put together something before I start developing, but this time I am into Hour 3 and I haven't put together any ideas that I like.

I hacked together a few ideas and a combination Missile Command / Financial Management game is my best bet. I start putting ideas together, and quickly realize that the financial management part would be a bit too difficult, but more importantly, I do not feel excited about this genre. It's not a genre I enjoy.

I'm about 4 hours into LD, and I don't have an idea. I finally decide on a bullet hell game, and a bit later, I decide to mash it with a breakout/pong clone. I do enjoy both of these genres and decided to finally start coding. It already 1:00am Saturday morning, my time.

I put about 2 hours into designing my game and laying it out in Unity. Around 3:00am (6 hours after the theme was announced), I decide that what I have is utter crap, and I scrap just about everything, and decide to get some sleep and try again in the morning.

Day 2

I get only about 4 hours of sleep and I am back at it. I put together a breakout style game where the player hits moving space invaders. I add an enemy that puts the player into bullet hell mode when hit.

Around midday, I am ready to gave up. The game just isn't fun. I come back a few hours later and add some features. It's better but I am giving up again. I do this "code/quit" routine most of the afternoon. I hate the theme, I hate my game, I'm not having fun, but I am not going to give up. I decide to finish today, get something completed, and enjoy my Sunday.

I'm coding late into the evening, and after playing a few rounds of my game, I decide that it's not that bad, so I will polish it up tomorrow.

Day 3

Sunday is spent adding audio, graphic improvements, instructions, and some effects. It's not great, but I like it.  It's pretty close to submission time and I don't think it is worth trying to cram any more features into the game at this point, so I do my final compile, and submit it.

What Went Well

So little went well in this LD, but looking back:

• I do like the work I did on the pixel enemies, and the graphics and layout of the game screen.

• The mash-up between Breakout mode and Bullet Hell mode is interesting.

• Despite a constant feeling of discouragement, anger and sadness, I finished this game!

What Did Not Go Well

• The switch to Bullet Hell mode needs improvement. I do like the sudden switch, but maybe a visual or audio clue would be helpful.

• The ball/paddle movement and collisions can be improved. The "floaty" control of the paddle is something I don't really notice, but it was a comment made by just about everyone who played.

• Due to the time it took to decide on a game, and the Saturday discouragement, I felt a bit time-constrained.

Voting Results

The comments around the float-y controls, the paddle, and the bullet hell mode discouraged me even more than normal, so I was expecting a dismal result. It turns out there are some positives.

Overall, I finished somewhere in the middle of the pack, and pretty close to the results of my LD40 game, ANTagonist, which I actually liked better. I'm not sure what to think about this.

What was a pleasant surprise was that the results of the audio and graphics categories were the best out of all 7 Ludum Dares I took part in. These always seem to be weak categories for me, so this is a great news and hopefully a step in the right direction. As I mentioned before, I am very happy with the look of my game.

Conclusion

Despite an absolutely terrible Day 2, I managed to submit a game, and the rating is somewhat better than I expected. I guess the take-away here is to never give up no matter what you are up against.

Hopefully I would do better in the next one.

See you in august everybody.(may be)

Here' my game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rackety-rekt

A Screen shot of my game

Thank you to every one who played and rated my game.

Peace

FlatTutorials

At the end, it is all about the progress, not the absolute score! :) Pretty happy with my overall skill improvement over past years.

This keeps me motivated to try Ludum Dare again in 86 days because I know there are a ton of things I will be able to do better.

For now, I still pretty thankful for the 1st place and I will be probably checking some games that I have not tried yet ;)

By the way, I am planing on posting more stuff about the games I am working on twitter, you can follow me https://twitter.com/lukbebalduk3

Thanks

The results are in for my first Ludum Dare game out of 2018 entries in the Jam category. I'm happy just to be in the top 50% overall and almost in the top 25% for fun!

Try it here -> https://razorlance.itch.io/escape-the-future

For my first Ludum Dare I was really impressed how much review I'm can get just from one game. Vote results is:

I'm got not the best scores but this is not important, because I'm got a lot of new experiences, and now I'm know much more about my self and my often mistakes what I'm making in my games.

Some of my tipical mistakes for example: - Game not revarding. - To long, and with out any hooks for player. - 2 genre was not mixed anought - Controls are realy important, I'm need to improve this in my games - UI of the game is not react to much of player actions - Such low amount of details in game, like hit screen, particles, things what present the fill of the game.

I'm glad what I'm take the part of Ludum Dare 41, thanks everyone for playing my game, and reviewing it.

I'm hope to join Ludum Dare 42 with my new skills next time :D

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/deep-space-cards-battle

I am not satisfied with the Ludum Dare results for Recipe for Disaster, I figured I'd take a moment to introspect as to what I did wrong and build on that moving forward. Specifically, I'll be talking about the Overall and Fun aspects, since the visuals were managed by my partner.

I firmly believe that Recipe for Disaster stands at the edge of fun. It has a theoretically neat concept with making a giant pizza while racing through obstacles in a shifting landscape, and I think the royalty free music I used really emphasizes the feel of the game. Additionally, the Tony Hawk style scoring system I thought made the game a blast to play, and even included an online leaderboard I coded on the fly.

But the players were unanimous: the vehicle is not fun to drive, and that was it's biggest downfall. Using a more realistic control model for the car rather than something immediately responsive and arcady dragged the pacing down to a crawl which didn't fit the overarching design. I think there are many other features I should have cut, just to ensure that more time was spent on those controls.

I did LD41 as a precursor to my next game project, and it certainly redefined what my priorities will be for that game. It's fine to fail, as long as the right lessons are learned from it.

follow the twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

submit your game here: https://goo.gl/forms/woWQ1x1EhTwLrTZv1

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!

I've noticed some interesting changes to the site lately, and every time it's updated I want to see all the little features. Is there a changelog somewhere where we can see the updates when they roll out?

I had another game for game jam but I didn't posted it cuz I had only one account. So now I am posting it here. Check it out and give me you feedback here. Just for your info, my highscore is 247 :P

https://velocityengine7.itch.io/orbeat

The game is not really that scary but considering that I wake up at 10 am and then work on the game up until 2 am, coupled with stress from my crappy laptop. I think stress is the reason.

Anyway due to multiple occurence of it I decided to stop and i'll vow to never work on horror games anymore.

File Size

The game is now only 37 mb compared to 100 mb. Probably because I updated my unity to 2018.1 from the very outdated unity 5.

Music

I gave the music more bass to set the eerie mood. I also left the drum beat unchanged so it can set the player to perform in a racing game.

Menu

The intro terrain is now on a cliffside instead of a roadside.

There's now an introduction video and a tutorial.

Gameplay

The controls are a lot better now. Compared to the ice skating rink from the Ludum Dare version.

Hitting the zombies will now explode blood to limit your vision. Compared to the old version where they just follow you indefinitely.

AI

Car AI are also improved. They would now drift when hitting a waypoint.

New Enemy: Ghost(Probably the reason I had sleep paralysis). It wasn't really that scary because I did not put a lot of effort in making it terrifying but, Repeatetive play-testing still always gives me the creeps.

New Features

A map with real time player and enemy location

Map

The terrain now includes a lake. The game now have very varied map height because of the new better controls.

WHAT IS NOT INCLUDED.

The last thing that I want to include but was not able to, is the different ending depending on the place.

Ludum Dare Page:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/black-horizon

BTW UNITY VIDEO IN WEBGL DOESN'T WORK AND I CANT FIND A FREE ASSET SO PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE WINDOWS VERSION FOR THE POST-JAM. THE WEB VERSION IS THE LUDUM DARE VERSION

Ithc.io Page:

https://kripp.itch.io/black-horizon

https://blog.github.com/2018-05-16-ludum-dare-41-highlights/

The HTML version has received the newest update, and now shows the scores so works exactly like the windows version 😁.

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

Dear developer, gamer, jammer…

As I assume anyone that reads this to by now have learned about the controversy surrounding the rating system, I would like to take a minute of your time to elaborate on my personal experience and opinion. Before going in depth I would like to start off by encouraging everyone to not be tempted into contentless discussion, as it is clear from many precedents that this leads to nothing but grief and arguing. Everybody who participated, even those who did not finish a game in time, deserve praise for their attempts and the throwing of mud is just inappropriate here.

That being said, over the course of the last few days I have tried to be constructive in discussing the current rating system. I think it is important to do this by entering in discussions that are provided with valuable arguments and that might contribute to a better experience for everyone, but after writing a few elaborate comments, I decided it might be better to write a proper summarizing blog post where the discussion can be kept alive and be even more transparent and accessible by everyone and it also should be clear that no single individual or group is being targeted.

But before I make my personal analysis, I would like to address some comments that are recurring very frequently. If I paraphrase: “It is not a competition, Ludum Dare is about making a game”. I respect that opinion but I would dare to nuance it. Games are being rated so a developer can get honest feedback, which for me personally was the driving force behind my development cycle. The rank is a nice bonus and seemingly flows naturally from the scores given in the various areas. So, you might be right, for some it is not a competition, for others it is, but what we all should share is the desire and right for recognition of your work, to learn and grow in the areas we excel in or lack. Another one is “It has been like this forever, it is what makes it Ludum Dare”. I am horribly sorry if I should offend anyone by saying that this is a load of crap, and is even contradictory to the earlier statement. For me personally this was my first entry, but I did follow Ludum Dare for a few years now and I have to say it is very sad to see the amount of demotivated game developers after the jam. It might be true that problems have been around for a long way, but ignoring them for the sake of having a popular opinion is not the way to go. It can be solved.

Finally, do allow me to expand on my personal experience. I decided to join the Ludum Dare event pretty late, I believe I officially committed to doing it not 24 hours before it started. I remember going through the rules the day before and having friends telling me I should worry less and it all is relatively straightforward. After that I asked my wife if it would be for me to lock myself up and make the best darn game I could. Laugh all you want, but I respect her and my toddler son enough that they should be okay with me doing it. A 48 hour jam is not a small task and I would not be able to help a lot in the household. 48 hours later I had slept for just 5 hours and I took some breaks to have some time with my kid. I also noticed I was sitting down too much as my one foot was swollen to double its normal size. So an important lesson learned…No jam is worth that, take plenty of rest, get up, walk around. Anyway, I finished the game loop and decided to not bother with too much art anymore, which also is clearly the explanation to the poor score in that area. I was proud of what I had and I was awaiting that sweet sweet sense of recognition when the voting was underway. Fast forward 3 weeks, the ratings were released and I was happy at first, I wound up where I expected to be and that was slightly above average! Not bad for a first time compo submission! But then I started seeing alarming posts. Both offensive and defensive, the blame game was underway and things got even worse when it turned out the rules might have been inadvertently not respected for one of the winners. To make matters worse, due to poor communication there were indications that the score was manipulated due to the fact a single group had voted within its own members. I have to say, at first that did raise a lot of questions to me and I have tried to be constructive about it, but I have noticed the back and forward salvos of arguments are still flying over everyone’s head, which is also the major reason I decided to make a blog post.

So here comes the juicy part… Was there cheating? Well that depends on what you consider cheating. According strictly to the rules? Yes there was cheating, as one of the games won the audio category, while none of the audio was made by the contestant. This was amended though, so if that is cheating or bad preparation (not everyone is as crazy to read the entire page of rules as deeply as I did), I leave that open for interpretation. What does concern me way more is the way the voting system works. I was not aware of it before the start and I apparently needed to see it for myself. The alarming part is that the winning game has but 20 votes, where there are other games that received over tenfold that number. I learned in statistics that these sample sizes are not comparable at all, furthermore any ranking based on averages is a nice attempt…But meaningless. Luckily (but maybe not so much for the gamedeveloper) this was clearly exposed during this LD, even more than was the case for previous editions. In the comment section there undeniably was what I call “friendly voting”, overestimating a game’s metrics, which caused its rating to skyrocket. And just to be clear, this is not bashing the unnamed group in question, the developers behind it or even the hosts of the Ludum Dare events. This is just me trying to explain what is not a “flawed system”, but what is a broken system all together. Statistically, pulling a random entry out of all entries to win would make more sense than having varying samples from varying voting pools. I received arguments that the event is too large and rating 3000 games in a way that is both qualitative and fast is impossible. That brings me back to the same arguments I received before writing my comments. If the rank is not important to anyone… then it does not matter if rating all games takes 3 weeks of 3 months. So here is my suggestion:

The days following the submission date for ludum dare were filled with enthousiastic twitch streamers (probably also a lot of activity on youtube, but I did not personally follow that). Sidenote, these people deserve utter respect, I have seen some of them play over 150 games while ranking them fairly. The way it often works now is that a streamer either selects random games or has viewers register a slot to get played. I also have noticed that the LD page features twitch streamers. These people are doing it for free and combined, they played (roughly estimated) over half of all games. I would make these channels featured referees during ludum dare, giving them more exposure while they in return rate games on stream. It is a pure win-win situation that doesn’t have to cost anything but a title and a feature status on the LD page, something that already is implemented for the largest part. The counterargument for this is that the public should not lose its voting power. That is most definitely true, but a refereeing system is not intended to eliminate votes. It rather is a layer on top of the public votes, where the effects of “buddy voting” will be reduced. Should it still be required, an even smaller panel of “experts” or “LD veterans” could rate and play the finalists, making a semi-final decision. A lot of salt would be avoided this way and it surely would be beneficial to everyone, as even games that did not make it to 20 votes (it is a popularity contest, do not even question that) would get a form of rank in one way or another, through the streamer-referees. And now, intentionally saved for last, I want to put down an official disclaimer that I am not a salty loser and I do not want to be in the victor’s place. Despite my slightly above ratings, which I am happy with, I can’t deny I felt a little bit offended by blind and wild accusations of being jealous and a sore loser (some people call me java-sore-ass already, thank you @HonestDanGames), but I only want a constructive discussion and hope that the LD team picks this up. For me it is clear, the post-jam explosion of comments and arguing has made me believe LD is “not my jam”, at least not until the rating is ameliorated.

But who knows… The itch might come back like it did for LD41 and I might join in again next time, maybe “just for fun” like the majority of you people out there 😊. Heck, I might even do it all on stream (SHAMELESS ADVERTISING)

With a giant respectful roar, cheers and Dev On,

JavaSaurus

Hello again. I thought maybe the "he rated a game a 5 that I disagree with so that must be cheating" roller coaster ride was over, but it's not. So my only recourse is to make a mega post summarizing the majority of my interactions within the LD41 rating period. This will be dense, but it will be entirely fact-based and authoritative. Unfortunately, now that the rating period is over, I can no longer see the ratings I gave all the games, nor does there appear to be any easy way to see a list of all games I've rated. I'm also not going to post every single GDU chat message or long discussion about cheating, because it would simply be too much. So think of this as the lore tabs in Destiny 2 after the removal of the Grimoire: incomplete. Below are links to all the games I remember rating, most but not all of which are from GDU members, and my initial feedback comment from each one of them. It is just as ridiculous that I feel the need to do this as it is that anyone would think I was inflating my fellow GDU members' scores with fake undeserved 5's after reading what follows. The last 3 games are the only non-GDU games I remember rating, because again, I don't have a list, whereas for the GDU ones, they were from a spreadsheet. You can see my feedback on those was completely consistent with the feedback from the dozens of other games I rated. It is simply not true that I cheated for anyone else.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$85014

"Yet another game I’m giving 5 stars all around. That is the 5th one so far. Man, GDU members are kicking butt this jam! I absolutely love both genres you did, and the voice over work was absolutely perfect. Good selection of video game trivia too. A real treat to play. I just wish I could play in full screen."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ready-set-dress

"I absolutely love this style of game. I used to be addicted to Pole Position as a kid. The only thing is I couldn’t really figure out what I was supposed to be doing as far as changing outfits. Was it like memory? Was I supposed to match what the other girl was wearing? Or just change as quickly as possible? I tried both but ended up dying regardless."

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

"Hmm, I wanted to have the great experience that others are reporting, but this game was just flat out impossibly hard for me. I’m not sure why, as I’m generally a pretty competent gamer. I love the graphics, atmosphere, concept, all that. It’s actually a really smart game. But I cannot collect the very first enemy. I tried hundreds of times. Just can’t do it. Is it just me, or do you need to be pixel perfect to actually get to the enemy? Or maybe I am not pressing some button I should be pressing? I really have no idea, but I tried and tried and couldn’t get a single enemy. And also, perhaps a bit more constructive criticism, the shield rings were really ambiguous and difficult to understand at first because they are placed so close to enemies. There should be a substantial gap between enemies and the rings to make it clear that you cannot pass the rings until you collect the enemies within. I kept going for enemies outside the rings, not realizing that the rings were knocking me back."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bunny-derps

"Mint Arcade, you have proven yourself once again! Great game. I could honestly play this for hours. You really know how to design gameplay that is engaging over a longer period of time without relying on too many assets."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/honest-dans-trout

"Yeah, I just had to keep playing this game until I got on the scoreboard. 5’s all around. Instant winner."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/stone-age-xo-inception

"This game has a ton of potential. I think what you were going for in terms of creating a relaxed puzzle game is really smart, and you did a fantastic job of achieving that goal. I would really enjoy to play this game in my spare time or on my phone. However, there is something majorly wrong with the upgrades. They’re actually downgrades. I don’t know if that’s intentional, or if it’s because of an exploit that needs to be fixed. But basically, the play gains IQ from each click. So it benefits the player to click every single grid cell as many times as possible without triggering it. Upgrading the IQ gain just reduces the granularity of the player’s control. Auto-clicking is a serious waste of resources, because you basically can’t take advantage of that extra IQ gain and still win. You could literally just make all the upgrades their opposites and it’d be more balanced. But realistically, I’m guessing you didn’t actually intend for players to be able to click on other grid cells after committing to one. Other than that, it’s actually a fun game."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/card-kart

"I love the concept. It seems like it could be a lot of fun, and would honestly make a great card or board game as well as a video game. However, I think there’s just too much going on with the cards, and it’s hard to understand how to play. I thought you could only discard at most 1 card per turn, but the game lets you do more? And there’s all this other stuff with turbo, acceleration, oil spills, etc. It’s really hard to get a good grasp of what that means when all we see is each racer’s speed and current position. Also, It’s really not obvious which racer corresponds to the player. I found myself wondering which position I was in."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/peculiar-adventures-of-dorothy-hops

"HAHAHA I love this interesting take on infinite runners. The game feels pretty darn difficult. I think I’d prefer if things didn’t take so much dang health so I could last a bit longer. But it’s a fantastic game."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/pinball-golf

"I LOOOOOOOVE THIS GAME! This is one of those rare games where as soon as I started playing, I immediately thought, “Why hasn’t anybody made this before?”. You combined both genres just perfectly. The scoring system of golf. The physics of pinball. I mean, I guess if I were being super picky, I would say pinball and golf are not actually incompatible, as they are fairly similar games in principle. But you did such a fantastic job of combining them, I’m so happy this game exists."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$76931

"Definitely has that signature Zombie Virals feel I remember from the last game! I really like this game. The idea of combining platforming with education is a great fit for the theme, because not only is it an unexpected combination, but it actually works really well by framing knowledge as the reward for completing a challenge. You could make a pretty good children’s game with this concept (just don’t make a game for kids about, uhmm cough “bear” penis cough). My only gripe is that after Logic Gates of Hell, I was expecting a bigger finale, but instead, this game doesn’t really go any further than the core gameplay. A big boss fight against a teddy bear or something would have been fun."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/light-at-night

"Is the impossible level actually possible? I got to the impossible level and couldn’t jump back up from the yellow crystal. The game is actually really fun. Although to be honest, it just feels like a platformer. I don’t really see how it fits the theme or combines any other genres."

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

"LOL I absolutely love the concept and music. The game is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s a jam game after all. Some of the enemies were bugged, and it wasn’t particularly easy to get past some of the gaps. But it was fun nonetheless."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/typewriter-dungeon

"The idea is actually very interesting and could make a fun game. However, the execution is off in a way that was probably hard to predict until actually trying it. I think you were a little focused on the dungeon aspect of the game, when in reality, the method of control really is incompatible with dungeon exploration. It’s just really tedious and slow to have to retrace your steps through a dungeon by typing the same words over and over again. You also tried to trick players with the words, which added to the frustration. Instead, the game could have been way more interesting if you focused on it being some kind of write your own story book, or like that game people play where they take turns adding a word to form a sentence and make a story. Your intro was a perfect example of this. You could chose “created by” or “made by”. I thought that was very clever. Rather than having players backtrack through a series of words which may or may not have anything to do with the actual dungeon design, you could just have them chose paths through a story and play sound effects or display images based on their choices."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/prototypes-and-dust

"Another hit from Adroit Conceptions! Excellent game. Doesn’t feel as “complete” as your island delivery service game for Jim Jam, but it’s also more unique and fits the theme really well. Some of the puzzles were fairly challenging. I love having to switch views. It’s a really solid and fun game, and I think it could really benefit from more polish. I don’t mind the use of primitives for graphics, especially in an abstract puzzle game, but the fact that this is also a platformer makes the environments feel a little lifeless compared to playing something like a Super Mario game."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dragon-pet-simulator-virtual-pet-stealth

"It’s a cute little game, but very light on actual gameplay and even story, which is a shame because I was expecting this game to be really story focused. The multiple endings, at least the ones I got, were also not substantial enough to justify playing through over and over again. They seem to just display a slightly different message at the end, but the story ends the exact same way. It’s kind of like those movies on DVD where they advertise deleted scenes and other special features, and half of them are just 10 second bits of dialog that do nothing for the movie. Overall, a fun little jam game, and a good match for the theme, but quite small in scope."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tennis-z-a-zombie-apocalypse-tennis-game

"This is the first LD41 game I’m giving 5 stars across the board! An absolute perfect game! At first, I thought it was way too hard. It is certainly a challenging game to get used to. I think I lost my first match without winning a single point. But I was able to wrap my head around it and just barely win my second match. I had a ton of fun. I do wish it were easier to kill the zombies, because it seems that in practice, although it’s technically possible to kill them, you’re better off just focusing on the game of tennis and not trying to fight them. I think they could even just take 1 or 2 hits to die, instead of the 5 or so it takes now."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/remote-cuddles

"Texting your dragon is a pretty funny mechanic, and a good fit for the theme. The gameplay is actually quite fun. That being said, there are a lot of frustrating things about the game as well. The 1st issue is that as others have mentioned, the web build isn’t very widely compatible. That may not be your fault, but I tried multiple browsers and had problems. I downloaded the Windows build, and it worked flawlessly. However, summoning the dragon just feels really random, as it may or may not kill the beasts. I definitely think the game would be better if the dragon AI was able to seek out enemies. Finally, after the “thin corridor” where you hide your dragon for the first time, that bullet hallway is really tricky. It seems you can’t completely avoid damage by dashing, which wouldn’t be a big deal if you could just take a few points of damage before reaching the end, but you then spawn beasts from the already cleared room behind the player, which is completely unexpected and makes that hallway really hard. The funny thing is that spawning the dragon there would have killed them, but the game just got finished instructing the player to hide the dragon! Basically, the game is fun, but it definitely could have benefited from more testing and iteration to iron out some of those issues."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/soul-engines

"I have 2 words for you: Burnout Paradise. That was the first game that came to mind when I read your description, and I immediately started thinking how damn cool it would be if there was a survival mod to that game. Obviously that was a massively ambitious AAA title, and this was a game jam game. But man, not only is the idea great, but the execution is quite good. There are certain rough spots. The crash physics are really wonky. There is no way to restart after dying. But there are plenty of bright spots too. The graphics are incredible. The day/night cycle works perfectly. Honestly, although it could use some further development, I’m extremely impressed with this submission."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/arbusts-revenge

"I reread the instructions and tried everything I could, but couldn’t seem to attack. I’m not sure if I just missed something. The gameplay is actually an interesting blend of genres, and seems pretty fun. But I just had no idea how to kill things."

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

"This game is sooooo good! I absolutely love this game. Fell in love with it immediately. It’s a massive success when it comes to fitting the theme, because the genres really are incompatible in the sense that playing one diverts your attention from the other, yet you’ve made it so it enhances the challenge, rather than breaking it. This game could’ve easily been terrible if you had spawned enemies right away, but giving players the chance to build up resources before the waves of enemies arrived was a smart decision. My only complaint would be that the enemy movement is too fast. The reason I say this is that you could essentially keep the balance of the game the same by adjust enemy health proportionally to their speed. For example, if you reduce their speed by half, they’ll take twice as much damage, so they need double the health. Normally in a TD game, the exact timing doesn’t matter so much as the proportions. But because you’re asking players to divert focus to the match-3 portion of the game, it’s extremely brutal when they’re paying attention to the grid, and they suddenly look up to find hordes of gargoyles half way to the base. There’s already a lot going on with the 2 halves of the game. It doesn’t need to be so quick that the player can barely react. At least not at first. That could be an additional challenge in later stages. Over all, I’m extremely impressed by the quality of this submission."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/gnome-mans-land

"Great job, Tim! The game is fantastic. It feels way more intense actually playing the game in full screen with the screen shake than it does watching the development stream. I only really had 2 issues with it; 1st is that I don’t think the game really fits the theme all that well, or did anything that original. I know you voiced your opinion about the theme being self-contradictory, but at the same time, many developers were going for really unexpected combinations, and reverse tower defense has been mainstream since the very successful Anomaly series back in 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly:WarzoneEarth). Had this game come out 10 years ago, absolutely, this would match the theme. But again, this isn’t much different from playing Anomaly, and that’s not some obscure game reference nobody would have heard of. 2nd is that reaching the end of the level just feels really unsatisfying and under-developed. I got my gnomes to the end, then a bunch of waves just kept spawning, and occasionally I’d kill an enemy that would appear. Then I randomly died at one point without seeing anything that would have caused damage. At that point, it looked just like I had lost, even though I had been delivering several waves of gnomes uninterrupted. And when I restarted the game, the music wasn’t playing anymore, so it felt really quiet. Normally, I wouldn’t make such a big deal of this, but for having a single challenging level that isn’t very long in scope, rewarding players who persevere and get through is super important. That being said, this gets high marks for just pure fun."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/$75021

"This concept definitely has potential. It’s certainly a great fit for the theme. I was really looking forward to trying it when I saw the screenshots because my dad’s a big golfer and he likes to mess around too and play lawn golf and do trick shots while drinking beer. So this game is right up my alley. But the execution falls short in a few ways. Not having audio really hurts the immersion. And the controls are quite difficult. It’d be one thing if the game was challenging due to obstacles, like mini golf. But there were several times when I was lined up perfectly and missed the hole by a mile at point blank range. Not a bad entry overall, but could use some work."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/check-please

"The game is absolutely hilarious and fun! The menus and credits were also a really nice touch. The only downside is that the game was extremely short, and I would’ve loved more. To be fair, it’s a jam game, and it looks like a lot of time was spent on creating the environment, which looks fantastic."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/stealth-trucking

"What a great game! I absolutely love this concept and think it could make for a great twist on the stealth and survival genres. Having to be a trucker in a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with bandits? Can anybody say Mad Max? Really well done."

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/cant-remember-you

"Okay, let’s get the good out of the way first. The artwork is incredible. The mood setting is fantastic. It’s immediately obvious a lot of passion went behind this game. So it gets good scores on those fronts. I also got lucky and didn’t encounter any of the bugs other people mentioned, so for me, it worked flawlessly. That being said, when it comes to the theme, I think the objective wasn’t necessarily to keep things incompatible, but just to try to make unexpected combinations. This game kind of breaks the visual novel side of things with the point and click portions, and doesn’t do anything to really improve their compatibility. I ended up finishing the game in about 2 minutes accidentally, because I got tired of clicking through messages that didn’t really continue the story, and I didn’t expect the game to let me get to the final location so quickly. Basically, in order for players to truly get the full experience of this game, you’re asking them to ignore the clues and read through side story for 30 minutes. For an example of how to do this kind of gameplay right, check out Life is Strange, LA Noire, Heavy Rain, etc. Notice how they have tons of optional side content to allow the player freedom of choice and different endings, but you can’t just magically skip to the end. The overall story is still structured. So this game is very impressive for a jam game, but lacks that kind of structure that ensures players have a consistently good experience."

This isn't a nebulous philosophical post like "How does one rate humor? Does not humor, itself being a subjective criteria, defy our attempts to quantify it? Can one 'win' at humor?" I'm not looking to define how to rate it or change anyone's mind. I'm just really curious. How did you choose a rating for humor? If an entry isn't trying to be funny but doesn't opt out of the humor category did you give it a 3 or a 0? Maybe just leave it blank? Some games are obviously trying to be funny, but fall flat. Did you rate any games that tried to be funny and fell flat higher than ones that didn't even try to be funny?

I'm trying to be more consistent with how I rate things, so I've been thinking about this. Here's some of the games that I rated for humor that jumped out at me.

BEASTS

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/b-e-a-s-t-s-break-everything-and-stack-towering-structures

I scored this one quite high for humor. The theme mashup is absurd and the fact that the winner of the battle becomes the mayor at the end made me laugh.

Love Machine

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/love-machine

This isn't even a game. At least, not a finshed game. You can fly around and enjoy the dialog, which I find hilarious. I mean, I found the dialog hilarious. Not the flying around. That is fun, but not funny.

Legend of Zoom

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/legend-of-zoom

I don't even know that there were any jokes in this one. Maybe the old man makes a joke or two? But the entire concept makes me laugh. Driving around, sideswiping enemies with my sword sticking off the car was a joy. I rated it high on humor, although now that I'm looking back maybe I really wanted to rate it high on mood? It came in 80th for humor, so apparently others felt the same way.

Flower Hero

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/flower-hero

I rated this one high for humor, but again, it isn't really 'funny', per se. More just the character design and the happy large flower in the background make me laugh.

Dancing Bandit and Dance Duel Cowboy

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dancing-bandit https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dance-duel-cowboy

Apparently I find dancing cowboys intrinsically funny.

So how do you rate humor? Any other games that tickled you that I should play?

Have you ever wondered whether the top Ludum Dare competitors tend to win again and again, or show up once and then disappear?

Have you ever wondered who the absolute TOP compo developer is when you look over the last several years of Ludum Dare?

I got answers.

What we want is a list of all the LD compo contestants for the last several years who placed in the top-100 overall. We can then count up how many times they placed, and maybe even compare how well they tend to place over time.

The table below shows exactly that.

This table shows all the compo contestants from LD26 through LD41 who have placed in the top 100 at least twice. In this table, NAME is the disambiguated name of the competitor. "Disambiguated" means that two usernames are considered identical if they are the same when converted to lowercase and having all spaces removed. WINS is the number of times that competitor has appeared in the top-100 overall between LD26 and LD41.

SCORE gives each contestant an overall score, calculated in the following way. Your score for a given contest is (101 - your placement); so the top finisher for a given Ludum Dare event gets 100 points and the person in 100th place gets 1 point. Your total score across the contests, then, is the sum of these single-contest scores. Higher is better.

In order from most wins to least, here are the top-100 winners with at least two top-100 Overall wins.

NAME WINS SCORE TijmenTio 12 394 dalbinblue 10 415 quill18 10 385 Benjamin 10 209 rxi 9 314 Managore 9 148 deepnight 9 141 DragonXVI 8 220 Split82 8 138 Sheepolution 7 480 TerraCottaFrog 7 361 aeveis 7 346 HolyBlackCat 7 269 ShaunJS 7 256 Nanolotl 7 256 01010111 7 167 ncannasse 7 150 timtipgames 6 461 pkenney 6 367 zillix 6 332 JaJ 6 288 nicotuason 6 287 Jezzamon 6 227 DDRKirby(ISQ) 6 168 dvdking 5 283 GeorgeBroussard 5 253 steve 5 243 Miltage 5 235 Zanzlanz 5 228 rubna 5 210 SaintHeiser 5 195 Jonathan Whiting 5 185 madjackmcmad 5 182 flyingbear 5 169 Danman9914 5 161 Multiplexor 5 128 Ditto 5 126 reheated 5 121 AdventureIslands 5 90 rnlf 4 284 Phil Strahl 4 275 Ozeotropo 4 264 TomBoogaart 4 254 Josh Riley 4 246 uheartbeast 4 240 Sanguine 4 224 bitslap 4 218 juxipolo 4 212 JokerDen 4 204 OldPeculier 4 198 ripatti 4 187 RHY3756547 4 186 NuSan 4 183 thomz12 4 180 sputnik 4 178 HacksawUnit 4 176 Tuism 4 166 dietzribi 4 150 mtrc 4 142 Evgiz 4 140 Andrew Shouldice 4 133 Xaychru04 4 122 Lancelot Gao 4 109 zatyka 4 108 handCraftedRadio 3 247 vicious_br 3 238 ruthiepee 3 236 bradur 3 234 Erkberg 3 219 jahlgren 3 210 jsmars 3 209 Antti Haavikko 3 204 tayl1r 3 203 headchant 3 202 TomboFry 3 201 Aaants 3 200 WhoaConstrictor 3 200 xel 3 196 sorceress 3 189 DrPrettyPatty 3 189 guoboism 3 189 hexagore 3 186 blobo 3 185 Knighty 3 181 JOrbits 3 180 Broxxar 3 177 FrozenCow 3 174 greysphere 3 169 Volute 3 167 EpaceGames 3 165 Frozen Fractal 3 153 arkeus 3 150 el-pepi 3 145 zorfmorf 3 144 cinnamonmelonpig 3 143 stevenjmiller 3 141 BlackBulletIV 3 140 boddiul 3 136 lectvs 3 134 Ysty 3 132 impbox 3 131 tripleVisionGames 3 126 candlesan 3 125 francoisvn 3 125 rujo 3 123 Crumpet 3 119 mahalis 3 117 Xaychru 3 108 harusame 3 108 kepons 3 107 BuffaloPhil 3 106 rezoner 3 105 nicso 3 104 bigbadwofl 3 104 ekun 3 102 Quaternius 3 102 Gao Ming 3 100 Lukbebalduke 3 80 mortus 3 77 Hypnohustla 3 73 Hempuli 3 70 SteveSalmond 3 65 gwinnell 2 190 Jod 2 179 ApoorvaJ 2 175 Peredom 2 173 Mental Atrophy 2 173 Farfin 2 166 Rulrite 2 164 NekuSoul 2 163 pixelgriffin 2 159 PapaCheech 2 157 thebrickanator 2 155 NicMagnier 2 152 Chaoclypse 2 152 BluShine 2 149 Myko 2 149 PeculiarCarrot 2 147 ehtd 2 147 ryguydavis 2 146 Fonserbc 2 146 Rahazan 2 145 patrickgh3 2 145 Simple Ghost 2 141 Marc Grabow 2 141 Jimbly 2 140 Erhune 2 138 Nick Weihs 2 137 snapman_GT 2 134 Carduus 2 132 Chaseplays 2 131 jeroenwimmers 2 131 flatgub 2 130 Andrio 2 130 karlipoppins 2 129 javicepa 2 129 Bernhard 2 129 Graf_Grun 2 129 nesis 2 127 Robotic 2 127 Devark 2 127 slovnoslomo 2 125 BinarySpark 2 125 pjchardt 2 124 TobiasNL 2 122 Sink 2 122 Rscar 2 120 navot 2 120 DrHahn 2 118 aamatniekss 2 117 designernap 2 116 adamgryu 2 116 CustomPhase 2 115 Spierek 2 113 JeffChen 2 113 Sophie Houlden 2 112 feiss 2 110 WeaselZone 2 110 Noisette 2 109 jwin 2 109 kbjwes77 2 109 Zener 2 108 glimaleite 2 108 Insality 2 108 gelisam 2 108 drilltail 2 107 Bogden 2 107 Ethan Allwood 2 107 farmergnome 2 107 krzymsky 2 106 GhostBomb 2 106 0x0961h 2 106 KilledByAPixel 2 106 pinkmonkeyhead 2 105 Conk 2 105 adcrusher 2 105 ShellfishGames 2 105 leafo 2 104 martincohen 2 104 egordorichev 2 104 NMcCoy 2 103 pirate-rob 2 102 dvdfu 2 101 manabreak 2 99 vrld 2 98 Ian Morrison 2 98 MrLeePerry 2 95 LancesCaterpie 2 95 little-burrito 2 95 Zarkonnen 2 94 FrankieSmileShow 2 94 qbicfeet 2 94 primaerfunktion 2 94 Hayden McCraw 2 93 myachin 2 93 mikelovesrobots3 2 93 ianburnette 2 93 cesisco 2 93 Suese 2 90 morphine 2 89 NickZangus 2 89 silkworm_sweatshop 2 89 Angela He 2 88 Jools64 2 88 adnzzzzZ 2 87 torcado194 2 87 Lynx 2 87 Romixal 2 87 btwj 2 86 Madsj 2 85 DiscoFish 2 85 pereubu 2 84 Trasevol_Dog 2 82 ZYXer 2 82 JohnnySix 2 82 dukope 2 82 Leon Möhring 2 81 vegapomme27 2 77 Fervir 2 77 AgentParsec 2 76 Cell 2 75 Alexandre Szybiak 2 75 invi 2 74 Steven Miller 2 72 Aomeas 2 72 Christian S. 2 71 andrewkennedy 2 71 Eshford 2 71 saint11 2 70 rjhelms 2 69 SeanNoonan 2 68 andrewjoy 2 68 Domantas 2 68 MicroMacro 2 68 Tom 7 2 66 ghostonline 2 64 Max Amaden 2 63 Jeremias 2 63 Ludipe 2 63 StaNov 2 61 kebabskal 2 60 Matthew Roelle 2 57 Remicy 2 57 Ellian 2 55 torcado 2 55 jebouin 2 54 Skoggy 2 54 Benn 2 53 mhsco 2 53 merrak 2 52 NickMakesGames 2 51 ForeignGuyMike 2 51 ENDESGA 2 51 ProjectX593 2 49 bushmango 2 49 Cosmologicon 2 49 OddballDave 2 48 Zelos 2 48 savethejets1 2 48 UltimateWalrus 2 47 euske 2 45 Wheffle 2 43 MrSun 2 41 Gurbx 2 38 lokijki 2 33 Brackeys 2 33 cjke.7777 2 30 ladybenko 2 24 TyrusPeace 2 22

--- UPDATED: Disambiguated names. ---

Originally posted on my site at https://levidsmith.com/games/blocks-of-nibiru/

After five years and sixteen consecutive Ludum Dare entries, I don't know if there's much for me to say in a post mortem anymore. Honestly, I don't feel like my game development skills have gotten that much better. However, I feel like what I have previously done can be done in a much shorter period of time. What used to take me the full 48 hours to accomplish, can now be done in the first day. That leaves me a lot more time to test and tweak gameplay difficulty.

The idea for this game came from the story about a hidden planet called Nibiru, which is supposed to cause the end of the Earth. I had originally envisioned a fully functional falling blocks game like Tetris with AI, but I settled for just getting the block stacking working. The objective is to prevent the blocks from getting to the top like in Tetris, but you have to shoot them instead like in a space shoot em up.

In most of my previous Ludum Dare entries, I only had one or maybe two gameplay mechanics. I believe Blocks of Nibiru had the most of any of my previous entries. Below are most of the mechanics I was able to implement for this game.

• Multiple ships
• Upgradable cannons
• Gun heat / Overheat cooldown
• Speed upgrade
• Orbital movement
• Block stacking
• Bombs to clear blocks
• Collectible powerups

I really started learning how to place objects in polar coordinates when I made my Easter Egg Hunt game last month. In that game I laid out the eggs in a circular fashion, using the angle as the interval and the radius as the random value. Using the angle and radius mapped really well to the horizontal and vertical Input Axes in Unity. I was amazed at how well it controlled in my game. Then I remember this had been done before. It was a game called Gyruss that I played on the Nintendo Entertainment system as a kid. However, Gyruss did not have the ability to pull in and out like my game. It may not seem like a big difference at first, but moving along the radius does really help when you're trying to track down a powerup or trying to spread out a multi-cannon shot.

Since my ship object was a prefab, it was not difficult to make multiple instances of the ship. Placing the second ship was easy, because I just added 180 degrees to its angle. The third ship was a little more difficult. I could not keep the ships evenly spaced (120 degrees apart) without moving them around, which would be awkward. Therefore, I just added the third ship to be 90 degrees between the first two ships. Then the fourth ship would just be 270 degrees away from the first ship.

For the cannons, I just modeled three red cylinders and placed them at angles at the front of the ship. I tried not to make the spread two wide, but not to narrow as well. The first cannon shoots directly forward. To keep symmetry, I decided that when the first upgrade is applied, the two angled cannons would be enabled. Then on the second upgrade, all three cannons would be enabled. Again, since the ships were instanced, it made it so that the cannon upgrades would be unique for each ship.

As I was playtesting the game, I noticed that an overheat / cooldown system was needed. I didn't want players to keep mashing the shoot button forever with no penalty. I wanted players to feel like there was importance for when they take a shot. Therefore, I added the heat percentage to the ship instance. When it reaches 100% (it's actually stored as a float value), then the player is locked out from shooting with that ship for a period of time. I used my harmonica to make the beeping sound when the ship overheats, so that there is audio feedback. I probably should have added a smoke effect or something when the ship is overheated. The heat reduction powerups were made to allow more shots before the ship overheats. Looking back, I would have made fewer levels of heat reduction, like just two so that when the powerup is collected it feels like it makes more of a difference.

The speed upgrade was not difficult to implement. I just increased the speed instance variable for the ship. However, it was not possible for each ship to have a unique speed, because that would eventually result in ships overlapping and give it just general janky feeling. So I decided to have the speed upgrade applied to all ships, which kept the symmetric spacing between all of the ships.

The bomb upgrade was fairly simple to implement. If the bomb counter is greater than one, then decrease it and delete all block instances currently in the game. I used a pizza pan and lid of a pot to make the sound effect, sort of like clashing two cymbals together.

The powerups were made with a six sided circle in blender extruded out to make a 3D shape. Then I duplicated and made a longer and smaller one to cut out the center using the Boolean modifier (I always forget if it's difference or intersect). The voice that plays when a powerup is collected is just my voice with Audacity's vocoder applied.

I guess the one thing I did learn from this game was how to rotate a skybox in Unity. I took a walk at the local park early Sunday morning, and took a picture of the sky. Unity now has an option to make a skybox out of a panorama picture, instead of having to put together six sides of a cube. The important thing is to make sure that the picture is seamless. I was able to do that in Unity using the Make Seamless Advanced plugin. I also took pictures of some rocks around the house that I used for the block texture, and the side of a tree that I used for the background board plane. The ship was textured with a picture I took of the metal on the side of my air conditioner.

I used the Blender cell fracture plugin again, for making the blocks explode into multiple pieces. I had to turn the fragment number down. I think the default was something like 100, so I turned it down to 20. The one issue was that I had to remember to set the animation to legacy for the explosion effect to apply. As usual, I put the explosion into a separate prefab that gets instantiated when the block is destroyed, so that the block is immediately removed from the game logic. It also allows me to put the destroy sound effect (which was just me clapping my hands in front of the microphone) in the explosion prefab, so that continues to play after the original block is destroyed.

The music was composed in GarageBand again. This time I used my new MacBook laptop, which is much more speedy than the one I previously used which was about six years old. I really didn't do anything out of the ordinary for the music this time. I just made a couple of melodies and switched them between instruments, and used one of the standard generated beats. I did increase the pitch of the music as the block stack gets higher, which makes it feel like a greater sense of urgency, similar to how the old Tetris for GameBoy did the music.

Looking back, I think there were a few things that could have made this game better. I wish I had put tail renders on the bullets. The explosions could have also had lighting effects. However, having too many point lights on at the same time can cause problems. I think after eight or so point lights, they just start getting ignored. I could have at least put a point light on the ships, or a flash of light when the cannon is fired.

I also wanted to have the skybox change color as the player progressed through the game. I couldn't figure out how to get a handle on the color of the skybox. Overall the game just like it has too much orange. I probably should have made the score text, level text, and bomb display be larger and a different color. The 3D text model on the title screen could have been a different color as well, because it's really hard to read especially in thumbnails.

I guess that's it. I used to say that the day when I didn't learn anything new, I would stop making games. There are some new things that I do want to learn in Unity, like the new shader interface. I just feel like I've moved out of the learning phase and into the making things more efficiently phase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgXQ_lXdP7w

As Ludum Dare 41 winds down for good and we begin the gap months between jams, it's worth seeing what kind of community forums / discords / twitter groups (I'm @OccultGameDev on Twitter) are going on. This thread, as all LD Threads, is likely to be disappeared tomorrow, but I'd love to see what folks are working on right now outside of LD.

Polishing the jam game? Working on your opus magnus? Doing some prototyping?

I'd love to see what the community is working on! So go ahead and post them here!

“After the accident I had trouble grasping for words. But a few dedicated doctors helped me remember."

RETROGRADE explores amnesia, trauma and recovery in a story-centered and music-driven LD41 entry.

We've made some improvements since voting closed, and we'd like to invite you one last time to explore this story with us.

http://chubanai.com/arcade/RetrogradeArcade/index.html

Thank you to everyone who gave us substantive feedback. We'll see you at No. 42!

In my last post I showed all the Ludum Dare compo winners who've placed in the top 100 more than once since Ludum Dare 26. I didn't have space to show all of the winners who'd ever placed in the top-100 since LD26. I had to cut out everyone who has placed exactly once. But these "One Hit Wonders" absolutely deserve credit too. So here they are: all the Ludum Dare compo winners who placed in the top 100 exactly once since Ludum Dare 26.

SCORE in this table is calculated as (101 - placement), so if you placed 1st, you get 100 points and if you placed 100th you get 1 point.

Note that @PixelMind at the top of the list has the amazing distinction of not only having won first place the Ludum Dare overall competition, but having done so as his or her only top-100 placement! That's actually kinda cool.

NAME WINS SCORE PixelMind 1 100 Nate954 1 99 GertJohnny 1 99 thomas-olsson 1 99 electr1ca 1 98 ildfuglen 1 98 vfqd 1 98 Solluxx 1 98 zulubo 1 98 Nik Sudan 1 97 vandriver 1 97 shillingburg 1 97 Sebastian 1 95 Pedro Medeiros 1 94 zoglu 1 94 Vertigon 1 94 aarkipel 1 93 Wan 1 93 thecodermonkey 1 93 charliecarlo 1 93 lulublululu 1 92 caeonosphere 1 92 icefallgames 1 92 Madgvox 1 92 FGM 1 92 Hammers 1 92 Chronodrax 1 90 azurenimbus 1 90 ataxkt 1 90 Huitre 1 90 StudioWolfox 1 90 pa3kc 1 89 cappelnord 1 89 vallde 1 89 Raindrinker 1 89 jack-lance 1 89 PixelFormedStudios 1 89 porousnapkin 1 88 MateCziner 1 88 Ourson 1 88 JoeDev_net 1 87 Draknek 1 87 timgarbos 1 87 AlanZucconi 1 87 MaggardJosh 1 87 RobinbyZhou 1 87 Sintel 1 87 Tamfoolery 1 86 fluidvolt 1 86 Attrition 1 86 monkeybit29 1 86 hypersnow 1 86 FiSilva 1 85 AkirAssasin 1 85 Lawrence 1 85 Koba0100 1 85 pLaw 1 85 Armanky 1 85 justinooncx 1 84 furriKira 1 84 benbusby 1 84 Jons games 1 84 rylgh 1 84 RhysD 1 84 eShredder 1 83 JoeProgram 1 83 baknik 1 83 adamprack 1 82 ashtheevil 1 82 Horsed 1 82 Zemmi 1 82 nonetheless 1 82 Ted Brown 1 81 Ovidios 1 81 TRAB 1 81 caranha 1 81 SmallDeadGuy 1 80 Lustdante 1 80 Wolve 1 80 Mysterarts 1 80 PaperBlurt 1 80 Jiyambi 1 80 onnofal 1 79 onzephyr 1 79 Atmospherium 1 79 Robinerd 1 79 quickfingers 1 79 wolderado 1 79 hippy-dave 1 79 yodamaster 1 79 yves 1 79 maloki 1 78 bentog 1 78 Greg Power 1 78 GogglesKitty 1 78 BoltKey 1 78 mrspeaker 1 78 superjoebob 1 78 avaki 1 78 Grenac 1 78 ReboundGames 1 77 topbraj 1 77 s-ol 1 77 looPing 1 77 Arnage 1 76 LMT 1 76 GreenyUk 1 76 TheWzzard 1 76 ghodan 1 75 rhythmlynx 1 75 patvanmackelberg 1 75 geekdrums 1 75 Spotlightor Gao 1 74 zzq 1 74 Lachhh 1 74 chicknstu 1 74 q_dork 1 73 Cambrian_Man 1 73 Kortuga 1 73 Aircraft Terrier 1 73 Justin Mullin 1 73 voxel 1 73 minism 1 73 CoderCameron 1 73 hypp 1 72 internetpaulicy 1 72 Gus the Shark 1 71 jackrugile 1 71 DeusOpus 1 71 Charles Cox 1 71 SiM2SiM 1 70 SalamiChild 1 70 frenchie 1 70 Modoc73 1 70 dkilford 1 70 thristhart 1 70 sgehlich 1 69 ashen 1 69 StabAlarash 1 69 Lex 1 69 Jonochrome 1 69 PaidGEEK 1 69 Remi Gourrierec 1 68 Yaroslav Kravtsov 1 68 tobia88 1 68 MSiddeek 1 68 Nucleose 1 68 abductedPlatypus 1 67 dimaswift 1 67 Kitch 1 67 karlin 1 67 r8berto 1 66 greg-anims 1 66 Robber 1 66 Tijn 1 66 notajetski 1 66 Remco 1 66 j_peeba 1 66 madlee 1 66 Aurel Bílÿ 1 66 renatopp 1 66 Solifuge 1 66 Misfit 1 65 Akurn 1 65 voidqk 1 65 Eniko 1 65 sydan 1 65 dingotime 1 65 Temmy 1 65 Lovro Kalinovčić 1 65 aevek 1 65 JoshBurleson 1 65 increpare 1 65 Shaun Lebron 1 64 TwinGhosts 1 64 Martin Vilcans 1 64 SuperDisk 1 64 Jon Reid 1 64 lessmilk 1 63 rahulparihar 1 63 treegemmer 1 63 CptDustmite 1 63 Pix3m 1 63 jorjordandan 1 63 Porcus_Pie 1 63 Veralos 1 63 Connor McGrory 1 63 Aggrathon 1 63 VDZ 1 62 Colorvade 1 62 MarkoPoloDev 1 62 Drachlen 1 62 Pierrec 1 62 Lancey 1 62 Dir3kt 1 62 atraxgames 1 62 dickpoelen 1 62 ix 1 62 frogcheese 1 62 Isogash 1 61 purenickery 1 61 Pinpickle 1 61 Mirroar 1 60 TheMadPangolin 1 60 joqlepecheur 1 60 piotrszoka 1 60 duncankeller 1 60 Ishisoft 1 60 Tim Ruswick 1 59 Gins 1 59 Crowno 1 59 gilmore606 1 59 MagnesiumNinja 1 59 SaFrMo 1 59 Fnkee 1 59 unprompted 1 58 Mikhail Lyubimov 1 58 seano 1 58 nka 1 58 unpronounceable 1 58 Orange 1 57 jirrev 1 57 Ervin 1 56 KappaIX 1 56 SecondDimension 1 56 HeyChinaski 1 56 DaanVanYperen 1 56 CornflowerBlue 1 55 Niphram 1 55 SMILEY_4_ 1 55 NeverAutomatic 1 55 kalibrated 1 55 quadtree 1 55 Peping 1 54 Brodenino 1 54 lucienpro 1 54 RNGSilvercraft 1 54 Polyganz 1 54 Pastry 1 54 Kevlanche 1 54 jay griffin 1 54 tomdeal 1 54 hairaz 1 53 flummox3d 1 53 gilead 1 53 Neonlare 1 52 PBG 1 52 dunin 1 52 tinytouchtales 1 52 Casino Jack 1 52 bluescrn 1 52 magicdidac 1 52 xand 1 51 reuno 1 51 Aru Nyan 1 51 Sos 1 51 dmcfarline 1 50 whalebot 1 50 khahem 1 49 Brandon Diaz 1 49 Hunter Loftis 1 49 derdragon 1 49 fserb 1 49 Maroovan 1 49 Thein 1 49 JMickle 1 48 terrivellmann 1 48 Kiyaku 1 48 Toki Anholmes 1 48 Radical Dog 1 48 Rogue Studios 1 48 Miziziziz 1 48 SonnyBone 1 48 atomic_swerve 1 48 yyam 1 47 misterstripey 1 47 IanGraven 1 47 Azure_Kyte 1 46 2dgamedev 1 46 fermenter 1 46 mitkus 1 46 sftrabbit 1 46 QuexD 1 46 Lyje 1 46 FiloGC 1 46 souperstrawer 1 46 4xisblack 1 46 Apace 1 46 Headmade 1 46 Hexadecima1 1 46 atuun 1 46 jahndis 1 46 Dreauw 1 45 jimmynoshoes 1 45 orangepascal 1 45 IAmSpencer 1 45 George 1 44 AdamHarte 1 44 nodoxi 1 44 SimonTheCase 1 44 Fenmar 1 44 vidarn 1 44 soy_yuma 1 44 Noa Calice 1 44 Tommislav 1 43 DavidErosa 1 43 Majko 1 43 Hi_ImTemmy 1 43 PTSnoop 1 43 bvanschooten 1 43 Jhelle 1 43 tacohej 1 43 adamwoolridge 1 43 Resonious 1 43 azlen 1 43 roxflame 1 42 Raiyumi 1 42 Lesbroufe 1 42 frittatenbank 1 42 omaha 1 42 GenericToast 1 42 randomnine 1 42 Mopz 1 42 theOnlyGoodDrcz 1 42 Jilt 1 41 LeafThief 1 41 GoldRanger 1 41 tsjost 1 41 crazya02 1 41 lanza 1 41 JigxorAndy 1 41 ecbambrick 1 41 CogentInvalid 1 41 Chman 1 41 conormn 1 41 rwos 1 41 MrTedders 1 41 mrnyarlathotep 1 40 Ludorverr 1 40 gdcvdqpl 1 40 tommie96 1 40 Zccc 1 39 Ixeno 1 39 Sakuyan 1 39 Valden 1 39 TiRSO! 1 39 alottabit 1 39 Chris Mondok 1 39 jorgemoag 1 39 plancien 1 38 yokcos700 1 38 LuckyFeathers 1 38 AndrewJAdams 1 38 Florian van Strien 1 38 swrni 1 38 Terry 1 37 NAL 1 37 Praron 1 37 celeron55 1 37 maxr00 1 37 cppchriscpp 1 37 Mark Smith 1 36 TobiasW 1 36 xk_the_name 1 36 Zednaut 1 36 Riley Adams 1 36 KeyMaster 1 36 Zekronz 1 36 Healthire 1 36 Weaver 1 36 Detective Pixel 1 36 somnolentPumpkin 1 36 maysick 1 35 Julian Creutz 1 35 PapyGaragos 1 35 dstozek 1 35 iceburg7 1 35 JoeManaco 1 35 ytaha 1 35 jjjjason 1 35 Poroh 1 35 Somfunambulist 1 34 Moocowsgomoo 1 34 CatOnMars 1 34 FisherGoodwin 1 34 Sh1rogane 1 34 Jiri Hysek 1 34 Nils -Gecko- Munch 1 34 LPeter1997 1 34 Crabman 1 33 maartene 1 33 jolle 1 33 allinlabs 1 33 FuzzyWuzzie 1 33 KCreanor 1 33 Calciumtrice 1 33 dv49 1 33 IcyLava 1 32 katie 1 32 Fouralex 1 32 josefalanga 1 31 mystakin 1 31 Homletmoo 1 31 Porpentine 1 31 flrn 1 31 L 1 31 Syrapt0r 1 31 TheBigShot 1 30 NOFUEL 1 30 Rudenko 1 30 PowerSpark 1 30 husky 1 29 mrnannings 1 29 Nisshoku 1 29 Rombus 1 29 CarlsonAndPeeters 1 29 Anikki 1 29 Tom Gardiner 1 28 4KbShort 1 28 hgcummings 1 28 Romko Pidstryhach 1 28 fisholith 1 28 jackyjjc 1 28 Kurakurt 1 28 gre 1 28 divillysausages 1 28 maxyan 1 28 Dwel 1 27 folmerkelly 1 27 printhello 1 27 orange08 1 27 smealum 1 27 SketchyGalore 1 27 oab 1 27 CKlidify 1 27 Steve [tacospice] 1 27 Flipsy 1 27 Daniel Moreno 1 26 Imphenzia 1 26 Breno_M 1 25 rectangular Tim 1 25 Omiya Games 1 25 wumpus 1 25 Ghostik 1 25 cwkx 1 25 methamphetabear 1 25 NAMKCOR 1 24 Cawrtz 1 24 oldmanbiles 1 24 Moritz 1 24 ditzel 1 24 rogueNoodle 1 24 semi 1 24 kratorspore 1 24 Jani Nykanen 1 23 spazzarama 1 23 AutumnGuy 1 23 kalugny 1 23 mcccclean 1 23 TLansdale 1 23 CastEclipse 1 23 palemachine 1 23 Logan 1 23 mar3k 1 22 Logun 1 22 Jima 1 22 simonhutchinson 1 22 FireSlash 1 21 Sytech 1 21 ker0chan 1 21 4sap 1 21 Madbeagle 1 21 echa 1 21 datacr4sh 1 21 Sebastian Lague 1 21 Teejay5 1 21 raver 1 21 CJ K 1 21 Capro 1 21 misson20000 1 20 bwalter 1 20 erebus 1 20 meg 1 20 crazyrems 1 19 chobrah 1 19 nurabsal 1 19 oatsbarley 1 19 geckojsc 1 19 Maple 1 19 Overv 1 19 MrDave 1 18 Mazzletov 1 18 JulianMH 1 18 JeromWaarom 1 18 btwj_ 1 18 jomacel 1 18 onilink_ 1 18 HernanZh 1 18 Harry Alissavakis 1 18 wademcgillis 1 18 StrideWide 1 18 stray 1 18 Kingethaniel 1 18 Zathalos 1 18 Lerg 1 17 Yvanor 1 17 binary_coder 1 17 turnip 1 17 KRP 1 17 wwwhizz 1 17 HighQuality 1 16 madameberry 1 16 toboggan 1 16 egor-idiot 1 16 simonnaus 1 16 AzimuthGames 1 16 stevenlr 1 16 Jegus9 1 16 nihilocrat 1 16 Twinters 1 16 Asturk 1 16 ziege 1 16 PUARSLIBURF 1 16 AmyDee 1 16 stjahns 1 16 squirrel 1 16 Windmill Games 1 16 cardboard 1 14 niksg 1 14 nathanhoffer 1 14 Yword 1 14 rpmoura 1 14 stormforce02 1 14 amras0000 1 14 Steve | tacospice 1 14 GastricSparrow 1 14 murraya2 1 14 rynti 1 14 pixzleone 1 14 Mark Overmars 1 14 lupusinsanus 1 14 ViliX 1 14 jayhC 1 14 infernet89 1 14 Chyme 1 13 superpokeunicorn 1 13 cerno-b 1 13 RevoluGame 1 12 TheFudster 1 12 kyyrma 1 12 vilix64 1 12 alect 1 12 Stevie Bushman 1 12 st33d 1 12 Nition 1 12 gmfk07 1 12 Herman Chau 1 12 walaber 1 12 sergicollado 1 12 Joe Williamson 1 12 amy742 1 12 John Drury 1 12 DJWizardCop 1 12 vinipc 1 11 tybantarnusa 1 11 VascoF 1 11 Edd Morgan 1 11 vikingpotato 1 11 Perry 1 11 jharler 1 11 conradte3 1 11 Alexbrainbox 1 11 Thibaut Blanca 1 10 Wizcas 1 10 cudabear 1 10 craighasdysentery 1 9 someoneman 1 9 Steven Colling 1 9 Wizard.Exe 1 9 Yasho 1 8 eXr 1 8 kikito 1 8 ViKing Games 1 8 fizzd 1 8 Agecaf 1 8 Vandash 1 8 Evilion 1 8 Saf 1 8 Matthew Rayfield 1 8 recursor 1 8 Waynetron 1 8 Sean S. LeBlanc 1 8 Vaughn 1 8 galman 1 8 GhostID 1 7 AlmightyTuna 1 7 Simon Stalhandske 1 7 foolmoron 1 7 RobotHoboDanceParty 1 7 drludos 1 7 peterkirk 1 7 Cake_Catastrophe 1 7 danhett 1 7 Krisjet 1 7 IndieLucky 1 6 lazybraingames 1 6 tjmolinski 1 6 dobnarr 1 6 Simon 1 6 invaderJim 1 6 Lecalat 1 6 Idovoodoo 1 6 someone 1 6 phi 1 6 Bemmu 1 5 hbocao 1 5 cbear_wallis 1 5 udo 1 5 Ayush Singla 1 5 shrekshao 1 4 alvarop 1 4 jcvsmc 1 4 madflame991 1 4 Arkthalohs 1 4 ulydev 1 4 koe415 1 4 dylanwolf 1 4 MoltenMustafa 1 4 skeeto 1 4 Brassawiking 1 3 Snail_Man 1 3 wupto 1 3 Kryptarchy 1 3 TheMonsterFromTheDeep 1 3 abezuska 1 3 toestee 1 3 Clavus 1 3 capsizedmoose 1 3 KittyMac 1 3 Eelfroth 1 3 boorik 1 2 Criggles 1 2 Pilly 1 2 cadaeibfe 1 2 brinkhousegames 1 2 TheCodeFactory 1 1 Pixelaborate 1 1 nihilaleph 1 1 TreePunchers 1 1 Vinterskog 1 1 marccspro 1 1 FormalCloud 1 1 Frigolit 1 1 Holofire 1 1 iamteekay 1 1 Mixer 1 1

TLDR: 2 rounds of rating - the 1st round would be the same it's now. The output wouldn't be the final rankings however, but tiers (so e.g. top 20, 21-40 etc).
The 2nd round would be similar, but the community would rate just the 1st tier of games (for each category).
This would result in tiers of games with the top 20 of each category (for compo and jam).

Why?

As most of us are aware, the rating system is far from perfect. Would the proposed solution solve all its flaws? Not really, but it would address one of the main sticking points - unrepresentative sample sizes of ratings of winning games.

Rating by its nature is very subjective. We all understand the categories differently and our ratings wildly differ. Your Fun 3* is probably different from my 3* and the same goes for all the other categories. There are people who are happy to give away all-around and there are others who rarely rate something a 5* in a single category. (Keep in mind I'm not pointing at anyone in particular, so avoid posting defensive comments, please). This just might lead to a winner with the minimal number of votes needed. The dev could have got lucky or they published an amazing game, but has gone mostly unnoticed. Either way, it's bound to raise some eyebrows.

How?

Add a second round of rating.
The first could be pretty much the same as it's now, except the results wouldn't be precise rankings, but rather tiers based on the the actual hidden rank. The number per rank is upto debate. I'd start with 10 or 20, but it doesn't need to be fixed necessarily (there could be 100 games in rank 10 let's say etc).
After said 1st round, a second round would take place, but only the top games (Tier 1) would be rated. The ratings could be pretty much the same, except the greatly reduced pool. The devs of those games shouldn't advertise their games at that point, but the landing page should lead all users into the 2nd round. The second round should probably last untill all the games get a given threshold of (round 2) ratings (200?).
After that, the ranking of Tier 1 would be published. (And possibly other tiers as well).

Benefits

• Everyone would actually have a chance to look at the creme de la creme and vote on the winner
• If someone gets into Tier 1 by having an unrepresentative sample, this should somewhat remedy the situation
• If someone places in the top 3, but they should have opted from the winning category, there should still be time to do right by the runners-up
• There would be further motivation to playtest more games (which I do for the winners anyway)
• Quite likely extra feedback for Tier 1

Drawbacks

• The voting would take more time (hey, more to do 'till the next LD... :laughing: )
• You tell me

What do you think, guys? Would this work? Am I completely nuts?
Please, do share your thoughts.

So I've been trying to find a job as a game developer in recent days but couldn't. I don't understand why they won't ask me anything about games, rather they ask me some boring stuff about software development and those questions which they would never ever implement in their games at all.

I am so frustrated and thinking of quitting my passion for games. Maybe I should learn making websites or apps or something? My friends and family says that Game Industry in Pakistan is no more and you can't get a job in it. What should I do? Shall I still pursue my passion and maybe work on making a great game and publish it. Or I should just quit it? What's the better option?

Look at those scores!!

30's in 3 catagories?? Thats pretty cool. Thanks yall. We're still working on a more polished version to upload on itch. Its pretty sweet. Also this LD has been supprisingly fun with the contrasting genres. I hope the next theme is just is wild.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/timestaar-turn-based-bullet-hell

Disclaimer: a friend has respectfully asked me to no longer comment on a set of related issues, and so out of respect for him, this is purely a technical discussion on how to improve the ranking system.

Here's the problem I see: despite people going into the competition fully understanding that varying sample sizes are not good for the objectivity of the relative rankings, despite the fact that these people are fully aware in their logical minds that the current rankings are an imperfect science which says little to nothing about one game versus another, despite the fact that people recognize that by setting the rating threshold required for ranking too high, it would exclude many busy people who simply don't have enough time to generate that much buzz around their game, there's something deeply unsatisfying about seeing a game with very few ratings beat a game with very many ratings. And this is for good reason. It's not only an emotional reaction, but there is a logical justification: because the system is very easy to abuse, and nobody wants to feel cheated after dedicating an entire weekend developing free entertainment for others. So here's my take on a solution.

I think in order to create a more objective ranking system, you absolutely must create an objective target goal. The most trivial example would be having a single authoritative user be responsible for all ratings. Obviously, that's impractical with 3k+ submissions, but it illustrates the point. The objective target goal is now to GET THE HIGHEST RATING WITH THIS PERSON. It is directly measurable by the ratings that person gives. And believe it or not, despite shifting the focus from some nebulous concept like being the best game overall to something tangential like BEING THE GAME THIS PERSON RATES THE HIGHEST, the fact that it is DIRECTLY MEASURABLE actually allows you to draw MORE INFORMATIVE CONCLUSIONS over time. If your submissions win multiple events in a row, you can actually now make a solid argument in favor of your games being the best AT ACHIEVING THE STATED GOAL. You now have something that is directly comparable between submissions and across events.

Unfortunately, solutions like that all have one major flaw in the context of LD, which is that they directly contradict some of the stated purposes of LD. Namely, that it's a community event, developers want a randomized sample of feedback from the general population, and nobody should be mandated to participate in any capacity. We'll call these kinds of solutions CLASS A solutions. CLASS A solutions compromise on those stated goals in some way or another. Most of the solutions I've seen proposed following this event so far are CLASS A solutions, because they involve some sort of authoritative voter round, where trusted voters, streamers, etc. can, to varying degrees, OVERRIDE ratings given by the general community in the initial voting round. I get it, they're not just completely throwing away the early results. But they are being granted more power to some degree.

On the other hand, we have what we will call the CLASS B solutions. Class B solutions are more desirable because they do not compromise on the goals of LD whatsoever (or at least do so very minimally, but that's up to you guys to decide). CLASS B solutions cannot weight votes, and they cannot mandate participation in any capacity. They can SUGGEST or ENCOURAGE participation in order to generate more ratings and hopefully reduce controversy or feelings of suspicion. An example of a CLASS B solution I've seen proposed is one that was brought up a few events back, where there would be something like a homework queue that rewards participants with extra Coolness in exchange for rating a suggested subset of submissions. This is certainly a cool idea, and does encourage participants to rate more games in general, but it DOES NOT DIRECTLY ADDRESS THE CORE COMPLAINT, which is that CATEGORY WINNERS SHOULD HAVE RELATIVELY HIGH COUNTS OF RATINGS.

So to summarize what I've said up until this point, what we really want is a CLASS B solution which stands a chance to address the core issue of winners with few ratings, without going as far as a CLASS A solution would to reduce community voting power or mandate participation. This is what I've come up with:

You can think of it as 2 voting rounds, similar to the CLASS A proposals so far, but technically, there is only 1 voting round. They're more like 2 voting phases. Participants only get 1 vote, as they do now, and votes are not weighted, so everyone's vote is equal, as it is now. Voter power is never once reduced in the slightest. The only difference is that the intermediate results are made public prior to the 2nd phase. Then, the final results are tallied after both phases are complete. Again, I want to make very clear, this is almost exactly the same as the way it is now. Each participant gets to vote on each entry exactly once, and that 1 vote is equal. The ONLY difference is that for the 2nd portion of the voting period, the intermediate results are made public. By doing this, you allow people who haven't voted on a game near the top of the rankings to vote on it, thereby increasing the sample size of the winners.

Think of it like getting dressed in the morning. Sometimes, you're in a rush, and you quickly slip into your pants, but your underwear doesn't feel quite right, so you adjust. The 2nd phase is the adjustment. If the intermediate results are released and people feel there is a game which doesn't belong at the top, they can add their vote, thereby increasing the confidence in the overall ranking. If they choose not to vote, and the game stays where it's at, that's okay too. The game isn't automatically disqualified, its fans don't have their votes questioned, and the game wins, because people had every chance to vote against it but decided not to. If you wanted, you could even have a confidence threshold, where you bump a game up or down a slot for having a massive gap in number of ratings compared to those around it, but honestly, at that point, we're just splitting split ends of hair. You could also prohibit the top 100 in a category from voting on each other's games as well, just to eliminate spiteful voting between them, but it's not really worth doing considering they each get only 1 vote and could just as easily make a bunch of fake accounts.

So far, this is the only CLASS B system I've been able to come up with in my head that comes anywhere close to protecting the values of LD while potentially addressing this recurring issue. Unfortunately, it is not without its flaws. It does absolutely nothing to prevent intentional abuse, just like the current system. Short of implementing a strictly managed CLASS A solution, I don't think there's any reasonable way to prevent intentional cheating. We're better off trying to find ways to utilize the resources we have, namely thousands of participants, to generate more honest ratings to combat the cheaters. It's also kind of sad to think that a submission could be a category leader going into phase 2, and then be edged out by a competitor generating late buzz. I mean, sure, the results are not locked in until after phase 2, but still, that's a bummer.

If you've made it this far, I apologize for the long description. The system itself is actually quite simple, but understanding the reasons behind it was quite the brain exercise. Please leave your comments below.

ADDENDUM: And for what it's worth, the reason I put "improved" in quotes in the post's subject line is that I personally do not believe this system will improve the objectivity of the rankings overall. I believe the system will be just as flawed, maybe even more so, because of the fundamental principle that I mentioned earlier about not having an objective target goal.

Think of it this way. Imagine attending an NBA Finals match to determine the winning team of the basketball season. There is a very objective goal. Whichever team scores the most points in the allotted time wins. That may not determine the best team overall, but it does determine the winner of that particular contest according to a strict set of rules. Now, imagine if instead of tracking points scored, the winner was determined by the volume of cheers from the stands. At the end of the game, the referee asks the fans of each team to take turns cheering as loudly as possible for who they thought won (I know there are instruments to objectively measure noise volume, but for the purposes of this example, pretend the ref is doing it by ear, and he's deaf on one side and spinning in a circle). Whichever one he thinks sounds the loudest wins. This system I've proposed is a little bit like fitting more people in the stadium to improve the confidence in this win-by-sound system. I'm just not convinced it's actually better in such a noisy (no pun intended) system.

You have to consider the very real possibility that someone in the middle tiers has a strong entry and wants honest feedback, but they can't generate buzz because everyone is too busy rating top tier games in phase 2 which don't even necessarily appeal to them. You've actually shifted the balance of exposure negatively, all for the sake of reducing suspicion, and the value of the change in objectivity is questionable at best. This "fix" is nothing more than a placebo to ease the suspicions of people who don't actually understand why community votes are not objective. In fact, that person who can't generate buzz may then be encouraged to seek out friendly votes from people they've curried favor with, introducing even more bias and muddying the middle tiers. Butterfly effect. Everything affects everything else.

If my suggestion were implemented and I was offered to participate in it, I'd have to politely decline. Because again, I recognize a CLASS B system will never have anywhere near the level of objectivity that a proper CLASS A system will. You need a CLASS A system for this to be a true competition. A CLASS B system is something you use to judge a silly informal game of hop-scotch on a kindergarten playground. A CLASS A system is needed if you really care about the competitive aspect of something. It's up to you, the LD community, to decide where your priorities are.

Hank the Drunken Dwarf

...Not this one.

When we’re rating an entry, we’re giving other people a sense of how it fares—is it visually, sonically, or mechanically better than some other game?

But flawed methods can lead to skewed results. Take this example from the American Association for Public Opinion Research:

People Magazine asked visitors to its website to vote in an online poll for the Most Beautiful Person of 1998. The ballot included Julia Roberts, Leonardo DiCaprio, Madonna and the other usual suspects. It also allowed write-in nominations. The temptation proved too great for radio bad boy Howard Stern, who advised his listeners to email votes for Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf, a Stern sidekick who died in 2001. A small army of online pranksters quickly took up the campaign. Hank swamped the competition, finishing with 230,169 votes, or about 16 times the number who supported DiCaprio, the pretty face whom People declared the fairest of the fair and put on its cover.

For a variety of reasons, these comparisons can fail us—even with when hundreds of thousands of people join in. And the problems may get worse when you’re drawing from a small population.

Polls that gauge the feelings of ten million people can do so confidently with a random sample of around ten thousand people—less than 1%. But, if we’re talking about a small, finite population—say, a few thousand developers participating in a game jam—you’ll need a larger percentage of a small group to gauge those feelings with the same accuracy.

A much larger percentage, in fact. That 1% can become 10% or even 50%. Is Horror Date Simulator 6 really a five-star game, according to the 1,000 developers participating in Lucky’s Dreamjam 42?

Ask a few hundred people.

So what? What’s at stake?

So, yeah, that’s too rigorous. Just a year ago, Ludum Dare’s ratings period was extended because fewer than half of all games met the minimum threshold for scoring—about 20 votes.

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that it’s unlikely we’d see the kind of participation needed to make a higher minimum threshold or a two-tier ranking system viable (if we’re trying to provide as many participants as possible with a rating, anyway).

It’s worth thinking about why we’d want a rating system in the first place. Ludum Dare’s smart balance filter encourages people to play, praise, critique, and promote each other’s games—and pretty successfully, I’d say. If that’s all we’re here for, reforms to the ratings system are really solutions in search of a problem.

What’s at stake? Besides a bit of prestige (a nice salve when mom asks why you don’t just put those skills to use for Big Company), a really high score encourages people to try your game after the jam ends. And that’s a big deal for those of us who’d like to see games we’re passionate about reach an audience beyond our basement.

Random samples -> reliable(ish) results

If we’re looking to improve the accuracy of a small sample, it helps if that sample is randomly-selected. Here’s another example of a failed poll from the American Association for Public Opinion Research:

In March of 2006, the American Medical Association reported disturbing rates of binge drinking and unprotected sex among college women during spring break. The report was based on what the researchers claimed was a survey of “a random sample” of 644 women.The survey results were breathlessly reported on the Today Show, the CBS Early Show, and hundreds of reports followed on local television and radio newscasts… One problem: The sample was not random. The results were based on only women who volunteered to answer the question as part of an online survey panel. Only about a quarter of these women had ever gone on a spring break trip.

Anyone who’s participated in these game jams can probably identify a few reasons why these samples aren’t quite random.

1. Self-Promotion/Self-Selection

Developers post on ldjam.com’s front page in search of more ratings. Besides side-stepping the smart balance filter, posts like this are a problem for ratings in that they’re most likely to recruit from a group of people who are excited about or interested in that kind of game.

2. Tit-For-Tat/Quid-Pro-Quo

“I’ve played your game, now play mine”—or “I’ve rated your game highly! Here’s mine”—might give that game a slight bump.

3. Voting Blocs

If you’re on friendly terms with other, competing participants, you’re likely to give their game a look. Even if this results in only five or ten additional ratings, the ratings for a game that’s just over the minimum threshold can experience substantial skewing.

Restricted Ratings: A Modest Proposal

I’m wondering how everyone would feel about something like this: everything—or almost everything—stays as it is. Anyone can play, share, comment on, and promote any game they’d like.

But, you can’t rate just any game—you’ll have a page with 50-100 randomly-selected games, ordered by their smart balance score. That list won’t change until you rate a game from that list. At that point, another randomly-chosen game will be available to rate… and so on.

There's a discussion in progress on randomness and group voting at GitHub, where Ludum Dare's source code is contained, and another on a "homework" feature, which rewards users for playing "less desirable" (less trendy, not web-based) games (thank you, @samusoidal).

I like this solution because it makes the most of these small samples and still allows developers to look for feedback from the kinds of players they’d like to make games for.

I’ve had fun thinking about this—and I hope you’ve had fun reading it!

https://erkberg.bandcamp.com
These are all the songs I wrote for the games I created in the last 5 years, mostly during game jams (and mostly during Ludum Dare).

Yes, it's more of a collection than an actual album.
Yes, it's barely 30 minutes long.
Yes, it's poorly mixed and mastered (and sometimes written...).

Still, it feels incredible!
I hope I can find more time for music in the future and get better at it, because I just love it!

I like the discussion that has been going around about the rating system and incentivising feedback and all that. I don't have anything real meaningful to add to those conversations. I love the Ludum Dare community and think it is a great, friendly and open place on the web that is often not great, open or friendly. Here's what I believe about Ludum Dare.

Ludum Dare is primarily about community

We have an awesome community. It is great interacting with you folks on here and I've met people I now consider friends here. There are no prizes. Just a large group of passionate people. I love that.

Ludum Dare is all about contributing to the community

The entire site and jam is based around it. Want people to play your game? Play other peoples! Give them good feedback! You can easily follow other people and keep up to date on their work. Joining teams is easy and the site supports it. I love reading people's post mortems and hearing about their journey. I like to see updates on what people are working on and how they are solving problems. I like to see all the eye candy where people create cool things and we get to respond with hearts. All that contributes to the community and makes it a great place. Which leads me to my next point...

Self promotion hurts the community

Note that I'm not saying self promotion is * bad *. It isn't. If you want to make it in the game industry you have to do it. But you don't have to do it * here *. It seemed that this jam the entire front page was always filled with "Play My Game!" advertisements. They don't add to the community. There are lots of other places where self promotion is accepted and welcome. I don't think that the Ludum Dare main feed is one of those places.

Here's my plan

1. I'm going to make sure that every post I make contributes to the community in some way. A way I solved a problem. A decision that I made. Sure I'll link to my game, but I'm going to make sure that I'm at least contributing to everyone when I do.
2. I'm going to respond honestly to everyone who rates my game.
3. If I see someone self promoting on the main page, I'm not going to play or rate unless I see they are at positive coolness. I may also politely and respectfully explain how the system works (maybe they just don't know!). Advertising only works because we keep buying the stuff. So I'll just spend my money (votes) elsewhere. Maybe if enough of us do it the behavior will change?
4. As I play and rate games, I am going to post about the cool things I find so that others can find them too. This might even help towards getting the entries that are in the running for the top spots extra votes, which may make others happy about the low rating count for winning entries.

See you all in Ludum Dare 42!

Just explain them what is a good behavior and why :)

When I first entered LD in December, I had a hard time understanding how everything works. To be honest I probably still don't.

When I look at people who ended up in top 100 for LD41, some of them don't understand that JAM and COMPO have a different ranking.

I saw people on youtube participating in LD for the first time and when the time came to submit their game, they didn't know if they should post in COMPO or JAM. The person ended up posting in "unfinished" and now has 0 ratings, when his game clearly showed some talent, and all he needed was encouragement to continue.

There are a lot of other examples, and I'm sure many of you can relate to a certain extent. And you know what, it's not their fault. These people have good intentions, like everybody else.

We should focus on informing the newcomers.

Because they are the ones who need the information, they want to listen, and they are open-minded. Explain them what LD is, why it was created, what is the spirit of the event, what are the rules and why, and so on. Maybe a video documentary ? I don't know ! But it has to be fun. Maybe a game ?? This place is full of game designers, I'm sure we can make it instructive AND fun. I like the idea of little badges and rewards, but it would also create some kind of hierarchy, with the newcomers at the bottom, and I don't like this idea that because you just arrived in the community people give you less credit.

Of course, we should all try to be exemplary.

But if you are here reading this feed, it's because you care, so I'm sure you are already doing everything you can. We might all have our own reasons to care ? Maybe if we share those reasons, we can get everyone on board with us ?

Here is my top 3 reasons why I love LD

1) You guys are awesome, seriously. If you've played some mobas, you know what a toxic community is. This community is at the other extreme. Comments are positive, constructive, creative, clever, encouraging, caring ... It's the social environment everybody on this planet would need to be the best version of themselves, learn, share, and love each other. It goes well beyond LD in my opinion.

2) Feedback. Lots of quality feedback. Peer review is in my opinion one of the best ways to learn from each other, and give back by teaching others too. It's also very scalable. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the #1 education tool in a near future. I'd love to hear your opinion on the matter as it's still very new all things considered.

3) Fun ! We are all here to create and play each other's games after all :) It's all about creating innovative concepts, experimenting, having fun together, and releasing all that fun into the world for free. How cool is that ?

Sorry for the long post, here are potato games for you :

https://itch.io/search?q=potato

https://gamejolt.com/search/games?q=potato

Finally had some time to contemplate on my blog about my first Ludum Dare attempt.

Maybe it contains some tips for you... (or maybe you'll think i am Captain Obvious)

Anyway the conclusion was: IT WAS FUN!

https://supernapie.com/blog/ludum-dare-41-post-mortem

hi im sort of new to game-making and so far i find it enjoyable, however i lack necessary art skills to develop myself as a game developer if anyone has any tips on how to improve art skills i would love to hear them

You can check out the Github highlights of this LD41. Congrats to everyone on the list.

I am having waayyy too much fun prototyping this isometric top-down racing game! =) I was meaning to finish off a more polished version of my LD41 game "Golf N' Grenades" but my passion for top-down racing was revived and got the better of me for some reason.

https://youtu.be/yOnBraCYarQ

One day, the world woke up with a huge problem : all the girls disappeared except one. No luck for you, it's your girlfriend.

So you did what a sane boyfriend would do in that case : you found a tank and decided to protect the one you love.

Face waves of guys, and give your girlfriend the presents she asks you by clicking on them !

Available for Windows and Android.

:joystick: > Download and save her !

And thank you again for this great event, see you all at the next LD ♥️

File Size

The game is now only 37 mb compared to 100 mb. Probably because I updated my unity to 2018.1 from the very outdated unity 5.

Music

I gave the music more bass to set the eerie mood. I also left the drum beat unchanged so it can set the player to perform in a racing game.

Menu

The intro terrain is now on a cliffside instead of a roadside.

There's now an introduction video and a tutorial.

Gameplay

The controls are a lot better now. Compared to the ice skating rink from the Ludum Dare version.

Hitting the zombies will now explode blood to limit your vision. Compared to the old version where they just follow you indefinitely.

AI

Car AI are also improved. They would now drift when hitting a waypoint.

New Enemy: Ghost(Probably the reason I had sleep paralysis). It wasn't really that scary because I did not put a lot of effort in making it terrifying but, Repeatetive play-testing still always gives me the creeps.

New Features

A map with real time player and enemy location

Map

The terrain now includes a lake. The game now have very varied map height because of the new better controls.

WHAT IS NOT INCLUDED.

The last thing that I want to include but was not able to, is the different ending depending on the place.

Gamejolt Page:

https://gamejolt.com/games/blackhorizon/335162

So a few days ago there have been these intersting discussions that talk about the ludum dare rating system. They had some good ideas and I had also an idea that I think is great!(everybody thinks his idea is good)

My "good" idea :

So I think that instead of only setting one goal to reach at votes to receive(20) it will be good to set something for games to rate. I know this exists but it doesnt affect ranks. I mean that if a developer doesnt play 20 games at the end of the jam he won't get ranked.

* Also * it will be good if the karma effected the way your votes affect the ranking.(sorry if I didnt express this in an understandable english) basically just like this in newgrounds.(the more karma/XP you have the more your votes are going o affect the game rankings) So that good and trusted will affect deeply the ranks.

* Also * give trusted youtubers and streamers(which are not participating) the chance to rate games like jupiter.

Hope it was clear and feel free to suggest anything!

How do you figure out your ranking?

I really think it would be nice to have these back, I never participated in them, but I know many people did and I think it would be awesome to have them back, even hosted on the old site for now.

Hint Hint, please people who are admins on the old site

So funny story, I completely forgot about LD41 for some reason :P I remember in the first two or three days I received about 48-50 ratings, then I kinda forgot about Ludum Dare and stopped playing games which then led to not many people playing my games and thus I didn't get many ratings. I only got about 60ish ratings for my game and still managed to place 22nd in the Innovation category and got 210th overall, no clue how. I'm sure there's many games that got hundreds of ratings and since I only got 60, I'm shocked that I managed to place 210th overall out of over 3,500 submissions.

Just wanted to make a post-mortem to maybe help others looking for art direction in future projects.

For our game On The Fly we ended up winning 1st Place in the graphics category as well as reaching 474 downloads on itch.io as of the time of this post! Wow! I did the art @Flightyfelon and my friend Josh @qkjosh did the programming and sound effects.

Getting Inspired

For us, after hearing the theme we set out to create our Game Pillars. We decided that we wanted to create a chill game about birds going down a river, with noodle necks inspired by wild birds striking silly poses.

We also wanted the two incompatible themes we chose to support these feelings in some way so we came up with Endless Runner and Dating Sim, to support our game's Two Pillars:

1 - Relaxation/Zen

2 - Noodle Neck Physics

And thus we got started on prototyping! As Josh prototyped the gameplay, I began prototyping the art. Starting with a Keyframe.

Sketching something out is CRUCIAL. Because until you do you have no idea how the idea in your mind will play out. Also, you can now actually direct the rest of your team towards your vision.

For example: Because of the keyframe we were able to fine-tune the perspective of the camera and world early-on.

Working Through it.

As Josh moved ahead with making the birds move side-to-side we kept passing the project back and forth with Unity's Collab functionality, making sure that at each step it was getting more fun to play and always staying true to our established pillars.

I started with the most important part of the game: The Characters. Trying to make sure they read very clearly from front and back since they'd be viewed from both sides. Actually, people found that the sparrow did not read well at all from the back and thought she looked like a girl with pigtails. Because of this, they were confused about the game's mechanics and didn't try to use the game's swap-birds function. See how important silhouette is?

Anyways, once we'd gotten the basic functionality down we could start polishing. This was around the middle of the second day and involved a lot of plants and insects and a very nerve-wracking function for Josh called the BugGenerator(); Yikes haha!

Around here we also mocked out the dialogue system. This was a time where a lot of ideas came and went. The important thing was to keep comparing the ideas to the game pillars and the keyframe.

For example, late into the jam we realized we would only have time for the dialogue system OR an end-state. We decided to not have an end-state because:

A) It would be against our first pillar of Zen/Relaxation

B) It would take away from the themes we'd set out with by making our endless runner less endless and also because the dialogue system was central to our dating sim section.

In a perfect world, we'd love to have had time for both. But we didn't. I think we made the right decision.

So now things are in place! Magnefique! Now let's look at polish.

Polish

Once the main art had wrapped up and Josh was chugging through finishing the dialogue system, I wanted to fine-tune the environment and simulate the passage of time by creating a day-night cycle. Together we were able to polish everything from the lighting to the textures to the little ripples the kettle left behing in the water.

At this point everything was pretty much done!

All that was left was UI and making sure the animations for the birds and bugs didn't break too too often. ;P

In Conclusion

Are there things we could have added? Definitely. It would have been great to have a completely finished game that had integrated the endless runner and dating sim mechanics more fully. Or had the bird's answers to the questions create a more noticeable effect on their relationship and change over time. But oh well. I'm very happy with how the whole game turned out and Josh is too. Hopefully one or both of us can make it back for the next jam and create a whole new adventure! ^_^ Hope this was a bit helpful!

If you still haven't played our game feel free to check it out on itch.io: Here

Dear Jammers,

We are pleased to announce a new edition of the Games Factory Jam and Weekly Game Jam, we are partnering and combining our two concepts!

The Games Factory Jam will last one week (from Friday 25 to Thursday 30 May) and will have a constraint and three themes (a pricpal theme, a secondary theme and a theme tertaire), you can vote for your favorite themes in this form: http://bit.ly/games-factory-vote

Join the Jam here: https://itch.io/jam/games-factory

Looking forward to welcoming you in this Game Jam, the Games Factory community and the Weekly Game Jam community wish you a great Weekend!

Hello world!!! So i've contemplating this question for a while, figured why not ask the LD Community. For me what excites in game development is exploring new ideas. Whether it is code or art or music, everything is a learning opportunity. I have deep enthusiasm to learn and therefore it provides me with the most enjoyment. I would love to hear what makes you excited about making a game?

Finally I managed to get the leaderboard done. It would be really great to find some impressive highscores. Are there some asteroid enthusiasts to accept the challenge?

Here's the link: https://mrmasterbit.itch.io/astropuzz

Or here is an alternative: http://glukosys.de/astropuzz/

hype hype hype hype HYPEEEEE! Just kidding, 76 days, a long wait to go before the next one :laughing:. How are you guys doing?

Post jam update - Added the ability to select cards by pressing 1-5 keys. - Added the ability to select cards with the mouse scroll wheel. - Added mouse controls to the menu and inventory. - Added a new ranged enemy. - Added a fullscreen option (Press F in the menu) - Fixed a bug that would close the game when you pressed escape. - Fixed a bug that would cause AOE spells to not deal damage to certain enemies

Download the game here: https://windmillgames.itch.io/cardcade

The future

We are happy to announce that Cardcade will be developed into a full game. After the Jam ended we began working on the game from scratch to ensure that the game can scale well without us running into issues later down the line. A big thanks to everyone who has played our entry and given us so much great feedback and valuable input.

Here is a sneakpeak of a new feature that we are working on, cardpacks: https://i.gyazo.com/ff75d7ea73dc22d47236a400f68a29f8.mp4

Follow development

Twitter: @Windmillgames

Ludum Dare 41 Game Entry "Gender Circles"

Finally in this Ludum Dare there is no school so I will have lot of time to make the game.

72 DAYS LEFT!

original file what was made on twine2

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bhcepk762ymv7fw/two%20themes%20tutorial.html?dl=0