Make your own levels! You can even use blocks that were planned for, but didn't make it into the Jam. There is even an Online Level gallery so you can play and share levels!

If you'd like to check it out you can play the game here!

As the saying goes: what happens on the graveyard stays on the graveyard. This is the motto by which Hans the gravedigger lives his life. Cut down trees, dig holes, drag ex people around - that's what he does. Day in, day out, through the night. Occasionally a zombie spices things up.

Life on the graveyard is stressful though - you got to keep up with the ever rising demand for graves due to increasing number of deceased. Harsh reality will push your little graveyard to its limits.

Grave Heart was developed in native JavaScript, and thus can be played in more or less every browser (sorry IE :( ).

If you're still interested in giving it a try, find it here.

Thanks to everybody who's played and rated the game, your feedback was very welcome! :)

Sincerely, the Grave Heart team.

(Here's an unfinished title screen)

Despite being in game development for 9 years, I've only participated in a game jam once before. The last one was a 7 day jam and I way over-scoped the project. This time it was different.

I originally didn't expect to participate in Ludum Dare 42 at all, but was interested in people's process. After spending a few minutes in a Twitch channel helping a team come up with ideas, I came up with an idea that I pitched to the channel, of which they didn't go with, thinking it was too ambitious. I was so baffled by how it could be "too ambitious" for a team with 3 engineers, and me being a self-taught programmer, thinking it was actually pretty simple, I coerced myself into just going for it.

There were a few key events that made this harder than it had to be from the start. (1) My reading glasses broke earlier that day, and (2) I decided to try and learn GameMaker Studio 2 for the project. These two things teamed up on me, almost like a conspiracy to get me to fail.

I give a lot of credit to the original GameMaker (before Yo Yo Games bought it) as getting me interested in game development back when I was a teenager, so I was not wholly unfamiliar with the program. However, GMS2's drag and drop features were much, much different from what I was used to, and I ended up just using the "code" panel for everything anyway. And this is where the lack of reading glasses came to help with my downfall. In addition to the confusion of scrolling windows within windows, the drag and drop code panel has such tiny text that only artifacts when enlarged, it strained my eyes more than I realized. That only made the frustration with figuring out the arcane way GameMaker uses arrays that much worse. It only took a few hours to develop migraine that lasted almost the entire weekend.

This was after I already asked Crispy to do the sprites, of which she managed a 4 direction static of the gargoyles. I was giving up and had her stop immediately, as to not waste any more of her time. I thought I was done.

Feeling a bit like a failure, as I've failed at a jam before, I was especially upset I couldn't even get the fundamental block interaction to work. That Sunday afternoon, sitting in bed with my newly fixed reading glasses, I decided to do at least that.

And it was easy.

Maybe it was having a new direction (completely ditching the array grid idea), maybe it was that I skipped the drag and drop feature in GMS2, maybe it was the unstrained vision, but the block interaction was working beautifully in only an hour. I thought to myself, "Hey, I can still do this!" I managed to convince Crispy to pick up the art again and she managed to do the blocks in time.

After many hours, I had a game. Not a fun game, but a game. And time was up, so I turned in what I had--with whatever placeholder stuff was still unfinished.

Among those placeholder stuff was the "Hero" sprite. The placeholder sprite was ripped directly from my current project, which is a dungeon crawler. I've gotten a few mentions of how weird it is that he's shooting lasers from his sword, but no one cared when "Zelda" did it in the original game (and that shows how much we knew, as we all assumed Link's name was Zelda)!

Another placeholder was the half grid instead of a full grid. I had absolutely no time to playtest my game very thoroughly, so I went with a lot of early assumptions. One of those assumptions was it'd be interesting to have misaligned blocks. I thought it'd make a more organic feel, but still have a grid so alignment wasn't too difficult. And even I saw that that was a terrible idea after playing for a short while after the submission. By then, though, it was what it was.

And then there was the health. I never played my own game long enough to notice it took forever to die! The game just went on, there was little consequence to avoid the gargoyles. The game ended when you got bored of playing, which sounds like just how all games go, but not when you mean within the first play session. To be completely candid, I changed the health from 100 to 10 and updated the submission, since it was a tiny change, I forgave myself that small edit during "submission day" (i think?).

And finally, the infamous placeholder design idea of being able to shove the blocks off the cliff. This one was put in by necessity. Right up till almost the end, I had the blocks just being pushed out of the play area ad infinitum. I needed a way for them to be disposed. Pushing them off the cliff seemed like a fair trade of not getting points and leaving yourself vulnerable while pushing, but that wasn't how it played. It was one of those small things that ended up kind of breaking the game; It made it not fun, more-so than even the half-grid and copious health.

The game was not fun, but I felt like that was due to the time constraint. And I knew I could have done it if I had the whole 72 hours, so as a proud designer, I had to prove to myself I could make it fun. So, with some help from feedback during the jam, I think I did that.

The Post Jam version took about a week, since I took my time to make sure it ran smoothly (I'm actually very thorough when I have the time). I added all the tier-one features on my list, including Laser spread, health bar, waves, upgrades, and even hero art. Although the art is still minimal, I felt like I succeeded in making the game I originally had in mind. And, for me at least, it was finally fun.

A few notable lessons:

Changing the grid from half steps to whole: The whole step was the first thing I changed, it was the most awkward thing in the game. People couldn't even tell it was on a grid at all, as the expectation was to snap in a one-to-one fashion, anything less just felt wrong.

Second was removing the "cleared block glow" blocks: No one seemed to get what they did. And thus they were not an incentive to clear blocks. So they just simply had to go. It was ugly anyway.

Third was the cream of any good shooter game: Upgrades: They were in the feature list from day 1. Having the ability to cash in your progress to become stronger is essential to make your progress feel rewarding and make a player want to keep playing. I think that addition alone pushed the game over the "fun" bar. You had a goal (kind of), you had incentive to clear blocks, you had replayability in what you choose to upgrade. This is what took the most time in the post jam development, and it was necessary.

And finally, the addition of grey blocks: This fixed the problem of just pushing blocks off the cliff. As fun as it is to do that, there had to be a penalty for it.

Over that same week, I was playing a lot of Puyo Puyo Tetris with my friends. I've never been a fan of either of those games before, my passion for puzzle games began and ended with Dr Mario, and those skills just didn't transfer. But I did learn the value of something that didn't really exist in Dr Mario's competitive gameplay: grey blocks.

In Dr Mario, combos will drop colored blocks onto your opponent, which can stop them from doing that combo they were setting up, but only for a little while. It may just as easily set them up for a bigger combo. It's not exactly the best way to incentivize comboing if it doesn't really do much to the opponent. Puyo Puyo is different, though. And it just felt so obvious after it came to me. Even though it's a single-player game, that mechanic can still work as a disincentive. So pushing off blocks works as if you're comboing on yourself, essentially. Those blocks don't go away, in face, you're just kicking that can down the road, and it comes back bigger and heavier (so to speak). To clear them, like in Puyo Puyo, you had to clear next to them, and thus they were the biggest threat in you "running out of space". It was just the most elegant fit.

With the addition of grey blocks, I noticed the problem of becoming overwhelmed with grey blocks; it can escalate very quickly. And also within the vein of these Puyo Puyo and Tetris games, even though you can play forever, there needs to be a final game over point for when you're overwhelmed, or despite the player never being able to recover, their frantic stubborn mind won't ever let them stop trying. It's no fun playing a stressful situation like that, just waiting for the inevitable. You need to stop the player before they feel like they need to quit out of frustration. So similar to depleted health leads to your end in a twin-stick shooter, too many grey blocks will lead to your end in the matching game. Getting 50 or more blocks in the game is also a game over. And so, the game truly becomes just as much about clearing the blocks as it is about avoiding and killing enemies.

This truly was a fun adventure for me. Having to make a game in such a short amount of time exercises your ability to prioritize and scope. And most of all, it gives you the opportunity to strip a game down to its core purpose: to be fun.'

Thanks to all of you who gave me feedback and helped me make this game!

Play the post jam version here: https://boopsgames.itch.io/the-gargoyle-landing-post-ld I think you'll enjoy it!

Heres progress on our soon-to-be title screen, we've continued to work on our jam submission and will post an updated version in about a week from now, stay tuned 😁!

If you have a friend around, feel free to give Hammer Dongers a try! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/hammer-dongers

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/grey-goo

I have 37 smart balance, so I haven't been slacking on my ratings...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF43xt2HoO8

Play it in https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/im-azon

Heyoo, our survival space shrinking game will definitly satisfy you. I hope you have a blast. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/relentless-siberia Have fun! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/relentless-siberia

We're playing your games live! And we've run out of games! :smile:

Submit the games here!

Stream <3

who is better :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/dungeon-demon-and-2-walls

We had such a blast this round with LDJam42. This community is so giving and supportive and being a part of something so wonderful is a blast of inspiration to the games we make outside of the jam. Thank you to everyone who played and left such incredible feedback for our game. Your comments taught and gave us so much. See you all in 4 hours for the results!!!

Our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/l-an-interactive-mystery

Thank you all for bringing me over the 20 ratings barrier! As a quick present, I show you guys my latest addition to the Post-LD version of Puzzle Out VR (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/puzzle-out-vr). A shiny new glove:

I am hoping to go all the way to make a moody sci-fi puzzle game.

Happy Ludum Dare -Mas

Results are almost here, so come play our dungeon crawling typing game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/backspace-bouken

The rating period is now over, thanks everybody who rated my game. Its now my most rated ludum dare game, with over 40 ratings!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/ice-n-fice

results are almost here!!! :scream:

The rating period is over, Ink Flood got nearly 40 ratings, now we just have to wait for the results :sweat_smile:

I can't wait to see how I did this year!

Play: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/stack-master

yes you! you are a winner too. you made a game or at least tried and learned a lot.

Ludum Dare 42 has ended.

The results for each category can be found here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/results

You can check your game page for your individual results (via the My Game link up top).

Congratulations everyone! You did it! You made a game!

Ludum Dare 43, the final December Ludum Dare

We've got one more event this year, and it's taking place Friday November 30th to Monday December 3rd at the usual time (see countdown clock in the sidebar). For those of you outside North and South America, this usually means it starts Saturday December 1st at a not-so-great time. :sweat_smile:

But wait Mike, you said final December? Please explain!

Ludum Dare schedule change starting in 2019

Starting next year, Ludum Dare events will take place twice per year: Every April and October.

Why the change? Well, keeping up Ludum Dare's 3-events-per-year schedule is something I've been struggling with for many years. Long story short, doing fewer events per year is something that will help me personally, and in general should help us run better events. I held out for as long as I could (10 years), but it's time for a change.

Stay Informed!

Want to be reminded of the upcoming event?

Sign up for our mailing list here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-mailing-list/

Or follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ludumdare

Wrap Up

That's it for me. We'll see you again in late November/early December.

Try it here!

See you next LD guys!

Thank you for everyone who gave our game a try, we appreciate all the feedback we received and loved playing your games as well! Many of you we will be following for future projects. Cheers!

... guess we have to do a post-jam version now! Thanks everyone!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/quibble-quarrel

If your looking for the total number of ranked games by category and score: ```

Overall : 725 Fun : 724 Inovation : 725 Theme : 725 Graphics : 696 Audio : 562 Humor : 485 Mood : 597

Overall : 1286 Fun : 1283 Inovation : 1280 Theme : 1284 Graphics : 1187 Audio : 786 Humor : 902 Mood : 1121 ```

Here is my progress over the last 5 Ludum Dare Game Jams: My game from LD42 (which also got an art upgrade as part of Optical Optimize)

These results are insane, the best I've ever received. Thank you all for a great Ludum Dare, and I'll see you all in December. If you wanna check out the game, here it is: You Are God

AMAZING RESULTS!!!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/super-responsible-parent

and now on to make a real game... WISH US LUCK

After 15 Ludum Dare entries to date, this is by far my best overall placement. Almost in the top 50! Thank you to everyone who played and rated my game.

Go check it out if you haven't already: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/growing-out

Thank you to everyone who played, commented and rated my game!

My #LDJAM results! Thanks to everyone who played, and everyone who rated, Grid Weaver! 🕷️🖤

Thank you everyone for your ratings and kind comments. I really appreciated this 42nd LudumDare session. I am very suprised regarding ratings which you gave to my project - 5 results in the Top 100 - my best score so far. Now I am working on an extended version of my game which I will show you soon. Thank you friends! I wish you the best ++

The results are in so is time to publish an updated version of Mondriancraft updated with the feedback from the players.

In the new version - A better end game - Some hints to help figure out the combinations of blocks

enjoy! https://kromeboy.itch.io/mondriancraft

Welp, my game wasn't as successful as I hoped, ah well. It was the first game where my initial idea was visible in the final product. SUCCESS!

So, despite not achieving enough rankings for any category, I'm still proud I submitted something, considering my patchy internet and lack of time.

As I write this I have just read the schedule change for 2019 and I must say Mike, congrats on keeping up the hectic schedule, secondly, I am looking forward to the new 2 jam timetable, especially as every couple of jams, It will take place on my birthday. 😀😀

Regardless, congrats to everyone and I look forward to the November/December jam.

Have fun and happy driving, Owen

I am so incredibly pleased at these results... my 8th Ludum Dare and my best placement by far.

Many thanks to everyone that played and rated Johnny's Flipbook Space Adventure.

Full results/play links here

Some final thoughts:

On the core gameplay, everything went well. It's a simple idea and I put in just enough, mechanically speaking, to make it go, leaving off the expansion for after the compo. If you play to later levels it becomes obvious how limited the AI really is. I guess some reviewers would want more depth, but I was focused on achieving "beginning, middle, and end" first.

The technical stuff I needed for this game(overlapping smooth movement and tilegrid snake gameplay) was intricate and slowed me down on polish items. I've been gradually working on an update and almost all of the effort so far has gone to reworking the collision/update code so that all the little details are sorted out and it's easier to support more features. This is one area where games that can reuse a generic collision model(which mostly means the usual casual puzzlers and gimmick platformers) will always have a double advantage in ratings: conventional moment-to-moment gameplay is easier to get reference implementation for, and the bulk of the reviewers will be proficient and already basically know what to do and how to play, skipping issues that come up in most real testing and raising their impressions of the game by sheer "comfort zone" factor alone.

And my game is close to but not quite on that plane, since it's built on Snake/Tron style gameplay, but it has a big gimmick that can also be missed - you can play the current game exactly like a traditional Tron type of game without jumping. It needs more than game-jam levels of effort both to understand and to be fully explored. One of the big features my game will get in the update is better tutorialization so that the comfort zone element is improved.

A lot of folks said "it needs a soundtrack", by which I have to assume they mean in-game music, since I put a lot of effort into a title/intro sequence that some of my ~60 reviewers almost certainly just mashed buttons to skip through ASAP. Anyway, I have the start of an in-game tune going now.

PICO-8 was not a significant limiting factor on the coding end of things, and it helped smooth out certain things(color choices, making sound effects, deployment). But people will always complain about low-res pixels once it gets so lo-fi that the fonts are squashed, which is the case with the built-in PICO font. And the small view and scrolling camera isn't appropriate for the size of the playfield, either. So aesthetically speaking it may have been the wrong choice, but for some reason we don't have high-res fantasy consoles. I guess I need to do something about that?

Thank you very much for voting and playing :)

*14th in Innovation, it's really appreciated !!! Thank you :) *

The fully featured game with multiplayer fights using Twitch chat is in development right now. You can follow the status of the game on Twitter, it will be released in the following days, free of course :)

If you can't wait, you can Play the jam version here.

And as always, I'm developing this game live on Twitch, currently coding the hero editor !

. Happy to get enough ratings and now have a score to beat for my next Ludum Dare. Am sort of surprised given the number of positive comments, maybe getting additional votes was actually a detriment.

Congrats to everyone in top 100 of each categories. My game made it to #61 for fun, and this is massively thank to everyone playing and rating my game, it means a lot to me!!

If your game is not in #100, this post might be helpful. If you take a quick look at the ranking, you might notice a pattern.

• Popular games do not do so well in the jam, except for Blow The Hen Down and some dozens of other exceptions.
• Fun: is not necessarily measured by how long you play, Heirs Kingdom does very well despite its short gameplay.
• Innovation: It's all subjective. I thought Pianobots was the most innovative, turned out I haven't played #1 and #2.
• Theme: If people can get it in 3 seconds within your game, it will do well here.
• Grapics: I think all games in top 100 are just equally good (sorry for the #101).
• Audio: If you don't have a musician in the team, try to do a great voice acting like in Lemon.
• Humor: Don't tell people my game is funny like me, it's definitely not as funny as The Hero's Incredible Chronicles.
• Mood: Guess what, texts can replace dark-themed graphics like in Take Care Of Her too.

So, bottom line? Anything could happen really, there is nothing to analyze! Just experiment with new ideas and have fun with it ;D. In the mean time? Hone your skills and get prepared for the next LD. Thank you all for a great experience, I will get good at it and I hope you do too!

Not a bad result for my first video game. I'm excited for next time. I learned a lot. Thanks to everyone that played my little game. I appreciate it!

As a musician by trade, maybe I'll focus more on music and audio next time. I'm happy to have scored reasonably well in the Mood category. That's definitely one that I was aiming for.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/poisoned-palace

Wow!

There was so many great games in this event. I'm sure everyone did their best to make a game that would be enjoyable to everyone and themselves.

Even if our own game didn't make it up in the top rankings, we had so much fun making it. And the feedback we got was also great. (Thank you all for the kind, funny and constructive feedback.)

One lesson we learned is that "polish" is very important. If the game doesn't look finished, it won't get a good ranking.

But since we had so much fun while making the game, we're going to finish it. We planned much more for the game, and our score won't affect our determination to make a fun game. You'll see Hans again in the future, for sure.

Hey everyone! So these are the results for my first game jam!

I won't lie, I didn't expect so big numbers in Fun and Theme. But from what I see in some comments and from people playing, I think I didn't manage to properly explain the mechanics. This is what I think it happened:

• A lot of players just kept waiting for plants to grow instead of planting and watering a bunch at the same time. So the game for these players was very slow and they didn't manage to fill even one third of the board. My intention was to have the player to run fast all over the place to grow as many plants at the same time as possible so in the end you can fill most of the board while trying to not get blocked by your own trees. And since people only managed to grow very few trees, the game didn't give that sensation of "Running out of space".

• Another issue were the controls. Making dungeon crawler controls seems to have not been the best idea. A lot of players considered them difficult or confusing, so that could have spoiled the fun. Maybe implementing traditional FPS controls would have been better.

However, I'm really glad with the Graphics and Mood categories. I like the neon / cyberpunk style so I wanted to create something like that and I put a lot of effort there, writing custom shaders for buildings and the animated neon lights, modeling and texturing all the props, the lighting and post-processing, etc. I'm really glad that people enjoyed the setting.

Being my first game jam, I wasn't sure if I would be able to finish something in three days, but I'm very proud of what I managed to do.

I hope to improve my skills and do a better game for the next jam. You know, always learn and try to improve yourself and, of course, have fun!

And last but not least, congratulations to everyone. There are a lot of amazing games here that I really enjoyed and deserve great scores.

So, see you next time!

Failed in everything except humor!

Thank you to everyone who played and rated Overwrite!

This was my 10th Ludum Dare, and I am extremely happy with the results. I wasn't too sure how well this game would work, as I felt the mechanics were a bit too open-ended for their own good, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Link to the LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/overwrite

Link to the itch.io page: https://steven-miller.itch.io/overwrite

Link to my twitter: https://twitter.com/stevenjmiller37

Also, since I don't get the chance to self-promote very often, feel free to check out some of my other games! I make a lot of puzzle games and basically nothing else.

Permanence is the winner of Ludum Dare 40 (it won mood as well)! I might be biased, but I think it is pretty good.

Snake Blocks is a game I'd recommend if you really enjoy puzzle games. It is fairly difficult, and I consider it one of my best games in terms of puzzle design and mechanics.

I have many more available for download here, roughly ordered by how much I'd recommend them.

I have all N/A's for my scores... I didn't have a lot of ratings (upper 20's), but others with lower amounts of ratings seem to have posted their results? Insight?

There's something I noticed that I think everyone here needs to see too. Everyone is giving VERY conservative ratings on all of the games. I mean, for crying out loud, first place overall only got 4.5 stars on average, and there were some categories with only 4 stars! I'm not here to point any fingers, but I am here to give some advice. What I do for my ratings is I give everyone a 4 star rating right off the bat. High expectations, but it works. Then, I affect that rating based on the game's performance. A game with graphics that aren't so great gets something like a 3 star rating. I never gave out a single 1 star rating, and I played a couple pretty bad games, but this is because that there is always something that saves a game from a rating like that. A 1 star rating in, say, graphics, means that the creator made none of the art himself and just use assets, or that the creator only used programmer art, such as gray cubes, without using materials or anything that could be called art. Meanwhile, a 5 star rating would be a top notch game, or just a tad below such, and this is because it's only three days that you get to make this! Anything done in such a short time span that turns out even remotely good should merit at LEAST 4 stars! Now, the big issue here is that we are not here to be cold-hearted with each other's works of art. We are all game devs working towards the same goal: making video games! There's no reward, prize, or anything other than having a game, and if your game gets panned or even if it just doesn't turn out that high quality when you plan to turn it into a full project, that doesn't help anyone's morale, not one bit! That's why I'm here to try and get everyone here to implement a new policy: Nice ratings, critical reviews. That means that you rate the game according to what you think it deserves, but be generous. If you can't simply be generous, just add a flat star to each category on any rating you give out. Then, make your comment critical. Give the developer what he needs to improve his game. We all know that while good reviews feel nice, just having someone say "great game" is completely useless unless the person can be more specific about why it's great. I'm not saying to be harsh with your reviews. If you can't think of anything good to say, just say good job and over-glorify a specific aspect of the game, letting the bad parts fade into the background. Now the real problem here is this: while panning someone's game does make yours seem better in the short run, if everyone's running around giving bad or nitpicky ratings to everyone else's games, that's going to absolutely wreck the system, and currently, it is! Everyone just gets bad ratings because everyone thinks that their game is better or equal to the other person's game, and because everyone is setting the bar at a quality similar to the expectation a full time critic would use! Now please, let's make next Ludum Dare a better experience for everyone! Nice ratings, critical reviews.

Cheers! - The Koala Squad

PS: Check this out too! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/exhaustion/ludum-dare-42-is-almost-over-but-our-main-project-isnt

Thanks to all who rated my game. And also thanks @jasper-hansen @yippiez @winnie33 @ely-shaffir @apple-dash @darkguardsman @popdaddygames @liven @nattress @dumivid. @unfinished @angela-k @hyprgloo @thibaultar @wowa @abhis1kadian @unitedfailures @team-on @ksyne @atom0520 @martintristan @andrei9 For your feedback in form of comments I will correct mistakes made in this game and update this game soon.

Pretty hyped about the graphics score for my first game jam:O Congratulations everyone for completing a game!

While not my best rankings, the scores for Mood and Graphics were pretty respectable (and they were the main focus of my prototype). Audio also did decently for something that was put together in 1 hour.

And now the (almost) traditional @ Thanks Board!

@chaitae @wheffle @teelin @remicraft @predominant @digital-bacon @anubhav-kashyap @ajayajayaj @major-sauce @kappinski @foxisiii @wisstopher @leave @hellsquirrel @jonathan-lorenz @cbdevilla

Thanks for playing my game!

@erikkire Thanks for at least trying to play, I'm so sorry it wouldn't run for you!

And a huge shout-out to @anubhav-kashyap, who not only made a very impressive product himself (in only 5 hours), but he helped me in the last hours of rating to get enough votes to rank.

Thanks to @pov for hosting yet another successful jam, even if the earlier start time hampered me a bit, and as a side note, I do think the suggestion to have only two jams a year is a good one (at least for me). I need more free time to pursue my other development projects but Ludum Dare keeps interrupting!

I look forward to seeing you all in December, and hopefully I'll be back with some surprises for you :wink:

Not bad for my first completed ludum dare, Top 100!

Mood: 82nd (3.621 average from 31 ratings)

I was pretty happy with being almost 600th overall in my first jam and was pleased with the fun and audio ratings. Innovation was not a surprise (the game isn't a new concept) :stuckouttongueclosedeyes:

So how does the finale to the Excessive trilogy turn out?

For comparison...

LD41 results

LD40 results

The results fluctuate on all fronts. And since the two previous entries were deliberately made to be serious, the Humor criterion only applies to this third game.

Overall, the trilogy is a great experiment on how I can create something unique using the very first programming language I've ever learned. I already have plans to release the entire trilogy into one single game before this year ends, and if I ever get my hands on something like the Commodore 64, it will have a limited physical release for legacy systems that support BASIC.

And while I'm still working on the still-unannounced commercial visual novel, I will also look forward to LD43.

Cross-post: https://jollysword.livejournal.com/161986.html

Don't flood the GUI :laughing:

That may submerge the user experience.

This is the best I've ever done in a LD! I'm really glad people enjoyed my game. Was worried that it wouldn't get many ratings because it's two-player only, but clearly I was wrong. Thank you all!

If you want to play something a little more long-form now that LD is over, my single-player ARG Subtext is out now!

If you haven't already, you can play Countdown here. Thanks!

After a long three weeks of waiting, finally the results of the jam are in. They go as follows:

Overall: 43th (3.254 average from 67 ratings)

Fun: 364th (3.242 average from 68 ratings)

Innovation: 180th (3.53 average from 69 ratings)

Theme: 78th (4.149 average from 69 ratings)

Graphics: 485th (2.939 average from 68 ratings)

Audio: 407th (2.754 average from 63 ratings)

Humor: 436th (2.031 average from 51 ratings)

Mood: 421st (2.821 average from 58 ratings)

Thanks so much for playing and rating my game! I'm thrilled that I managed to get 78th in theme for my first ever game jam, and this really encourages me to continue with game development in the future. In case you are wondering, yes, I will take part in Ludum Dare 43 this December, and it will be also uploaded to my itch.io page.

Nothing special, but I still did what I set out to do, which was make a game in two days.

I do feel like people need to start giving actual criticism instead of over-glorifying some good aspects and then completely ignoring the bad, or sugar-coating it in some way. I've participated in two game jams now and both of them have suffered from this problem. I hate to admit that I'm also guilty of it. I think it's because we don't enjoy talking negatively about someone else's work, but at the same time we have get our game played somehow.

I still enjoyed this a lot, and I'm glad I got to be a part of it. Thank you all for a good first Ludum Dare! I hope to be able to join the next one!

This is the best result I had in LD! Pretty happy with the result. Thanks to all the people who played the game, to those who streamed it, and gave constructive feedback. Can't wait for LD43!

Next goal: TOP 100!

After 2 days of work and ton apon tons of sweat.it is time!as alaways i failed in everything.i dont know how it happened with about a 100 rating avarage i have got... Thats bad :laughing: Well my game is a absoloute sh*t.i hope yours not as bad as mine . i didnt expected my first ludum dare to be under a 100 or something.but i didnt expected to be last either :laughing:well at least i've got a game.right?...no wait yeah yeah yes i dont even have a game,i have a Garbage bag.i'll try harder to update it and re-send it in the Itch.io to make the world a awfule place again!i'll be also working on one of my old projects! Well that was LD for me :D see you in the next one! Good Luck :fourleaf_clover:

I'm a little bummed out that my game didn't do so well as I thought it would, but I know I did gud for humor and audio!

I did worse than last time, just as I feared I would, but overall the ratings aren't that bad. I did substantially better in Audio and marginally better in Theme. Probably should have opted out of Humour - last Ludum Dare it was the category I placed highest in, and this time my rating has dropped by an entire star!

Overall, I'm satisfied with how AsterVoid turned out, but I feel like I let myself down with such a derivative concept. For LD43, I'm going to try and produce another story-based game that's hopefully not just an enhanced remake of some other game.

Congratulations to everyone who took part!

With my first Ludum Dare under my belt, I was pretty surprised to see that my compo entry ranked 54th for innovation! As someone who's only released 2 games for game jams (or 4 interactive experiences but none of them were really that game-y), I think that's pretty cool :smile:

Lots of lessons were learned (already discussed in my game's description), and I can't wait to apply those lessons in another game jam/Ludum Dare!

I just realized I have a typo in my name, So is it possible to change it? :sob:

Now my rankings are not good at all but my scores out of 5 are some of the best i've gotten so im focusing mostly on the scores here not the rankings.

So, the overall score im incredibly disappointed im not even in the top 1000 every single other category I did better than overall. This means that the game is WORSE than the sum of its parts. So I am going to focus more now on game design, my programming and drawing skill are good enough that I should be placing in top 1000 if you put them all together just need good game design.

The good news is I got my best ever Theme and Innovation both 300s out of 8 jams I did. I am really really happy that innovation was so high. That means this game has a solid concept behind it like the comments mentioned and i'll work on making this a bigger game. As for Theme its my highest ever score 3.8 out of 5! Of course sadly no one judges a game on some kind of theme outside of jams, so it's not as important score as the other categories.

Fun, Graphics and Mood are my second best ever scores. I am only disappointed at the graphics score, I really really tried to do some good graphics but wasn't rated well. Fun was decent there is a lot of room to improve the game mechanics to make it more fun but as it is its still decent. Mood I don't know what that category means.

What I should do next time after looking at the scores and comments.

Sound effects are more important than music, they provide feedback to your actions. I can't make music so have to rely on free music, and that's not gonna be very good or fit the game most of the time. But you can make good sound effects for free and I should have focused on the sound effects.

Graphics I just need to have cleaner more polished in terms of the placement the game looks messy so I need to arrange all the arts pieces better, I also need to create some good ui buttons fonts before the jam because my UI always looks very bad. The art itself I think its improving and looks decent.

Finally it needs more juice and responsiviness in the game, more sound effects and visual effects when you click on things or interact with the game.

And of course thank you for rating and commenting on my game.

@cg-fred @rkuhl @inquisit @artem-avramenko @gerox @pinoza @ijzm @plukers @allen-oliver @leeloo @dankar @nobongo @jsmcag @mza @korso @cheetah @pace @anna-petrova @bentglasstube @merpader

Thank you everyone who played our game and congrats to all others ! That Jam was a blast ! like always !

Wish to see you around for the next one ! Take care all ! :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/globulator

I'm curious what the rankings would look like if you averaged all the categories together to get a different kind of "overall" score. I noticed a lot of the top games got sub-150 rankings in one category or another.

I'm guessing this would be possible through the API somehow, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to use it. Does anyone have a good grasp on the API or have access to the ranking data for all the games in a script-friendly format?

I'm so proud of my team and what we were able to pull off this Ludum Dare. Everyone did a great job with the aspects of the game they were in charge of.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/camp-snuggle

Heres the awesome ratings!

Heres a wordcloud from all the comments!

Heres the game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/plug-and-shoot https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/plug-and-shoot

It's our second time participating in Ludum Dare. I think we did pretty well, but we thought that we'd do better :)

I wrote an article about our experience: https://medium.com/wise-hedgehog-studio-english-blog/ludum-dare-42-game-jam-our-experience-7f3474effb50

My results are in:

They are pretty low i would say. But i am satisfied with it and i am not wondering as i did some mistakes in the development and did not tweak the gameplay properly.

That's what i have learned about it. Also i should reaally playtest and shouldn't released too early.

I still like the idea and maybe i would make a real game out of it. Improving the gameplay should be the biggest issue at all (as it becomes short unplayable). But maybe later.

Well looking back my last two games wasn't the big hit but last time i really improved the graphics. Also my LD40 Game (Wonder Land) is still my favorite game and will be my next big project where i definetly working on.

This was my first Ludum Dare and the compo was really fun, I definitely will be here for the next Ludum Dare in November. Here is how I did:

Results

• Overall: 376th (3.35 average from 22 ratings)
• Fun: 366th (3.237 average from 21 ratings)
• Innovation: 562nd (2.775 average from 22 ratings)
• Theme: 339th (3.6 average from 22 ratings)
• Graphics: 458th (3 average from 21 ratings)
• Audio: 37th (3.786 average from 23 ratings)
• Humor: 309th (2.5 average from 20 ratings)
• Mood: 339th (2.974 average from 21 ratings)

Thank you to everyone who played my game and left feedback. I feel my dreams getting closer step by step.

As you can see they obviously aren't this good, but I do know and understand why. Trying to make such a "huge" game in such a short amount of time was obviously a mistake and it didn't let me the time to polish it more and feel enjoyable nor ballanced, and obviously the learning curve was a total trash, so I know a lot of player didn't got to fully understand what was going on or what to do.

However I am glad that some people (on this site but also some friends & close friends) gave me a lot of feedbacks of what needed to be improved, why and how.

I am currently working on a post-jam version, and I have fixed everything that made the game unejoyable and crappy. There is now a lot more of feedbacks and actions you can do on the rooms to have more control on them. I will send a beta version to some friends soon, and continue to fix things according to what they think. I don't know when I'll upload this version, because I want to take time to make sure the main mechanics are enjoyable and that you can fully "interact" with your building (a feature I thought for the game in the first place but never got the time to include, obviously).

Oh, and here is a screenshot of the game right now (still a WIP obviously)

(Everything is animated so it looks a bit different while playing the game)

Also, you can read the post-mortem of the ludum-dare version here : read the post-mortem

Here are the results for my LD 42 compo entry : EVOLUTION !

Can't believe my game came 1st in graphics ! That's just so motivating :) ! Big thanks to this awesome community for playing my game, rating it and giving me all this helpful and kind feedback ! I'm already looking forward to LD 43 in November :) !

SYSYGY`s Eggs & Kings - this is an unrealistic hardcore game that will explode your computer! Grab your gamepad and a lot of patience! You will have to destroy crowds of monsters, collecting their precious eggs.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/896870/Eggs__Kings/

Hello guys remember when i said that i'll add LD winners to my game when rating ends. So I've already started gathering games, here's a list of winners: and i forgot to put Character Assassin(Fun bronze) here

I'll also add community award medal(games that have been put in shere cool entries channel in official LD discord server) if your game is on the list and/or cool entries channel reply to this message and/or contact me, I need to ask few questions

Comunity awards list will be posted soon

Discord: ChaosTheLeg#3576

Thanks to everyone who played and rate/comment our game !!

We are really proud of our 12th ranking in humor :smile: and our 811th overall rank for a game made in 10 hours :timer:

See you in december for LD43 !!!

Looking for a post Ludum Dare game jam to do?

Geta Game Jam 4 occurs in just 10 days, between September 15 and September 18!

The theme is Chain Reaction!:chains::chains:

We can't wait to see what you all create!:smiley:

Join Geta Game Jam 4!:smile::thumbsup:

Become a part of our wonderful Discord Community!:confetti_ball::balloon:

Hi guys!

I just wanted to know if there is a way to see all the games you've rated this LD? There were some of them that I really liked and I want to keep an eye on them and their creator.

Cheers!

We thank everyone participated in LD42. See you on the 43rd!!!

Here's a list of comunity award games, if your game is here, reply to this post and/or contact me

Discord: ChaosTheLeg#3576

LD has been a great experience, like every time I took part so far. Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game Wallifornication and submitted one of the countless, awesome games this LD. LD42 was pretty successful for me, since I created a game (mechanic) that I feel honestly excited about. That's why I decided that my entry will be rewritten and reimagined from scratch and turned into a full game. I'll be posting my progress on Twitter, so feel free to follow me there.

Now, I noticed that many people seem to be upset about ratings being skewed, all over the place or generally too low. My advice to you is to forget about score and placement for a moment and think about this: - what did people like about my game? - what didn't they like? - do I agree? - did I expect this? - did I reach my goal for this LD?

I for my part have set my goals for next LD already, ready to improve on some of the mistakes I made this time around and act on the things I learned from ratings.

See you there. :wave:

Follow me on Twitter

This was my first compo and i was working in hotel at same time . So i hadnt much time and i had to make the game in 36hours. Thanks for your rates :smiley: this is my highest score i got since 38th ludumdare

Game here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/escape-2600

Reviewing is difficult. I don't put a huge amount of weight on the ratings I receive, and the ratings I give aren't a 1:1 copy of my remarks in certain ways, but I did leave a comment on just about every game I rated this LD, generally avoiding generic praise.

I am reviewing in a direction that I'm personally interested in, which isn't "is this game really polished right now," but rather, "could this game be expanded upon successfully?" A few of them are, in fact, essentially perfect at the scale of a game jam game, already communicating everything they could hope to given their concept - so I give them 5's.

But most of them aren't "perfect at this scale", they're "technically interesting but run out of steam" - the design is built too much on reskinning a generic framework, so by itself the game isn't remarkable and there isn't really anything to extend to make it remarkable. And so my reviews get much harsher on design than on polish as more of the basic stuff is covered, because while getting to any gameplay is a technical achievement, focusing only on quantity and polish in a short time frame amounts to "mindless crunching" and it's something that becomes more of an issue as you get to those higher percentiles and the ratings get more competitive and you might start thinking that the way to "win at game jamming" is to make Large Quantities of Game. My highest placement in an LD, #23 Overall, was done more-or-less in that way, and it worked - but it also contributed to my disillusionment about what I was doing with games. And that's why I'm interested in the "can be expanded" aspect: There are formulaic ways to expand scope, by adding more content according to a template, and adding features like crafting and quests and achievements and so on, but more often than not, these things turn into filler.

Polish alone is a "school grade" way of thinking about game making: You might get an A for effort, but it's also taken for granted that you will work on the polish if you just keep working on the game. I don't want to be someone actively encouraging all-nighters just for the possibility of cramming in one extra feature. We already have a AAA studio system that is hungry to make Large Quantities of Game as efficiently as possible. Whatever your opinions about that process, it has a big influence and throws off our calibration about what we should be aiming for in a game jam context, because whatever you do in an LD, a whole big studio with a schedule of years and a few millions in funding can certainly do more of!

It's in matching the polish work with design work that says something interesting that can bring a game over into the realm of "winning hearts & minds," and it's a harder skill to improve, because even in a small prototype, that work doesn't sit at the surface, so it's harder to get the feedback you need, and harder to give useful feedback. It almost doesn't matter who you ask, whether they're a friend, a big project stakeholder, whether they have lots of experience, whether you go and do a huge data collection campaign - after years of seeing what I can get by asking fellow humans, I've concluded that unless they've spent a long time thinking and gaining expertise in that specific design realm(like, as much as you have), presenting them with a playable build will most likely only give you insight into the surface stuff, and that means that the upper end of the LD rating system will always be noisy and not really be capable of solving your deep issues or making keen judgments about which is the "best" game. So I'm not too worried about my own placement, even though like noted in my last post, I see areas where I can do better.

I recently posted an article about performance feedback that covers this issue and relates it to the general question of performance: how do you get feedback on how you're doing, if you can't just ask people? I don't think I have all the answers, but do check it out if you want to see my current thinking.

With all that in mind, I found myself categorizing my types of comment into tropes:

• Major technical and accessibility issues - difficulty running game, missing instructions, playthrough stopping bugs, control issues, that kind of thing. Note the issue, suggest a way to resolve if any.
• Generic design - a game that follows some very conventional lines and mostly feels like a reskin. Sometimes this happens from technical skill constraints, but just as often it's a creative problem and the feedback becomes targeted towards concepting with more creativity. Pulling together themes, scenario, mechanics etc.
• Guess-and-check design - A highly specific rule alteration to a generic design, which usually leads to a game communicating random things(for the worse). Discuss expectations and coherence.
• Scope substituting for coherent concept - game has lots of features and content and shows technical proficiency, but design never resolves into a whole. Discuss scoping and making a coherent concept.
• Designed, polished, but could be expanded with some changes - feedback about scaling the design and possibilities.

And sometimes after doing this I thought, "wow, I was the first comment and it was pretty harsh, I'm so sorry". But I was sticking to more-or-less the same process the whole way through. Will I do it like this again next time? I have no idea. I'll probably revise my process in some way. But I'd like to think that I am doing some good by aiming for consistency with my own rules and not trying to fit in with the crowd.

Wow. Just Wow.

I was hoping to see some improvement in game results here in some areas, but... this? Just to make things a bit more clear, here are the numbers from last 4 entries:

           39      40      41      42

Overall: 3 > 2.909 > 2.904 > 3

Fun: 2.767 > 2.606 > 2.635 > 2.727

Innovation: 3.267 > 3 > 2.981 > 3.076

Theme: 3.633 > 3.03 > 3.68 > 4.076

Graphics: 2.833 > 2.924 > 2.442 > 3.258

Audio: 2.214 > NA > 1.235 > 1.423

Humor: 2.346 > 1.75 > 1.457 > 2.383

Mood: 2.519 > 2.55 > 1.72 > 2.581

All the results are better than the last entry and in 5 categories out of 8 the results are best overall (or tied for best)

This, considering the game was developed in under 1 day is amazing. :smiley:

Now to analize the results by category:

Fun Well... Yes, I am not your point of reference for fast-paced and egaging thrilling games. I am more of a puzzle game creator, so the Fun level is not really different across the timeline. Still it is good to see the rating bump up a little.

Innovation This result actually surprized me. And the timeline of it surprizes me even more. I do like to invent and script new mechanics, and think up some new ways to play, but... it almost looks like the more I try, the more people get confused by the game and the less rating I recieve. And hilariously enough the best rating I got by building a game around a well-known logical puzzle (Bridge and Candle... though a lot of people confused it for Wolf-Goat-Cabbage...)

Theme is my best category so far. Never dipped below 3, and now... Man. 122th place in JAM category... If I didn't miss the Compo dedline this could have bun my first ticket to Top100 club. :smile: Anyway my approach of not trying too hard to twist the theme so the game stands out seem to work.

Graphics I was hoping to get a good rating here, and I got it. Which I am really happy about since this game challenge for me was to create textures. And seeing the rating soar up, I think is a clear indication that I got them right!

Audio Well... LD 39 is the only entry on the list where I had ANY sounds. So it is totally unsurprising to see this rating low ((if you wonder why I keep it enabled, this is so people who played my game could get more "ratings given" and thus more exposure for their games)). However I have to point out that absense of sounds in this game seems to be less annoying than in my previous entry. :smile:

Humor This... is not a category I put a lot of effort into, but since I don't have the most engaging gameplay to present, I tend to lighten the mood, by adding some jokes and references here and there. This time it were the names of the piles you had to put into the room.

Mood Honestly, I don't know how to aim for good mood in a game, as it is really subjective. However it looks like the games that get a good rating here are the games that try to... convey some mood.

And this concludes my, not so short, analysis of the game results.

Great thank you to everyone who played and rated my game! And to everyone who would like to check it out in the future - please be my guest.

And I will see you next Ludum dare.

PS: Oh, and is anyone checked out the Boxes I had created for the game and want to use them, in any of your games - feel free to do so. I am not good with licensing stuff, so I would be glad if anyone could help me out with some advice in this regard, but any 3D assets I have created for any LD (up to date) and published in source code for my games - is free to use for any purpose you might have for it.

Its fair to say that Bunny Bazooka is not a highly rated game. But I improved on many aspects in comparison to my previous unpolished mess Caves of Mimicry.

The ranking comparison is a bit misleading because of the huge amount of people that took part in LD. Plus the preovious game was a compo game and this game was a jam. So perhaps is not a fair comparison. But, I avereged better with Bunny Bazooka, averaging ~3.0 in comparison to 2.7 previously, with the highest bumps being in fun, graphics and humour (although many people didn't think this was particularly a funny game).

In conclusion, I am fairly certain the biggest drawbacks for the game was the unfamiliar mechanics coupled with the disorientating screenshake.

However, I had a ton of fun making and playing it.

See you guys at the end of Novemener! (hopefully)

Thank you all!

Try me here!

Pretty happy with the results. Surprised i got 24th place in the theme category. Thanks to everyone that played my game.

For my first LD ever, can't say I did half bad! Really impressed I got 15th in innovation

Am 235th in Innovotation and quite happy with the result. Thanks to everyone who rated the game and gave feedback.

I'm working on a new version of the game with more features and of course an AI opponent. If you want to know more about that follow me. All links are on my profile page.

Here's our results from the Ludum Dare Jam rankings. ​

There was no real suprises here. We hope you all liked playing the game as much as we liked making it!

A look back at my ldjam entries. The ratings are vaguely comparable since the number of entries hasn't changed that much since LD31 (for the Compo anyway. Jam entries gone up more, I think). I'm consistent if nothing else. Thanks for all the ratings + supportive comments!

I'm happy, of course, with my LD42 result, nearly matching my LD31, which was a much more actiony/humorous arcade game. Wider appeal + quick/fun gameplay + decent use of theme = success?

For LD30 I made a really weird moody game. Scored well for mood, but was barely a game ;)

LD42 Prime Planets [JAM] Overall: 298 Best category: Innovation 114

LD41 Alien Holes [COMPO] Overall: 543 Best category: Innovation 331

bit of a gap...

LD32 Sticky Bomber [COMPO] Overall 590 Best category: Fun 360

LD31 Release the Yeti [COMPO] Overall: 240 Best category: Humour 45 (& Fun 59)

LD30 Escape the Dream [COMPO] Overall: 565 Best category: Mood 30 (yes, 30).

LD29 Stroppy Swan [COMPO] Overall: 388 Best category: Fun 248

Law of weirdness: I put 8 hours instead of my normal 30+ (in my previous 6 Ludum Dare), and my result is way better in some categories. I am super thrilled of a 4th position in "Theme" and 20th overall!

Since LD I have remade the game from scratch and I'm in the process of publishing it to the Google Play Store now.

Original sketch using my kids pens on our way back from vacation (half way in to LD42):

Original LD42 game, menu + in-game screenshots:

New remake version (3 weeks in the making):

My #ldjam results: broke top 100 in everything, so I’m grateful <3

I ran an analysis over the stats over my 9 jams, while the dataset is tiny, there were some interesting observations:

First off, I think scores and placement isn’t the most important thing about #ldjam. Enjoy the community, making games, and getting valuable feedback! Don’t judge your jam just by numbers!

First, the raw data, scores and placements, plotted into charts. On the surface, nothing interesting other than I've seen constant improvements in my jams, yay.

BUT let's dig for some insights...

Fishing out correlations: Since what I care most of all is the overall score, I looked at the correlation between other categories and overall score.

Surprisingly, the #ldjam category most correlated to the overall scores: 1. Theme 2. Graphics 3. Innovation 4. Mood 5. Audio 6. Fun 7. Humour

The top 3 of theme, graphics and innovation were 80%+ correlation, while the rest hovered around 70%, and audio falling off the 42% cliff.

I never thought theme would be THIS important to #ldjam jammers, but I guess it makes sense since we tend to look at people who may have joined the jam with a pre-made game/idea with crooked brows.

But that FUN being among the LOWEST correlated was a surprise to me. I always thought the enjoyment of a game was the most important thing. But apparently not?

I also tried to find correlation with ratings given/received, and comments received. The data there were incomplete due to the old site not keeping those data and I didn't record them from earlier #ldjam events. But the correlation was weak at best.

So that's my analysis of my #ldjam historical data. The sample size was way small and some data was incomplete, but it was interesting nonetheless. I'd love to see other people's data to see if these were results very individual to myself!

Back again for a third time. These are my results!

Post-Mortem

Day 0: Right. Let's just say that this theme surprised the living hell out of me when it was announced. It was 23:00 in Germany at the time, my plan was to come up with a basic idea until 0:00 and then go to bed. Well, the theme killed me. It really did. I wanted to avoid the obvious ideas such as: "Space in terms of that giant vacuum above us", "Boxes" or anything to do with running. I ended up coming up with 2 ideas. A space builder/ management where you have to build a successful galaxy, with factories and planets and everything, imagine Stellaris meets SimCity. My second idea was more of a a concept. How about a game where every element (enemies, bullets, blocks) all took up disk space and the player has to delete objects to keep the disk space down or you will lose. I developed the space builder idea but the more I worked on it the more terrified I became of feature creep and over scope. I had one of the worst nights in a very long time, I JUST COULDN'T FALL ASLEEP I just wanted to run upstairs and start prototyping to see if my idea is viable but I desperately forced my eyes shut. I went to bed at around 0:30 and ended up dozing off at around 1:30 it was that bad.

Failure of the Space Game I began prototyping with 6 A5 pages in my notebook filled with planning I felt optimistic. But as I as working on the mechanic which would allow planets to call for resources when they're low around 2 or 3 hours in. I realised. I will never finish this game. It was way out of my skill level and I had to forcefully send my project to a halt. 3 hours wasted. I went to the LD and saw all the North/ South American users who I knew were able to work in the afternoon while it was midnight here but it still demotivated the hell out of me.

The Beginning of DOS: I slammed the desk and restarted. There was a lot of back and forth here but I eventually returned to my second idea. However I rethought it. What if YOU were in a game but something is trying to delete you to free diskspace? After some more planning I built my prototype. And this is how it began.

A simple pointer that would grab objects and then drag them to the recycling bin to be deleted. The objects to be deleted were pre-defined by me and this is how I built my levels. I later decided to allow the player to stand on the mouse-pointer (as a compromise for the fact that I couldn't figure how to allow the player to interact with the picked up objects).

Categories:

*Fun: *Messed up the difficulty, still irritates me now. I built the levels until they were difficult for 'me' to complete. It seems like I forgot that any difficulty for the programmer is basically doubled for the player most of the time. A big plus for me this time around was finding a good way to convey information to the player. Something that I failed at before. If only I remembered that tutorial levels are pretty important too! (Stupid Level 2 too damn difficult grr)

*Innovation: *Not surprised in the slightest that this was my best category. Nothing else to say.

*Theme: *I think I should have added a quick sum up of the story in the game so people understood where the "Running Out of Space" bit came to play. I shoe-horned it into my description which wasn't very smart.

*Graphics: *I finally came up with an art style over the post-jam period. Still thinking though on how to implement it properly due to the way my game is built. Otherwise, nothing else to complain about.

*Audio: *STUPID DEATH SOUND RUINED EVERYTHING.

*Humour: *Surprised this got such a high rating.

Looking back at my targets:

I made a post, where I set myself targets for what I wanted to keep in line this Ludum Dare. And looking back:

1. I focused on mechanics and not on content.

2. I scoped down to the point where I actually had left over time at the end for polish (for once!)

3. I am still alive and able-bodied.

So I can tick those off.

*Progress: *Just like last time. I constructed a well made and orderly graph to show my progress since LD40 (my first game <3) and I am happy to say... THAT PROGRESS WAS MADE BAY BAY.

What I've learnt and Conclusion:

As always I have learnt a bunch of stuff. Every LD taught me something new that I didn't know or forced me to get out of my comfort zone. Last time round I learnt about: Prefabs, Tilemaps, Raycasts, Friction and Jumping all of which I applied in this game. This time round I :

1. Learnt a huge amount on animations, I didn't even know Animation Events existed until now.

2. Secured my knowledge on Raycasts.

3. Learnt a good amount on Audio in Unity.

4. Learnt to love delegates.

I will continue to work on DOS in the future as I do truly love my game more so than any other of my previous LD Jam entries. This one has a lot of potential and I will keep working until it is the game that it is destined to be. Thanks for reading! Have a good 4 months until LD43 comes around!

I've only participated in 2 game jams so far and both times I've got relatively low ratings, which I was really upset about at first but don't really care about now. Now I participate in LD just to have fun, not to have the highest score. But what I find problematic is that not a lot of people want to criticize your game properly. I'm not sure why, maybe they think that it's too harsh, or maybe they don't want to seem rude. But in the end they just leave bad ratings without explaining why they did that. And it's not very helpful. It tells me that my game is bad but it doesn't tell me WHY it is bad. I did get a bit of helpful feedback on my first game but this game jam I got almost no useful criticism. Some people said that the game is too hard or that it is confusing and while I can start improving on those things later it doesn't really tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Basically what I'm saying is that I would really appreciate if you could go and give me some critical feedback on my games.

Well the results are in and I couldn't believe my eyes! 6th in fun and 41 overall! Hay Caramba! So proud and humbled. It looks like I will be further updating the game today to fix all the bugs and add all those things that will make the game even more FUN! I scored kinda low in inovation and its true this game is not inovating at all. So I will focus a little more on that. Thanks y'all!

Table of contents - Results - Very brief introduction about myself - About the LD experience and the game - What went right & what went wrong - What I learned & recommendations for future jammers - Future for Survirus

Results

My game finished 27th overall! Here are the ratings for all categories.

This was my first game jam ever, so I'm happy with the results in general (specially fun!), and I feel satisfied with the quality of my game :)

It was great seeing streamers figuring out the game mechanics and commenters sharing their moments of thrill and excitement!

Very brief introduction about myself

It is fair to say that my field is kinda related to gamedev. I'm a telecommunications engineer major (think of CS + electrical engineering) so I've had my fair share of programming as a software engineer and app developer (Java, C#, React-Native, Python,Ruby, HTML, CSS, Javascript).

Just like many people here, I grew up playing videogames and they are my #1 passion. My goal and short-term focus as of now is to grow a portfolio of my work and find a studio that shares my view on game development.

About the LD experience and the game

Survirus is an arcade/skill/puzzle game that will test your reaction times and your decision-making ability. You play as a virus living inside a HDD, and your goal is to prevent the computer user from filling it up with their pointless data.

I was lucky to come up with the idea pretty quickly, which allowed me to go deep in regards to gameplay and polish. My plan was to work on core gameplay and mechanics during the first two days, and leave a whole day for visual polish, ingame instructions, and audio.

• First day: I came up with the virus and HDD idea in the first few hours, including the grid gameplay and sector locking/unlocking mechanic. I started coding the procedural grid generator (this allowed me to find the optimal grid size faster) and the data structure to store each sector's status. Towards the end of the day basic movement and the locking mechanic was implemented. All in all, I was very happy to have had come up with a decent idea and actually have made good progress on it.

• Second day: I worked on refining player movement and ironing some kinks out regarding the core mechanic. At this point there was no game loop, pause menu or main menu, which bugged me quite a bit, so I got started on that. To relax my mind a bit and let off some steam, I started working on polishing, since this is something I always enjoy doing. The dome was created, as well as the background grid and the first iteration for the particle systems. I then went back to coding and got in "the zone", which boosted my efficiency quite a bit and I was able to finish out camera smoothing and player movement tweening.

• Third day: Unfortunately I was falling a bit behind schedule, since at this point the main game loop was still not finished. So that's what I did during the morning, and I got it 90% done. It was time to do something else and start looking at finishing the visual aspect of the game and polishing up. No audio present in the game at all up until this moment, so that had to be taken care of too. My brother helped me out with the background music while I worked on the sound effects (BFXR ftw!).

This was the most hectic day of all three. Around 5 hours till deadline now and the main loop is still not finished, same for visual polish and audio. No instructions to speak of and there isthis tricky bug I haven't been able to squash just yet. I doubled down and started hammering at all these things one after another. Although I was mentally exhausted, I was able to get in the zone again and surprised myself at how quick I was at finding out the right way to approach specific issues.

I know I wouldn't have been able to survive this last day without the last previous good nights of sleep.

Twenty minutes till deadline! But the website isn't working! Why did I wait so long to upload something? Is this happening only to me? The site is so buggy the timer says there is 24h till deadline...

Mild panic is settling in.

The website was so sluggish it was impossible to even read the post on technical issues. Fortunately my brain was still lucid enough to turn to twitter for information, and there it was:

"Deadline extended for 24 hours"

Oh...

Oh well this is good. I will be able to submit my game then. On the other hand I had this feeling I had been "cheated on" by this decision, since I organized myself around three days, and busted my ass off for the last 12h to get to the finish line. Obviously this was a tricky feeling caused by exhaustion. It was the right decision seeing as the technical issues looked like they were there to stay for a few hours still, and probably most participants hadn't been able to submit their entries yet.

The thought of going to bed and dealing with this stuff the following day crossed my mind, but I was too excited to stop now, so the only thing I could do was to stay up and work on some very little details that were still bugging me, create "promotional" images and gifs for the ldjam and itch.io pages. Around 5 hours after the original deadline I was able to upload my game, and that's when I went to bed.

I could have kept working on expanding the game the following day till the new deadline, but I wanted to take a rest from all the craze, and I also had some irl stuff to take care of.

What went right & what went wrong

• What went right

  • Found my idea quickly, yay!
  • Managed to get a good amount of visual polish in, and many people commented on that!
  • Managed to organize code properly, which allowed me to quickly test stuff
  • Fun and challenging gameplay that keeps players interested in "just one more game"

• What went wrong

  • Lack of tutorial stage meant people were confused even after reading the instructions
  • Some bug allows the player to stay alive infinitely sometimes
  • Gameplay might be a bit shallow, even if it's challenging

What I learned & recommendations for future jammers

• A lot of people don't read the instructions and jump right into action. Most streamers had to do a double take on them after failing miserably on their first try. A game like this obviously needs a tutorial stage in which every element is introduced one by one, and for the difficulty to ramp up appropriately. Unfortunately it is not possible to do that during a game jam, at least in my opinion (and for a game like this).
• I strengthened my C# knowledge. I decided to do things a bit differently to what I'm comfortable with in regards to data structures, and it paid off. Not only I was able to generate more solid code, but I also learned something new!
• Keep some nice little "tools" handy (shaders, pause menu scripts, camera movement). As an example, pretty much all the effects in Survirus are achieved with a single shader I was working on during the previous week for a different project (you can get this shader for free, see link at the bottom).
• Get enough sleep! This is is fundamental, really. You want a clear head during the whole event, mainly for two reasons:
  • If you don't get enough sleep your brain will get tired, you will become slow and make short-sighted decisions. I have participated in 24h coding marathons in the past, and this definitely happens.
  • Being well-rested gives you the chance to get in "the zone", this mental state in which you are completely focused on your task and you are able to plan ahead and organize very easily. This happened to me during this LD, and it was fantastic. When I entered this state, I was able to see everything clearly, I knew what had to be done at every moment, and I knew how to do it. I was able to keep planning the code structure while I was coding something else.
• You can make a good-looking game with mostly primitive shapes, fancy shaders and basic particle systems.
• Find your idea quickly, this will give you more freedom coming into the second day.
• Keep your scope small, go for procedural content if possible. You will get a better gameplay/content ratio.
• Don't forget to spend some time with your family/friends/SO during the jam! It will help you clear your mind. I went out for dinner with my parents during the first day, found the time to skype with my girlfriend, and still made it!
• For your first game jam, I would recommend doing it alone, you will have a better grasp on all the work needed to make it to the finish line.

Future for Survirus

Survirus will continue development, with both short, and medium/long term goals.

• Short-term: Arcade mobile version, pretty much similar to the existing one, with bugfixes, performance optimizations, more maps layouts, small tweaks, QoL changes, a better interface, tutorial, leaderboards, and maybe a couple new mechanics.

This mobile version will most likely be free to play, with a paid version which will be basically the same thing but with some customization options. Meant as a "support the dev" option.

• Medium/long-term: PC release, with story mode, new gamemodes, boss stages, customization options, co-op and local multiplayer, new maps, effects, new music, etc. This will be a paid option ($10-15) and ideally I'd like to port it to the Switch in the future.

Play Survirus here

Thank you for reading!

Guillermo

gguillermix()gmail.com

Shader I used for everything in Survirus: https://github.com/AdultLink/TexturePanner

Check out my other free shader for radial progress bars: https://github.com/AdultLink/RadialProgressBar

To the Community:

Thank you for the feedback and I am happy to see people saw past the flaws in the design and execution. I had a much more positive LD experience this time around and quite a bit of the critiques that I read have been taken into consideration for the continued work I've put in.

The Results:

Overall: 424th (3.269 average from 28 ratings) Fun: 490th (2.981 average from 28 ratings) Innovation: 296th (3.308 average from 28 ratings) Theme: 590th (3 average from 28 ratings) Graphics: 249th (3.537 average from 29 ratings) Humor: 178th (2.957 average from 25 ratings) Mood: 196th (3.292 average from 26 ratings)

Overall, I am pretty happy with the results. I was lucky to complete the game as it was in the time limit. Even then it was just barely a game, in the sense that the player had little control over the outcome. Despite being an amateur I try to put that extra polish on everything and I think the scope of the project was too high for the Compo. Now that I am more familiar with how the board game logic works I could probably make a better one in that time but there is so many small details to consider to make it both fun and theme related.

The theme category was my worst rating and I can understand that. At the submission time the most interaction you had was clicking to proceed and deciding to sell or not. Choosing not to sell had no merit so overall inventory space was no issue.

Post-LD:

I am still developing this idea. I'm trying very hard to keep it in line with the theme it was designed for. I have pretty much redesigned the majority of the code and still expect at least one big overhaul before I start tweaking all the assets to make them better.

There will be two different event tiles. One for treasure which is being tweaked to have an interactive component, which is currently a choice of what loot you want or in some cases the loss of something in your inventory. Actually, an idea that just came to mind as I am thinking about it is filling the inventory with junk instead which is more in line with inventory space issues! The other event will still be a combat encounter but I have tweaked the combat system and will have to playtest a lot of finalize how I do combat upgrades to make it more engaging.

Once all that is done I have to figure out how online multiplayer will work, which I imagine where the major code overhaul is going to take place.

See you all in November, and I better have this published by then!

WOW. My first time making it to the top 10, which is still unbelievable!

Here's a short post-mortem, as it went really well, all things considered.

• Clearly the decision to go all 2D and minimalistic paid off. Even though graphics still aren't my strong suit and the art in my game was mediocre, going for a strict minimalist style somehow got me into the top 100 for graphics which is a pretty good trade-off. Compared to my previous LD entries where I got tripped up trying to do 3D and did not do too great as a result, 2D really is much more achievable for a compo entry, where I actually had enough time to focus on game mechanics and polish.

• The decision to go with a familiar genre - top down shooter - paid off as well. I've always thought that game jams tend to be easy mode if you're doing either a 2D platformer or top down shooter. Not just because its done to death and relatively easy to achieve, but because players just get it, having played so many variants of it. No lengthy tutorials required, its easy to understand, controls are intuitive, everything just clicks. I always trip up on doing tutorials well, and I'm glad that this game was pretty self-explanatory.

• The amount of polish matters. A LOT. After having experienced a few jams, I realized its really all about the polish sometimes. I did a lot of tweaking on small matters to make stuff "feel just right", such as the physic impact of bullets, movement of the player character, the death animation. I'm surprised at how well I scored on audio and mood as well, as my ambient soundscape was basically slapping together various pad synths on LMMS, and added reverb to every sound FX. Much better than my past LD entries, where audio was basically an afterthought.

• A systematic approach to completing the game did pay off as well. I put up my very first build on day 1 for testing, with about 5 test levels. That allowed me time to gather some initial player feedback, and also helped to guide my focus on making sure that the levels are watertight, without any major bugs and to settle on a consistent design. This is the part of the game jam which I usually dread - the "point of no return", where all the possibilities the game could be collapses into a single invariant state. After getting over this point, things were smooth sailing - then it was just coming up with the levels without having to revise or re-do previous levels.

• Leaving the part which can be scaled back last. As all the game mechanics were already tried and tested, and it was just a matter of weaving a logical flow through the mechanics, I left level design to the last. Although I ran out of steam in the last few stages (which is why the level design suffers a bit then), I could easily scale back on the the number of levels and the game would still feel no less complete. I recall this talk about an inverted pyramid here - Article on Gamasutra- which is totally applicable for game jams as well.

With that, I'd really like to thank all the players rating my game and providing great feedback, and especially the streamers playing my game! I will be taking all feedback in to refine my game for a post jam release, so stay tuned!

Check out the game

So, I got some middling scores, but I'm happy with my final result. I knew from the outset that A Strange Sinking Feeling was a niche game, since it's actually entirely a text document, and not everyone is really into tabletop games. It was essentially like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Still, For a game I wrote in a few hours and tweaked over a day, it did as well as it could've. I've learned that yes, I can make a game like this and no, I'm not very good at it yet :smile:.

Something interesting is that this game is actually a canon part of my other game Can't Anyone Save The World? 2nd Edition, since it takes place in a cave system beneath the Great Western Woods. I'm always expanding on this little world of mine...

You can play the mentioned games here:

https://krgamestudios.com/astrangesinkingfeeling

https://krgamestudios.com/castworld2

As usual, getting the results is a lot of frustration. Anyway, here they are:

Some comments: * I ranked very badly in Theme. I am extremely surprised by this. I used the theme in the following way: you have a bag full of useful tools, but as you collect gems, you are running out of space and must thus decide to throw tools away one by one. I still think it was a quite interesting idea and that it fitted the theme correctly. Also, I haven't seen any game with the same idea. Still, I got one comment telling me "does it satisfy the theme though hmmmmm". Last LD I was ranked 10th in that category. If any person who has played my game can explain this to me, I'm very curious :smile: I suspect many people didn't even get past the point when you first have to throw away a tool and haven't read the description either. * I'm in the best third of the ranking in Graphics, and it's the highest rating I've ever had in this category (previous record was 3.54...). I expected a bit more since I felt my game was way more polished graphically than my two previous games, but I'm still happy. * My rating in Audio is not very good either. Although I had some little music in the beginning and spent hours recording original sounds, this is ALWAYS something that nobody ever mentions in the comments. Also, many people didn't even rate my game in this category (again, why?). I'm really starting to think that I should just increase the volume to make sure the players realize there IS sound.

The rest makes sense to me although I'm quite disappointed that a few silly bugs ruined the experience for a lot of players :sob:

Compared to my previous games, it's rather good, although I haven't really improved:

That's it for me! Thanks to all the people who played my game and took the time to leave a comment! See you in the future if I decide to participate again!