It's over. Congrats to everyone that joined! I had a lot of fun, both making and playing games - I played a lot of great games. A lot of you gave great feedback on my game, so here's an update for Tooth, Claw & Teacup. - Improved combat - Music - New enemy - Added screen transitions - Added a Linux build
For the full list of changes click This
I also moved the source code from google drive to itch.io
And here are my results:
I think I did pretty good. Can't wait for October!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHQFkw1O66M
What is Fragment Jam?
Fragment Jam is a game jam focused on admiring and sharing unfinished games (fragments). Maybe you want to revisit these projects someday, maybe you want closure and to move on, perhaps you want to make a fragment for the jam. Fragment Jam is here to help sort it out and to provide a platform for celebrating and sharing our fragments.
Other cool things:
Hope to see you there!
Here are the concept art / notes of my game for LD44 :
Very happy with the results of my first LD entry Pay Me in Blood, which received 30th in Theme, 37th in Innovation and 39th in Overall.
The plan is to continue development until it becomes a full game. You can follow me on itch.io to receive any updates on the project. Hope you guys had a good Ludum Dare as well :)
Not perfect, I definitely see where I could have improved the game to hopefully raise some of these, but as it stands I'm happy with this. Congrats to everyone else who finished!
This was my first game jam ever, and even though I'm about to be a college senior studying game design I still consider myself very much an amateur. With that being said, I'm absolutely thrilled with my results!
Overall: 949th (2.981 average from 28 ratings)
Fun: 1006th (2.673 average from 28 ratings)
Innovation: 772nd (2.904 average from 28 ratings)
Theme: 515th (3.404 average from 28 ratings)
Graphics: 799th (3.096 average from 28 ratings)
Humor: 489th (2.923 average from 28 ratings)
Mood: 726th (3.1 average from 27 ratings)
These might not be the highest numbers, but for my first time making a game so quickly - and first fighting game - I'm pretty happy being middle of the pack. I was hoping for about 3 on my scores, and that's about what I got, so I have no complaints.
I learned a lot this jam, and so I'm sure I'll do better next time:
-I should focus on what I know. That means that, since I'm not super confident with animations (and don't like making them!), I shouldn't spend a whole day working on them and getting really demoralized. I also might not want to try a new game genre for the first time unless it's something relatively simple. Fighting games... are not easy.
-Simple is best. My original idea for the jam was much more complicated, so I went with my second idea that was simpler. And I still only just barely finished! So next time, I should start very simple, and if I have time, add extra features.
-Feedback (for in-game actions) is really important. I got a lot of people telling me that they wished my game had either auditory or visual feedback when you hit the opponent. I hadn't thought that it mattered, but clearly it does. Next game, I'll include that for sure.
-Feedback (on the game) is REALLY important. I forgot about play/rate until the last few days, so I just barely got enough ratings. Next time, I plan on doing it from the beginning. I loved hearing constructive criticism on my game and learning what I did well and what I need to fix. It was also really nice to get practice giving criticism and feedback. I had to really think - what specifically do I like? what specifically needs to change? I haven't done that much in the past, so getting the experience is sure to be helpful.
-Playtest! Especially with other people, if possible! I didn't have a hard time playing my own game because of course I knew the strategy, but it quickly became clear that other people were having a hard time with it. I left balance and testing for the very end, so I didn't really get a chance to make changes. Ideally, in October I'll have a friend or someone play the game a few times, so I can tell how it plays to someone else. I learned in class that it's important to have non-developers test your game, and now I have actual experience that that's true!
Thanks so much to everyone who rated my game and left feedback! I read everything you wrote, and have really taken it to heart. I'm very happy with how you rated me, but I'm confident that I can do a better job next time. I've got plans to do a few other jams this summer - I want to do Awful Summer Games and my college is hosting a jam as well - and I'm also doing a project with some friends, so next time we all meet I'll know what I'm doing much better. See you all in October!
This was an incredible Ludum Dare for me, not even with just the scores, but also with what really matters, making a game that you making a game that you yourself are happy with. I, as everyone should, focus on the star ratings, not the placing itself (though that doesn't hurt). Let me break down my scores, with a bit of a post-mortem for each category.
Overall: Solid category. A little above average on the star side, but there's not too much to say since I'll break down each individual category as I come across it.
Fun: Just about average. Not one I expected to be too high, it was more of a simulator than a true game. I struggled for a long time trying to get gameplay polished enough to even be somewhat "fun," and I'm happy with where it turned out considering the context.
Innovation: Above average (though not by much). Not one I expected to get this high on actually, it seemed like a pretty obvious idea. Maybe that's why it was so high, everyone wanted to come up with a super unique idea so the obvious ideas were left open. No matter what it is, it's still definitely serviceable.
Theme: By far my best score, both in this LD and across all 8 LDs I've done. This was incredible to see, and is both my first top 100 and my first score above a 4.0. Again, it seemed like a pretty obvious direction to take the theme, but I guess it still fits very well. Definitely pretty cool to see that score, especially considering how subjective the theme really is.
Graphics: This fell right where I expected it to. A little above the middle, but still one of my best Graphics scores (since I suck at pixel art most of the time). Actually, I spent the entire first night and several hours of the first day just working on graphics and not even touching the code. I felt I could do that since my idea was so simple, and even though it could've backfired terribly, I think it turned out fine.
Audio: This fell exactly in the middle at a perfect 2.5. Almost everyone that played Orcan Harvest had something to say about the audio. There was no music, just wind, and every single piece of audio excluding one was made with sounds from my mouth. The selling sound effect was actually made by dropping coins on my desk, but all of the other ones were made in probably an unconventional way. I was in the voice chat of the LD Discord server as I did audio, and for the sake of everyone else I muted my mic and tried to refrain from laughing and ruining the entire recording. Definitely my favorite part of the whole experience this time around, even if they don't sound the best.
Humor: Just above average at an (almost) perfect 3. I'm surprised I got that high, there was nothing intrinsically funny in my game excluding the concept, and even that isn't very funny in my opinion. I just thought I would leave it in for once and see how it did, and the results of my little experiment were surprising.
Mood: Just above average (seeing a trend yet?). Audio was the biggest part in this, with the wind and lack of music really selling the kind of "back alley" feel I was going for. I also added a low-opacity black overlay near the end of the jam, and while I regret it and it makes the colors seem dull, it definitely adds to the spook factor.
Well, that's all I've got. Kudos to you if you read this far! I'm factoring in all of your guys' suggestions and have a version 1.1 almost done and ready for release! Now's the best time to buy in bulk!
-Mathstr0fficial
Overall: 399th (3.576 average from 48 ratings) Fun: 189th (3.7 average from 47 ratings) Innovation: 775th (2.9 average from 47 ratings) Theme: 881st (2.932 average from 46 ratings) Graphics: 623rd (3.424 average from 48 ratings) Humor: 527th (2.864 average from 46 ratings) Mood: 565th (3.295 average from 46 ratings)
The results are in, everybody is excited, so let's see them:
I don't know how many participants were in this jam, but I'm pretty satisfied with myself. Getting 2.8 stars in average is not bad. And next time, I will try to improve. Thanks for everybody who voted for the game.
Jam's over and I scored pretty high (low?). Gives me a good baseline however to work harder on next jam! Pleased with where I got to on Humor and Innovation though!
Thanks so much to all who rated my game over this past month! Here are my results for ldjam 44!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/kill-the-money
Hi All!
Results are in. This was my second LDJAM and 9th game overall. I still struggle a lot with building a game in such a short time yet alone a good game :D But I am happy with graphics being above 3 in average rating.
Thank you to everyone who played my game! See you all again in October!
Thank you everyone who showed support to my team on the game La Dança de los Muertos. We were just 4 and for some it was the first Jam, and others just one more. I hope we can do this well in the next one. See you guys in october o/.
This LD was the personal best in overall! Super happy, had lots of fun. Thank you everyone who played my game and thank you every single one of you who made and submitted a game yourself for continuously inspiring me!
These are my Ludum Dare 44 results:
I've been participating in every Ludum Dare since the 39th one. I'm not going to discuss all of them here (I have another post about it here) but here's a GIF summarizing the past results.
There are many places to improve. Previously I've been working on improving the game feel, polish and overall playability of the game. This time I've chosen to focus on Audio. Instead of going the usual road of generative sounds/melodies (which is perfectly fine btw!) I decided to start learning an instrument and spent some time in Audacity for sound editing. Overall, I think it paid off! Of course I'm still very much on an amateur level. But! I was super happy of being able to produce melodies and sounds for this game myself. This added more room for creative process and is something that I definitely plan on doing in the future. The effort somewhat showed in the results as well - the game was rated 15th in Audio (which is a lot higher than I expected and deserve).
Although I will keep working on my audio skills, there is another category where I feel very weak. It also shows through all of my submissions. It is the Innovation. I don't have a definite plan of even any constructive ideas on how would one improve in this, but I guess it will all come down to training. So this is the category in my radar for the next Ludum Dare.
As for the actual thing that I've created this time, here it is: an action (sometimes more of a chaos than action) filled bullet hell.
You can try it on Itch.io or my LD page of course.
See you in the next Ludum Dare! :slight_smile:
Yep, that title is intentional.
:astonished:
Wow! I didn't even dream of such good results! Thanks to everyone who left a rating or a nice comment, they were all greatly appreciated!
The last thing I thought I would get the best score on was the audio. It was sort of an afterthought, and the music was made in Bosca Ceoil (I mean, I'm not saying it's bad, but it certainly could be better).
I will be continuing to develop this game, try to make online multiplayer (I have been working on it for a looong time), make more characters and levels to play.
8-Bit Knock Out! got accepted into the GDWC Fan Favorite category! You can vote for it by clicking the "Vote" button under it on the GDWC page (thegdwc.com) (please do it!)
Anyone else think it'd make more sense if the Overall category was taken as an average of your other category ratings as opposed to an individually rated category in its own right.
I'm not saying it's unfair, it's still a level playing field, I just think it makes more sense that Overall be your actual overall score than a rated category. As it stands it would be possible to rank highest in all but the Overall category, which seems counter intuitive to me.
Of note, having totted up a few average scores versus Overall category scores, it seems that people tend to score higher than their average, suggesting that scorers tend to be generous with their Overall scoring. Isn't this a pleasant dev community!
ps) apologies for the alliteration
Wow. 11th in Audio and 14th in Humor. Really chuffed guys, thanks so much for playing and rating! Link down below if you want to have a play/laugh/listen.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bounty-hunted
First of all I would like to compliment to everyone, for being able to make and publish a complete game in such a short time span!
For this edition I tried to break the top 100th barrier and... I managed to!
I was very surprised and proud of myself. Looks like that the overall "enjoyability" of my game was the best score, probably driven by a fun gameplay and a good looking graphic. Unbelievably, also the theme adherence didn't score so much, even thou I sincerely hated this theme :D
Also, I'm very happy on how my scoring is overall improving (slowly) from one LD to the next :)
Again: Good Job everyone! And I hope to see you all in the next Ludum Dare!
Overall: 74
Fun: 172
Innovation: 205
Theme: 76
Graphics: 69
Audio: 143
Humor: 633
Mood: 43
why do we even include humor category every time, huh? :smile:
A bit of retrospective (click to see the full image):
Thank you all and see you next LD!
Thank you all for playing and rating my compo game Jumpcoins! And double thank you everyone for leaving constructive and supportive feedback! :):)
This was my second Ludum Dare, and the first one where I broke top 100 for any category.
This time I really tried to focus on Fun and polish, and I chose to not focus on humor, mood, or innovation (after all, if you've ever played Celeste, then Jumpcoins will feel eerily familiar :sweat_smile:), which were all reflected in my results. I couldn't be happier :) Next time I'd like to break top 20 in a category!
