Thanks to everyone who played my game, Blood Pressure, for their ratings! I'm really happy with how well my game performed. Not only is this my highest overall ranking game, but it's also my most well rounded game to date, with all categories either in the top 100 or close to it. This is also my second time getting a 4+ star rating in the graphics category, which is kind of nuts since I'm not really a visual artist. In any case, thanks all for playing and I look forward to participating again next Ludum Dare!

Here's a link if you want to check the game out for yourself: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/blood-pressure

Thank you so much for the ratings and feedback!! This was our first competition, and we strived so hard to at least get to the best 1000 games, and we did it!! In fact, we got position 29th in graphics thanks to your votes and my amazing friend and gamedev partner @Greon!! Thank you so much, really. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and it hasn't even ended.

We are making it into a full game!

A LOT of tips given through feedback are ALREADY in the game. It's gonna take a little while to release it, we're making a lot of new features to polish it into a full product, and of course add what we didn't have the time to during the competition (also, the annoying song is finally removed, and we have a mute button! :sweat_smile: ) and you can follow our journey on our twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/Hermitao10

https://twitter.com/Greon8

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/death-got-your-girlfriend

I could use some heavier feedback on the art style of my game (pretty please). I grew up with hand drawn games, so I'm heavily biased, and find it almost impossible to be objective. Also I did all assets in a rush, so the art is far from perfect, I realize, but would like to know what disturbs you, or if something does or doesn't work well together, etc, the more, the merrier. Any nitpicks, improvement tips, or anything of sorts would be very welcome. Many thanks, here's the game

And a video

yt

Yay, the results for Ghostly Tricks are finally out!

Despite the results being worse than my previous entry, I still think this was a success for three reasons:

• I had a really hard time coming up with a game idea for this theme;
• This was my first 'puzzle' game so making levels was pretty challenging;
• I actually lost an entire day because I gave up at the end of day 1 but decided to try again at the end of day 2...

Thank you everybody that played and rated my game! I hope everybody learned a lot with this jam and, most importantly, had fun. It was fun playing your games too. Let's just hope that the next jam's theme will be better! :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

My final product from the Compo jam was Sigillis, a game where you draw things on the screen to cast spells. Problem is that the game needs to figure out what the heck you've drawn, and that's where my pattern recognition algorithm comes in. An unfortunate warning in advance, my freeware only allows for a max of 720p quality, so sorry that it isn't as beautiful as it could / should be. See how I made the pattern recognition algorithm below:

https://youtu.be/9e1_Ms47ANk

You can get the source code and play the game here. Thank you for taking the time to watch!

This is my first ever attempt at creating an info-graphic presentation, so please tell me what you think. I tried incredibly hard to get the audio and graphical quality as high as possible, even with my limited resources. This video took over 60 straight hours to produce, so please please please, take a few minutes out of your day to let me know what you think about it. It means so much to me, and I really want to know how I can improve future videos. Thanks for your time, and double thanks for an awesome Ludum Dare! Cheers, JUSTCAMH :v:

Orcan Harvest v1.1 has been released! In the weeks after Ludum Dare, I've taken into account all of your suggestions and put together a (hopefully) much more complete organ-selling experience!

Changelog: - Added button pressing animation for visual feedback in addition to my audio feedback - Added a blood splatter effect to selling organs - Orc sprite now deteriorates the closer you are to dying - On the lose screen, "Score:" now reads "Extra Lives Bought:" - Added a screen that shows an extra life being added to your lives counter when bought - Complete overhaul of the organ selling system - Voice clips! (and some subtitles)

The updated version is now at https://benjaminfalkenberg.com/orcanharvest while the original version is now at https://benjaminfalkenberg.com/orcanharvest/beta

Take a look, and leave some feedback on the updated version if you get the chance!

Hello, everyone! Congratulations to the winners and participants!!

After completing my first Ludum Dare and rating a bunch of games, I took some time to write an article and pick out my favorites. You can find the article here.

The link in my game site has officially been updated. The original build has been replaced by Post Jam Patch Version 1 https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/robyn-hud

Special thanks to everyone who rated my game, and special thanks to those who pointed out crucial feedback and helped motivate me to release a post jam patch.

release Post Jam Patch Version 1 (PJPv1). This is a pretty major patch which should improve quality of life for the player with major changes to the item/obstacle spawning algorithm, as well as some graphics improvements, and added controller support. More info and a playable build available: https://rithmgaming.itch.io/robyn-hud

We are nearing 1000 players that at least finished level 1 in our game Fluffensnuff, which i think is a great moment to share something interesting with you.

So basically, this is how the players came in through fluffensnuffs lifetime As you can see we got a little traffic from my blog posts, and a lot from the great gamejamcurator and randomize user, who amazingly showcased our game.

So, i was very surprised when we suddenly hade a huge spike in players, amounting to 200 players on 24h, without us having done anything. It was even more surprising, that they didn't show up on our itch io dashboard. This means the players did not get the game from itch.io.

I wondered what could have happened. Someone must have shared our windows build. But 200 players is insane, this would have to be a huge community. After half a day, google provided the answer for me: the web version got "ripped" and uploaded to another site! Specifically this one http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/fluffensnuff/ And a few others, mostly embedding the first site as an iframe, thus avoiding traffic they'd have to pay for. A few sites also made new logos, described the controls or even wrote a few really pretty paragraphs of backstory. * http://cu.game-game.com/198867/ in spanish * http://game-game.fr/198867/ in french * http://game-game.hu/198867/ in hungarian i think * http://mail.sugar-free-games.com/playgame.php?game=19886 * http://games.allmyfaves.com/fluffensnuff/ * https://www.minijuegos.com/juego/fluffensnuff

I also saw a lot of fellow jam games on the site, shoutout to @le-slo @oultrox @telepinu @veryeviltomato @reuno @daniel-moreno @ditto @joemanaco @xellaya @ddrkirbyisq -> http://www.freewebarcade.com/latest/1/

I have no doubt that this happens with each jam, not limited to LD 44 or even LD.

So, what do you think about that? How do you feel or would you feel if your game got rehosted without your knowledge?

Personally, i find it pretty cool on on hand, as we get a lot pf plays. On the other, i do not like that i have no way to update the game, to deliver new content or better balancing. In any case, a pretty interesting process. I did not expect such a "machinery" rehosting free web games.

Bonus, few trivia numbers :D * 30 players finished the last level (17), which is a bit more than 3% * The game can be played through with en estimated 400 moves, the best player right now has 431 moves * The most moves a player has made in a single (!) level was 1383 * The fastest playthrough was from @AVAVT in 15 minutes, while 10 people took more than one hour to finish the game

Note: I copied this over from my personal blog. There’s no content difference, but IMO my blog has nicer fonts.

Ludum Dare 44 is over! It's actually been over for a couple of days now, so let's just get to it (heck are there even any people looking at the LD feed anymore :eyes:)

Overall

This is my third Ludum Dare where I actually completed a game, and as I continue to improve as a dev, my Overall score also continues to improve. Extremely happy to be in the top 50--next time, maybe the top 10?

Jokes aside, it makes me happy to see that a text-adventure game can do this well. Glad to see that the LD audience is diverse in their interests.

Theme

Oof. I know entries that stretch interpretations of LD themes typically don't do too well, but I definitely was hit pretty hard. In case you're wondering how I feel my game tackles the theme, I'm going to actually cite what my friend had to say, as he put it way better than I could:

Your life is the sum of your earned experiences. You have to manage how you spend each word because they are the currency you use the act.

In that regard, as we'll talk about later, the game even punishes you for amassing too much currency :wink:

Feedback

I had gotten a lot of great feedback on Invertebrae from friends, family, and of course the Ludum Dare community. While some of the feedback I had expected the moment I hit the publish button, there was also completely valid criticism that I hadn't seem coming at all.

How Long Is Your Game Really?

Nearing the end of the compo period, I was running through Invertebrae nearly every half hour, making sure that grammar was sound, the UI never bugged out, and that I hadn't inadvertently created any soft-locks with the puzzle mechanism. Each of these playthroughs would take me roughly 5-10 minutes, so in my head, I just pegged my game as a 20-minute game at most.

Imagine my surprise when the comments started coming in with playthrough times of 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, heck my friend even stopped playing to go to sleep and then continued it the next day.

First off, it makes me so happy that anyone would play a game of mine for more than like 20 minutes, much less two hours. The idea of creating something that could hold someone's attention for that long really is some of the nicest feedback I can receive as a game developer. Plus, let's be frank--most Ludum Dare games can be fully experienced in 5-10 minutes. In the time it takes to play a one-hour text-adventure, you could have rated like ten other great games.

However, not knowing that my game would have such a playtime means that I didn't design the game for such a playtime, and that was definitely reflected in the criticism. As I addressed in a post-compo update, the core drag-and-drop UX is pretty, but also pretty inefficient. Dragging words back and forth leads to a lot of unnecessary movement, and this is only exacerbated by the large number of words you could amass.

The Moon Is Exponentially Far Away

Due to one of the core puzzles in the game, a lot of people ended up hoarding a lot of words. This was definitely not the intention--the multi-page feature of the word bank was actually only added in the last five hours after I realized it was even possible to collect enough words such that they went off the bottom of the screen. However, with puzzles like open computer that rely on you having to re-use words you played prior, and navigating between nodes of the story being a slow affair, it was silly of me to not expect players to store every word they saw in worry that it would be necessary later.

Instead of puzzles that are designed to be worked out from a pool of four to seven words, now even the simplest puzzles are obscene, with tons of accidentally reasonable combinations of words not satisfying the one or two answers I had in mind. Plus, the moment you learn that some puzzles have multiple answers is the moment you start thinking that all puzzles have multiple answers. I tried to poke fun at this with things like the stairwell ending, where you play pet cat after walking on a stairwell that "squeaks like a dying cat". But while that ending is quite funny (well, only 190 places of funny as the results showed), the hundreds of non-existent endings that players tried to get to certainly aren't.

A lot of people had noted that a couple of the puzzles were really difficult. While I agree that a few were a bit obtuse, I do think it was primarily due to the excess of words that people could collect. Even sort of sketchy phrases like pretend security are way easier to reason if they're only two of five words in your word bank, rather than twenty.

If I were to work on Intevertebrae in the future, I would definitely design the puzzles to have fewer words overall and give each word more uses. Not only would this decrease the frustration of cycling through endless combinations, but it would also increase the number of actual word puzzles, which is the real difficulty (and source of fun) that I wanted present in my game.

OK People Said Good Things Too

I've gone on about the most popular critical feedback for a bit now, but people also plenty of nice things to say:

• People generally enjoyed the story! This is definitely my favorite comment. As someone who hasn't written a story since probably middle school twelve years ago, I've been nervous about attempting a narrative game for a long while, which sucks since they're my favorite genre. While the plot might not have been the most unique, it's definitely a large confidence boost to hear that people liked the writing.
• Even with some of the inadvertent difficulty, people thought the time-traveling, knowledge-base-building puzzle mechanics were novel and entertaining. Novelty is extremely important to me as a developer--as someone who plays way fewer games than I used to, the easiest way to get me interested in your game is novelty (well-executed novelty, anyway). I've been wanting to make a narrative game for a while now, but was putt off by both my lack of writing confidence, as well as a way to make myself stand out from the thousands of other (great!) games in the genre. I'm happy to have finally come up with something that both I and others enjoy.
• As minimal as they were, the two small music tracks were definitely worth making. I ran out of time for music my last two LD games, so this time I made sure to reserve two hours for just for music. The time restraints ended up working in my favor, as their minimalism allowed them to settle into the background and serve more as mood-makers than attention-grabbers (further shown by my Mood ranking versus my Audio ranking, lol).

So really issues aside, I'm really proud of how I did this Ludum Dare, and I'm looking forward to the next one. See y'all at LD45!

Hmmm, inception?

So I just recently released a 'techlog', all about the Pattern Recognition Algorithm that I made during LD compo. *If you haven't seen the video, then you can see it a few posts down, or just click here. *

Strangely, I found the production of this video to be far more complex than the actual pattern recognition algorithm algorithm that I made, so I thought that I would detail all of the different challenges I faced, and how I overcame them:

:book: Scripting:

No sorry, I don't do impromptu. All of that was scripted, and whilst there's a negative stigma about using scripts, it definitely improved the quality of the presentation. This was actually the fastest part of the production, but I think that this was a big mistake. I rushed the scripting, and there are times that you can tell. When editing later, I often found myself wondering; what I was thinking... Times like those, I had to create text in the video, to explain the things that I failed to mention in enough detail.

There was some times that I branched off from the script, and this worked out pretty good. There are even a few instances that you can tell, just off the changed tone of my voice. Not sure if such a clear transition is good, but the impromptu parts made the video seem a bit more casual. I had initially intended to cut out the ramblings at the end of the video, but in many ways, it felt good to be freed of the script and just speak openly at the end of the video.

:loud_sound: Audio:

Audio was a real pain to pull together. I spent some time complaining about it, which certainly felt good. I had to record at the dead of night, otherwise family members were active, birds were chirping and cars were driving around at full throttle. I had to strip my room bare of all sound making devices; the clock was moved to the corridor, and I even had to remove my computer, since the fan was too loud to record over. Instead, all of the recordings were done into my phone, and transfered later. I initially used the phone's microphone, but I found that my head moved enough to create audible changes in the volume and quality. So instead, I used a headset, which worked better.

Then once I had the audio sample, I had to edit the sound in Audacity. This was strangely even more of a pain, not cos Audacity is bad, but cos I'm bad. I'm an aussie, and whilst I hate to blame my heritage for it, my voice sounds kinda... trash. It's way too coarse and certainly not the deep, stereotypical Australian voice. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it sounding perfect. Most notably, audacity was unable to repair the coarseness of my voice, so I wasn't able to get the 'narrator' level of audio quality. I was able to make it sound a bit deeper by increasing the bass and reducing treble, but still far from David Attenborough. With the mic so close to my face, the recording picked up everything, including breathing and all sorts of other mouth sounds. These had to be individually repaired, and all up, the audio editing alone would have taken around 8 hours.

:paintbrush: Graphics:

I had no clue what I wanted to do for the graphics of the video, but I'd recently installed Krita and was amazed by the software, so I knew that would be the focus. I had initially planned to use more footage than graphics, since that would save SO much time, but the only footage I could really show was the code, which wasn't particularly engaging. I decided to go for a 'hand made' feel, with everything drawn, including text. Every time that text was to be displayed on the screen, I had to draw it. I don't have a drawing tablet so I was stuck with my mouse. It dawned on me halfway through to use my Laptop's touch screen, which greatly improved the quality of the drawings. I also discovered that there was different smoothing options available, which I used to further improve the quality of later graphics. Once I felt more confident, I even created some drawings, a few characters and fancy titles, just to spice it all up. :hot_pepper:

Small issue, but there was 174 graphics used in the video... So just importing them into my video software became a pain. I had a pretty neat idea though. For each 'set' of graphics, I used a different prefix, so all of the graphics related to a specific part of the video could be found in one place. Don't even get me started about the time spent making them, let's just not discuss that.

:video_camera: Video:

Okay, so as you've likely noticed, I'm stuck with freeware. I don't have any nice quality tools, just free stuff from the internet. And the video editor I selected felt free. It was pretty damn painful to do anything. Keyframes could only be linear, and things as simple as using the transparency channel of an image required a filter be applied. Even just transforming and layering graphics ended up being a pain. It doesn't seem you're meant to have 15+ layers of graphics, because at this point, the layers went up and out of the layers panel, covering everything else on the screen. So this phase of development was basically a battle against the software.

I wanted the graphics to look very professional, and I wasn't sure how to achieve this. I looked over so many different videos, but all of them used complex motion graphics, that I really couldn't replicate. I experimented with blurs, and different blending modes, which worked out surprisingly well. This was strangely simple to do, and the background throughout the video is just a long clip of me playing the game, put through an intense blur filter. The strobing colours of the enemies prevented the background from seeming static, which was a nice bonus.

:heavycheckmark: Overall:

Altogether, the video was well over a 60 hour investment, but it was fun, and I learnt some stuff. I wish that I could get some professional video editing software, but other than that, the freeware has performed surprisingly well. This is likely my last post for the season, so see yas next jam! It's been great, and I'm really looking forward to LD45. Cheers, JUSTCAMH. :wave:

So because I have way too much free time on my hands, I rigged up a program to pull all of the score data from every completed LD44 entry (or at least the ones that got a score in the Overall category) and dump it into a CSV file. I was then able to use this data to produce a series of histograms, so that people could see what the score distribution is like for each category and how well their game did relative to the average. Please ignore the "below 0.5" and "above 5" columns; this was the only way I could find to make Excel display the full length of the score axis instead of trimming the empty space.

Compo

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Jam

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Combined

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We got really happy with the ludum dare results .... tbh I just saw them now like a couple of minutes ago ... and I must say, I am very happy with the result although it shows a very kinda obvious observation: we really lack good coders and people to help us with game design .... in all ludum dares so far all we managed to make were "non games", which is something I kinda like... when its intentionally made to be a "non game" ... in ludum dare though we always tried to make something fun, something to be played and enjoyed ... maybe if possible something a bit deep emotionally, but it was always a matter of trying to do something fun, but failing due to poor time management and lack of proper skills to do a really good piece of playable work ... Nevertheless, I am very very proud of what we managed to pull of this time, a very buggy, moody, artsy, musically rich thing, that got us 37 in the mood category ... next Ludum Dare, if any good coder wants to team up with us, we would be more than happy, so that we can do better in the other categories as well =) Thanks for everyone that played, rated and had a chance to see our work, we promise we will strive to deliver a better gamy thing next time ^_^

"Storytelling, emotion, and the vibe you get while playing." say the rules.

I realize that the vote I give in mood is usually more related to a mix of graphics and sound, a measure of how engaging and convincing I found the environment, but this is just me.

We were discussing with the team and, after seeing the statistic distribution of votes someone posted, looks like mood category could be generally misinterpreted (or better, freely interpreted).

I feel that the evaluation of story and concept tend go more on the "Overall" vote. Just a guess based on how WE voted.

What are yout thoughts?

This has been already brought up during the last years probably, but...

Do you think we could use a separated "Story" metric?

Introducing: -smoke trails -plates -cutlery -a wine bottle and some other stuff!

Well it's been a bumpy ride for sure. A race to the deadline and getting something out that's barely playable (I thought)! But looking at the results, you guys thought differently: it's been on average one of my better scoring Ludum Dares:

To be fair: I think making a game for the good old Commodore 64 gave me some bonus points with the reviewers.

It's been great to do another Ludum Dare after a few years, thanks for everything!

PS1: I saw on my profile on the old LD site I ticked a box of my bucket list:

"My first Ludum was in october 2012 and I did some more. That's a few years ago, but I'd like to do a 'hard Ludum Dare' for the Commodore 64. One day, maybe. Who knows?"

PS2: I'm still working on the game, I think I got rid of most of the big bugs. There is a Commodore 64 16K cartridge competition with a deadline of juli 1st (https://itch.io/jam/c64-16kb-cartridge-game-dev-compo-2019). I would really like to enter the game for that as well (all competitors get their game as a physical cartridge!).

my game at day 1 of the competition:

my game now (I know it doesn't look that good yet, but there's been a lot of improvements!):

After my recent release of the RNG (Random Game Name Generator):

https://89o.itch.io/rng

I decided to make a game jam based around this tool. Basically, you have to make a game with a title generated by it!

The jam page:

https://itch.io/jam/rnjam

Hope to see ya there! :smile:

Now that LD44 is over, I want to again congratulate everyone who participated, no matter if you finished or not. In the end we all learned a lot for out game dev and the next jam should be even better, who knows?

I also managed to play 30 games this time, so if you want to see me fail at platformers and blame the controls, here are all the parts of Phil Plays Your LD44 Games:

https://youtu.be/Eif1jd8eJcI

https://youtu.be/lVCsQbSi-js

https://youtu.be/NxsO8deuXdo

Thanks to everyone who played and rated Evil Dungeon! I had a blast playing your games!

Ratings Breakdown

Note: Percentiles were calculated differently this time around. In my previous Ludum Dare postmortems I was unaware that the total entries reported included those which did not receive the minimum of 20 ratings to be considered ranked. This time I utilized data obtained by @adroitconceptions which can be found at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mud-framework/total-rated-games-by-jamcomp-and-category-1. Also, I was unable to opt out of the Humor category for this jam although I didn’t intend for it to be rated in that category.

Postmortem

The theme of this jam was “Your life is currency”. Participants were given 72 hours to create a game from scratch that incorporated this theme. I brainstormed numerous concepts and mechanics such as:

• Spending life to buy items/upgrades
• Selling blood obtained from enemies to a blood bank
• Luring/trapping people to sell on the black market
• Surviving as an animal in an environment full of hunters
• Collecting money to stay alive
• Navigating a maze filled with “life tolls” that consume your health when passed

I had a feeling that most people would be making something where the player spent health on items and upgrades so I wanted to try something different. I went with the last idea and came up with an evil dungeon full of traps, darkness, and “Demon Gates”.

What Went Right

• The game was completed and submitted on time. Although the scope had to be reduced, the game was fully playable and bug-free.
• The flashlight mechanic looked nice and worked well. I used the flashlight/darkness to limit the player’s visibility which made choosing the right paths more challenging.
• The level design provided the right amount of challenge and progression. The first level serves to introduce the player to the flashlight and Demon Gate mechanics. The second level introduces the arrow launcher and spike traps. The third level increases in complexity and contains numerous areas where the player can choose to cross a Demon Gate, taking guaranteed damage, or try their luck avoiding traps and obstacles and potentially incurring a greater health penalty.

What Went Wrong

• Time management. I spent too much time on prototyping features, building a test level, and creating sprites that didn’t end up making it into the game. The scope had to be reduced as a result.
• The presentation wasn’t as polished as I had planned. Notably, I didn’t have time to add background ambience/music which would have went a long way in the mood department. Also, player and UI animation didn’t make the cut which made things feel more static than I would have liked.
• The Demon Gate mechanic was a bit too punishing. When the player chooses an incorrect path such as a dead end, they are penalized both times they pass the gate. In retrospect, I should have disabled the gate after it is crossed so there is only a single penalty per mistake.

Conclusion

This was a rough one! It was my third Ludum Dare/game jam and ranking-wise it was my worst to date. The root of the problem came down to time management. I spent an abundance of my limited time frame prototyping my various ideas which didn’t leave enough time to make the actual game, or at least the game I had envisioned.

It wasn’t all bad though. This was my first game jam game that featured multiple levels, rather than a single level containing waves or increasing in difficulty. I was also happy with how the flashlight mechanic turned out. I got a chance to brush up on my trigonometry, gained more experience creating sprites and working with tilemaps, and learned a few new things about Unity and Cinemachine.

I’d like to thank everyone for playing and rating Evil Dungeon! Your feedback is a great help to me and I really appreciate it! Although the outcome wasn’t ideal, I still had a great time creating, playing, and rating games during this jam. I’ll be back with a vengeance for Ludum Dare 45!

Play Evil Dungeon

Dave Brake Creations

With the new update (now uploaded), I have massively updated the map for Enemy Of The State!

This is the old map:

Not too bad, but very stale. The worst part is the kitchen, way too big.

Now here's the new map:

As you can see, the kitchen has been shrunken to a reasonable size with the addition of a balcony!

Further shading has also been added to give a better sense of depth, along with new flooring and more details! Overall giving the apartment a more interesting look.

Still working on adding more stuff to freshen the place up, but for now, progress has been made~!