Don’t know exactly what does it means, but looks like it took the 1st place in humour category... thanks everybody for rating <3

I did not expect my game to do this well. thank you everyone!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/swing-by

Thank you for playing and rating!! That was so fun! (To be honest, I wanted more comment...)

Next time, I join JAM!!

LD47 is finally over, and I'm very happy about results of HONK II.

The results are better than original HONK and platformEGG.

Here is some stats from itch.

Now Titled Goose Team is disassembled until next Ludum Dare.

I had high hopes this time around, and I admit that I'm a tiny bit disappointed. :disappointed:
Anyway, thank you so much for playing my game everyone! :hugging:

Overall, there were many awesome games made for this jam. Thanks to the people who checked out my game and gave some feedback :slightsmile: I just wanted to say that I'm not done with my game yet, and you're still stuck in a loop :upsidedown:

We also want to share our results with the rest of the world. They are nothing special tbh but sharing is caring, right?

We will be updating [while'd] using your feedback ASAP. If you are interested on trying it please, don't lose sight of its itch.io page.

Thanks to everyone and see you all on the next Jam!

I'm honestly thrilled with these results. I had no idea my little game would be anywhere near this good:

Hello !
Does someone know how many entries have been published in compo and jam ?

Bearing in mind the number of people who enter, that's a pretty good result. I'm especially proud of Graphics being my highest-scoring category, considering I wasn't entirely happy with them.

I know there's a website somewhere that lets you see the percentile rankings of your Ludum Dare entries, but I can't find it... anyone have the link?

Not bad for my first Ludum Dare entry. I'll get better next time. Now, will I join the LD 48? All depends on my free time. See you in the next Ludum Dare!

Hi! I'm 14, and so this was my first ever ludum dare. I decided to go straight into the compo, and here are my results!

I'm really happy with my results from my first game jam. But I wonder if these are results on 3200 entries or 800 entries? I did a Compo game. Anyone know that can fill me in? :)

Congratulations to all for participating. I had a blast playing your games and making mine! Thank you all for rating and giving me such an awesome feedback! 11th place at mood is so awesome! And so are all the other ratings. Looking forward for the next LD <3

Hey everyone !

Thanks for having played our game "I Reboot" ! Here are our results :

• Overall: 516th (3.692 average from 41 ratings)
• Fun: 411th (3.671 average from 40 ratings)
• Innovation: 388th (3.703 average from 39 ratings)
• Theme: 481st (3.895 average from 40 ratings)
• Graphics: 543rd (3.855 average from 40 ratings)
• Audio: 481st (3.539 average from 40 ratings)
• Mood: 834th (3.361 average from 38 ratings)

Keep safe and keep rockin' !

@wegpast @arktas @lut1n

So the results are in and I am incredibly happy from all the feedback we've been given. The scoring feels fair and mirrors my own perceptions that we had a not-so-original concept that we managed to execute quite well. I wish we could have rated a bit higher in fun but it's no surprise since our game is a bit barebones in places. You can read more about my thoughts on how we did in our post-mortem!

Until next time, have another sneak peek at some more fun™ that is coming to Among Stars and Robots, soon!

Also, you're all in our game!

..are pretty much what I expected them to be ¯\(ツ)/¯ .

Ok, maybe I didn't expect them to be this good, but still, I worked really really hard focusing on Fun and Innovation aspect of the game, and ratings prove that I did a good job.

Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game!

Love you all!

My best entry to date for overall and fun, which are the two most important categories to me :joy: not bad for a 15 hour game! Check it out! :grin:

Top 100 rank in two categories, Mood at 102nd and all others in the Top 200. This has to be the best overall results I've ever had in the seven years I've done Ludum Dare, considering that the last two didn't get anywhere near the top 100.

Thank you everyone who voted for Twist Turn Shoot Burn, this has been a tough year to do game development and Ludum Dare has helped me rediscover why I love making games.

If anyone is interested in seeing more of my work (or read my less sane ramblings), you can follow me on Twitter!

Not bad! I think I did quite well!

~~I don't know how many games have been ranked in each category for both this and the previous LD, so I'll compare the actual scores instead~~ [Added percentage comparaison below] :

Overall : 2.211 => 2.518 (+ 0.307)

Fun : 1.921 => 2.464 (+ 0.543)

Innovation : 2.684 => 2.929 (+ 0.245)

Theme : 2.474 => 2.722 (+ 0.248)

Graphics : 3 => 2.732 (- 0.268)

Audio : None => 1.8

Humour : 2 => 2.14 (+ 0.14)

Mood : 2.395 => 2.231 (- 0.164)

There's progress, and I do understand some of those results, but the comparison still hurts a bit. My first LD could barely be described as a game, my second one was a very bad game, but at least a game, I expected a bigger jump. Graphics going down, I disagree, I feel like my first LD got a "pity boost" for its graphics, which weren't better than the second's game (n°1 had 2 animations, one of which was playing backward, n°2 has 5 or 6 and they all work ! The backgrounds are much better looking, the 3D models are better...), but meh, I get the 2.7, it still looks awful. 1.8 in audio is the one that hurts the most, but I do know that I don't know anything about music and picked random notes to try to make a song, so I don't know what I really expected. Failing to reach an average score in any category is also very frustrating (in my ratings I considered 3 stars to be average), but again, being a beginner, I'm probably placing the bar a bit too high for myself. Mood, I don't think I even understand what the word mean, I've had a very hard time judging other game on this, so I don't really care.

Overall, better scores, there's progress, the game, this time, was a game, but there's still a ton of stuff to learn before I can safely say I did something good. Next goal score-wise probably will be to get a 3 in at least one category I guess...

Edit : Thanks to @adroitconceptions I do have more stats to show ! Here are the percentage of people who did worse than me :

Overall : 0.09 => 3.65

Fun : 0.28 => 9.38

Innovation : 11.23 => 26.87

Theme : 2.88 => 11.11

Graphics : 24.64 => 13.11

Audio : None => 1.4

Humour : 5.10 => 13.76

Mood : 3.69 => 2.08

The graphics one is even more frustrating, BUT : I've managed to leave the worse quarter on one category (innovation), something I didn't manage to do for my first LD ! I also manage to not be in the worst 1% in anything, even though my audio is really close to be in that. This stat is way better for my moral. The fun rating in particular, going from 1.9 to 2.4 felt like not enough between my two entries, but going from better than 0.3% to better than 9.4% is waaaaay better. More work to do, more learning to do, but there's progress, for real. Am a bit less sad thanks to this (thank you very much adroidconceptions for your numbers !).

As I have been specifically asked for this information:

```

Overall : 630 Fun : 629 Innovation: 629 Theme : 630 Graphics : 610 Audio : 499 Humor : 465 Mood : 576

Overall : 1668 Fun : 1668 Innovation: 1669 Theme : 1669 Graphics : 1507 Audio : 1103 Humor : 1250 Mood : 1528 ```

Hello,

so this was my second Ludum Dare and I am very happy with the results. Here they are.

In some categories I was a bit better than last time, in others a little worst, but... I am truly amazed by the 4th place in the Humor category! Thank you all so much, it means a lot to me. Many thanks to the organizer of this amazing event. And see you all in the next edition of LD!

Well, we scored better than we expected, we are very happy with these results of course!

Thanks to everyone who played and rated our game! If you haven't, and are up for a 15-25 minute adventure game with a twist, feel free to play the game and let us know your thoughts (or just watch the playthrough)! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/smells-like-chlorine

Congrats to everyone who finished a game and don't be discouraged from bad ratings! Every gamejam is an opportunity to learn and have fun. :)

Have a good one, and see you all maybe next time. ;)

I am going to put the ranking explanation here. to be sure i understood it right. Also, i hope it could be useful to others.

From what i can gather:

position, is your position in the total ranking of participants.

between brackets position,it uses the number of stars in average for that categorite (total / num of ratings = stars obtained summed / 30).

• i had to ask in the ludum discord and make my own deductions to get this. if i am wrong, please correct me. and i'll be happy to learn.

PS. next time, would be nice to have this explained somewhere or with the results. Also it would be nice to know the total of people.

EDIT: i reread and saw that the dot in the brackets it is a decimal comma. i missunderstood it as separator for thousands.

Easily our highest ranking entry, previous entries we ranked 407th, 318th and 386th. Our secret: learning to use an audio DAW, blender and how to import assets into the game engine (BabylonJS). The other times we spent most our time learning tools instead of using them (which is fine btw and part of the experience) - but this time we were able to focus on content and spent the whole of the Monday on polish.

Our entry page for Caterpillar Cowboy, feat a Developer Vlog

Thanks everyone who supported loopy. I'm really satisfied with the results of my first ldjam as a non-programmer. Learned a lot and had fun a lot.

I revised loopy according to your feedbacks and updated on itch.io. Also optimized for android as well. Check out from the link: https://cyaygel.itch.io/loopy

It was a good run. See you in next!!

Greetings, fellow game developers

This morning, as everyone else, I opened Ludum Dare website to see jam results and read blogposts regarding them. Some of these blogposts got me thinking about collecting more stats about submitted game and 5 minutes later I am making that hacky web scraping script.

Collected dataset is included at the end of this post and I invite you to look into data yourself. Please take everything written here with a grain of salt since I am nowhere near to the actual statistician.

Initially I wanted to collect info about ratings amount and grade correlation, target platforms and genres. In order to do so we have to parse grades, game links and somehow to extract the genre of the game. Since Ludum Dare doesn't allow to provide genre in game description we would have to get it from somewhere else. Fortunately, itch.io is recognized as one of the best platform for game jams and it's used by a lot of games for file hosting, and it allows to specify genre!

Dataset

So, after a bit of coding and some DOS attack-like activity in my network, I managed to collect what I needed. As Ludum Dare stats say, there were totally 3206 games submitted, out of which 2406 are in jam and 800 in compo. A minimum amount of received rating required in order to get graded is 20 and 2298 games managed to get over that threshold. Additionally, 1863 of these games provide itch.io link and 936 of them specify their genre. All statistics here based only on games which got past 20 ratings threshold.

Target platforms

In order to determine target platform I analysed both selected link tag on ludum dare page and itch.io pages (when available). And turns out that there are no surprizes here, most of the developers aim for web and windows support, and mobile games are highly underrepresented. I also expected that top-100/top-500 will be mostly represented by games playable in browser with lower proportion of other platforms, but turns out that it's not really the case. I think it's safe to say that desktop games don't really lose any points without browser support.

``` Supported platform across all entries: WEB 1825 (79.42%) Windows 1710 (74.41%) MacOS 524 (22.80%) Linux 519 (22.58%) Android 47 (2.05%) IOS 3 (0.13%)

Supported platform in TOP-50: Windows 48 (96.00%) WEB 32 (64.00%) Linux 19 (38.00%) MacOS 17 (34.00%) Android 3 (6.00%) IOS 1 (2.00%)

Supported platform in TOP-100: Windows 89 (89.00%) WEB 78 (78.00%) Linux 30 (30.00%) MacOS 29 (29.00%) Android 5 (5.00%) IOS 1 (1.00%)

Supported platform in TOP-500: WEB 428 (85.60%) Windows 392 (78.40%) MacOS 136 (27.20%) Linux 129 (25.80%) Android 12 (2.40%) IOS 1 (0.20%) ```

Genre Distribution

Across 936 entries for which we have genre data results are the following:

``` Across all entries: Puzzle 269 (28.74%) Action 212 (22.65%) Platformer 176 (18.80%) Adventure 135 (14.42%) Shooter 73 (7.80%) Simulation 55 (5.88%) Racing 40 (4.27%) Strategy 32 (3.42%) Survival 31 (3.31%) Rhythm 28 (2.99%) Interactive Fiction 26 (2.78%) Role Playing 25 (2.67%) Visual Novel 22 (2.35%) Card Game 15 (1.60%) Fighting 10 (1.07%) Educational 4 (0.43%) Sports 1 (0.11%)

In TOP-50: Puzzle 12 (32.43%) Action 9 (24.32%) Platformer 8 (21.62%) Adventure 5 (13.51%) Shooter 4 (10.81%) Simulation 4 (10.81%) Card Game 2 (5.41%) Rhythm 2 (5.41%) Strategy 2 (5.41%) Fighting 1 (2.70%) Survival 1 (2.70%) Role Playing 1 (2.70%) Interactive Fiction 1 (2.70%) Racing 1 (2.70%) ```

Puzzles and action games are the most popular choice for developers, almost half the games mention that tag. It's also nice to see that overall and top-50 distrubution is almost the same, which means that you're safe to choose any genre you want for your game and it wont affect your grades.

Rating Distribution

Now lets see what is the distribution of rating for games overall and in most popular genres. This stat is based on @AdroitConceptions suggestion.

``` Rating distribution overall In category overall: 3.44 ± 0.45 In category fun: 3.27 ± 0.53 In category innovation: 3.27 ± 0.54 In category theme: 3.51 ± 0.57 In category graphics: 3.53 ± 0.59 In category audio: 3.33 ± 0.59 In category humor: 2.92 ± 0.67 In category mood: 3.36 ± 0.52

Rating distribution for genre Action In category overall: 3.52 ± 0.45 In category fun: 3.44 ± 0.51 In category innovation: 3.27 ± 0.56 In category theme: 3.42 ± 0.60 In category graphics: 3.66 ± 0.55 In category audio: 3.42 ± 0.58 In category humor: 2.88 ± 0.63 In category mood: 3.32 ± 0.50

Rating distribution for genre Adventure In category overall: 3.40 ± 0.48 In category fun: 3.14 ± 0.56 In category innovation: 3.15 ± 0.56 In category theme: 3.40 ± 0.63 In category graphics: 3.61 ± 0.61 In category audio: 3.35 ± 0.65 In category humor: 2.97 ± 0.68 In category mood: 3.50 ± 0.54

Rating distribution for genre Puzzle In category overall: 3.55 ± 0.48 In category fun: 3.35 ± 0.55 In category innovation: 3.49 ± 0.53 In category theme: 3.67 ± 0.55 In category graphics: 3.60 ± 0.57 In category audio: 3.30 ± 0.58 In category humor: 2.83 ± 0.59 In category mood: 3.39 ± 0.51

Rating distribution for genre Platformer In category overall: 3.50 ± 0.47 In category fun: 3.38 ± 0.53 In category innovation: 3.26 ± 0.62 In category theme: 3.50 ± 0.63 In category graphics: 3.56 ± 0.58 In category audio: 3.29 ± 0.56 In category humor: 2.91 ± 0.60 In category mood: 3.34 ± 0.51

```

We can see that all categories generally rated in the same way with the exception for humor, which is usually lower than other categories. It's also interesting that Action games tend to have the higher fun grade.

Received ratings and Grade correlation

One of the common topics discussed in posts regarding results was about how high amount of ratings leads to lower average grade. For some people it may sound logical and I wanted to check if such statement has any truth behind it it. For measuring correlation we'll be using something called Pearson's correlation coefficient, which probably fimiliar to anyone who came across statistics course at some point.

Turns out that correlation coefficient between amount of ratings received and grade in overall top is 0.22233

For other categories results are the following:

text Ratings received/Grade correlation across all entries Ratings received/Grade correlation for overall: 0.22233126091016753 Ratings received/Grade correlation for fun: 0.19439265109626402 Ratings received/Grade correlation for innovation: 0.13478324542490097 Ratings received/Grade correlation for theme: 0.13059698797880057 Ratings received/Grade correlation for graphics: 0.2075506952357996 Ratings received/Grade correlation for audio: 0.2045200770843993 Ratings received/Grade correlation for humor: 0.2031874502415293 Ratings received/Grade correlation for mood: 0.19442989187360174

Correlation coefficient between 0 and 0.3 generally regarded as a very weak correlation - so that means that while higher amount of ratings can lead to higher grades such influence is not really significant. Besides, I think now we can say that our initial hypothesis is incorrect.

Across games which managed to get into top 100 correlation coefficient looks like that: text Ratings received/Grade correlation for overall: 0.28650349819411464 Ratings received/Grade correlation for fun: 0.13743718059002868 Ratings received/Grade correlation for innovation: 0.12956207793693833 Ratings received/Grade correlation for theme: -0.003790955798309322 Ratings received/Grade correlation for graphics: -0.047956136459542414 Ratings received/Grade correlation for audio: -0.053283386265215796 Ratings received/Grade correlation for humor: 0.08796826193357084 Ratings received/Grade correlation for mood: 0.032409899490679184

So, this is actually really intersting. First of all there is noticeable difference in correlation for games in top-100 and across all entries. While coefficient for all games is somewhere around 0.2 almost everywhere, in top-100 it drops almost to zero for all categories except innovation, fun and overall (in next section we'll see more about fun and overall correlation). We can conclude that low amount of ratings doesn't prevent your game from successfully reaching top-100. I don't feel confident to state any other meaning of such result but it's certainly worth remembering.

The section Received ratings and Grade correlation in the initial version of this post looked totally different and was calculated absolutely wrong. The reason for that is because I actually did a correlation between amount of received ratings and position in category top. And that was simply incorrect for two reason: first of all - we're calculating correlation both in jam and compo, and compo has significantly less entries which yields different positions. The second reason is caused by the fact that position is actually decreasing while average grade rises (1st position is better than 2nd position, but grade of 5 is better than grade of 4) - which results in negative correlation and can be confusing for some readers. I apologize for such misinformation.

Correlation between different categories

Another interesting insight can be spotted if we take a look at how different categories correlate with each other. It can show which categories are rated in similiar way and vice verse.

Since there are a lot of categories full correlation output is a bit long and can be seen on pastebin. A sneak peak from full output: ```text Overall/Fun Grade correlation: 0.8935648248913685 Overall/Innovation Grade correlation: 0.7239394376255062 Overall/Theme Grade correlation: 0.5898030292263634 Overall/Graphics Grade correlation: 0.704619779209486 Overall/Audio Grade correlation: 0.6761667301174727 Overall/Humor Grade correlation: 0.4370432044059216 Overall/Mood Grade correlation: 0.7307469349058053

Highest grade correlation between overall and fun: 0.8935648248913685 Lowest grade correlation between theme and humor: 0.26277385324255415 ```

So, what have we got. First of all, we can see that correlation between fun and overall rating is pretty close to 1. That means that people usually tend to give high overall rating for fun games and vice verse. Also, as expected, mood has pretty high correlation with graphics and audio.

Besides, humor seems to have lowest correlation with almost each of the categories. I am not going to draw any conclusion from that fact but it's quite a surprising result.

How can you look into dataset yourself

Collected data used for this research available on Google Spreadsheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nkWSSBI9JDTxYfKzh3ZX8XPEOHNCivJVpXGMlmJ8XbU/edit?usp=sharing

I would love to share with you source code of data scraping script but I don't want to cause unintented ddos on ldjam.com and itch.io so I am not going to post it here. If you really want the source code feel free to DM me on twitter

To sum up

Whoah, that was a fun morning. I believe these stats can be interesting to fellow game jammers because they were definitely interesting for me. Overall, that was an awesome Ludum Dare. If you managed to finish your game you should be damn proud of yourself! See all of you in April!

P.S. If this post was interesting and you value time put into that little research please share link to this page with your friends - I'll appreciate it.

P.P.S. In case you feel like some more interesting stats can be derived please write about it in the comments and I'll do my best to include it in the post.

Check out our results! Thanks for thinking we're so funny!

Agent, can you hear me?

Thank you so much for playing Looper and for all your comments and feedbacks!

If you haven’t yet, please check out the original Ludum Dare version (although the new one is going to be so much better!)

I'm really happy with the results considering this was my first Ludum Dare and game jam!

And I'm even happier that you enjoyed the game and for all your comments!
Thank you all for your kind words, for your suggestions, for showing the game on twitch, creating fanarts and climbing the online leaderboard (there are hundreds of entries!!!)

(Amazing fanart by @doctorhummer)

The big update

Many of you have asked to keep working on it and to add new maps and weapons.
I'm currently working on it and the update will be available soon featuring: - 3 new maps of increasing difficulty (associated with 3 different leaderboards) - new powerful weapons - complex enemy AI - music - new animations, graphic effects and much more

So stay tuned for more updates! If you want to stay up to date on the game, follow the development and check some behind the scenes, be sure to follow me on Twitter.

Congratulations on winning, winners! I'll be giving the winners some artworks later!

Thanks everyone for playing The Curse of Cattenburg during Ludum Dare 47! It was fantastic to have so many people give such lovely feedback to our cat themed original card game! We were also exceptionally pleased and proud to have ranked 3rd in Art and 12th Overall.

The Future of Cattenburg

We have been discussing expanding the game into a full-game over the past few weeks, and we've already been cleaning up the code base and having many, many conversations about design directions we could take the game. We're somewhere between Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon in terms of game flow at the moment, with the Card Game created for the jam being at the heart of the game - to resolve combat. We're looking to add some deck-building to the game, too.

If you're interested in following the game, we've just made a brand new discord for people to join to get game updates, discuss the game, give feedback and report bugs.

Will you become a proud Cattenburgian? Join the Cattenburg Discord Server today!

With results out, that marks the end of that ludum dare 47, which was amazing. I had a lot of fun trying to develop a game, and even more fun playing all of yours. There were a lot of games that blew my mind, and regardless of the final ranking, I truly think everyone who participated can be proud of what they accomplished. So once again, well done to everyone!

That said, I was working on a post jam version, and this version is out now. It mostly improves the texts and overall comfort, with hope to make it less tiring on the eyes and less dizzy (that was a comment that came back a lot and was totally true). Here is the linky to try it: https://macmist.itch.io/loopy-flight-post-jam (for some reason I can't add it to my submission page). Now that this base is done, I do have a lot of real improvements planed, such as shooting, power ups and so on, and I hope to be able to update the game regularly in the weeks/months to follow.

Thanks again for everyone who already played the game. This was my first Jam and I'm already looking forward to the next!

After @abvadabra thankfully provided some raw numbers for this LD, I had a bit of fun with it.

Here's a small snapshot:

This tells us a few interesting things! * Someone received 485 ratings * Someone gave(!) 373 ratings * Someone received only 17 ratings and got a score anyway * On average, people receive 2 ratings more than they give * A lot of people don't rate humor * When they rate humor, it's usually significantly lower than the other categories

My best ratings so far. Moving in the right direction.

More important than the scores was this amaizing community, the feedback and ability to watch people play my entry fed into the post jam which I have really focused on these past few weeks. If you are not ready for Ludum to be over then any feedback on what has changed in A Night Around The Fire will be very useful to me. I am happy to return the favour on any other Post Jam builds, just hit me up with links.

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/a-night-around-the-fire

So, it seems that since a month the old ludum dare page is not available anymore.

For example, if you check this link for one of my previous entries Ludum Dare 33 you can see it does not work!

The only fix I've found is using the internet archive Ludum Dare 33 on Internet Archive, for those who doesn't know, you just have to put the link if you have it and it will try to find the page.

I hope the page will work again soon tho, does anyone have any news about it? It would also be cool that those games were linked to the new account, so that you can also see those entries when browsing someone games!

This is enormously better results than on my previous LD game. Thank you everyone who has checked it out and everyone who participated. See you on the next Ludum Dare

I'm super happy with the results, especially with the categories Theme and Mood, where I've focused most of in my game. Humor being in a good place is a bonus for me, because I only inserted one joke in my otherwise dark game :P

BONUS

Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Very happy with my graphics and music rating but am glad for all of them! See you all next year!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/beatboi

We still can't quite believe it that you rated us into the top 100 for our first Ludum Dare, thank you! We had a blast developing our game and playing all of your games. Until the next time!

Hi! Thank you for your rating and your feedback. But can you help us? We are pretty sure we participated in graphics category, but we didn't find the result of our game. If anyone who rated our game can tell us if you remind you rated our game in the graphics category, it would be nice.

I'm genuinely amazed that my game did so well this time, especially considering it's not even fully finished; an entire level, as well as A LOT of polish was missing from the game, but I still managed to reach 10th in innovation in the Compo. WOW

Thanks to everyone who rated my game, and everyone (with evidently questionable taste in music) scored me highly on audio.

Congratulations to everyone who participated this time around and thanks so much to everyone who played and rated.

This is such a personal victory for me. For long a long time I've struggled with making stuff that looks good. So in this jam I really set out to do two things; to try to make a game with an achievable scope and that looks good. I think I'll do a little write up about this entry in the next couple of days.

I'm thrilled to bits with this result!

We can't all come first in the jam, but so long as we're improving, we're winning. 👍

Thank you so much for your support. It means a lot to me. This was my first Ludum Dare and the results have blown me out of the water. All of you have been so kind and responsive.

Damn, top 11 fun for my first video game Ludum Dare entry. You all are very generous.

Apparently doing a Compo as a first entry is pretty weird?

I guess I could shill my game, but rating's over so y'know what, do whatever.

Thanks y'all. See you next year.

After entering 10 LDJams I have my first rating in top 100, only in humour but I'm okay with that:

A comparison of previous events scores and ratios of placement against number of submissions with the required number of ratings in that jam (only featuring 9 because 36 didn't have ratings):

My first mobile game, House Match, is now available for download on the App Store and Google Play!

I'd like to thank everyone in this community for helping me along this journey. I started competing in Ludum Dare 4 years ago, when I was just 14. I've learned so much from this competition; the feedback I've gotten on my games has been invaluable, and your creations have truly inspired me.

If you want to check out the app, you can download it here

You can also play our entry for LD47, Hula Hype, here

Thank you!

That feels good!

Thanks to those who rated, for a top 100 overall score, two times 12th place and an average score of almost 4 stars :)

For anyone who's reading this: I've managed to do an insane amount of work in the 48 Compo hours; I'm going to explain how I did all that by taking you through my process for everything: from idea, writing, music, modeling, sound recording, scene building to programming:

Join me this Sunday, November 1st, 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET / 19:00 CEST for about 2.5 hours on https://twitch.tv/virtualplaynl

(if you somehow don't want to watch on Twitch, you can also watch via YouTube through https://youtube.com/virtualplay )

Hope to see you there!

Well well well, it seems that the dogs have come back to roost (I know it’s a chicken thing, but just accept the analogy, it’ll make sense in a second)! And now, we can finally rest knowing we’ve got the ratings of Woofice Chair! (told you it’d work)

It’s always good to look back at and compare these, since they’re easy-to-understand metrics to show if we’ve improved or changed in certain aspects of development.

Before we go into ratings, we wanted to say that we’re humbled by the reception we’ve got! We also got to play a ton of fun games, making it an all around fantastic period!

For those not so satisfied with your results, remember that a lot of elements can factor on the ratings and rankings! That includes having few ratings (which reduces the accuracy of the rating your project would actually have), more participants on this jam, and the quality of older participants getting better and better at each jam, between other factors. Were you to submit a game with the same quality on each Ludum Dare, odds are that you’d get different rankings and ratings each time.

Don’t let that discourage you, though! There’s no wrong or right way to enjoy Ludum Dare! Some people here strive for self-improvement in game development, while others are even getting their first taste of it. Some could casually participate in many events or even try to submit the best rated games! Maybe even use the opportunity to meet new people and teammates! Just follow your gut and stay positive! :muscle:

Now that it’s all said and done, let’s see how we performed with Woofice Chair!, shall we?

Ranking-wise, this is the highest we’ve been at Humour, which is fantastic! But here’s some fun statistical data, complete with our over-analysis of the situation. At some point during a previous Ludum Dare, we made a Google Sheet to write down the results we’ve got in the past entries. It even got conditional formatting to give us better visual clues of important numbers! Gold cells represent our best at a jam yet, while red represents our worst:

Rating-wise, this is our best Overall game with 4.15 (up from Wizsnooks’ 4.071). It’s also our best game in Graphics, Humour and Mood. Yet, ranking wise, we’ve got past games that did far better in rankings.

Our “best game” in ratings is scoring lower in rankings likely for things mentioned before. The quality of good, fun games seem to be on the rise, likely as a result of people participating constantly. And that’s great! That only means that jams are getting better and better! There were also way more participants this time around that there were in any of our previous participants, most likely the result of a certain ongoing worldwide unavoidable phenomenon.

Finally, ratings-wise, we wanted to be more calm on this jam for a while, which is why we didn’t rate as much as when we made Jazzy Beats. However, because of the good words we got, we felt like we needed to give back the good vibes and ended up playing a lot more games! A bit too late to catch up, but we still had a blast with your submissions!

For those that are participating for the first time, don’t get discouraged! Keep on participating, whatever your goals are! Participate, get experience, and keep creating the wild ideas that come to your mind!

For the time being, we’re rearranging some stuff as we get back on the commercial game development track, but if you’d like to stay in contact with us, consider following us on Twitter! You’re even invited to join us for a chat at our Discord server! We’re preparing some Halloween goodies, so you should really stop by! :jackolantern:

Thanks again for all the good will this time around! Wish you all the best of luck on the next Ludum Dare! :whale:

PD: We're still preparing a post about adding juice to our games, so look forward to that too!

...and I did much better than I had ever expected to, given that this was my first one! I managed to get top 100 in two categories, and was in the top sixth of entries overall :smile:

I had a great time, and Ludum Dare has successfully convinced me that I am capable of handling the Compo, which I think I'll be doing for the foreseeable future. Good job to everyone, including you reading this right now; there were some really great games! I'll see you all in April :)

PS: if you haven't yet, do consider giving my submission, while(true), a shot (link below)! I've gotten a lot of good criticism, and I'm probably going to give it an update or a few in the future.

https://noahkuhn.itch.io/while-true

Hi everyone!

Congratulations on another successful LDJam!

Even if the results weren't what you hoped for, just remember that you made a game in next to no time and that's something to be super proud of doing!

Before this jam, I made a post looking at my previous three jam results. Off the back of that post, I decided that my focus for this jam would be trying to improve on my graphics, sound and humour in the hope of boosting my overall rating. I wanted to add a bit more animation and some juice to the graphics and input. So I ended up implemented a couple of things like easing for projectile firing and impact shake for explosions etc.

I'm glad to say that I seem to have achieved what I set out to achieve!

The improved ratings didn't translate to much of a shift in my category rankings (apart from humour) although it blew my last game jam entry out of the water. That was to be expected, though. My LD46 entry was a hot mess.

It's worth nothing that my improved results in the areas I focused on are counterbalanced by reduced performance in other areas. I suppose that's to be expected when you have limited time. However, I guess my focus for the next Ludum Dare is to make a well-rounded game and manage my time best towards that end.

So, I guess I'll see you all for the next one!

Pillars of Anguish was rated by 47 of you wonderful people (at LD47, heh). I think we did quite well!

I have always been the odd one out, with an odd sense of humour. I've been slow on the uptake, people didn't understand my jokes, it's always been awkward. Because of that, it feels incredibly validating that our game, where I wrote around half of the dialogue lines, has come out 46th in Humor!

We're happy to have created this game, and really glad you lot have enjoyed it. Thank you all so hecking much :sparkling_heart:

Speaking of enjoyment, we've also ranked fairly high in Fun. This was a bit of a surprise, since many people said "the game was great, but it wasn't fun, it was frustrating" :grin:

Our ranking in most other categories and Overall is equally satisfying. Thank you for recognising our effort, and for all the amazing feedback you've given us :sparkles:

Before LD47 started, I wrote a couple of posts with my thoughts on the themes and theme selection process.

I'm happy to say I wasn't quite right about the quality of "Stuck in a Loop", and I think I've learnt something from what other people have done with it. While I still kind of wish I could have experimented with building an environment based on a prompt, we ended up creating a game around a mechanic idea, and it worked out pretty well. I saw several games that actually surprised me with their interpretation of the theme, and while lots of people had similar ideas, their style and execution still made for quite unique experiences.

So perhaps mechanical themes aren't so bad after all? Regardless, I hope we can take what we've learnt here, and make the best of it at the next Ludum Dare :)

Congratulations to everyone who participated! You made excellent entries, and we had a ton of fun playing them.

Oh, by the way, I'm live right now at twitch.tv/Outfrost, editing a compilation video of people playing our game. Come say hi!

For my LDJAM47 game, I’ve made a 3D platformer with 3D models and animations.

Because I could to it, now you can get the hero of my game as an avatar in VRChat (search for "Beaty" in VRChat).

I recorded my entire sculpting session. In case you want to see the process of sculpting my model here is the video (it took < 20 minutes, read it fast forward if you want because it’s still long).

https://youtu.be/dmShGQGPWeY

wowowo!

I'm super chuffed to have placed first in innovation! The innovation category has been my favourite category for a while, ever since the "Tiny World" theme and the game that took place in the page's favicon. So it's been the main category I've been focusing on when I've been entering Ludum Dare.

I was hoping I'd do well there, but had no idea I'd rank as highly overall too! And very surprised that I also came first for audio, given how many talented musicians there are here.

Here's a little recreation of what I did when I saw the results:

https://youtu.be/w4U2ALaRa0s

The idea for making this game came from going through the process of calling the DMV to renew an expired registration for my car. I remember exploring this phone system and trying to figure out if it was possible to resolve my problem without getting put on hold, and the experience was both ridiculous but also surprisingly entertaining. It just felt perfect for parody.

So I had that potential idea on hold, and then when I saw the theme announcement I realised this would be perfect! So I dropped all my other plans and started figuring out how to make an automated call system. And here we are!

So thanks to everyone who rated it! If you haven't tried it yet, you should jump on soon because there's a limited amount of credit in the account that's running the game, and when that expires the game is going to go down :P

Well, I sure did poorly in the rankings, but whatever! I've been making games for several years now, but this was my first game jam and it was great meeting so many talented developers and artists! Now it's time for.... a recap of how I made my game, Outside The Loop!

(Sorry about not having many mid-development pictures, I'll be sure to take some in April for LD48)

Pre-Jam

I got on early enough for theme voting and had a fun time with that! It was disappointing some themes, like "Death Is Not The End" and "Only Three Buttons", didn't make it, but at least one I voted for won. So glad it wasn't "Clockwork"! The best I had for that was animate clocks doing construction work.

I knew that whatever happened, I'd host in HTML5 and add gamepad support for optimal multi-platform fun. I wasn't sure what to do other than that, I think it's better to wing it!

Dev Day 1

A whole lot of planning and designing a title screen, and not much else. One time-consuming task was I decided I wanted to make a unique font for my game to complement the game feel. I spent 20+ minutes writing the English alphabet in a perfect font, writing numbers, and then writing gamepad control symbols. As for developing the world in Day 1, I did... nothing.

Day 2

...And then I did some world design finally, in Day 2! I made the ground, then the grass, plus the blocks, loops, and endless world looping. And then...

...the character! (Hehehe, who's ready for some awful art?)

Character Art!

The character of Outside The Loop has three looks, two from me and one player-made.

Placeholder art:

I didn't draw the character until Day 3, so the character looked like this for 24-ish hours.

(HAHAHA!!! I just love placeholder art.)

The current art:

Too bad I barely had time to do this. I was hoping to make something better looking.

The best-looking: player art!

Countless thanks to @moski for this incredible artwork!

OK, now Day 3

After work, I got to work finishing up my project on Day 3. I put in all of the code, including progression, loops, and the controls. I made sure everything was working, then with less than an hour left I distorted a synth to make the only sound effect to make it into the game, and spent 20 to 30 minutes sketching my player. Then I discovered a bug that critically messed up the game, and I spent a while chasing the bug around and eventually squishing it. Then with only a few minutes left I tried to improve the player's look, and uh oh! I had to spend the remaining time on another technical issue! So I finished killing digital bugs with five seconds left, and sadly I missed my chance to improve the graphics and audio. But at least I got my game working!

What's next?

Despite getting brutally low ratings despite so many people saying it was great, I still consider my game a success! After finishing my upcoming PC/Xbox One game, I'll begin developing Outside The Loop more! I'll be adding features that are classics in platformers, like enemies, power-ups, and bosses, but I'll also be adding some things that are completely unique!

I'll definitely be joining LD48 in April, it was great meeting so many talented developers! Can't wait to see everyone! And hopefully I won't have so much work to do during Ludum Dare....

Don't forget winners, over the next day or two I'll be making celebratory sketches for the winning games!

We couldn't finish A Short Detour, and yet this small glimpse of a more complete game managed to win some of your hearts. Thank you for an awesome time, and for being the most welcoming community around ☺️

I am excited to announce that the whole Ludum Dare 47 experience has inspired me to continue expanding my entry Universalis. I promised in my Mode Selection that Objective and Sandbox modes would soon be coming. With the latest update, you now have a chance to try it out!

Update Page: https://hawkinberry.itch.io/universalis-update

OBJECTIVE MODE

I have added a taste of what objective mode can look like for Universalis. I have a lot of ideas to implement beyond this, but I would be beyond ecstatic to hear what you think so far!

SANDBOX MODE

I was planning to include a sort of "sandbox" from the start, and some of your ideas have influenced the features now available! Not only can you toy with the gravity and launch settings, but you can enable planet gravity AND play with multi-star systems. In the future, I would like to add more flexibility on the placement of stars, so stay tuned!

Thank you again to everyone who played and rated my entry. Ludum Dare was a whole lot of fun, and I'm excited to be part of this community now.

Best, Hawkin

Just so you little rascals know, ldstats.info now has access to the LD47 data as well.

Edit: As I menitoned in comments:

I didn’t make it tho, I’m just mentioning it, since I was checking it since this LD ended.

Or in other words, ldstats.info is not my creation. Just to be clear. I'm not to take credit for other's work.

He told me to remake his game, and I did here, made this in an hour or so https://www.construct.net/en/free-online-games/outside-loop-ludum-dare-47-18328/play

People played our game live on streams, and we got some great reactions. Check it out!

https://youtu.be/jbj00XWWgTw

GLITCH LOOP is 1st Overall for the Compo!

Congrats all for the amazing entries and thank you very much for the votes! This LD was a lot of fun for me and I'm glad you liked the game :)

Found this amazing website: https://ldstats.info/ (Made by @kuro ?)
So here are some stats there: I thought this time around my team made a much better game than in April, but it seems that it was rated slightly worse even. I think I know what I can improve. Anyway I'll be patiently awaiting 48!

This is a bit crazy. I opened my ldjam account to find that I placed 5th! honestly I played a lot of games that I think are better than mine.. Thank you so much guys! I guess y'all loved my goose

That's amazing!

Thank you everybody that played and enjoyed The Looper's Path! This was one of my best games already made and definitely the best LD entry I did!

If you want to play, go for it: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/the-loopers-path

whoops accidentally clicked publish too soon and can't delete the post...

I don't usually post results, but after 10 Jams either as part of a team or by myself we finally achieved a score higher than 4.0, two in fact. Humor makes sense as we were going for that but we were surprised to see theme of all things.

This makes Philosophy on Rails: An Introduction to the Western Canon our best ranked game in most categories compared to our previous entries.

Whenever we participate in a game jam, one of the core aspects people always compliment us on is on polish. During the rating period of Woofice Chair! those compliments came back around and we are very proud of receiving them again! :sparkles:

But what is this dark magical art that people call polish? And what about juice? While both are regarded as something to highlight in jam games, we believe polish is deeply connected with gameplay. Polish not only helps give a game a more complete-feel, but also helps making gameplay more satisfying to the player!

Despite ratings having already closed, I've written a development insight covering some of techniques we've use to give some extra polish and juice to our game! This includes various topics such as using screenshake and smoothing cameras, using trails and particles to give extra oomph to the player's movement and even using FMOD to add extra depth to the audio! :eyes:

While our intention was to originally cross-post this development insight here into Ludum Dare, the final article ended up with over 28 videos, some of them requiring sound. Fully converting each of the individual video into the 4MB limit for GIFs this site asks for would be an enormous time-consuming task for a lesser reading experience.

Therefor, as a first time exception since we've started writing development posts about our Ludum Dare games here on the site, we have to ask you check-out the post in our main website's blog instead! We apologize for inconvenience, but we think this is the most practical way to get around it. :bow:

Click here to read the development insight at Whales And Games!

Of course, if you have any comments, questions or things that you'd like to add, feel free to do them through the comments here!

Just two days ago we made a post about our results this time around, and we're very happy with the ratings that we've got! While our artist has already congratulated everyone of you in his post, I'd like to future reiterate his words! Congratulations to everyone that participated this time around, and we hope that you keep it up for future jams! :muscle:

We'll certainly keep an eye out for some of the folks we've highlighted this year, and we look forward to participating again! Cheers! :whale:

Hey there humans!

Here are our results! We are so glad to have been part of this, created Time To Dance!, got the opportunity to be part of this community and play so many kewl games made with such love and haste.

Putting aside the ranking which doesn’t really matter, here’s what really stoked us:

• We got over 100 people to play and rate our game! Over 60 left us priceless feedback, advice and encouragements.
• We scored a 4-or-above in every category!! That is so heartwarming and we interpret it as something like “the game is very good as is, and can become excellent if we work on the aspects mentioned in the feedback”!
• We scored especially great in innovation and that’s the core of the kind of games we want to make in the future.

The great thing is that, thanks to the awesome reception and feedback, we are now working on a Post-Jam version which will be available very soon. We’ll address the main issues that surfaced, include many players ideas and add other things we thought would be cool... favourite choreography contest & leaderboard, boss-fight, increased difficulty, new levels and music, etc etc!

Follow us onTwitter, itch.io, or join our discord if you want to keep contributing to it!

Stay tuned!

Much love.

VV

Second Ludum Dare in the books! I'm absolutely overwhelmed by the response. Thank you so much to everyone who played Splines 'n Shapes! For me, finishing a game in 48 hours counts as a huge success. I didn't even consider these results to be a possibility going into this jam:

I'll try to go over the process of making Splines 'n Shapes, as well as learnings, thoughts and next steps. It might get a bit long and ramble-y so feel free to skim this or just skip it entirely.

Game Description

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/splines-n-shapes

Splines 'n Shapes is an abstract puzzle game where you adjust loops and collect shapes. Loops are adjusted by repositioning control points and shapes must be collected in order (tri -> square -> pentagon -> etc) as well as in a single loop cycle. (Also... you must make a full revolution and collect the first triangle again :sweat_smile:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieoemXV6vnc

Development Timeline

Initial Ideation

Whenever the theme of a jam is announced, I spend the first couple hours brainstorming ideas. I usually do this by taking a walk, away from my phone, my computer, or any distractions of that sort. I've heard that being in a calm, diffuse mode of thinking is better for creativity than a focused, active mode of thought. I find that walking and removing distractions helps put me into that diffuse state.

Having said all that, I didn't really brainstorm anything too interesting :sweatsmile: :sweatsmile: :sweat_smile:. Initial ideas included: 1. trying to escape a recursive function / for/while loop 2. nascar game w/ left turns? 3. something something hyperloop elon musk 4. some sort of paper plane game where you control how the plane loops 5. a game where you repeatedly throw and catch a boomerang in place.

Ending up going with option 5. I envisioned some sort of topdown view of a seated guy throwing a boomerang where the player could adjust the trajectory of the throw. The idea was still hazy, but it was time to start implementing.

Initial Implementation and Salvaging the Design

My initial implementation was for the boomerang throw to follow a Bezier curve where the two endpoints of the curve are at a single static position (explanation of Bezier curves). The two inner control points are adjusted with WASD and arrow keys or gamepad sticks:

I found this control scheme to be pretty bad for a couple reasons: 1. Reorienting the curve into a new direction (e.g. north to south, east to west) took an unacceptably long time. This wouldn't work for any sort of semi-realtime game. 2. It's pretty easy to get the control points mixed up. For example, if WASD control the initial left point and arrow keys control the initial right point, things could get mixed up if the initial left point was moved to the right of the initial right point.

It became pretty clear to me that if I was going to continue in this curve route, I'd need to switch to a click and drag interface. And I'd need to spice things up a bit.

Enter Splines

I recalled the term "Spline" and that it was related somehow to Bezier curves. Google led me to this document explaining them. Here's my shitty layman's summary of it (images taken/modified from the doc itself):

Splines are essentially a bunch of polynomial curves glued together. However, if you simply match the end values of these curves, there can be irregularities and kinks in the spline:

(C0 is a cubic bezier curve defined by control point sequence <P0, P1, P2, S>. C1 is defined by <S, Q1, Q2, Q3>)

There's a special set of splines called relaxed uniformed cubic B-splines. These splines are made up of Bezier curves glued together such that the spline remains smooth when moving from curve to curve. We can do this by setting anchor points, and then determining control points of each Bezier curve such that the slope and curvature at each matching end point is equal. The following image and algorithm might help explain:

• First we must place our anchor points (denoted by the points B_i above).
• We then trisect each line segment between B_i and B_(i+1) in order to obtain the inner control points P_i,0 and P_i,1 for Bezier curve C_i
• We then find matching endpoint S_i as the midpoints between P_(i-1),1 and P_i,0. S_i is the endpoint of curve C_(i-1) and the start point of curve C_i.
  • also note that the start point of C_0 is S_0 which equals B_0. the end point of C_(n-1) is S_n which equals B_n. (n is the number of anchor points in the spline)

Hooray we have now have a relaxed uniformed cubic B-spline (I'm gunna call these B-splines from now on):

(The reasoning for why this algorithm works is in the paper linked above.)

In order to make this B-spline a loop, we add an additional curve between B_n and B_0. Like in the above steps, we must trisect the line segment to get our inner control points, and then update S_0 and S_n based on these inner control points:

ayyy! check out our B-Spline loop! The small gray points are our anchor points (our B points). The calculated S and P points are hidden. Looks pretty ugly though, so I resized/rethickened the shapes and loop, and used a 3 color gradient that I cycled to turn it into this:

The shapes and loop are all rendered with Freya Holmér's Shapes Library. This asset is a godsend in jams, especially for the artistically challenged like myself.

At this point, I had a pretty fun toy to play around with. Now I just needed to turn it into a game. I had some thoughts spinning in my mind. The main idea I had was for the revolving orb to hit a sequence of targets on the screen. The targets would need to be hit in a particular order, and these ordered targets would be represented by regular polygons (triangle, square, pentagon, etc). But by now I was about 13 hours into the jam, it was super late at night, and I fell asleep.

However, I woke up after only like 3 hours of sleep. Wasn't intentional. I think I was a bit anxious and excited about all the things I needed to implement, so I had trouble falling back asleep. In my groggy haze, I started to implement sounds.

Sounds

Decided to go with synth sound effects for this game, mostly because it's within my current skillset (I'm about 3/4 of the way through Syntorial...that's about it :sweat_smile:) and because I felt some influence from Mini Metro.

The sound effects I knew I needed were: - orb properly hitting a target - orb incorrectly hitting a target - selecting/deselecting an anchor point

I played around with Synth1 in Reaper and came up with a basic patch that sounded pretty soothing. Main properties include: - sine and triangle waveforms for osc1 and 2. - Low Pass filter at about half cutoff. - High amp release - Chorus - a bunch of reverb from stock plugins

(also had some minor variances between the orb hit patch and the anchor selected patch. 'Orb hit' has some FM w/ osc2 pitched at 28 semitones (FM amount is modulated with an envelope). This gives it a bit of a bell-like quality. 'Anchor selected' has zero amp sustain and osc2 pitched at 31 semis above)

The Synth1 patches are available to download on my itch page: https://sharkwithlasers.itch.io/splines-n-shapes

After getting a general sense of how the synth patches would sound, I noodled around on the keyboard to figure out note sequences that sounded nice. (for when an orb properly hits a sequence of targets)

I arbitrarily decided to play notes in the key of Bflat major (because C major is basic AF). And came up with ascending note sequences based on the number of targets that would need to be hit for a particular level:

number of notes | Note sequence (in scale degrees!) | Actual notes --------------- | --------------------------------- | --- 2 | 1, 3 | Bb, D 3 | 1, 2, 5 | Bb, C, F 4 | 1, 3, 5, 6 | Bb, D, F, G 5 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 | Bb, C, D, F, A 6 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 | Bb, C, D, F, A, C 7 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 | Bb, C, D, F, A, Bb, D

There wasn't too much rhyme or reason to how I came up with these. I kinda just followed my ear. I think I reduced the potential cheesiness by: - avoiding long runs of the major scale (nothing longer than 3 notes here) - avoiding outlining the I chord (I do this in the 4 note sequence though :slight_frown: ) - ending the longer note sequences on chord extensions of the I chord. (gives it a little bit of spice?) - (and perhaps ending on the 3 and 5 in the first sequences helps establish the key? maybe?)

For the "Anchor point selected" notes, I would randomly choose a note in the scale degrees {1, 2, 3, 4} (and ensure no repeates). The "anchor point deselected" note would be a perfect fifth below the "selected" note. This pairing of notes felt pretty smooth and consonant.

For the "Target improperly hit" note, I landed on using Eb (perfect fourth above Bb). I experimented with using dissonances like the tritone, but these sounds clashed with the chill mood that my game was headed in. The perfect fourth seemed like the perfect balance of consonance and dissonance for this sound.

In order to get these sounds into Unity, I rendered the notes at Bb, then modified the pitches at runtime with Unity's AudioSource. These didn't sound as nice as when I was playing in Reaper, though. Going forward, I'll probably render each note separately in Reaper and dynamically play the correct audio clip in Unity.

Design and Game Feel Iteration

If I remember correctly, I spent the next portion of the jam working on polish and finalizing the small details of the gameplay loop.

One thing I find pretty neat about game jams is that I start with a hazy initial idea, and through the process of iterating through many micro design decisions, end up with a totally different, but concrete result. These micro decisions sculpt and shape the game into a product I would have never thought of during the initial brainstorm. I think that's pretty cool.

Some of the many decisions I had to make included: - deciding that the shapes must be collected in order - capping the number of shapes in a level to 6 (it's hard to distinguish shapes once you go beyond 8 sides) - deciding that all shapes must be collected within a single revolution - deciding that this single revolution starts when you hit the first shape (triangle) - deciding that you could still adjust the loop while the shapes are being hit / validated - deciding that the orb must finish it's cycle and hit the triangle again. - increasing the speed of the orb when it hits the first shape (to discourage loop adjustments during validation)

I'm not sure if all of these decisions were correct, but overall, I think it led to interesting puzzles where the player is not punished for experimenting.

For game feel / polish, I basically follow some lessons from the great Juice it or Lose it talk. Primarily, for any object/player interaction, there should be visual and/or audio feedback.

Some interactions (and feedback) in the game included: - shape getting hit (shape flashes and enlarges, orb gets larger, loop thickens, audio) - hovering over, selecting, and deselecting anchor points (enlarging the points on hover and select, shrinking on deselect, aura radiates from point, audio) - revolution passes that is invalid (all shapes darken and then reset, audio) - anchor point added/removed (during level transitions) - shape added/removed - ...

I mainly used DOTween to handle the visual feedback. Tweening is dope.

After this, I had to work on structing my code to have a level sequence, and properly transition between levels. This took a while and was pretty messy, so I'm just going to leave it at that. At the time of completion of all of this, I had about 3 or 4 hours left to design levels. (I think I snuck in a 3 hour nap in there somewhere. Unintentional once again, I think the anxiety of the jam made it hard for me to fall back asleep).

Level Design

For some reason, I always leave the designing of levels/puzzles until the end of the jam. I think a reason for this is because level design is such an open ended subject. In any case, I didn't have much time, so I followed these general principles: - Convey the mechanics of the game through the sequence of puzzles (I'm not a fan of tutorialization) - Show interesting, unique properties of B-Splines through these puzzles

The way I found interesting mechanics of B-Splines was by toying around with them in a sandbox, noticing an interesting loop/property, and then sprinkling shapes along the loop to turn it into a puzzle. It was a bit of a rushed process, but by the end of the jam, I had about 20 levels! Hooray!

Made a build, made a page, submitted. slept.

After the Jam

Over the past weeks, I've been playtesting the game with friends and streamers. The feedback I've gotten has been incredibly helpful and supportive! And it's been great getting to know people in the LD community!

(There are a ton of improvements that I could add to this game. Some low-hanging fruit, as well as design decisions that don't have a clear answer. (maybe I'll list some here later))

Because of the external support, as well as the fact that the aesthetic fits my limited art and audio skills, I plan on expanding this into my first full project. There's so much to do / think about! - What should the scope of the game be? - Should I limit the curves to just B-Spline loops? - What kind of gameplay do I want players to experience (casual and chill, or stimulating puzzles)? - What mechanics/extensions should I add to this game to keep it interesting? - Can I jam a narrative into this? - What should the game teach the player? (interesting shapes? interesting abstract properties of curves?) - ...

It's pretty exciting, yet daunting to think about. It seems like these questions can only be answered by doing the work and iterating.

So, it's time to get to work! I might post updates on my twitter if you are interested.

Thank you for the wonderful jam experience!

Hey, we just wanted to say big thanks to all who voted and commented our game! (the cat also expresses gratitude)

Wow, during theme voting, gamedev, and ratings we never had a period where there were no posts for four hours!

Sorry about the delay, winners, work is getting in the way of making your celebratory artworks! I'll get to them later when work isn't an issue. Stay tuned!

After I draw some celebratory artworks for the winners as I promised, anyone want their own artwork inspired by their game?

Acceleration has increased. The sprite of the aircraft has changed. The music has changed.

It is easier to play.

https://hikokyoujurou.itch.io/swing-by

1. Assign some random games to each user (10-15, for example).
2. These games would be mandatory to rate in order to be able to get a score.
3. You would be still be able to rate any other game you wish.
4. This way we would help everyone gets a score.

BTW, thank you all for rating my game. I made it to get a score on my first LD :smile:

Thank you to everyone that played Tip of My Tongue!

Here are my results:

Based on feedback, I was hopeful that I would place within the top 10 of humor, and I am so happy to have placed 3rd! My first trophy! Thank you all so much.

I expected that my placement would show a bump in browser plays over the last couple days, and it did. What I didn't expect was that the day after the jam ended, 17 people downloaded the PC build of the game. That's more downloads than the entire rating period. Strange!

Congrats to everyone that finished a game this go-around! And thanks again for playing Tip of My Tongue!

See you next jam?

AZTEC RIDE IS ON MOBILE!

🎢 PLAY & RATE on the Play Store

Originally made in 72 hours during Ludum Dare 47, we released a new, polished version to MOBILE!

Keep the roller coaster alive by giving your Aztec community a nice thrill, but be careful not to lose them!

New features

Gameplay

• The game now features procedurally generated levels.
• You fail a level if you lose all of your people, or if you run out of fuel and don't manage to reach the end of the track.
• Added a settings menu.
• There are three input methods:
  • Two buttons
  • Throttle
  • Analog stick
• Added tutorial.
• Updated physics behavior.

Graphics

• Updated UI graphics.
• Updated camera behavior.
• New art and animations.
• Added Anti-Aliasing.

🎢 PLAY & RATE on the Play Store

Fancy a challenge? We're holding a speedrun competition for our game. The deadline is 5pm Sunday (GMT.) Submit a video of your run, as well as your time, on our game's LD page, and the player with the fastest time will be added to the game in the form of a statue, and mentioned with your best time in the credits. Thanks! Esphoros/Computer, Convg

Check out our final result of the previous jam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQkr69u99Ug

We put some more work into, and made our meatball even more beautiful, now you can truly experience it in all its meaty glory.

New features include a eating/vomit system. Scientists that are eat able. Mutation ragdolls and a power up muscular system for Gymzilla. Everything is also more polished and it now includes a fully fletched meat menu.

Links

https://gamejolt.com/games/Meatball-VS-Gymzilla/513415

https://tocogames.itch.io/meatball-vs-gymzilla

Hello!

First of all, thank you so much for the enormous amount of feedback during the last weeks. What's even more encouraging is that Ace of Rope scored 5th overall, with most categories having a very high score as well!

As a result, it wouldn't be very fun to end this game at the jam version, so I spent the last weeks expanding it. You'll find even more colorful characters, wacky dialogues, and nice landscapes as you confront the dangers of the West.

Just in time for Halloween, here's also a quick update that adds a third zone to the game. Embark to the icy north, get lost in a dark forest, challenge the host of an odd mansion, and find the truth about your origins.

More info on the itch.io page. Have a nice end of October!

Are you using any extension for monitoring Page Views, Avg. Session Durations, etc? I use Monster Insights, and realized the average session duration was only 26 seconds. Rough entry this year! I think this is a really helpful stat to look at as far as knowing if a game mechanic you worked on "worked" for the public, I only captured peoples' (albeit short) attention span for 20ish seconds. Moral of the story: I need to work more on fun mechanics that keep people playing, instead of investing time in mechanics that are neat but aren't necessary or fun.

I made a compilation video of people's reactions to our game, Pillars of Anguish! If you haven't seen it, check it out! It's 20 minutes, but worth it :grin:

I'm also live right now at twitch.tv/Outfrost, working on improving the game post-LD. Come say hi! :wave:

https://youtu.be/jbj00XWWgTw

I started working with Unity a year ago and up to this day I was still not sure whether my solutions were being solved in a similar way by others, or maybe I was overcomplicating things.

Ludum Dare gives you the possibility to see each others code in COMPO entries, and it's a gold mine. The amount of solutions for certain problems you can find is incredible and it's very reassuring to see that someone uses the code in a way you used or you wanted to.

I was especially keen to refactor code of my game (Post LD) using Scriptable Object Architecture. Now, looking upon some games' code I can understand the real-world problem examples better than looking at 2017s Keynotes and tutorials.

This way, I can improve as gamedev and get better in other Ludum Dares coming!

Coming from Javascript world (React developer) I can see clearly how bad (or good?) my game code is and, thanks to incredible and talented C# devs from the top games, I can learn more about gamedev concepts to become better developer overall.

Thank you for being such an insipiring community.

I've dedicated past couple of weeks to polishing and expanding the game. And so now it has twice as many levels. Which means more challenges, more puzzles, and more cool gravity mechanics!

Check it out here: https://oneir0mancer.itch.io/skycrawler

Fancy a challenge? We’re holding a speedrun competition for our game. (Best time so far is 2mins 17secs) The deadline is 5pm Sunday (GMT.) Submit a video of your run, as well as your time, on our game’s LD page, and the player with the fastest time will be added to the game in the form of a statue, and mentioned with your best time in the credits.

Thanks to everyone who played and rated Debug Or Die! I had a blast playing your games!

Ratings Breakdown

Note: Percentiles are calculated based on the total number of ranked games in each category. A game in Ludum Dare is only ranked when it receives 20 or more ratings. Ranked data courtesy of @adroitconceptions.

Postmortem

The theme of this jam was “stuck in a loop”. Participants were given 72 hours to create a game from scratch that incorporated this theme. I thought this theme was one of the better in recent memory and brainstormed the following concepts and mechanics:

• Player stuck with a hula hoop around body. Bounce through the level with the goal of removing the hoop.

• Race around a track using timed button presses to increase speed. Reach the target speed to break out of the loop.

• Bullet hell game with screen wrap. Dodge enemies/projectiles that loop across the screen and kill enough to break out of the loop.

• Puzzle game with a programming mechanics. Break out of the loop by pushing around and aligning command blocks to satisfy loop conditions.

• Runner played inside the radius of a large circle. Jump to avoid traps/enemies. Circle gets smaller the longer you play.

• Hamster in a wheel. Didn’t think this one too far through.

I ended up going with the puzzle game with programming mechanics because I thought it was a good use of the theme and I’ve wanted to take a stab at something like Baba Is You.

What Went Right

• The game was completed and submitted on time. As has become a running theme with my jams, the scope had to be reduced, but the end result was playable and functionally complete.

• The level design came out nice. I was able to design levels with progressing difficulty that showcased the mechanics and challenged the player. I also included a tutorial level to introduce the mechanics which I felt would be especially helpful to those without programming knowledge.

• The core mechanics work well. The grid-based movement made it easy to control/play. I incorporated break points, which are an obstacle that can be moved, and comment blocks which the player can pass through but command blocks cannot. If the player already had programming knowledge then it would be immediately obvious what each of the block types does, and if not it was easy to pick up.

What Went Wrong

• Numerous features and polish had to be cut to finish on time. These included additional levels, multiplication/division blocks, additional environment affecting conditions akin to the door in level 3, undo functionality, sound effects, and graphical polish/animation.

• No undo functionality. This was mentioned above but it was something that many players mentioned. It can be frustrating to have to start a level over after pushing a block into the wrong position when you’re already close to the solution. Again, this was a planned feature that didn’t make it in.

• A couple of bugs made it into the initial release. On the plus side, they weren’t game breaking and it’s very likely they weren’t noticed as I patched them the day after submitting.

Conclusion

This was my fifth Ludum Dare/game jam. It was also the longest I’ve went between jams (a year) due to being busy with a new job. This left me with a bit of rust that had to be shaken off early in the jam that undoubtedly cut into my time budget.

There’s always room for improvement but I’m very happy with the results. It was overall my best rated submission and the first time I broke into the top 100 in multiple categories. I chose to go with while loops because I figured they would be the easiest for people without programming knowledge to understand. I kept the math simple so the gameplay wouldn’t be frustrating but still provide a level of challenge and engagement. I also recieved numerous comments complimenting the usage of theme, level design, and educational value of the game which is always wonderful to hear.

I’d like to thank everyone for playing and rating Debug Or Die (unofficially known as Baba Is Loop :P). It was great to get back in the groove and make a game I probably wouldn’t have thought up if it wasn’t for the jam. I had a ton of fun playing your games and I eagerly await the chance to do even better for Ludum Dare 48!

Play Debug Or Die

Dave Brake Creations

Good news, finally! I've begun working on the artworks I promised to make for some games! I'll be making artwork for the 1st-place winners and whoever requests one.

I made an update for my virtual chicken staring contest! The game is now much better and not ugly.

Here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/virtual-chicken-staring-contest

Thank you for your interest in my very complex game.

That could be a nice place to hang out in. :)

iLoop is a hypercasual 2D endless runner game about a tiny cute robot, who has been sent on a mission, to collect food for the army warehouse.

Can you unlock the secret rank which is only achievable at a certain high score?

Download & Review the game now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.godotengine.iloop

The best time so far is 2mins 17secs. Think you can beat it? The deadline is 5pm (GMT) Submit a video of your run, as well as your time, on our game’s LD page, and the player with the fastest time will be added to the game in the form of a statue, and mentioned with your best time in the credits. Good Luck!

Convg + Esphoros

If you were stuck in a loop playing "Edge of Ludum Dare" maybe you would like to see this full map of the adventure. Thanks to everyone who played and rated this little text-based game made with BOLT and Unity.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/al-filo-de-la-ldum-dare-edge-of-ludum-dare

Hey all!

I've managed to do an insane amount of work in the 48 Compo hours; I'm going to explain how I did all that by taking you through my process for everything: from idea, writing, music, modeling, sound recording, scene building to programming:

Join me in 30 minutes: 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET / 19:00 CEST for about 2.5 hours on https://twitch.tv/virtualplaynl

(if you somehow don't want to watch on Twitch, you can also watch via YouTube through https://youtube.com/virtualplay )

Hope to see you there!

You can Download our game for Free

Download here : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SpaceStrawberriesStudio.ColorQuest&hl=en_US

Yes, yes, the event is over and all, but that doesn't mean I'm done telling you about great games you might have missed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWPQeRs6Ems

Feel free to use following timecodes to skip to a certain part of the video, or viceversa, find the link to a corresponding game you really liked down below :D

Gorilla Taxi

by @idinakloppstock and @rongo-matane

Beyond Death

by @marc-antoine-girard, @ilovepatatos, @jberger, @jean-philippe-brien, @charles-viau and @trypants

Clockmaker

by @cyphyrgriffon and @tristan-mansfield

Circleline

by @caeonosphere

Re-Slash

by @forameuss, @hypercubecore, @lwyx and @croxel-studios

Johnny Lootem's Going Loopy!

### by @juicybrucey and @mr-field

I'm exhausted ever since the Play + Rate ended. Is that normal? Why would I now be tired and not before when I played a dozen of games per day? The wonders of gamejams, I tell you!

Have a wonderful week :D

If you’re interested in more great games I found, do take a look at my previous highlights

#3 #2 #1

In godot, I'm making a collision script, so, I have made a for loop looping through all the bodies the key collided with and if it is im the 'Player' group, then it prints something

The code -

If you look at the bottom, there are these debug messages and I have no clue what it means.

Thanks everyone for playing The Curse of Cattenburg during Ludum Dare 47! We were really proud to have ranked 3rd in Graphics and 12th Overall.

What is Project Cattenburg?

We have decided to develop the game into a real game! We're currently ironing out the overall design, we're thinking somewhere between Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon in terms of game flow, with the Card Game created for the jam being at the heart of the game to resolve combat. We'll also be adding some deck-building to the game ❤

If you're interested in following the game, there's a few ways you can keep in touch:

Join the Cattenburg Discord Server

Follow on the Game Page on Itch.io

Follow on the Game Page on GameJolt