Honestly, not sure how to feel about my submission for this jam. Its not a lot but among all my other LD entries, this game has the most votes obtained, yet got the worst score, even compared to my first entry. I think its because I went with a relatively safe option that I knew I could easily finish before the deadline. Maybe I should try a more adventurous idea next time? Either way, thanks for rating my game and giving me valuable feedback. I actually updated the game a bit based on the feedback I got, which is a first for me. See you all in the next LD jam!

This was an incredible opportunity for learning.

First of all, congratulations to my team, composed of my students who accepted the difficult journey of creating a game in seventy-two hours, even during this time of difficulties (both in Brazil and in the world), due to the pandemic (COVID- 19). Each student from a different place (which gave us a lot of difficulty because it is a new format even for me, since I have participated in several editions since 2015).

Secondly, I would like to thank everyone who gave sincere feedback on our project, as well as everyone who responded to my comments on their projects.

It was a very busy event this time.

I am especially grateful for all the knowledge that was, both in the project, and in taking the time to evaluate/rate and review so many games. I got the third place mark in quantity of "karma" (a system that I am still trying to validate/evaluate).

I also want to congratulate all the brazilians who participated in this event, because I know that things are getting worse. But they will get better! o/

Ludum Dare, thank you. See you in October.

:flag_br:

Esta foi uma incrível oportunidade para o aprendizado.

Primeiramente, parabéns para a minha equipe, composta por alunos meus que aceitaram a difícil jornada de criar um jogo em setenta e duas horas, mesmo durante esse tempo de dificuldades (tanto no Brasil, quanto no mundo), por conta da pandemia (COVID-19). Cada aluno de um lugar diferente (o que nos rendeu bastante dificuldade por ser um formato novo até mesmo para mim).

Em segundo lugar, gostaria de agradecer a todos que deram feedbacks sinceros em nosso projeto, assim como todos que reagiram aos meus comentários nos próprios projetos.

Foi um evento bastante movimentado desta vez.

Fico especialmente agradecido por todo o conhecimento que foi, tanto no projeto, quanto ao tirar um tempo para avaliar e revisar tantos jogos. Consegui a marca de terceiro lugar em quantidade de "karma" (um sistema que eu ainda estou tentando validar/avaliar).

Também quero dar os parabéns a todos os brasileiros e brasileiras que participaram deste evento, pois eu sei que as coisas estão piorando. Mas elas vão melhorar! o/

Ludum Dare, obrigado. A gente se vê em outubro.

Results are in and I'm not disappointed. Even got in the top 300 with "theme", haha.

Thank you so much <3 I think it is great succes for the first gamejam ever

You can play it here: https://sheetcode.itch.io/sheep-it-alive

or see video blog here: https://youtu.be/dtn-ZPoQvbY

See you in the next gamejam!

Here are my results! I'm glad I was ranked 52nd overall :) Thank you everyone for playing, rating & giving feedback!

You can also see how I made my game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrVwKoJoaw4

Very glad of the results of my game Light From a Star (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/light-from-a-star) !

It was my first game jam ever, and I still can't believe I had such a good score on innovation and theme ! Thanks to everyone who played and reviewed my game, and congrats to all the developers and artists who took part of LD46 ! :smile:

On a fait une vidéo récapitulative (en français) de la création du jeu en 72H. Très fiers du résultat au niveau du thème et de l'humour merci haha ! https://youtu.be/WzTlml6WfgA

Heyho everyone.

First of all thanks to everyone who played our game and send in some feedback. Really appreciated them!

This is a small (yeah sure ...) postmortem and analysis of the feedback we received for our game Feed The Machine.

The Bad

UI

We tried a lot (especially with UI) and now we know better, I would say. We decided quite early that all UI-based information should be in the gameworld itself. In retrospective I have to acknowledge that it didnt worked out. It helps with the confusing and being stressed, but it doesnt feel like fun for the player. Should it helped to present the informations in a different way? Absolutly yes. It would have been possible to present the information just clearer in the gameworld but we didnt do it.

Now, why is this? Well you could say "its a jam, you're missing time to fix stuff like this" and it would be true if we didnt finished the development like 12 hours before the deadline. So there where enough time. The real reason is: we didnt see the issue here. After developing our own game, our own vision we were to focused and single-visioned that we didnt realized the problem. Simple issue but something to learn for the next time.

Tutorial

The tutorial was another bad point. It was to long and I have to agree with this. While I was hammering it together I already felt like "woof. This is a lot of information." What I didnt do was sit back and thinking about "What is the main goal you have to achieve." Only that would have been enough, the rest the player could have been figuring out by him/herself.

With more information on the UI (issue #1) it would had helped the player learning the game while playing too. This is way more fun than reading 3 minutes of text.

Other things

Player animation would have been nice, and I even tried it, but Unity gave me a hard time, so after one hour I dropped the idea. Number one priority is to finish the main gameloop, so I focused on that. Over the last weeks I practiced the animation system in Unity a bit, so I'm save for LD47. Still no idea what I did wrong while the jam.

The visibilty of all items wasnt that good all the time. Player missed things or where stuck because of no visible reason. Or they where stuck all the time, because the item-colliders were a bit ... not-fun I would say.

One more button would have been great as well. As you fix a ton of broken machines or pipes, your focus is on the machines. But if a machine is below a pipe it feels like a luck-based game what the player character will do. Fix the pipe or the machine. Having different buttons would have dealt with this easily.

And the last "bad" thing: I sill have the feeling the two of us arent good with coming up with "arcade"-games. Most of our games are resource management turn based games. Because we like stuff like this, stereotypical Germans that we are.But we're trying to come up with fun "arcady" games. Getting them to be fun is still a struggle for us.

The good

Even that we, as always, struggled with the theme we had a solid game idea really quickly. And we finished the jam like 12-ish hours before the deadline. Which felt amazing. Sure, there are some issues we could (maybe should) have dealt with but we didnt. Still, having that much time left was a bit confusing but great feeling.

The idea of having the UI in the gameworld felt fun to play around with. Sure, we screwed this up and there are better ways to do it. This was a motivating aspect while developing the game.

If I remember correctly we hadnt any real issues implementing all background mechanics. This was great too, this way we had a playable game relativly quickly, which isnt usual for us. This helped to take the time for some balancing (still, the game is pretty difficult).

Thats it I guess. We learned a lot with this game and, again, thanks for all the feedback we got. It helped to point out the bad stuff.

For the next jam I hope we jump back to our usual resource-management / turn-based games. With this and our previous game I have enough of stressful playthroughs :D

Have a nice day everyone, and I hope you're happy with the ratings and feedback you've got!

See you in a few month.

Finnaly the results came Congratulations very bidy I came 2530 probably don't remember nicely. My game was dying plant.

Now, it's difficult to evaluate how I've done compared to previous events, because I entered the Jam this time and I've always previously entered the Compo. However, my positions (apart from Graphics) all seem to be in the top 30% or so, and my scores are all comparable to my previous games. I was fearing a repeat of LD42 and the atrocious scores I got in that event, so I think I can be pretty pleased with myself. Mostly-plotless arcade games are actually viable!

A massive thank you to everyone who rated Save the Bird!, and see you all in six months' time for another Ludum Dare!

It is the same category btw.

I'm in the mood for some practice :smile:

That's the top 2% for Compo! :smiley: :tada:

Devlog/post-mortem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQc133Aex0

:star: :star: :star: :star:

EDIT: Percentages now fixed to relate the total of games participating the jam. Before I had the compo games in the total and it skewed the percentages.

I'm happy about the results but same time a little bit puzzled about the ratings... Last time we put in a 50% complete game which had only graphics and story as strong points and it got way better standing than our current game.

Our current game was feature complete, had at least better audio, gameplay, overall mood and polish and we had actual full team making it.

Maybe it's just corona giving other people time to push their games to be top good. It most surely has influenced the amount of participants since this time there was double the average amount of games posted.

Anyways, we had lots of fun making our game and we even put up an advanced edition to our page :slight_smile:

If you haven't tried Feed The Fire, try the better version. I'd say it's quite complete for what it is. Only thing it's missing is tutorial and story, but at this point we most probably wont expand those aspects.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/feed-the-fire-4

We had to submit our game in the Unfinished-category.

Naturally the game isn't included in the final results, but there were many who played and gave a rating.

I'd be curious to know if there's a way to view the individual numbers of an unfinished entry, even though they're not included in the average value? (Or would something like this be considered bad taste?)

With these invisible ratings shrouded in mystery, it feels a bit like I I R O has been left in a weird state of eternal limbo!

But still, there were folks who came and left valuable feedback, so I guess that's what truly counts.

Thanks for the always incredible Ludum Dare, everyone! :sunflower:

I've grabbed data from the API to do some data analysis for my own curiosity, and I thought I might as well post the number of people who achieved a result in each category, so that everyone can more accurately identify what percentile they fall in:

|Category | Compo | Jam | |----------|-------|-----| |overall | 1078 | 2547| |fun | 1078 | 2544| |innovation| 1077 | 2547| |theme | 1077 | 2545| |graphics | 1047 | 2318| |audio | 805 | 1596| |humor | 862 | 2021| |mood | 1003 | 2379|

Hive Preserver ranked #50 overall, which actually makes this our worst ranked Ludum Dare game so far, but we still really love it! :smile:

In fact, we started making this our "quarantine game" and have been cleaning up the project. Right now we are going a little more in a stealth gameplay direction, but we are still experimenting. We started by developing a better alien locomotion controller that can crawl on walls and ceilings:

https://youtu.be/-Aw_R7h2niw

If you want to stay up to date follow our project on itch.

Follow us on Twitter on YouTube

I was especially hoping for a good score in audio and it looks like I got it. (Top 6% according to my maths) Overall I'm pretty pleased with my first entry. It was a great experience and I hope I can participate next time as well.

The Game...

I would like to talk about my game now. If you would like to test it first, here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/frictionless

This game is about protecting your heart in space, by catching the bullets of bad guys and using them as ammo for your own gun. You have some spells and a dash to assist you. It has a high skill ceiling and the learning curve starts of steep.

...and its Problems

I'm not sure if you care, but the biggest problem with the game was that the rules of the game were not conveyed too well. Yes, finding out the best strategies and all the behaivours of the enemies and stuff might have been an important part of the experience (and I won't explain them here), but throwing the player into the cold water like that certianly wasn't the best idea.

The movement doesn't feel good and that's probably because there is never a point of reference for anything. This makes it hard to aim at enemies, especially while chasing the heart.

Speaking of: A lot of people had their heart taken away by the yellow enemy pretty quickly, because it is hard to avoid. At this point you either give up and die or somehow deal with it. It is possible, since the third boss is all about it, but still pretty hard. This could have been fixed with some simple stat-changes...

"Boss? There are bosses in this endless game?". Yes, there are bosses. One for each enemy-type. And for each type of skill you need.

The orange boss is all about catching his fast bullets and making decisions about who to kill first.

The green boss is a 30 second time bomb. It tests you on getting bullets fast and not missing your shots (Or alternatively using your damage spell).

And the yellow boss is, just like I said, about keeping up with a very fast heart. If you don't, you will die.

All the bosses were done by taking the base of a normal enemy and tweaking its stats in a way that creates an interesting boss. They even used the same spawning system as the normal enemies.

At the first drop of the song, the enemies get slightly stronger and turn into squares. The bosses show up at each drop starting from the second one.

The Idea of the Game

From the very start, I knew I wanted to create a bullet-hell-sorta top-down game. One point, where all the bad guys would go to and you have to defend it. "Sounds kinda like tower-defence, doesn't it?". But I thought that was just lazy. So instead I thought about how you could defend something. You could kill the enemies before they kill you. But what if you instead had to stand between the bad guy and the heart? Taking the bullet and tanking the damange seems interesting. But instead of creating a very big health bar for the player, I could just not give him health at all. And so it was.

The idea with catching the bullets came naturally as I needed a way to get rid of enemies. You can't catch the bullets of 20 enemies. That wouldn't make sense. As a balance change I also made it so that the player could only catch one bullet every second. That way they had to get rid of the bad guys somehow.

The Story

What story? (The "story" was made after the game and it only makes a bit of sense)

Polishing a Game that doesn't exist (Graphics n' stuff)

I'm honestly surprised that my score in graphics was this good, even though the style was so simple and yet... It makes sense. As someone who does a lot with colors and graphic design in my free time, but has never drawn even a single apple, I can say that the style perfectly reflects me and my skills.

And that's interesting, because even though at the start of the jam there was no game, I already had a vision of what I wanted to do with the game and I started the design before having even made a game. A lot of content wasn't there untill the very last day, but the game looked great:

The colors look appealing and are somewhat within a color scheme and there are a lot of details that really distract from the simple style of the game. The things I'm talking about include, but are not limited to: The main menu heading reacting to the beat(explained in the next section),the transitions inside, from and to the main menu, the flashes when activating a spell and obtaining a bullet, the particles in the mana and health bar, the particles when killing or hitting an enemy and the particles that make up the scene. All these things make the game what it is.

As you can tell: Particles are important and I would say I'm pretty good at fine-tuning all of them untill they all look good. Especially the post-processing was a big part of the project and its style.

The Main Menu

A lot of players didn't seem to understand, that the tips-menu™ was only supposed to be viewed if they were stuggling. But a lot of them viewed it as a tutorial, since there apparently wasn't a menu for that (It's in the bottom right). I could have made the menu only unlock after the first attempt, but I could also have just told the player this information.

Then there was the spells-menu. I wanted to keep the descriptions pretty short, but still understandable and while I think I succeded in that, it was still only supposed to be viewed after the player understood the main concept of the game.

Exept that there is one spell that they should know about. A spell which only has a 5 second cooldown and might even be necessary for the game to be completed. And that spell is the bullet-spell. It gives you 2 bullets as ammunition right when you use it and I tried to make it really strong, so that it balances the hard game a bit. As always, I succeded, but the player didn't know that. They had to test the spell, its cooldown and its cost in order for them to find out when they should use it.

Communication is important and I failed at recognising that during the development.

Alright. Now lets talk about something I didn't mess up: The title. Yes, "Frictionless" sounds cool, but that was not what I was refering to. The title in the menu reacts to the beat and the only reason why I'm mentioning this, is because I think it looks pretty cool and I'm proud of it. For "How-I-did-It" it's not that hard. I just knew the bpm of the song, which made it easy to implement the shake and scaling. Just know that there are some beats which get skipped, since there is no beat at that point. "But how did I know that?" you may ask. Well... that's because:

The Music

I made the music by myself... both songs.

For that I used "Fl-Studio". Since I was already a bit experienced in the art of music, it was no problem for me to create this piece of art. The title screen music was done within the time of the jam, but the play-theme was not, which is why it doesn't quite fit. It still works, but you can hear some birds at the start. That doesn't make a lot of sense, since you are in space.

Still I'm pretty happy with the music. I like it.

Menu Theme: https://youtu.be/K98BYziapy4

Play Theme: https://youtu.be/P2g0ZOKc8pU

The Sound Effects

All the sound effects were, again, made by me. They were all made within the jam and no, I didn't "cheat" by using a program that does the sound effects for you. I made all of them from scratch. The shooting sound for example is a high pitched sine wave with its course pitch getting lower. All sounds have reverb, delay and stuff, but you probably don't care about that. Anyway...

The Conclusion

Damn, that was a heck of a ride. If someone actually got this far then I just want to say: Thank You <3 It means a lot to me. But even if that's not the case, then it's fine, since the main reason for this post was to grab all my thoughts, my problems and my overall experience with the game into one place in order to reflect on all of it. I hope that this helps me for my next game, so I can make it even better. Every jam is a chance for improvement. And I want to improve.

Maybe this post even inspires you to make your own. I would recommend it, so you can reflect on your own game. If you havn't made any game yet, maybe you should give it a try. What's the worst that could happen? No one is going to laugh at a bad game. Most people will instead try to help you, by giving you constructive-criticism.

Ludum Dare was certainly fun and a great experience.

Have a good day

15th in Theme! I kinda wish that my overall result was more inline with some of the other results (and the fun probably would have been better if I hadn't made it so damn hard), but I'm not complaining much - it's still in the top 6% in the compo, and the Theme result was in the top 1% :smile:

• Overall: Top 6%
• Fun: Top 13%
• Innovation: Top 3%
• Theme: Top 1%
• Graphics: Top 4%
• Audio: Top 4%
• Humour: Top 3%
• Mood: Top 8%

Feel free to check out my game if you're still playing them: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pug-panic

Hello everybody, thanks a lot for all the ratings and feedback for our game Dorfromantik!

(Play Dorfromantik here if you haven't already!)

We're happy with our results, especially the Overall and Graphics score :)

Now our team has committed to continue the development!

We're currently collecting feedback to decide in which direction we want to head :) For anyone who played the game already or is interested in this type of game - we would be glad to receive your feedback! We prepared a Google Form to collect specific feedback on the game!

>> Please help us out by filling out this Questionnaire <<

Thank you to everyone who helps us with their contribution! You will definetely hear from us ;)