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:

Results as percentages (rounded):

• 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 ;)

While not the best results in overall cat I couldn't expect more as there were some issues and bugs that ruined the overall experience of the game.

By the time I fixed it it was too late as people stopped playing and rating. Lesson learned, do more testing next time :D.

Rendered a little speechless at the fantastic feedback and results for my first ever attempt at a game jam. I plan on making a post mortem video soon but for now I still need to digest the amazing fact of being top 100 across all categories. I'm very proud of this, thank you so much to everyone who played, rated, and left feedback on my game to help me improve it for an expanded future release.

PLAY HERE! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/dont-kill-death-or-die-trying

Thank you so much :two_hearts: :fish: :fire:

This was our first game jam, this is the first complete game we ever made, and would you look at that!

And on this incredible results day, we received some other wonderful news!

Flippy Fish is live on Google Play Store :arrow_down:

Here is the link for those who want to download the uploaded version of our small funny action game on their phone. No add, no in app purchase, and C# code available to everyone on github :hugging:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Doot.FlippyFish

See you in October :hearts:

Thanks guys! It was just an amazing experience that allowed us, albeit partially, to make our dream a reality! We received a LOT of quality reviews and decided not to stop there. Now we are developing a full-fledged version of our game, which I hope you can play soon.

You can play the Ludum Dare version here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/aqua-vitae

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QotE094Y5ks

If you are interested in our progress, please follow us on:

*Patreon, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter *

Thanks again to the entire LD community! You are the best! :heart:

Hey guys! A lot of you have sent me your games to play and give feedback, I played 8 of them and then got sick and had to take a break, now I’ve resumed playing and already uploaded a new video!

So if you want any feedback or want to see a random dude who is practicing game dev for a long time to play your game and give feedback in the most causal format then send your games too!

you can send here: https://forms.gle/adk9nyLJh7jsRHnW8

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-totally-convenient-feeding-machine

The feedback seemed OK so I don't quite understand what happened. I agree it wasn't my best game ever but my only game that scored worse was one I rushed in 7h total for LD#15 (that one was really bad).

I have been doing LD for 18 years and I can't even score in the top half anymore... :/

So, this was my first Ludum Dare and it went awfully, from the overall mood (with someone very close to me becoming ill just a day before the LD) to software driving me mad (lost an hour because my IDE had forgotten where Unity was) to software driving even madder (Unity deciding it didn't recognize my animation until I renamed my 3D model from "humanoid" to "Jesus" for some unknown reason) to just overall not having the necessary skills for such an experience (I learned that I can't just texture stuff in Blender and have it be picked up by Unity somewhere around mid-day 2 for example).

Day One seemed "fine", but day two was so bad I really believed I wouldn't make it and in fact, 3 hours before the deadline I had a 3D model, a background, some code, but no game whatsoever, I even believed there wouldn't be enough time to get anything interactive to post. After a lot of pissed off variable name and a bit of crying, I had something to post : it is awful, the graphics are buggy, the gameplay doesn't work, nothing that I wanted to implement is there except one thing which doesn't look like it should and doesn't work like it should, and that's without talking about the fact that I didn't have time to do any music nor any sound effect : it was a painful and disappointing experience.

I feared these results, because to be honest, I wouldn't have been surprised to be in the dead-lasts for all category : my graphics are buggy, the gameplay is interactive and that's already saying a lot, there's no music, no humour, the theme was supposed to be there but not implemented right so it isn't really there : I failed and I expected these results to show that... but weirdly enough, they don't.

I'm in the sub-1000 on some of those !

Compared to the 1383 participants, that's a huge victory ! Even better : my shitty buggy 3D got me in the sub 800 on graphics, not that far away from the upper half, and that's the strong point of my submission (which is insanely reassuring for me as clearly graphics interest me way more than code or music). ld-rank-checker tells me I'm #966, sub-1000 again... it's hard to believe.

Like, seriously, I expected 1200th+ on all of those, I don't know what to say. I've no word for those 21 people who ranked my interactive experience.

Thank you so much.

Scores

• Overall: 1944th (3.167 average from 26 ratings)
• Fun: 1316th (3.271 average from 26 ratings)
• Innovation: 2521st (2.083 average from 26 ratings)
• Theme: 2245th (2.979 average from 26 ratings)
• Audio: 1469th (2.609 average from 25 ratings)

This being my first game jam I was a bit apprehensive about the feedback I would get and was anxious about whether someone will even bother playing my simplistic game. However, I needn't have worried because this community is amazing! I'm extremely thankful to all the people who gave my game a try and more importantly gave me some feedback, no matter how small. I look forward to LD 47 where, hopefully, I will be able to do a better job. :)

Really proud of what we achieved!
If you are interested in making your own desktop games check out Desktopia!

In the end, almost 70 of you played my compo entry Super Survival Ball, the true ultimate ball game, and it was met with a very positive reception that I am deeply grateful for. Here are the final judging results for it:

Not quite what I was hoping for, but I'm pleased that my best category was fun, as that was my goal.

That's not why I'm writing today, though. As those of you who played it know, I ambitiously added an online leaderboard feature that allowed for everyone who played the game to face off for the high score. And now that judging is over, it's time to recognize those extraordinary players who not only played my game, but excelled, and showed themselves to be ball game champions by scoring over 1 billion points!

Keep in mind that players were able to enter any name they wanted, so I don't know who these people are.

1. SodaKing, 10,522,729,190 | The only player with over 10 billion points is SodaKing, a true master of bouncing balls. Godspeed, SodaKing.

2. Me, 9,148,285,150 | This run was my attempt to dethrone SodaKing. I stood no chance.

3. Cae, 4,148,655,450

4. Tempii, 4,080,410,810

5. Me again, 3,274,112,780

6. TheCamel, 2,721,956,360 | This one is a friend of mine from work.

7. Zanthous, 2,225,085,980

8. Me again, 2,040,812,750 | I had to play a lot in testing, obviously.

9. Endurion, 1,325,558,680

10. Rille, 1,175,148,370

11. Tempii, 1,075,712,900

12. Tempii, 1,010,866,240

Thank you to Tempii, in particular, for playing so many times.

Those of you who think you can dethrone these champions can still play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/super-survival-ball

In total, 53 scores were submitted. Thank you so much to everyone who played and rated, this was a great time. I hope to see all of you again in October.

Thanks everyone for playing and rating my game! It means a lot that people would spend time playing my game and giving feedback. I feel like I've already become a better designer! Anyway, let's get into what I've learned, and the scores...

Fun (1640th)

This... was kinda expected. It's not that good of a score (3.12/5), and I think that either came from the game being too confusing (due to the lack of a tutorial), the length of the game, or just it not being fun to some people. In version 2.0 (not out yet, I'm working on it...), I already added a tutorial and significantly decreased the length of the game, from 500 seconds to 370.

Innovation (1288th)

Apparently keeping a fire alive had already been done before. I saw a lot of other games with this theme, and there isn't a problem with it! It's a good idea, but I probably could have made it something creepier. Not to mention a point and click survival horror game wasn't too innovative either.

Theme (694th)

I'm pretty happy with this one! I'm glad it resembled the theme.

Graphics (1841st)

...I should of just done pixel art. Well, I had fun drawing it, so whatever. It's staying!

Audio (366th)

Pretty good! Despite there not being a paper pick-up sound and only one ambient track, I'm glad people liked the reverb and sounds!

Mood (137th)

WOAH! I was not expecting the mood to be this high up! I'm glad I was able to convey the mood of the game well (even with only one ambient track)!

Overall (960th)

I'm glad people liked it and enjoyed it.

Post Jam Version (2.0)

An update to CaveFlame will be released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart CaveFlame. The major changes include: - Menu, Intro, and Ending Music - A tutorial - New ambient sounds - Shorter game time - A reworked ending, as well as a second one - Other small changes, like the valve turning dark when it cannot be turned and not being able to leave when it is in the Fire Room instead of dying - Cheat codes(?) (maybe... there's not a lot of fun cheats to do with this though)

I'm not turning this into a $10 commercial game with a $50,000 kickstarter budget. Although, making it mobile wouldn't hurt...

Anyway, thanks for reading! Here's the game if you want to check it out!

Oh, what's this? Ratings are in? Wow, let's go take a look: Hmm... a little small... let's zoom in... Alright, things looking normal... scores in the 50 - 70th percentile, not bad not bad...

Wait... what's that? ENHANCE! WHAT!? An outrage! An absolute shock! An affront to the dignity of my did-it-in-less-than-five-minutes graphics! We must get to the bottom of this. Okay, let's empty out the folder of assets in my game and get a line-up. Alright, here are the suspects:

Suspect No. 1: The Concept of Love

A bit lumpy, but this one seems to have an alibi: it's just a particle effect and, to be honest, probably the most polished thing in the game, graphics-wise... what's the next suspect?

Suspect No. 2: The Concept of Heartbreak

Well now, this pair of shady fellows seems like a plausible MURDERER for my graphics score! I mean, they might look good if they actually coordinated, but as a particle effect where each is just randomly placed... hmm... looks pretty bad, huh. Well, let's keep 'em here and see who else might be to blame.

Suspect No. 3: The Negative of the Concept of Love

Okay, all these images that are clearly derivatives of the first one are getting a bit suspicious - and this one is just for a fade in/fade out. Granted, it is way too low resolution to be scaled as big as it is used, and it's a bit weird when it clips into the edges... but, I don't think it murdered the graphics score...

Come on... think... what are the graphics that the player stares at for the whole time...?

AHA!

Suspect No. 4: A circle

Oh man, now that I look at it again, Circle is pretty unpleasant to look at... as one commenter put it, Circle has a bit of a resting "horrified screaming stare" face. Of course, it's not like Circle plays a big role in the game, right? Oh, it's one of two main characters? Well that's not good, but I feel there must be something more. Still, it's gonna be hard to tell Circle how ugly it is...

Doesn't the player control something? And what about the background? Or the levels? I don't see anything in here for them... really suspicious how I can't find the sprites that make up the majority of the game... hmm... wait... what's that little thing? Is it even there! ZOOM IN! Oh, I think we've solved this!

Suspect No. 5: A single white pixel

AHA! This must be it! This little pixel was masquerading as most of the graphics - just using various colors and scales as disguise! Heck, it thought it might be able to be the main character without much modification! I bet this didn't help either... of course, Suspect No. 4 is still... certainly a contender for the ~murderer of the graphics score~.

Welp, I'm exhausted. That was a lot of investigative work. Still, I think these graphics are better than average for me - at least there was a color scheme this time, haha!

This was my 4th Ludum Dare and 15th game in total!

Does anyone have these stats or know how to get them? I noticed the person who usually posts them didn't make a game for this jam. I just like to see where I fall within percentages especially since there were SOOOOO many submissions

Thanks to everyone who tried our little game, we're eager to continue to work on it as a little side project and see where it leads us :)
Was a fun gamejam, good work y'all!
Don't stop believing and developing <3

I'm absolutely gobsmacked that we managed to get first place in Audio! Definitely have to give props to @hydezeke for the visual inspiration and making everything work together, credit to my friends who provided their lovely voices for the ending theme, and for people like you for playing our little game.

Last week, I wrote a Twitter thread on the musical/audio decisions that went into our game, which you can find here if you want to learn more:

https://twitter.com/MrHassanSan/status/1256652601187328000

And here's the full OST (minus your own musical improvisations):

https://soundcloud.com/hadurant/sets/plateau-melody-ost

Thank you so much for playing, and congratulations on your game!

So my first Ludum Dare has come to a close, and I have to say, I loved the experience. Not only was making the game super fun, but grading and playing others games was a blast too. Not only that, but I think I did pretty good all things considered for my first game, especially considering It was a Compo game.

Overall: 212th (3.775 average from 53 ratings)

Fun: 103rd (3.902 average from 53 ratings)

Innovation: 247th (3.653 average from 51 ratings)

Theme: 146th (4.069 average from 53 ratings)

Graphics: 307th (3.735 average from 53 ratings)

Audio: 157th (3.67 average from 52 ratings)

Humor: 270th (3.296 average from 51 ratings)

Mood: 398th (3.367 average from 51 ratings)

I'm most happy about the FUN catagory. Not only did I place very well (the top 5% if the total number of participants is considered to be 2,000), but it's the category I wanted to do well in as well. Most of my other game jam games I've created haven't been seen as very fun, and that is what I strive for in my games. I defiantly believe that this game shows my progression in design philosophy for the better, as not only did I find it enjoyable and replayable, but others did too.

Other categories such as mood and graphic I though I would do worse in, seeing as I just threw them off to the side, but If I had the time I could have put more time into the characters and world. Things like a dynamic background would really elevate this game to a new level, but sadly, nobody has the time to put in every feature they want.

I think for the next time however, I'm going to try to create key bindings and controls that are more intuitive, as I believe that is what this game is missing the most. I know that every game has flaws, but I feel as though when a player tries to play a game, but doesn't understand how, they have a poor experience overall. I defiantly need to find better key combos that are more industry standard (Like making jump space bar, and not L)

I had a blast this game jam, and I hope you all did as well. If you want to check out my game, I'll be happily abliged.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-it-afloat

Hi There !!

Here are the results for my lil game, Nothing too great but oh well !!

For next Jam would love to connect with someone now, so if you are a solo developer looking to make something great next time around do ping me :)

Thanks everyone for playing and all the good comments! :heart:
We really enjoyed this game jam together and we can't wait for the next! We currently work on big update for Save the Fish to make it more stupid: new features, seagull and playable on TWITCH!

Keep in touch and follow us on itch: https://labelpastek.itch.io/save-the-fish
Love.

Hey guys! Just wanted to thank everyone on behalf of the Finterior Decorator team. We were 5 people, and this was the first LD for all of us. We're so appreciative of all the feedback we got, and also the ratings! It was an absolute blast making this game, and it seems like quite a bit of people enjoyed it too.

Again, thank you and see you all next LD!

The Ludum Dare 46 is finally over and the votes are counted. Let's see how I did:

Overall: 899th (3.622 average from 43 ratings)

Fun: 749th (3.561 average from 43 ratings)

Innovation: 877th (3.451 average from 43 ratings)

Theme: 319th (4.11 average from 43 ratings)

Graphics: 1458th (3.451 average from 43 ratings)

Audio: 391st (3.768 average from 43 ratings)

Humor: 581st (3.423 average from 41 ratings)

Mood: 915th (3.553 average from 40 ratings)

Let's put that in perspective of past Ludum Dares. Since there were about 2 times as many participants this time around (mostly thanks to COVID-19), comparing places between events has become meaningless, so I'll be looking at a relative place in an event instead (calculated by simply dividing the place by the number of participants, lower number is of course better):

Looking at number of stars is another valid comparison between events:

Unsurprisingly the charts look like upside-down copies of each other.

Overall, graphics, audio, humor and mood are constantly improving. These categories are IMHO indicative of the raw game making skills, which of course improve with experience, so are completely expected to improve with each event.

Theme and innovation are going up and down like crazy and are more indicative of the inspiration that comes in the first hours of each event - when deciding what to create and how. It's also harder to guess what people will consider proper use of the theme and what they will think of as an innovation. Harder to judge too.

Humor is the most fickle of the categories being the most subjective one. This depends heavily on what kind of game you decide to actually make, but can rise with inspiration throughout the event. Some of the humor can even be a result of inexperience, like making art that is so ugly that it's funny and creating game mechanics that fail in a more or less spectacular way.

I won't speculate on what will happen if this trends continue, but I think I can be optimistic. Patience is the key here.

One more thing: since the number of participants varies heavily between events the actual place isn't as important as the stars you get, it would IMHO be better for most people to put the average star rating in bold and not the place, unless of course you're in the top 100 somewhere.

Yay, results are in! I'm super overwhelmed by the amount of ratings, feedback and comments. I was expecting worse results, but I'm quite happy with them! This is my third compo and I feel I've been improving in every Ludum. I feel bad about not being able to rate a lot of other games, I didn't have so much spare time with my current job.

Thanks everyone for playing and rating!

I’ve decided to keep working on this game. I want to work on a new version, heavily improved, and with more content. I like the concept and others do too, and I know I can do a better version of it with some more time, so I want to give it a try!

Feel free to join this Discord server if you want to keep updated about this new version:

https://discord.gg/Fc8YydC

I forgot to check the results for a few days, and now I come back to find my entry in 10th place for Humor! I remember being happy about a category top 100 for my first ever Ludum Dare. Sadly that entry is no longer present on the new site though. Big thanks to everyone who rated and commented!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been considering rebuilding Me And My Horse into a full game, using Godot perhaps, but I'm also interested in trying to build my own engine for learning reasons.

Since this was made rather sloppily to meet the time constraint, I chose to implement features as simply as possible. I imagine a Yoshi's Island style throwing mechanic would have worked better, for example! And someone mentioned wanting to ride the horse, which I would definitely add. (In the most humorous way possible, of course.) And I have several ideas for more mechanics, powerups, and story. Also much better art. The current man and horse were pretty much slightly touched up, quickly drawn placeholder graphics, as you can imagine.

I'm busy with my personal life currently, and the project would be on my free time over a long period no doubt, contesting with other more important projects. I'll definitely make a post here if or whenever I get started and have something to show! Or if anyone wants to keep an eye on my twitter (same username), but it's pretty dead at the moment.

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THANKS EVERYONE SO MUCH FOR PLAYING MY GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!<3 LD COMMUNITY IS THE BEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD:)

Thank you all for playing, rating and commenting on my game! And to all participants and organizers of Ludum Dare. This was my first Ludum Dare. I had so much fun! Also I'm really happy with the positive feedback from all of you. This means a lot to me! I can't wait for the next time. And one more time, thanks for keeping Vlad alive ;)

My first ludum dare, and my abomination got first place in humor and fun. Looks like I've already reached my peak, things can only go downhill from here

Thanks to all the great feedback from friends and other jammers, I decided that I will make a post-jam version out of it, and release it as a tiny game! :fireworks:

If you have some spare time, try it, because feedback is still pretty useful to me :slight_smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/boiling-planet

Thanks in advance!

I made a quick video about the game, if you'd like to see where this goes, just subscribe to my YouTube channel :smiley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGbjUZA6zBI

Thank you to everyone that tried out my game and for leaving feedback :) This was a really fun experience and I can't wait to enter the next Ludum Dare ahh https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/the-plant-shop

Advice for game developers from a book by William Hogarth:

Of Intricacy.

...Pursuing is the business of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure. Every arising difficulty, that for a while attends and interrupts the pursuit, gives a sort of spring to the mind, enhances the pleasure, and makes what would else be toil and labour, become sport and recreation."

"Wherein would consist the joys of hunting, shooting, fishing, and many other favourite diversions, without the frequent turns and difficulties, and disappointments, that are daily met with in the pursuit?—how joyless does the sportsman return when the hare has not had fair play?

From: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/51459/51459-h/51459-h.htm#CHAPTER_V

There are "turns and difficulties" in MOURNING, a spawn of LD46, though it usually takes <10 minutes to play:

Play it here (HTML): http://www.pub22.net/mourning/

Credits:

Sounds:

Stek59 https://freesound.org/people/dimbark1/sounds/316797/ Bradovic https://freesound.org/people/Bradovic/sounds/171992/ dimbark1 https://freesound.org/people/dimbark1/sounds/316797/ camel7695 https://freesound.org/people/camel7695/sounds/437475/

Images:

Seline: Graphic Design: A Library of Old and New Masters in the Graphic Arts p. 133 (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009078797)

Baskets: A Study of the Textile Art in its Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17730/17730-h/17730-h.htm)

Stone walls: Architecture Classic and Early Christian (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29759/29759-h/29759-h.htm)

West Castle: Pagan and Christian Rome p. 187 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22153/22153-h/22153-h.htm)

Egyptian Elements: History of Architecture p. 12 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26319/26319-h/arch1.html), The New Gresham Encyclopedia Volume 4, Part 2 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35844/35844-h/35844-h.htm)

I just wanted to say i am very grateful that i participated in the jam and everybody who rated and appreciated my first jam game, honestly :) I never expected anything near to the score i received now so when I saw it I was ecstatic and fulfilled as a developer and as a human being. A lot of lessons have been learned this jam and one of them is time management, since i was developing games for a hobby and hopefully becomes my full-time work. Time is of the essence that is why dividing time is the first i did for the different parts/areas of development (programming, audio, UI, testing and gameplay). Again thank you for game jams like this for it is keeping the indie game industry alive, see you in the next jam guys. Peace

Thank you all for the rates and comments in my game!

I got one of the best results in all my LD games.

This chart is generated by http://www.ldstats.info/

Two bits of good news in 24 hours!

• Results are in!
• iOS App approved! (for this game)

I have not submitted an app to the App Store before, so this is just a personal goal/landmark. This isn't an amazing game or anything - I just wanted to go through the process and get something up there to learn from the experience. Plus, it feels pretty cool!

...though, I expect to get killed in the reviews on the App Store :cry: lol

Here is a link to that: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fish-motel/id1511033023?ls=1

Here is a QR code to scan (just open your camera) if you are reading this on a computer:

Note: I'm planning on testing out uploading to Google Play store this weekend, or soon. Just wanted to do one at a time since it is all new to me

Other news, I am very happy with the results!

Holy Moly! 6th place?!

I mean, it isn't completely out of the blue since people's comments were great, but I definitely did not expect to get that high!

The other scores were good too, or at least I mean I'm happy with them! I'm a bit surprised that music/audio is that high since it is my first time making music, but I kept it simple.

Anyway, thank you all that have played, voted and commented!

Also, when reading everyone's comments, including on other games as I like to read other comments before I post mine, I noticed overwhelming positivity. I don't just mean there were no jerks - but people were either outright positive or when giving feedback it was actually 1) helpful and 2) sincere, and 3) a lot of times sandwiched between compliments. It is just great to see that kind of community!

Oh, and here are some links and screenshots of my game for reference: - Ludum Page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/fish-motel - Itch Page (play in-browser): https://loubagel.itch.io/fish-motel - Personal Website: https://www.loubagel.com/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/LouBagelCombo5

Rescue Mission

LD46 was one of my favorite LudumDares. I had the house to myself, and outside of food preparation and a couple of hours of sleep, I just made a game. I scoped small, and cut a bunch of stuff out of that, and ended up with a game that had a start and an ending, and some gameplay in the middle.

One of the biggest problems I've run into in past jams is coming up with ideas when the theme is announced. I generally like to come to the jam without any preparation, but when the theme is announced I end up completely blank for a long time.

This time, I held idea jams every day during the week or two leading up to the theme announcement. What I did was to pick a random theme, give myself ten minutes to spam as many ideas as possible, and then pick the three best ideas and spend ten minutes each expounding on them. After 40 minutes, I'd have three great ideas with basic plot, core mechanics, and art style/genre already figured out, and could then pick one to move forward on.

It worked really well for the actual theme announcement, and even though one of my least favorite themes was picked, I was able to immediately begin brainstorming, and ended up with several plausible game ideas in less than an hour.

During a pre-jam mechanic testing session, another thing I had never done before, I came up with a physics-based rocket engine that worked really well, and I ended up using the same idea as the core movement mechanic for Rescue Mission.

I spent much more time on art than I have been able to in past jams, which was pretty great. I had borrowed a drawing tablet from a friend, and it worked out well, even though I did decide to crunch the size down drastically since I'm not much of an artist.

For this Ludum Dare, I did interpret the term 'base code' more generously than I have in previous jams, and took the rocket engine code, some pieces of an enemy spawner script, and a tiny music manager script from some of my other projects. While this did cut down the coding time some, it was almost more of a pain trying to get everything to work together than if I had written it all from scratch, so I'll probably refrain from doing this too much in the future.

Audacity and my headset mic were giving me timing issues, and I couldn't get two tracks to sync up even with a click track, so I ended up just recording the different music tracks in single takes. I'll need to get a proper mic and a better DAW next time I do live music.

Anyway, the compo itself was a great time and very enjoyable, but on Tuesday, I came down with a bad cold, and was out for two weeks, so I wasn't able to participate in the play and rate portion of LD46 as much as I'd like, and only barely managed to squeak through with 21 ratings on the last day.

But in the end I made a game in 48 hours, had a lot of fun, and ended up surviving, all thanks to Providence and maybe 30 cups of Mate.

You know LD's over when there's a seven hour gap between blog posts...

It's been an awesome LD, and I'm so happy to have had the chance to join with you all! LD really is my favourite event of the year, and I can't wait for the next one. See yas in October, and best of luck til then! :v:

(Based on data grabbed from the API)

I got 47.9% in theme. Thanks for getting me to the bottom half! :smile:

Hey everyone,

just wanted to let you know that I am extremely satisfied with my Results.

Being in the top 200 in both Fun and Innovation Category feels really awesome.

Also wanted to inform you, that the post-jam version of the game is now available on the google play store.

You can check it via the following link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.brotherbyto.math

I would like to thank everyone who played, commented and rated The Dark Cave. This was my first Ludum Dare and it's been quite the ride!

Here are my results:

Here are the results broken down into percentages:

Overall: 24.93%
Fun: 32%
Innovation: 33.4%
Theme: 63.4%
Graphics: 24.2%
Mood: 2.3%

For my first Ludum Dare, I am very happy to have made the top 30% for most categories, and be within the top 3% for mood. It's a nice feeling!

To my surprise, the game received over 300 ratings making it the 10th most rated game this jam! That's incredible and I can't thank you all enough. I've taken your feedback onboard and I've started a post-jam version of the game.

If you missed my last post, here is a sneak peak at one of the new enemy types you’ll encounter in the post-jam version of my game. The currently unnamed ‘Spiky Ball’ creature telegraphs its attack direction to the player. Once it hears a sound it moves over to that location and sets a new target path, killing whatever creature is in its way. One or two of these can be quite easy to avoid, but things get a lot more complicated and fun when lots are on screen at once.

Have You Got Twitter?

It’s so nice to be surrounded be such a large group of kind and supportive people who make amazing games! If you would like to follow the post-jam development of my game, or want to share what you're working on post-jam, we should follow each other on Twitter! I can't wait to see what you all make.

I’m Tom, and you can find me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/DeveloperTom1

Until then, I hope to see you all at the next Ludum Dare!

Thank you to everyone who played our game, and especially to those of you giving feedback. This game jam has been a great experience for us. We learned a lot and weve had a lot of fun playing your games and interacting with you both in the comment secions here and on twitch.

We have been looking through all the feedback weve received in the last few weeks and we decided to make an update to the game, so feel free to check it out. We have also put together a web build and a Mac build including all the changes weve made.

Again, thank you all for playing our game, this wont be my last Ludum Dare for sure!

https://thorgamedev.itch.io/frozen-skies

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I doubt it will be my last.

I have taken my time to document and share my experience with this jam, from the development, the immediate reflection, and now the retrospective and finale.

In short, it was awesome. The community was great, the feedback was helpful, and I have grown as a game developer thanks to this crew.

The video says more, but it's been a blast. Thanks for making this happen everyone!

https://youtu.be/kP96b5axv7Q

Thanks to all the great feedback from friends and other jammers, I decided that I will release it in a few months as a tiny puzzle game! :fireworks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70OCzwWbOQ0

I also made some predictions about the results before the voting ended... Let's see how accurate I was :smile:

If you have some spare time, try it, because feedback is still pretty useful to me :slight_smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/boiling-planet

Thanks in advance!

Now that the Jam is finished, I've been thinking about the future of my game. I personally think that the game is very good, and it has me wondering, would people like to play an expanded version with more content/endings, achievements, and a cleaner interface made in a proper engine?

If you haven't played my game, you can play it online here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/irving-forrest-technologies-and-redacted

Please leave your answers in the comments. I'd love to hear from you!

I'm proud of what I made this Ludum Dare 46. I didn't really care about my placings but I am surprised that my Innovation place to be higher than my placing on other categories. I enjoyed playing my game when I was testing it and I'm glad other people also enjoyed it. To be honest this is a game idea of mine for a long time already except for the timed destruction of the towers that was inspired by the theme. The key input mechanic was inspired by one of my favorite games in the PS1: Trap Gunner.

I'm happy that I was able to implement the things I wanted to implement because as the deadline was nearing I was losing motivation but I told myself to just do it because I know it will be worth it in the end. I managed to stay on track and prioritize the things needed for a playable game.

I am currently working on a post jam version with the feedbacks taken into account and I am losing some motivation again :D but I will make sure to finish it even if I'm working on it slowly and bit by bit. After that, I wanna move on and join some jams in itch.io :)

Now, I want to document some of my experiences for my future self to read. You can go ahead and skip this.

What went wrong

When I was testing, I came across a bug that the tower never gets fixed but never gets destroyed either. My implementation for the tower fixing was that after the player successfully inputs the combination, there will be a short delay before the tower is restarted. Initially the delay was 1 second so I tried changing it to .2 and I thought I got rid of the bug but later on I came across the same problem. Upon further debugging and researching I found out that any Coroutine that was started will stop working if the object running it is deactivated.

As a way to show (when overheated) or hide the fix inputs when the tower is selected or unselected I was deactivating the object that contained the fix inputs. To fix it, I added a bool so that the object isn't deactivated when the tower is about to be restarted.

Another "problem" I came across is related to object pooling. The tower keeps on firing at the same enemy even if it already died (and reused again for another enemy) and is out of range. I spent a day or so debugging it. I even guessed that it might be because the enemy died in the same frame and the tower hasn't changed target. The next day I decided to look for help in the Unity forums. It was a long post. When I was about to click the submit button, I thought suddenly came to mind: "Have you set your currentTarget variable to null before acquiring another target?". So I did that and my problem was fixed! WHAT!

What went right

I had a lot of motivation right at the start and I focused on the core mechanic which is the key sequence inputs for the tower. It felt like I knew what to do and how to do it so I didn't really have problems with it.

I was quite satisfied with the organization of my code such as separation of concerns, singletone managers and all that.

I finally got round to compiling the timelapse video for my Ludum Dare 46 entry. Check it out here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2IhsKSVee8

This is the best either of us have done in a LD with 70 in humor and 63 in overall!!! We also got the most feedback we have ever had with 43 rating. Thank you to everyone who played the game, we got a lot of really nice feedback.

Go check out our game if you haven't already. We put a lot into it and it can be beaten in around five minutes.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/save-the-sun-man

So I've spent the last few days fighting with Phaser, VS Code, Cordova, Grendel, and Android Studio trying to get my HTML5 game to mobile. This morning, success!

Is it just me or are the build chains getting more complicated as time goes on? Does anyone else miss the Flash days? :laughing:

We now have an actual story!

There are also a number of small fixes based off the feedback the community provided :) We couldn't be more proud of it's final version.

Try it here: LINK

Come watch me: https://www.twitch.tv/oddlyspecificgames

Added the much requested tutorial and some visual effects.

Give it a go

Here is a turn-based warm-up game I made in the week before LD46:

It's available here.

My LD46 entry spawned a game called Mourning. It uses the same code-base, and it's also winnable in <10 minutes (typically).

https://youtu.be/2r1Y71W0LOo

I'm pretty please with most of these results, but coming 8th for Humor is just crazy

SO I know the results have been out for some days now,but I checked it out just now. Actually I had another jam result declared the same day which I was expecting to almost win but the game lost miserably so I was kinda too depressed for some time to check the ludum dare game ratings, because I honestly was not statisfied with my game and expected a rank between 3000-3500, but I was shocked to see my game was in the top 500,that really uplifted my mood and helped motivate me a lot more. So a BIG Thanks you the whole community. I do plan to release a complete version of the game for both mobile and pc after this because of the game's success. Again, thanks a lot to all the people who played my game.

Thank you everyone for this incredible Ludum Dare. So much amazing games and congratulations to the winners. It was a first for me and we are happy with our overall 118th place and fun 63th place. We just updated a post-JAM version of our game with more levels, better UI and new music.

We have more ideas of mechanics and graphics to bring in our game and I hope to continue to work on it from time to time (depending on feedbacks and availability).

Hope to see you soon rolling ^^.

Many thanks,

Khyrgrim.

Hi folks!

Another LD is over, and as always it was fun. There are many many games are created- and that's super cool. As for me, in last game jams I used to spend only part of time on jam (because of regular job, other things). And maybe it had an impact (negative) on the result. But in one game guy cited a quote of Jonathan Blow:

If you take breaks during a game jam, your game’s gonna suck!”

And I was really impressed by it! Since next game jam I gonna do my best.

And I regret about not playing many other's games 😟 Because even among these games I've played there are very good games, that I really loved! Very good concepts, and art, and fun! I think in each game one can learn something new.

So, thanks for reading this 😉 And thanks for creating games! Good job guys, let's keep going on!

I have been working on some platformer control scripts.

If you guys have a minute I would love it if you could try them on itch.io and give me some feedback. Here is the link: https://voidsay.itch.io/platformer-movement-script-demo

Sometimes the jump key isn't being detected. I have been wondering if it has something to do with unity or with my wornout keyboard.

Update/TLDR:

I have an improved jump, but it still needs work. It isn't the keyboards fault it's a Unity oddity

Here's the time lapse video for the development of my LD46 game Chicken Little. Unfortunately, the GarageBand music composition portion was lost due to a permissions issue with OBS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39Hs0ltf1Os

You can still play the game at https://levidsmith.com/games/chicken-little

Thanks to everyone who played and submitted a score to the leaderboard. Here are the top 20 scores:

I turned my LD46 entry into an android game and published it in Google Play. This is a first for me and I would like to thank everyone in the community for the feedback and the kind words.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SuikaDev.GuideTheBot

Kindly check it out! Again thank you all :smile: :heart:

16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16.16

=============== SORRY FOR THIS ===============

Hi play my platformer at: https://bluefire-studio.itch.io/thesummit

Unreal is not the best engine to publish game on the web. Moreover 3D can look bad because the rendering is quite limited. But I really enjoy when people try my games so I had to find a way to publish my game on the web without losing to much on the graphics quality. I found a way to have decent graphics by baking light on the textures with substance. It was a bit tedious because I had to do that for every model but the result is ok for the web. Even if it's too late for this game jam, I think for the next game jam I will start with this technique to publish my game directly on the web.

This is a small timed puzzle game you can finish in 2-3 minutes. Find the correct pump to reanimate the robot by seeing which wire connects to the robot, then activate it. Pump the wrong pump and the robot explodes.

For people who already tried my game at the beginning of the jam, I tried to find a way to make it more interesting so I added more levels, some narration between the levels and improved the overall experience by adding more feedbacks and improving the graphics. Each piece of narration depends on what you did during the level so it reacts a bit on how the player plays.

I hope you'll have some fun if you try it. Thanks to all people who played the game.

Link to play it : https://julienlussiez.itch.io/pumpit Link to the LD page : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pump-it-1

It's been April/August/December since like 2008, why the change to twice a year? This jam is one of the only times of the year I make myself code for fun, does anyone know of any other similarly popular jams that might fill that sudden gap if this is a permanent change?

Also holy crap, just realized there were about twice as many submissions as usual during this crazy time! I feel much better about my ratings now that I know I was competing against so many more people than normal ;)

Those are my percentile scores (I'm audio) from my last 3 (and only LD) jams. The fact that all of my work has been in the top 10 percentile (and one in the top 3!) is amazing and makes me feel ecstatic.

This is because I've only really been making music for about 3 years and I've only been doing game audio for a little over 1 year. I feel like I've found something I truly love doing and I can't wait to explore it further. You all are a fantastic community and I think LD is a very special thing.

Thanks again everyone and I'm excited to see you all at the next one!

ADDENDUM: I used https://ldstats.info to get the above info

This is most likely the final version of my LD46 spinoff game. It was inspired by a photograph of a woman in a 1936 book titled Graphic Design: A Library of Old and New Masters in the Graphic Arts. It takes about 10-15 minutes to play. Pure Javascript.

Play it here: http://www.pub22.net/mourning/

Credits:

Sounds:

Stek59 https://freesound.org/people/Stek59/sounds/457318/, Bradovic https://freesound.org/people/Bradovic/sounds/171992/, dimbark1 https://freesound.org/people/dimbark1/sounds/316797/, camel7695 https://freesound.org/people/camel7695/sounds/437475/

Images:

Seline: Graphic Design: A Library of Old and New Masters in the Graphic Arts by Leon Friend, M.A., and Joseph Hefter, Ph.D. (c1936) https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009078797

Baskets: A Study of the Textile Art in its Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament by William H. Holmes (1888) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17730/17730-h/17730-h.htm

Stone walls: Architecture Classic and Early Christian by Professor T. Roger Smith and John Slater (1882) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29759/29759-h/29759-h.htm

West Castle: Pagan and Christian Rome by Rodolfo Lanciani (1893) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22153/22153-h/22153-h.htm

Egyptian Elements: History of Architecture by A. D. F. Hamlin (1909) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26319/26319-h/arch1.html, The New Gresham Encyclopedia Volume 4, Part 2 (1922) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35844/35844-h/35844-h.htm

Mirror: Colonial Homes and Their Furnishings by Mary H. Northend (1917) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34897/34897-h/34897-h.htm#CHAPTER_XI

Mistletoe Portrait: Women Painters of the World by Walter Shaw Sparrow (1905) http://gutenberg.org/files/39000/39000-h/39000-h.htm#Page_217

I'm happy to report that we've released the post-jam version of Birdie Burglars, now available on both web and mobile platforms!

Please slingshot the meowmies responsibly.

Web: https://cocoamoss.com/birdie-burglars/birdie-burglars.html

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/birdie-burglars/id1509336732

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cocoamoss.birdieburglars

Besides the mobile port, the new release includes a reworked main menu, new particle graphics, a settings screen where you can adjust control direction and sensitivity, a new ending screen, and a jukebox feature where you can listen to the music from the game.

Made a small youtube post about my game. Thoughts behind the game, concept etc :).

https://youtu.be/8IIRgDLe4lY

If anyone wants to collaborate on next game jam do hit me up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCDpVhXqM00

Grave lighter Postjam Version 1.1 Changelog

Polish

• new assets to round out the world
• fixed/improved asset placement across the board
• lamp now swings back and forth instead to staying still while moving
• fixed a few bugs that allowed palyers to skip through walls and escape the map
• improved a few animations
• refined the soundscape

Balance

• lowered the difficulty across the board by raising the light radius/intensity and adjustign the burn rate
• added a few contextual clues that should help guide the player to a puzzles solution
• fixed a few bugs that caused existing clues not to appear

VR Support

The big thing we've been working on is bringing grave lighter to VR! We are using the hardware agnostic Unity XR Toolkit, so it should work with most available VR headsets. While there is plenty to be improved we are very happy how well gravelighter lends itself to the VR experience. * VR Support * several movement options: Teleport, Roomscale movement, walk, snaptrun * VR Tutorial * Seperate Main and Pause menus for VR * Hand driven interactables (levers, pickups, etc)

Check it out!

Yooo, what's up? I am COLO, a hobbyist game-dev. Last month I participated in Ludum Dare 46 for the first time and I was quite surprised to see the feedback that I got after the jam. Since I've been learning unity for about 3 months now, I came up with the idea of improving my game and release it on mobile. The game mechanic is quite simple. You shoot enemies to replenish your constantly draining energy (Genki). Here's what has been done so far... If you have any ideas on how I can improve the game, feel free to comment down below. Hopefully, I plan on releasing it by the end of this week. Thanks, and don't forget, GO BEYOND PLUS ULTRA!!!

I want to thank everyone who played, ranked, and commented on my multiplayer game Life Alive. It was so much fun to build, and I was pleasantly surprised to rank 28th in Innovation 28th and 30th in Theme for my first LD jam!

Based on feedback and me finding a few bugs after the jam, I've made some updates to the code (which I'm declaring as version 0.9.1):

• Fixed server to regenerate the board after 300 generations (so the board doesn't die out completely over time)
• Added a transition between moves so you can easily see what direction you're moving in
• Added small death melody
• Fixed issue where unnamed players were showing empty string instead of "Guest" in event log
• Fixed bird's eye view camera orientation (it was upside-down)
• Fixed issue when connecting and simply watching bird's eye view without first joining the game
• Lowered the sound effects volume
• Added version number to splash screen

Feel free to join in and play at any time! Be sure to invite a friend or ten so you won't be lonely.

So my game is finally online on Google play. Feel free to rate it there.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CrazyFoxGames.KeepYourDreamsAlive

Hello Jammers!

We’re playing your games live on Twitch. Play+Rate might be over, but we're still at it! If your game is in our queue, it might be played today! If you haven't submitted yet, we've got a few good ways to get your game in late. We love having devs in chat with us and we’ll prioritize those games, but we also highlight every game in case you can’t join live.

• When: 3:00-5:00 PM EDT today
• Where: https://twitch.tv/cyberlightgames
• What: The next installment of Ludum Dare to Play 46!

Note: We were unable to participate in the Jam this time so we cannot officially rate anyone, but we would still love to play your game and get you some feedback!

When we got the results from our latest game, Extinction Intervention, the results were a bit disheartening.

We had gone from first place two jams ago to 772nd. Our 16th jam together as a team may have been our worst yet, but that won't discourage us from continuing to create, learn, and have fun. We had decided to try something totally different from our previous games, and we are still proud of the final result.

Looking back at our jam process, we've identified areas where things worked out the way they were planned, areas where we could improve upon, and what our takeaways were from this LD.

For this game we tried to make a frantic, arcadey clicker game. Although the core mechanic is just clicking, each extinction source contributes to gameplay in a different way, vying for your attention.

The meteors represent a constant unstoppable threat, something you have to continuously go back to. The volcanoes force your attention away, if you leave them unchecked they make the entire game space more chaotic even though the threat of a lava rock actually hitting your dinos is pretty rare. The big wave is essentially a tank mob in any other game, with high hit points, if left unchecked will wipe out all your dinos, but takes a long time to get rid of allowing the other disasters to build up. The UFO directly targets a dino, making it the highest priority target.

The goal was to make the player strategically decide what to focus on at any given moment. However, because the core action was too simple and even tiring, it failed to give enough variety and depth to the gameplay. Perhaps if there were different actions to perform, and a greater variety of threats, the game could have been seen as more fun.

Additionally, if we had broken the game up into different Eras of time and focused on delivering each disaster/mechanic with more depth, players would get more moments of achievement and rest and could enjoy the game more.

~Vu (programmer)

From my earliest sketches I’ve always wanted the game to be bright and colorful to evoke a sense of urgency. Pixel art was always on my mind, mostly because it’s a medium I want to improve in. Although I am more comfortable with lower resolution pixel art, I thought that since the game takes place on one single, static setting, I could experiment with a 512x512 canvas.

That decision proved to be fairly costly. The clouds, ground, and water would take me the better part of a day to create, often placing the pixels one at a time, to maintain the pixelart aesthetic I wanted to achieve.

For animated dinosaurs and disasters, I kept the animations around 4 hand-drawn frames to preserve my sanity. The UFO, however, somehow inspired me to hand-animate a painstakingly detailed metal spinning sequence, which was about 9 frames long. To make matters worse, I realized that I had operated on the wrong scale and made the UFO too small. In order for it to be playable, it would need to be twice as large. Scaling up any art means filling in missing information, and with pixel art it means essentially quadrupling the work. Needless to say this was a long and painful ordeal for all 9 frames to be up-rezzed.

Looking back, I could have probably achieved a similar aesthetic with a painted look, and could have saved precious time. But seeing as graphics was our highest rated category this time around, maybe the struggles were worth it in the end.

~Rose (artist)

This time around, I had some external circumstances that kept me from really getting to the audio for a while, and basically just had one shot to come up with an audio theme. I ended up picking a lot of inspiration from the headbobbing dinosaurs. There were some ideas that I really wanted to do, like have separate tracks based on what disasters were active but just didn’t have the time to get to it in the end. The final song has the different tracks put together except the UFO track.

~Johan (musician)

looking back at our entries you’d see that every game we've made varied in its gameplay, art style, and feel. This contributes to the range in our scores and placement.

If you look purely at the placement, it doesn’t give you the big picture. It certainly feels like we were doing better in the earlier jams, consistently making top 50, while now we’re struggling to maintain top 100.

But when you look at the rating value, it tells a different story. Our early sub-50 placements were hardly hitting any 4s, while later we see higher and higher ratings throughout. The quality of our games continues to improve, and a couple drops here and there doesn’t reflect on our abilities, just something may not have vibed with the community.

And finally, we look at the percentile, which takes into account the total number of jam entries:

Out of 3576 entries, 776th place is still in the top 78% percentile. Still the worst overall out of our entries, but not as bad as it may feel! (Fun fact, there were exactly 776 entries back in LD27) It’s astounding seeing the growth of LD and the sheer number of amazing entries each time.

There's definitely an upward trend, as we learn and improve each time! We're trying new things faster, more efficient, and still having fun in the process. We learn new things and pick up new tools along the way. We engage more and more with the community and give back. Most importantly, we'll never stop creating. We'll never stop taking risks.

Thanks for reading!

Challenge yourself to develop a game in three days!

• Develop a game from scratch within the time frame
• Work either individually or as a team
• Use any game engine or programming language
• The theme will be announced when the jam starts

Occurring between July 18th and 21st!

>> Learn more here! (Remember to hit "Join Jam!")

>> Become a part of the Discord community!

Unfortunately we had to miss the last two LD's because we've been working on THIS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EodWWKbK6Ng

This is the "post-jam" version so-to-speak of our LD41 entry!

(the theme was "combine two incompatible genres")

It has come such a long way :)

ANYWAY! You can now wishlist Toodee and Topdee on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1303950/ToodeeandTopdee

Every click helps!

If you're interested in seeing development updates, follow us on Twitter, Discord or Twitch!

Thank you and keep on jamming!

You can help them dance here https://gamejolt.com/games/Bobbleheadswanttodance/490051

or see more here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/bobbleheads-want-to-dance

In this month's Knox Game Design meeting, we show off the LD games created in the Knoxville area. We also had an in-depth discussion on leaderboard security.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYDKLYk55K0

Hello Jammers!

We’re playing your games live on Twitch. Play+Rate might be over, but we're still at it! If your game is in our queue, it might be played today! If you haven't submitted yet, we've got a few good ways to get your game in late. We love having devs in chat with us and we’ll prioritize those games, but we also highlight every game in case you can’t join live.

• When: 11:45 AM - ? PM EDT today
• Where: https://twitch.tv/cyberlightgames
• What: The next installment of Ludum Dare to Play 46!

Note: We were unable to participate in the Jam this time so we cannot officially rate anyone, but we would still love to play your game and get you some feedback!

From scratch C/C++ retro fps/roguelike devlog!

Lighting!

Post-processing!

Tools!

What would you like to see next? :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z_1rzthr8w

Working on my puzzle game which was started at LD46, and the new visuals are starting to get in shape.

What do you think? :slight_smile:

A teaser will soon appear on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/Tudvari