Just woke up, really want some pancakes.

Tags: cakes, Pan, pancakes

First, congratulations to everyone who participated this year! There were so many entries I was sure I would have been swept away in the flood.

I was extremely pleased to see this wasn’t the case, and placed my best out of several Ludum Dare events. Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game, I really appreciate it.

This is a huge morale boost considering there have been events where I’ve given up at the theme announcement, I feel invigorated and am already looking forward to LD38

You can play Hoplitelite by clicking here.

OMG!

Play Interrogation Room

 

Tags: compo, DiscoFish, final, LD37, Ludum Dare

Now I want macaroni and cheese.

Probably going to make some Bone app the teeth!

Tags: Bone app the teeth, cheese, jellyfish, mac

If you missed the chance to play my game : My Game

This Game Jam has been exciting and the most fun I’ve had making games. I really enjoyed making my game and I am planning to expand on my game in the future, regardless of what the ratings are. Anyway here is my results.

Coolness 61% #282 Humor(Jam) 3.04 #438 Innovation(Jam) 3.11 #457 Theme(Jam) 3.57 #485 Audio(Jam) 2.72 #713 Fun(Jam) 2.71 #781 Mood(Jam) 2.52 #793 Overall(Jam) 2.79 #798 Graphics(Jam) 2.41

 

Even though I did not do as good as I thought I would, I still did pretty well and still want to continue working on this game. If I decide to update it  I will be on here to let everyone know.

See ya!

 

 

 

 

What a surprise !
We’re so glad that we’ve had a 3,86/5 on overall rating, which makes us 125th of this jam, over 2400 games !
But more, we’ve got a solid 4,16/5 on innovation rating, leading us up to the 37th place !
Such a significative category for us ! 😉

2017 is going to be an amazing and productive year for FafaStudio ! 😀
We hope you’ll be there to witness it !

 

Our game !

 

Fafastudio Facebook

My first Ludum Dare was LD36 but as everyone is probably aware of the compo wasn’t rated that time around. I was eager and exciting to find out the results this time but I had mixed feelings about it. I was hoping for a top 100 over all, and decent placement in graphics and audio. I fell short of all the top lists (category top-25 and overall top-100) but at the same time I am not disappointed or discouraged. I knew that I made a trade off by “only” spending 20 hours on the game as I did a lot of other stuff during the same weekend. Considering I didn’t even think I would have a game to submit when 12 hours remained (I made most of the game in the last 12 hours) I’m pleased with the results!

I will strive to have more original gameplay in my next entry.  Game design and mechanics are probably where I have least experience and what I find to be the most challenging so it’ll be great to practice that more.

Thanks to everyone who played, rated, and commented on my game and related YouTube videos.

My Results:

#39 Graphics 4.22 #40 Audio 3.86 #112 Overall 3.70 #121 Humor 3.22 #152 Fun 3.55 #161 Mood 3.44 #201 Theme 3.84 #356 Innovation 3.01 #1071 Coolness 41%

 

Wow! My game Space Captive did very well for my second LD event.

It barely missed top 25 innovation and top 100 overall. An all the categories were within 300!

These ratings kind of blew my mind! Also the game had pretty good comments and I was generally happy with the game myself too, and i think that is what matters the most.

There was probably two things that I might have done to make my game and the ratings better
*I should have made the bugfix for the game right away
*and I should have made web version(which I couldn’t do, due to the way I had coded the game)

However all in all I would say this was great success for me and my game.

Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game

I didn’t expect that but my ratings are really good. Thank you for your kindness. I received 93 votes – which is my best score (and I rated 163 projects). I started this project using a new shader and I didn’t go wrong – #35 for Graphiscs and #61 Overall. Now I am working on this project so as to create an interesting puzzle game. As usual, this LudumDare event was great. I wish you the best – my dear fellows. Bye ++

RoomOne entry

I was up till about 2-something AM waiting for results. I was probably one of the first people to see the results. 😛

I think I did okay. I got above average in every category. xD

Made it into the top 100 for Innovation though.

The theme was one of the three I really didn’t want. (Five Minutes, One Room, and Simplicity) I also restarted with only 29 hours left.

I think that my biggest mistake was making a game that takes more than 2 minutes to play. :/ Next time, I’ll make an in-game tutorial. In my first LD, I got 17 fake ratings on my game. (17 less downloads than ratings) This time I timed when I rated games to avoid that, and it worked! 😀 I’m really looking forward to the next LD. Hopefully it’ll have a decent theme and I won’t have to restart. 😛

Check out my game here.

 

Rating Percentages:

Innovation – Top 8.5%

Theme – Top 28.8%

Fun – Top 29%

Overall – Top 33.7%

Graphics – Top 38.1%

Mood – Top 38.2%

Humor – Top 40.8%

Audio – Top 43.6%

View post on imgur.com

This was one crazy Ludum Dare filled with surprises, problems, and a lot of fun. My team and I were also not expecting the theme “One Room” to be selected and we were very surprised when it was revealed.

Our original idea was to have a large, spacious room in which random obstacles are generated and the player is forced to fly around and fight against AI enemies. This turned out to be much too complex and uninteresting for the team. The next idea we had involved the player adventuring around a huge scaled-up room, completing missions and fighting enemies, with a medieval theme. Unfortunately, once again, this turned out to be much too complex for the team, so the idea evolved slightly. We kept the large, scaled-up room, but drastically simplified things by:

• removing most textures
• switching to a much simpler color scheme
• switching to a simpler low-poly model style
• simplifying and improving the performance of the lighting

Due to a lack of time, we also had to simplify the enemies and gameplay. Our original idea was to have animated, billboard-style enemies, but since we had changed the theme of the game, we had to scrap this. The new enemy style was heavily inspired by the No Man’s Sky Logo, where enemies would be diamond-shaped with a random, rotating 3D primitive in the center of the diamond. Next, we had to simplify weapons. We were originally planning on having a large variety of melee weapons, but with the changes to the enemies and theme, we had to switch to projectile-based weapons. Eventually, though, we had to scrap these weapon ideas and opt for a simplistic projectile-based system using rigidbodies.

The most unfortunate event to happen for me this Ludum Dare was probably the contraction of some unknown disease that was like a blend of the cold, the flu and a sore throat. This had a severe impact on progress, as my team was unable to work on late Sunday and all of Monday, and I was deathly ill on Monday with a fever of 101° F. This severely impeded my ability to work on the game, leading to more issues caused by a lack of time.

Despite all of these problems, though, I think The Living Room Battlescape turned out quite well. The reviewers seem to agree with this sentiment as well:

The results for Ludum Dare 37 are finally in. For my team’s first Ludum Dare ever, we managed to get into the top 25 for Audio!

Could things have been better? Of course. But at the same time, I think being able to place that high in at least one category is in itself a great thing. The difference in the average score between us and the top ranking Audio score was less than 0.5. Truly it was a close race.

In the previous game jam my team, Team Spontaneous Combustion, had participated in, we placed 20th in Audio out of ~400 entries with a ~3.9 average rating. So to have 55 people give the game a 4.35 average rating for Audio (assuming all those people rated the Audio category) is a considerable improvement, in my opinion. Even with the rankings that fell below #100 – I mean, there are thousands of entries, so we could think of our entry as placing in the top 26% and whatnot. Just the fact that we could create what we’d normally take a week to do into 72 hours is impressive, and the same goes for everyone who participated in Ludum Dare. It’s hard enough working in a team to make something in 72 hours, so I can’t even imagine how people make playable games in 48 hours on their own. 😛

---

 

When we first released our entry, Spellbound, I wasn’t sure if it was going to do that great. Ludum Dare 37 fell at one of the worst times for me, with exams coming up on the horizon and work that was scheduled on two of the three days I had to complete the OST. As a result, I didn’t spend as much time with the audio for the game as I wanted to, creating the tracks within a couple of hours and being like “meh, I don’t really know how to develop this so I guess I’ll loop it”. Surprisingly, I was able to create music based on the different books that were opened, all except for the final stage. I had, at first, thought of remixing the previous water book track for the final stage (’cause you know, ice is a solid form of water :P), but due to a loaded schedule, ran out of time.

Overall, I’m really happy that a lot of people enjoyed the music to Spellbound and am very proud to have worked with Team Spontaneous Combustion on our third game jam, and first Ludum Dare in general. There were a lot of wonderful entries in this Ludum Dare and I’m glad to have played and rated quite a few.

If you haven’t checked out Spellbound yet, give it a look at here! The game is playable on web (but the download gives you better resolution options).

~Random-storykeeper

 

 

Tags: LD37, Ludum Dare 37, music, spellbound, team spontaneous combustion

Wait! Don’t do your percentages yet!

Before you do percentages, you need to know how many people you were even competing with. Now it’s easy to just think: Oh, well there were 1489 jam entries and 901 compo entries, so it should be easy, right?

No! Bad boy!

Not everyone competed on all ratings, and more importantly, not everyone got enough votes to get a rating everywhere. You can only compete against the entries with enough ratings. You simply cannot make the assumption that all the entries with insufficient ratings “were worse” than the ones with. Statistics simply don’t work that way.

So here’s the short of it. This is how many entries got a rating in each of the categories. If you want to determine your position, use these numbers and not the global ones. Yes, your scores will be worse, but at least they will be accurate.

JAM ENTRIES

Humor: 643 entries received a score

Theme: 897 entries received a score

Fun: 885 entries received a score

Audio: 552 entries received a score

Mood: 826 entries received a score

Graphics: 848 entries received a score

Overall: 917 entries received a score

Innovation: 848 entries received a score

COMPO ENTRIES

Humor: 424 entries received a score

Theme: 624 entries received a score

Fun: 621 entries received a score

Audio: 446 entries received a score

Mood: 536 entries received a score

Graphics: 598 entries received a score

Overall: 640 entries received a score

Innovation: 596 entries received a score

How did I get these numbers?

By scraping the whole site. You can find a table with every single entry and data about it here:

Ludum Dare 37 Data (Big, big table)

If you would like to do analysis on this data, I also provide it in JSON form, available here: Ludum Dare 37 data (JSON)

Data from previous jams is also available: LD36, LD35, LD34, LD33, LD32, LD31, LD30, etc. Just edit the number in the URL for previous jams, or change it from .html to .json to get the json version.

If you just so happen to run http://ldstats.info/ you’re welcome to use this data and make the site way, way more useful! 😀

😀 LOVE YOU! <3

~Lime

Here’s the ranks and ratings for Super Battle Cycle, my entry!

Click for LD page

Wonderful! They’re the best ranks I’ve gotten in any entry. I think I will continue developing the game to eventually sell it… I hope it goes well, I’ve never tried selling a game before.

It would have been nice to get top 100 in Overall, but I’m satisfied with hitting top 100 in two other categories 😀 Congrats to the winners.

Great Ludum Dare, guys. Thanks everyone for playing, keep updated on future plans for the game on GameJolt and Twitter!

Tags: LD37, results

This is mostly for our sake, but we hope that anyone who reads this can help learn from our experience.

Our Entry: At Night They Come

In this analysis, we’ll be going category by category to examine what we did right and what we did wrong, and what we can improve for next time.

Humor: This wasn’t a category we were particularly invested in, hence it was one of our lowest scores.

Audio: One of our larger complaints was that the audio feedback for attacks was unsatisfying, and that it left some players confused. This was a feature that went under our radar while we were developing, by the time we added some it was too late. However, Keagan and Joel, our music developer friends, did a lot of good work. Overall the music side of things was fine, I don’t feel like we need to change much of anything there.

Theme: I feel we used the theme pretty well, having the game take place in a child’s room. We could’ve improved the technical side of things however, instead of making a separate screen for a menu, help, winning, and dying. Stylistically we followed the theme well, on the technical side we didn’t really. We’ll try to be more strict about how far we need to deviate from the theme.

Mood: We tried to keep the mood generally light through this, while still making the game at least somewhat immersive. This again wasn’t a category we were heavily invested in, however our score was a bit better than Humor.

Graphics: Graphics is usually either a hit or miss. It all depends on people’s graphical preferences and what styles they like. Our style was a bit mixed, jumping between minimalism to some detail in different parts of the game. The palate, I think,  stays pretty consistent, and highlights important objects/enemies, which is always important. There were some sloppy mistakes here and there, and some sprites were hard to nail (specifically the bed bugs) and it inevitably led to some sprites being over simplistic to make time for other ones. In the end however it looked pretty good, we’ll be looking to improve time management  and a more centered graphical style for next time.

Fun: This is the most important category for us, because if your game isn’t fun, what’s the point? We scored a little lower in this category than we would’ve liked, but after some time we have managed to find some reasons. The first is that enemy spawns were inconsistent, sometimes you could go a really long time without a single enemy spawning, or sometimes you’d get hoarded by one specific enemy and nothing else. Another reason is that we didn’t implement a better shooting system, and it was very hard to shoot some enemies with the in-game version. Another factor was again the lack of audio feedback. Although some of these issues aren’t present in all genres, it shows that we need to dedicate more time pre-release to making sure the game is balanced and fun. In my opinion, the formula is much better now, it has some minor hiccups but we’ve definitely tried to improve it.

Innovation: We couldn’t come up with a lot of ideas for how to make a good twist for this. The idea was there, and I think it’s pretty unique. The enemies and their mechanics were fun to work on, too. Again, not a category we were overly concerned about.

Overall/Final Thoughts: When it’s all said and done, we made a nice little arena shooter in 72 hours for our first official Ludum Dare. We didn’t expect this to win any awards, but rather to get some good tips on what we can improve for April, and also what we’re currently developing. After all,  what’s the point of participating in a game jam if you don’t use the feedback you get? We had a great time making this, and seeing all the other entries for this, and that’s what’s really important to us. Congratulations to everyone who participated, and we hope our analysis gives you some valuable information.

Until April, best wishes – The Gamechoy Team

The dust has settled, and the fat lady has sung. The results are in.

The higher scores can be attributed to several things: a capable artist, Ren’Py’s improved UI system, and my own experience in the engine.

Regarding the criticisms of This One Room (namely the eye-killing red in the UI and issues with the writing), I will smooth out those issues for an eventual Steam release. This version made for LD37 is not the final, ultimate one, after all. It will be included in a commercial re-release, which will be a compilation.

Now bring it on, Global Game Jam!

(Cross-post: http://jollysword.livejournal.com/154468.html)

The results are in!  I was thrilled to get #3 in Fun, which is a fantastic honor, along with Top 25 showings in Innovation and Overall.  I’m super excited by this, and think it’s fun enough to refine for release.  I’m all right with all the rating really, but I was surprised I didn’t get lower scores for Mood and Graphics, honestly.  I’m not an artist at all, but I wonder what I could have achieved if I had spent more than a few minutes on my graphic sprites, or tried doing them in pixel art.  Just a half hour of dedicated revision to my visuals near the end as the game coalesced might have been more impactful than the minor additional features I added during that time.

Cardinal Cell (LD37, December 2016)

This is a great boost compared with my quite mediocre first Dare last year, which isn’t surprising since for that one I didn’t really have a clear vision of my gameplay until almost the halfway mark…  I just winged it the whole time. This lack of clarity of purpose as well as my inexperience with 48-hour jams certainly contributed.  In the end I’m sure I was just coasting on the boost I got from Lovecraft fans by coining some Cthulhu chants.

Arkham Madness (LD34, December 2015)

In hindsight my experiences indicate that having a clear gameplay plan was critical to my success, and last year it may have benefited me to take up to an entire hour to detail all the mechanics I intended to create.  And as I’ve said before, your game is all part of a single package…  It’s entirely possible (and very human) if people were more charitable on my graphics and sound if they had fun, just as baller graphics and sound could have improved people’s impressions of how much fun they had (although thank god they didn’t drag down my Fun ratings this time! :-).

Well, looking at the score my game got, I’m realizing something…
It wasn’t very good.

#463 Audio(Jam) 2.82
#603 Humor(Jam) 2.05
#724 Innovation(Jam) 2.55
#733 Mood(Jam) 2.70
#772 Graphics(Jam) 2.55
#790 Coolness 49%
#809 Fun(Jam) 2.43
#844 Theme(Jam) 2.41
#880 Overall(Jam) 2.50

I knew I wouldn’t do AMAZING but I thought I’d do better than this! I started messing up on day 2 and started hard-coding things without functions or classes. This was terrible, and it’s something you should never do. It made for a lot and a lot of bugs, but I would have to fix each of them individually because they were all unrelated. This made for a lot of visual bugs, where things would disappear right before you left a room, or things would appear right before a fade in. Also a couple of falling through the world bugs which also sucked.

There are a lot of things I learned from this Ludum Dare:

• Never hard code things you use more than once! Go the extra mile or it will come back to haunt you later in development
• Add a main menu, all it needs is a play button. Without it, your game looks like even more of a mess
• Get mechanics down as quickly as possible
• It’s better to have some great gameplay instead of some good gameplay combined with some buggy last-minute gameplay

Oh, and you can play it here.

Tags: gamedev ld37 ludumdare37

If you are coming to MAGFest we are hosting a 2 hour tabletop game jam Saturday at 3:30. No experience is necessary and supplies will be provided. There are also several other really cool game jam panels this year including my “How to make a game in 48 hours” panel tomorrow! I hope to see you there!

 

 

Tags: MAGJam

December was tough for me. Finally after the new year I put together a version of the game with new visitors. And more difficulties!
Thank you for the warm feedback. You inspire me to continue making this game.

play game