I feel like this probably isn't how it's supposed to be done?

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|

(Based on data grabbed from the API)

Another day older and deeper in debt.

I've completed The Company Store, a game about going deeper and deeper into debt. It's also about mining, but the mining is coincidental and not intended to relate to the "deeper and deeper" theme.

It's a match 3 game with a bit of strategy to it.

I've balanced the game so that it's basically impossible not to rack up more and more debt, until you eventually go to debtors' prison. I guess the goal is to last as long as possible, arcade-style. This all makes sense thematically, but in retrospect making a game where the best thing you can do is not be in as much debt as you might otherwise have been is probably not great for making the player feel like they're accomplishing something...

Is it just me, or are most Unity WebGL games not working in Firefox? I've tried on two different OSes (Linux and MacOS) on two different computers.

I downloaded the entry data (via the ldjam API) to do some fun data analysis.

My first thought was to (approximately) count how many people chose certain popular interpretations of the "deeper and deeper" theme, by searching the description text. Here are the results:

|Pattern | # | |------------------------------------------------------------|------| | mine/drill/dig/underground | 768 | | ocean/sea/underwater/submarine/dive/fish | 701 | | dungeon/cave | 367 | | hell/devil/demon/satan/lucifer | 198 | | sleep/dream/nightmare | 173 | | past/history/memory/memories | 135 | | deep space/outer space/spaceship/deep in space/ | 62 | | woods/forest | 96 | | debt | 34 | | desert | 13 | | philosophy/philosopher/emotion/deep idea/deep conversation | 7 |

Of course, some games will be double-counted, and space games are probably under-counted (but just searching for "space" returns 835 games, which definitely over counts because it'll include mentions of the space bar).

A more data-driven followup to my previous post. I tried to extract all explicit theme statements from game descriptions (i.e. statements of roughly the form "deep(er) in (noun phrase)", and I made a word cloud of the results:

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that there are more games about the ocean than there are about caves, just that there are more games that explicitly mention going "deeper into the cave" than there are that mention "deeper in the ocean" (edit: in fact, while there are only 192 descriptions containing the word "ocean" vs. 247 descriptions containing "cave", there are 243 containing the word "dive", so I'm pretty sure that there are more ocean games than cave games overall; they just don't tend to explicitly mention the ocean.).

Here's a word cloud based on game descriptions. I tried to extract the verb from all phrases of roughly the form "(verb) deep[er and deeper] into (noun phrase)", although a few non-verbs also seem to have snuck in.

Also check out the nouns (i.e. what are we going deeper into?) if you haven't already.

Here are the total number of games with a reported rank in each category, according to data downloaded from the API just now, in case anyone wants to calculate what percentile they fall in.

|Category | Compo | Jam | |----------|-------|-----| |overall | 898 | 1920| |fun | 898 | 1920| |innovation| 898 | 1920| |theme | 898 | 1920| |graphics | 876 | 1773| |audio | 708 | 1286| |humor | 647 | 1436| |mood | 831 | 1804|

I've always been a bit skeptical about the usefulness of sentiment analysis, but Ludum Dare comments are basically reviews, which are essentially the canonical setting where sentiment analysis is supposed to be meaningful, so I figured it might be interesting to take a look at the sentiment of comments from LD48. I downloaded all comments via the ldjam.com api, and measured their sentiment using VADER via NLTK.

As you've probably already noticed, the vast majority of comments are positive:

The average sentiment is 0.668 (where 1 is most positive, -1 is most negative, and 0 is neutral), and only 7.5% of comments are negative (sentiment < 0). The sentiment is slightly lower among anonymous comments, but even then the average sentiment is 0.336 and only 21.4% of comments are negative. Moreover, there are hardly any anonymous comments (only 112 out of 82973 comments, or about 0.13%, are anonymous).

So, given that comments are overwhelmingly positive, is sentiment (as measured by VADER) a meaningful measurement? Well, it does seem that the average sentiment of comments on a game is correlated with the game's final score:

So there is a signal here, but it's not particularly strong. However, if we restrict our analysis to games with a larger number of comments, the correlation becomes a lot higher, presumably due to the Law of Large Numbers:

For comparison, here are the correlations between the overall score and various category scores:

So if you have a very large number of comments, VADER sentiment can be about as relevant to the overall score as people's actual numerical reviews in categories like Audio, Innovation, and Graphics. But for the vast majority of games (i.e. about 90% have less than 40 ratings) the signal is about as meaningful as the Humour score, which is the least important of all category scores.

Hypothetically, if there are ties for 14th and 6th in the Compo category, what order will they be tweeted in?

Serum Run is my most successful Compo entry to date (got 19th in Mood, and personal bests in Overall and Graphics), and I've released a post-jam update with some music, bug fixes, UI improvements, and a bit more content.

I have more ideas for narrative content, but part of me feels like continued work on the game will have seriously diminishing returns, because who's gonna play it now that the ratings period is over? I mean, unless I'm willing to put serious time & money into developing a "product" that can be marketed, kickstarted et cetera, what are the odds that enough people actually play it to justify the additional effort?

Maybe it's different if you make the top 10 or have an existing online following, I guess. But it seems like after the rating period ends, sharing your game around online stops being part of a pro-social community activity and starts to verge into unwanted marketing/self-promotion, and the quality bar to justify this sort of marketing is so high.

What do y'all think about post-jam updates and diminishing returns in terms of potential viewership?