(More images: http://imgur.com/a/iR1sP)

Not going nearly as fast as we (naive-ly) hoped, but I'm quite happy with the pace now:

I crashed in bed immediately after finishing Johi Farm: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/johi-farm So I didn't have the time to show it off. Please give it a try!

I'm just interested in trivia like total number of games submitted (in each category), entry with most comment currently, blog posts with most :heart: etc.

I'm guessing the only way right now is to delve into source code on github?

Grow normal-sized vegetable in a tiny world, try Johi Farm!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/johi-farm

A bit of context: LD38 is my personal first Ludum Dare and 3rd Game Jam. In the beginning I planned to join in Compo, but when I submitted my off-work plan - I teach programming to youths and children at TechKids coding school, hence weekends classes - the other instructors noticed and wanted to join as well.

In the end, most of the main instructors joined and the school decided "Well, it doesn't hurt to close the school for some days". It was all planned right after LD37 ends so it's not like we just spontaneously decide to close down the school, we had plenty of time to organize our courses.

So that's how the team was formed, and we're under pressure that an entire school was following our novice game-making progress. I sincerely hope the end result is not too disappointing to my students.

What went as planned

1. The idea: The first promising idea we had was about a guy who couldn't grow a beard, one day stumbled upon a potion that make him smaller. The guy would then sneak into the house of bearded men and attempt to trim their beard to sate his jealousy. It's also an inside joke because among the instructors only 1 of us managed to grow a beard.

Could've worked, sound good. But after a while I thought it's too hard to express the idea, and if done poorly the players won't be able to feel the joke. So the idea was scrapped.

After that we talked for awhile, and somehow we reached Harvest Moon and then an idea popup: "Hey what if we make Harvest Moon from the perspective of the 7 helpers? Like how we have to take care of a guy's farm while he runs around picking up flowers to woo girls around the village?"

After some more discussing we decided that idea was a bit too big for a jam, and trimmed the scope down to what we have in the end. That leads to...

2. The scope: I already had experience working with @mitus (our programmer artist) in the recent Global Game Jam, so we kind of know how much content we could pull out in 3 days. In the end, the scope of the game was spot-on: the final Jam version has exactly all we planned from day one, with about 1 hour to spare. The 1 hour before deadline was also planned, we already predicted that the site would go down near the end, and to be safe the Jam version must be submitted earlier.

Actually we almost didn't reach that target. 5 hours before deadline we just finished the 2nd stage of the tree, having worked a full 24 hours without sleep. But we can't bring ourselves to sleep then because the idea of an end game boss fight was too tempting. And @huynq did awesome work pulling out an entire boss in 2 hours. After we got the bird animation from @mitus I was tweaking the battle's design right behind @huynq's back, demand ups and downs of delays again and again for nearly an hour. This fight must be awesome. I'm quite sure near the end of it he was like

But..

3. It was great fun! And I think our game is fun, too! @mitus is great at conjuring child-like imagery, and his characters always surpassed our expectation (just to note he's also a programmer like us). @darknesszx was on music & sfx and despite this being his first time doing actual composing, he did a great job.

What didn't go as planned

1. A Jam team full of programming instructors is a terrible idea. Who the heck brought that up?

Let's admit it: despite my praises, programmer art & programmer music sucks. And because I'm the one most experienced in game making I was tasked with game design. I wanted to code damnit! And I've only read game design books for off-specs entertainment.

One of the most complained flaw in our game was that the water can can't be pulled, only pushed. I already saw that problem during the jam - it's a result of miscommunication - but I thought it's not a big deal and not worth the effort to fix. Guess I was dead wrong.

2. The whole schedule of LD is messed up

I'm happy to have a chance to make games, and I'm thankful to @pov and others who helped make LD. But to be honest: this is the most messed up event I've ever attended.

We ourselves host hackathons on a monthly basis in our school, and we know full well the work load that come with such events. But when something is bad, it's bad. Excuses don't make bad experience good.

We're a pretty busy bunch, and delay after delay messed up our schedule and we couldn't fully enjoyed the post-jam process. When we scheduled our time to prepare for voting, we ended up with an entire day free looking at a delay notice. And when the voting actually started, we're all diving deep in a mountain of work.

What I've learned personally

1. Farsight-ing is pretty benefiting

Heh, that feeling of "I have already seen the ending" at the end of the Jam, when the site went down 5 minutes after we publish our game: It was quite awesome.

2. Anger-management is crucial in teamwork

To be honest we didn't really "hit the ground running". There was a lot of issues at the beginning of the jam. Dead mouses, broken usb cables, corrupted files, etc. Minor problems after minor problems. And I snapped. I was quite frustrated with my teammates for their lack of preparation and it showed. I didn't realize my attitude was destroying the team's morale, I just have to give them a piece of my mind.

On the afternoon of day 2, I turned around and suddenly realized that it had stopped being fun for the guys.

A Game Jam is not a dead-or-alive race. I was taking it too seriously, too selfishly. I'm sure the guys feel bad about the issues too, and it doesn't help if I as the leader delve too deep into it.

So I changed my attitude, barely in time I guess. By the end of the Jam, everyone's laughing again, enjoying the creative work we planned to do in the beginning.

3. I really should seriously learn how to make proper shaders

I spent 3 hours trying to create a 2d "glow" effect for sprites without avail! I didn't realize it was so hard. 9-pixels alpha blur only work well on pixel art. When I try different blur methods they all kill performance and impractical for any kind of web build.

In the end that's 3 hours wasted and I've yet to get any decent glow shader yet. Would love to see someone experienced with Unity's shader sharing some insight here.

====

So, that's it for my post-mortem. It can be summed up to: It was fun, the event schedule was terrible, and I should learn proper anger-management.

And also, try my game! There's no point sugar-coating the fact that I'm advertising here :D

I find it really strange that really comes second :sweat_smile:

If your game is - like mine - too deep under the stack of games, it's not a simple task to look for it in the list.

So I slapped together a quick query that check a game's position in the coolness list. Check it out for yourself :smile_cat:

There's only some days left in the judging period, and I thought it's a good idea to help out those games that are close to being ranked.

This tool I made fetch games that are under 20 votes right now in 1 or more categories.

If you're in the mood for some voting, why not help those who seems to need that 1 single vote most? :smile_cat:

Yesterday when I made this tool to help out games close to 20 votes, there was more than 500 games lacking vote for ranked. And guess what, just now I checked again and

That's more than 100 games reaching the requirement in less than 24 hours!

Keep on playing guys, it's helping! :muscle:

Hey everyone, I just want to update that I've added a "find game that need votes in all categories" feature based on popular demands.

http://vatcss.info/ld38votes/ Rate away! :smile_cat:

SPOILER: None of them are mine *runs away crying*

Well after embarrassing myself again by forgetting the distinction between Compo and Jam, here's the updated list with Jam and Compo games separated. Cheers!

Hello guys! This my second Ludum Dare and my 4th game jam overall. I was (and am) really excited because unlike last time when I joined with friends, this time I participated along with my own students who I taught personally.

For LD40, I think we improved quite a bit comparing to last time, most notably we have a dedicated artist. Despite being his debut game jam he was the one who conjured the game's idea. I loved it immediately because not only is it immediately fun, it also have a subtle layer of philosophy underneath.

For the game's design. I think the lesson I had from last LD was very educative. This time I kept the player base (other Jammers) in mind throughout the process and designed the game based on it. There are 2 clear distinctions between LD jammers and a random player that I noted:

• LD Jammers are surprisingly careful to read. Maybe because we have to create tutorials and lore ourselves, we're also careful to read a game's story. Taking advantage of that we added some background story for the game and it seems everyone paid attention to it (excuses the non-native English). It make me really happy - phrasing all that stuff was not easy. I think while gameplay make a game, lore make the game realistic and extensible.
• LD Jammers won't spend a lot of time playing your game. This shouldn't come as a surprise at all: given the number of submitted games, surely anyone would want to spend their time wisely and play as many games as possible. The result of that is no one would spend a lot of time mastering tricky moves or exploring non-obvious secrets (they would but only if your game is really, really good). That's why we created a game where you literally cannot lose. Everyone can enjoy the full game to the end, and if they liked it, we made it obvious that they can try again for better contents.

The resulting game is satisfying for me personally, the game got quite positive feedback from both LD Jammers and our friends, much better than last time's (nowhere near Managoore's, but well).

But most importantly it shown I've learned a lot from last time.

It is not all roses though, there're a lot of things we could have improved, like how we were nowhere nearly as hardcore as last time (we actually slept 4 times in 3 days!) because half of us caught a cold before or during the jam.

The pixel art could be better, and at panic rush moment I had to scale some assets on the HUD and broke pixel scale. There was a @!#$%& sound bug on WebGL that took me 3 hours and still unfixable now, and we had to workaround by removing that particular sfx - we should've checked WebGL compatibility earlier. And we almost submitted a test version (immediate gameover!) and went to sleep, luckily a friend played the game at the time and notified me about it, just in time for the fix.

It was a wild ride, and it was really fun! Looking forward to next one!

(Cleaning up the room after use was not an easy task)

And of course, the mandatory shameless advertisement: Play my game! I always play others' game carefully and give constructive feedbacks, not just "Nice", "Great", "Ok" :smile:

But since every wordcloud has "game" and "really", let's remove it, shall we?

I'm quite happy with the result of this LD, so if you haven't played our entry Phaeria's Mine, please give it a go! :smile:

Discord or gitter for example?

I'm just wondering, because it's hard getting the updates sometimes. We missed LD39 because I forgot to check the website.

I would like to express my gratitude to all you guys for playing Phaeria's Mine. The game ended up ranked 16th in the Jam Overall category! :smile:

We were blown away by this result, it truly exceeded our expectation!

I personally believe there's still much potential for the game though, and after some discussion we all agreed that the game deserve a better version. We've started development on the game with the intention to release Phaeria's Mine as a full game on PC.

=====

There's so many possibilities for the game, so we'd love to have more feedback & ideas from our fellow gamedevs. This post is an official invitation for those interested: join us in Phaeria's Mine discussion group!

If you're interested in joining, simply drop a message here and we'll invite you into our Facebook/Discord group :heart:

Thanks again for playing, and I'm taking the liberty to massively tagging people who have rated the game below :wink:

@maximebou @lugdumdare-team @erlatronics @fusionnist @scriptorum @shivur @poshdan @kyle-pham @gruhh @king-kujito @louspirit @darkfire92 @turbulentwinds @svr-audio @law5guy @lars-dk @vfabien21 @rongo-matane @artur-hawkwing @ted @deathray @ddrkirbyisq

Hi guys,

Last time I made a game for 2 players, and it didn't go very well because most people play LD games alone (let's conveniently forget the fact that my last game sux ^^' ).

I still intend to make shared screen game this time, so as insurance I'm asking ahead for people who can play this type of game. Due to this being a pre-jam shoutout, I can only tell that I'll making a split screen or shared screen game for 2 players or more.

===

If you have friend/family who can play together offline, please tell me in the comment, and after the Jam I'll ping you (by prioritize playing your games first) so you'll remember me and play mine ☺️

===

Hi guys,

Last time I made a game for 2 players, and it didn't go very well because most people play LD games alone (let's conveniently forget the fact that my last game sux ^^' ).

I still intend to make shared screen game this time, so as insurance I'm asking ahead for people who can play this type of game. Due to this being a pre-jam shoutout, I can only tell that I'll making a split screen or shared screen game for 2 players or more.

===

If you have friend/family who can play together offline, please tell me in the comment, and after the Jam I'll ping you (by prioritize playing your games first) so you'll remember me and play mine ☺️

===

This is the last re-post of my shout out. I'm sorry for spamming :)

2020: Scientists announced the failure of all climate change prevention efforts. It is now too late to save humanity. No matter what we do now, the damage is irreversible. Earth's climate will slowly plummet into chaos, until it reach the point where no life can survive.

===

2070: Despite the death penalty, scientists herald of the end was a relief. Humanity's final restrain was broken.

No longer do we need to care about, what, "recycle, reduce, reuse".

No longer do we have to prevent car's exhaust releasing toxic into the air.

The Earth would be dead soon anyway, why would we care?

Complete freedom pushed the boundary of nature's last defense, and it collapsed. Hundreds of years sooner than even the smartest of us would've expected.

We have imaged a thousand ways humanity would end, we were only trying to dismiss the truth we all knew: humanity will die by its own hand.

===

2080: 99% of life was eliminated. Humanity's collaborate effort built one single spaceship, big enough to bring (not you) some last thousands of humanity's populace into space.

It would be our last bet to search for another sustainable planet to destroy, or face extinction in darkness.

Skype wants to install something that Windows doesn't support...

Get your ** together Microsoft!!