The results for my first COMPO and third entry in Ludum dare have finally come out, here they are: In this post I am going to break down each category and share my thoughts on it while also comparing them to my last Ludum dare entry from 2 years ago "Project Minima"

Fun was one of the games strong point and a ~0.14 stars increase in ratings from the last game. This was definitely my top priority when it came to the game. I tried my best to make this game as balanced as I could within the given deadline.

This games innovation ratings is a giant improvement from the last game, almost a 1 star increase. This is my first game jam where I actually got out of my comfort zone and didn't just make some basic platformer and it seems that it paid off greatly.

This is another category with a lot of improvement, an increase of just a little over 1 star. I don't know if people noticed this, but I attempted to implement the theme in two different ways: First are the tax collectors and second is the market where you collect various trinkets in order to profit off them.

Unfortunately Graphics is one of two categories that actually saw a decline in ratings, about 0.35 stars. It's also the one with the lowest placements. Graphics definitely suffered the most from the tight deadline. The sprites themselves aren't bad, but the house that makes up like 1/5 of the screen is very unfinished and the game lacks any form of foreground meaning there is a lot of empty blue space coming from the background. There is also the fact that the game uses the default font and some default Godot button UI which does not fit the pixel art aesthetics at all.

Audio is the games weak point when it comes to pure ratings, it's also another 0.35 starts decrease from the last entry. This makes sense since Audio is the category where I have the least amount of experience. It's a bit of a hit or miss if I make a decent song or not. I spend like 30 minutes just trying to relearn how to use beepbox lol. There is also the fact that initially the music was very quiet meaning some people might have missed it and given the game a lower rating because of it, which honestly does make me a bit frustrated.

Humor is by far this games strong suit and it's the first time in any game jam that I get a 4 star rating. It completely blows my previous entry out of the water with a ~1.3 starts increase in ratings. I think this comes from the humorous premise of the game and from the occasional humorous descriptions of some of the purchases in the game, though I'm not exactly sure which one has had a greater impact. Honestly this ratings surprised me the most as I didn't expect it to be this high.

Mood is like a 0.031 stars increase from the last game. Honestly I blame this relatively low rating on the graphics, since if there was more stuff it would've given the game a bit more "world building". I don't quite know what else to make of it. Ironically this leaves my first ever entry the one with the highest mood rating.

OVERALL Technically overall is an improvement of only 0.008 stars but honestly if you take the average this game's ratings were significantly better.

LAST THOUGHTS

It's hard for me to quantify how "good" these ratings are but I can definitely quantify the fact that this was a significant improvement from my last entries.

Honestly I think the games scope was too large for just the 1 and 3 quarters days I had available. Even for the full three days jams it would've been quite ambitious. I think my main problem was being unprepared for both the jam and my exam, I should've planned things way in advance to have the full 3 days available. I am confident this game would've been much more polished. There is a lot of good stuff that didn't make it to the final version. Though even the time I had could've been used more efficiently, I spent way to much time rebuilding and uploading the project after every little flaw I found in it, I should've play tested inside the editor until I was confident that the first build would be the final one. Art was a bit slow as there was a lot of different stuff to draw but the programming went incredibly smoothly compared to my other jams. Aside from this I need to finally get to learning how to make some actually decent music lol.