This was a very stressful experience to be honest, only found out about this jam one day into it. I thought why not make a game and submit it, ended up with pile of crap for most part. One thing I am glad about, is that I actually finished the game. Play it now.
I have come to accept that my original idea is not working after several hours of work put into it…and the first day is coming to a close soon.
I can’t believe I made it in time. I am pretty happy this time that my game feels more complete than my previous ludum dare entry.
Play my game.
This is one of the few themes I really didn’t want. It will involve a lot of art since you need to visually show the shape shifting and a lot of the games will be similar I bet, more than previous themes. Damn you guys for voting for this theme.
Feels good man.
Well, I should start by saying I probably wanted this theme the least out of all the options, but I remembered playing a game called SPY on kongregate a few years ago and decided to make a similar game in 3 days, I am pretty happy with the result, only things that went wrong is I couldn’t find suitable sound for the game(it has no sound sadly) and I was too exhausted to force myself to make more levels. I didn’t build the levels efficiently enough and it became a real slog to do them very quickly. I also recommend either play on itchio or play full screen it cuts off the width a bit without full screen.
Man, how was this the most popular choice. I can’t wrap my head around it. Anyone got any game suggestions or ideas. I have nothing.
First of all, anyone find it strange how many people saw the theme and made a game about robots and aliens? History channel poisoned our minds man…This theme was a bad choice. You can basically make what ever game you want and just add an aesthetic coat to it and boom you followed the theme(some haven’t even done that) A good theme to me is one that encourage new and interesting game mechanics to develop unlike this one.
Anyway I finished my fourth ludum dare game in a row! This one I am slightly disappointed with, I still have not learned the lesson of feature creep and scoping your game. I over stepped my boundaries and had to scale down my game, cut down on some features. The thing that stings the most is I never figured out the end goal of my game so it’s a bit like a sandbox really. I also learned that I need to improve my knowledge of photoshop and practice more with my tablet. It takes me way too long to produce art. I don’t know the proper procedure with digital art to achieve the results I want but that will hopefully change as I start learning more.
And btw if any of you guys want me to play your game I will play it and leave a comment. I left a comment on every game I rated in previous jams so you can count on me. I can not play though VR/Mac/Linux/Iphone games though only windows or web/webgl.
I am in. Only idea in my head was a puzzle game, so I am doing a puzzle game.
I finished…only thing I am not happy about is the character movement but otherwise the game is not bad.
Anyway here are my scores, once again overall was my worst category.
I’m in.
https://digitaldude555.itch.io/small-obstacles
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/small-obstacles
I am 19 on almost all the category but you need 20 to get a score at the end.
Edit: wow that was quick thank you everyone.
Where are they?
Well based on the comments, the game was too short in length which I agree with. I spent most of the time designing new levels post-jam and thinking of new obstacles to implement. Around 2 people in the comments said graphics were poor and judging by the ratings they were right, I scored in bottom %20 of games in graphics. It was mostly squares after all I thought the various animations would help my score and maybe they did, not sure.
Many complained of the controls and I agree. Post-jam I made them more tight. I used a control scheme that was not appropriate for this particular game. I also made the stupid mistake of activating the rotating and elevator platforms with a mouseclick while you were standing over the button zone, post-jam I changed it to a keyboard button but now I am thinking that the elevators and rotators should just activate when you move over the small white spaces.
The difficulty was also said to be incredible easy and truthfully I always struggled with adding challenge to any of the games I made. One guy found the game too hard but it was 1 out of 20, an outlier but I suspect it was because of the games controls.
The instructions of what to do were not clear and confused some people, I should have included them ingame but I feel since it's a jam it was probably not number 1 priority and I forgot to put it in. In non jam games I should definitely make an ingame tutorial and list the controls.
Another complaint was restarting from the beginning of the level after death, I feel that was the only complaint that was wrong. The levels were short(10-30secs usually), but if I ever design long levels, a checkpoint system might be a good idea.
Results
Final results
Overall: 705 (2.697 average in 35 ratings)
Fun: 542 (2.875 average in 34 ratings)
Innovation: 603 (2.697 average in 35 ratings)
Theme: 752 (2.152 average in 35 ratings)
Graphics: 677 (2.455 average in 35 ratings)
Audio: 501 (1.852 average in 29 ratings)
Mood: 695 (2.464 average in 30 ratings)
Now lets look at the rating in comparison to my previous games(I made 6 ludum dare games now). 705 is my best ever placing but considering only 800 games got rated this time(huge drop from recent years) it probably means nothing, I am in bottom 10 percent of rated games. Also my overall rating is worse than almost all other categories, remember the saying greater than sum of its parts well this game is opposite of the saying, depressing.
Fun was my best category which is good but still 542nd out of 800 is okish and fun in general is my strongest category in every ludum dare i've been in.
Innovation was better than almost all previous games I made which took me by surprise, only good spot this ludum dare.
Theme was terrible score but at the end of the day this game didn't follow theme and I deserved nothing here really.
Graphics rating were the worst in any game I have done so far, I guess it makes sense, I need to improve my art a lot.
Audio 501st place, sounds good but considering majority of games don't have audio I wouldn't be surprised if I was close to last overall, my only audio was the movement.
Mood I don't even know what this category means.
And now to address my title, according to the ratings my game was in the bottom 10% of all rated games, everyone in comments was saying, cool game, nice game, good game, ending all sentences with exclamation marks. Then these guys proceeded to rate the game 2/5 sometimes less on each category, why? Why lie in comments? I really don't get it. Is it cause the devs feelings or you fear backlash on your own game if you critisize too much? Anyway...
Now a shoutout to most truthful and constructive commentators. @pkenney @rubyleehs @g12345 @spacedoubt You guys laid out the games flaws pretty nicely, plus gave me advice on how to improve the game. I appreciate above all else your honesty and helpfulness. Your opinions closely matched the ratings I recieved.
And now shoutout to the rest of the commentators.
@kabalatrance @scornz @samurai-spark @bram-ve @mutfak-studios @nilead @camilo @tdennist @steve @meenners @pecolyte @jk5000 @mcjammydodger @noddingtortoise @tuomo
Well it didnt go exactly as I planned, I didn't have time to test it all the way and i'm not sure if it's even finishable, but you can try. Still I am happy it's a big improvement over my last entry, especially in terms of graphics and audio. Here is the link, please play and rate.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/$46085
Is that site not working or it's just me?
The theme isnt really that bad, it's just that you can't stretch the meaning and make some generic game like the past themes. That's what makes it a good theme in my opinion.
1. driving game (wheel is ancient)
2. medieval battle (with ancient technology weapons)
3. ancient OS simulator (e.g Windows carved in stone, Linux on abacus)