I wasn't able to join in sooner, but there's still almost 20 hours of dev time.

Wish me luck!

A title-screen title for my game:

Even though it's not a level of finishment I wanted, I published Turing Compete.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/turing-compete

This LD, I participated with my wife. A very nice experience indeed.

This is what we did, if you'd like, please try and play it:

We have plans to post-LD our game to something even better and make a richer experience.

If you have a few minutes, please take some time to play this, but more than the ratings, we'd like some comments: How would you make this better, what were you missing while playing, did you found something frustrating, what was confusing, etc.

But whatever you do, don't put anything on this box!

No software comes without :bug::bug::bug::bug::bug:, so it was with our game. :slight_frown:

We are glad that LD community is not critical of such things but is always helping out when they detect them.

So if there's anyone who tried our game and it finished for him in like 10 seconds, that was a very small :bug: with very big consequences!

It has now been solved, so if there's a chance for another try, we would appreciate it :)

Couldn't join sooner.

I have 1:04:53 until the compo deadline.

Let's do it.

I love the theme. I hate the theme. I love the theme. I hate the theme.

Because of time constraints, I'm gonna participate with my significant other :)

Let's brainstorm. :smile:

Whenever I participate in LD, I think of some ideas I always wanted to try and when the last voting round comes I just distribute the themes across the ideas. Then I wait...

When I heard the theme, I disliked it. It was somewhat too specific, so I couldn't fit it properly. I mean, of course, it's easy to do something in-theme, but I anticipated that a lot of games will be almost the same, a pool of life that you use for buying stuff, and also survival. Which is also ok.

However, I wanted something different. And yet I couldn't think of anything.

For this LD, as for the last one I've participated in, I decided to do it with my wife. Two minds are better than one. :smile:

After some brainstorming, we realized that we would actually LOVE the theme if we just...

...well,... why don't you just see for yourself?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifeless

We now have a port for Web and Android.

(web does not work well in full screen, but otherwise works completely fine).

Please check out our game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifeless

We try to review all games that reviewed ours so give us some love. :heart:

Forgive me if my tone is harsh, but I'm getting sad. I still want to believe in the LD as a nice community in which developers HELP each other by constructive comments and experienced advice.

The main LD feed is instead polluted by shameless plugs of games that have 100+ ratings asking for even more ratings. Many of those games have authors who have themselves played less than 20. This is taking feed space from people who actually need it. This is what saddens me.

This is commercialism, not a community!

Guys, let's help our fellow developers!

If you have 100 ratings (some have even twice that number), one more vote will not do you much difference. But to someone who has 12, one more vote is very important. It's not the goal to win. The goal is to learn, to progress, to give and get feedback. That was always the spirit of LD.

Let's play the system suggested games. If you love the LD, go even further and filter by Danger and help the guys in need.

Let's become a community again!

Here's an infographic showing some of the data from our valuable players.

Of course, during the rating period, the times were rough, so some of the players' data actually didn't reach us, so the data is made out from what we have (cca 50ish plays).

We want to thank all for their valuable time spent on playing this game, even those who didn't reach the end of the game. Which is a bummer because if they did, we would have won :smile: hahaha...

You can still play the game if you are interested, although this infographic is kind of a spoiler.

In any case, without further ado, the game Lifeless in words and numbers:

Disclaimer. We did not collect any personal or identifiable data. Here's the actual process: 1. Generate a random GUID when the game starts. 2. Send the data along with that GUID.

That's all. We just have random GUIDs with a number of values (such as game duration on particular screen).

We will also soon scrap all the data anyway.

This year's theme pool has so many bad themes that I think people who suggest themes that get more than 30 times more NO than YES should be banned from suggesting themes in the future :laughing:

Ok, jokes aside.

But, I suggest something similar, but without anyone getting banned:

After a theme gets more than X votes, if the ratio of NOes over YESes reaches Y, it should be dropped from being suggested to other voters.

The X should of course be a number that is statistically meaningful. The LD staff could get some actual numbers from the LD data, but I'd say that 500 votes is a pretty decent number to prevent false negatives. For Y, I think a number of 30 is quite right.

So, what does that mean for 500 votes and Y = 30? That means that in 500 votes, if a theme has less than roughly 16 Yes votes, it is marked as not appealing and is removed. If a theme has 486 NOes and only 16 YESs for 500 people, it is highly unlikely that it will surface out in any of the voting rounds, so it could be dropped.

The removal could of course be just a timed job that would go over all themes every hour or so and prune the list. No need for checks after each vote.

This way, the slaughter would be done really much much sooner. Also, it would save quite some time to all the people clicking NOs on themes that are already known NOT to be appealing.

Is it still possible to reach an archive of LD games from the old LudumDare page?

I am trying to find a game that was very high up in innovation several years ago. You would write a sentence and your sentence would be turned into pixels on which you'd jump. And each character had its own different way of interaction. And you could also play things other people have written.

If you know of this game, please, help me find it! :)

Introduction

If anything, I've learned that the entropy is the constant during the game jams.

Ironically enough, our game is called Entropia.

This is my 8th LD. I've been here since LD32, in and out. Last few jams, I've participated with my wife and we did some nice games together. This time around, we teamed up with our friend, Will, who is also a colleague of mine. We've been working together as developers for 2.5 years. Although, we're working on business apps, not games.

The time zones

As you know, the world has been split up into timezones. Earth going around the Sun and all that. Well, the thing is, we live in Central Europe and our friend Will is in Brazil. Far, far away. Before the jam, I was kind of scared of the time difference, but we still decided to try it out, regardless of the 5 hours between us.

Me and my wife, we haven't started immediately after the theme anouncement, but almost a full day after. Will on the other hand already had some art sketched by the time we joined. Then we hopped into a Discord video call and brainstormed for a while. Then we went to bed. That is the nature of the timezones. But even if time zones weren't the issue, the remoteness of our team was a struggle.

Note to self: The team should probably all be in the same room (or at a shouting distance).

Who does what?

Will loves doing pixel art. Despite being a developer and not an artist per se, he does it really well. So his part was a no brainer. As the matter of fact, he did join our team primarily to do art.

And that's great! Why, you ask?! Because I suck at art.

I love to code. I can do some art. But I draw like I'm blind. So, that was a no brainer as well.

My wife, well, she's more of a jack of all trades. Good at a lot of things. So while Will was turning calories into pixels, and while I was pretending to understand the code I've written 15 minute ago, she was already deep into doing menus, coding animations and looking for good sounds and music for our game. Her being a constant advisor was keeping me on track and she was cheering for me when I got stuck in some obscure bugs and almost wanted to give up. While I can't precisely categorize her work into a single category, all the bazillion things that she did was actually pushing us forward.

Will and me, we called her a manager.

Note to self: Always work in a team. Being a lone wolf sucks.

Learning from mistakes

My main problem as a coder is the fact that I have WAY TOO MANY ideas that I want to implement. Proper scoping is a challenge for me and I constantly need someone to tell me that we have to cut this feature or the other. That's also the reason why my solo LD games were mostly unfinished.

This time around I decided to keep my scope down. There was plenty of time. But, there was another problem. I've never done a game in my life that utilizes pixel art. And quite a lot of my time was spent fiddling around the engine trying to make it work properly.

A few hours before the deadline, everything was in disarray. Total entropy.

Note to self: get accustomed with the tools before the jam.

Time is ticking away

Well, you are all very familiar with the feeling of the dealine approaching. So many features unpolished, so many bugs waiting to be discovered. And so little time.

In the end, we didn't manage to produce exactly what we wanted. But it was playable. I still remember the first time I've started it up after the core gameplay was finished. It was actually a game. And then we started tweaking it.

But, 50ish hours is not really enough to make something balanced. Balanced games require a lot of testing. And I mean, A LOT!.

Note to self: For jams, make games that don't require much balancing.

What the future holds

When the jam was over, we needed some rest. Mags and me, we fixed a few bugs and made ports to other platforms. Then over the next few days, I've fixed some more of gameplay and we published an improved and updated version. The way it was meant to be played.

After a bunch of people's comments, we've realized what parts of the game we need to change. So we had a meeting discussing the potential future of the game. If there'll be time, we'll try to make it into a proper mobile game.

Until then, I can only say that I've really had a nice weekend with my wife and my friend.

Having you guys rate our game is really appreciated. But even more than that, the feedback you're leaving is what matters the most. And for all of that, I thank you.

Entropia

So, now that you know everything about it, maybe you can try it out.

Direct link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/entropia

If you've already played and rated, it'd be great if you could play an updated version and tell us what you think of the improvements.

You should probably try to stay alive as well.

Also, if you have a few minutes, there's an Entropia Post-mortem as well.

Thanks to all who have played our game and rated us.

It is so nice and educative to see your game played on a stream. Especially when it's played for half an hour. This really made us proud.

Here's a short clip if you wanna check it out. Also, check his stream as well.

We'd be happy to receive your feedback as well.

If you have some time, play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/entropia

Is there any way to know how many games in a particular mode of LD (jam or compo) have gotten 20 votes and received a rank? There's only the distribution for submitted games, not for those that actually got ranked... Anyone?

Guys, this is getting out of control.

TLDR; Please be respectful, go vote and shut up about it!

In most countries (well, at least in democracies), in the days leading to the election, there's a concept of Election silence. That means: shut up about it and go vote.

We would greatly benefit if we used this concept here.

• The news feed is completely cluttered by the posts containing basically nothing more than a screenshot of slaughter results or voting results.
• There's an increasing number of offensive people calling other people names for their theme choices

Please, be a respectful member of the LD community and: * 🚫 Try to avoid posting screenshots of your theme slaughter results. The truth is, nobody other than you has any value in knowing that you slaughtered 100% of the themes. It's not an achievement, there's no reward in it and many people do. Simply be proud and do not clutter the news feed. * 🚫 Try to avoid posting screenshots of your votes. This is about election silence. Democratic process should be an anonymous one. You should not try to influence others in their choice of the themes. Let people choose for themselves, however unreasonable their choice might be to you. We are all different. Similar to the slaughter results, your votes, while contributing to the end result, are still completely useless to everyone else. There is simply no point in sharing them. * ⛔Do not call out people for their choices, let alone calling them names! This is not what LD is about. * ✅ Please do post your development experiences, the things you've learned, the struggles you've been through during the jam, the post mortems and everything else that's related to the process of making your game. Such posts are indeed helpful (and interesting) to the community at large. And THAT is what the news feeds should be for. Otherwise, people writing those useful and interesting articles lose all visibility because there's 200 hundred screenshots of Round 1 votes.