Thanks for the awesome jam good LD friends! 😀 Thanks for voting and the cool chats and feedback and votes!

Had a wonderful #LDJAM this time around, I felt much better about this one than my previous one, both during and after the jam. And that definitely showed in the score

So now that I’ve done four LDs (sorry #30, I couldn’t get to you), I can put some kind of data together and see if I can make sense of my performance. And to be honest, it’s baffling.

LD32 vs LD33

First, comparing this one to the previous shows a definite improvement, and that I’m really happy about. The previous one was really quite uninspired and rushed, and I’m glad that my approach to this one (not pre-determining what to make before the jam) has yielded far more creative and interesting results.

LD 31 vs LD33

In comparison to my best LD so far, I couldn’t beat it. But hey, that’s really not a major issue. But that feels like an anomaly to me… my LD31 was a purely multiplayer game which meant it was impossible to test, with no Audio to speak of so it scored 0 there, and it was a platformer which was like 80% of other games. Why did it do so well?? Was it genuinely a great game, and I really should work on that one further, or was it an anomaly? WHICH IS IT?? D:

Theme?

PokEscape placing 437th on theme makes me feel kinda sad, because the very first line of the description said “You are the (Poke)Monster!”, which I thought was a great fit for the theme. Which meant that 90% of people who rated the game either missed that line or never read it, or didn’t agree with it. Sigh.

Comment count

I went through my games and roughly counted up how many comments I had on each game, and this last one was a lot higher than the rest by about 50%, which is possibly significant. Was it because this game referenced Pokemon? Or was it due to other factors? I really would like to know how many ratings my past games has. Don’t know where to find that. Sigh.

Adios LD!

It’s been a rad Ludum Dare as usual 😀 After this analysis I think I’ve decided that data analysis is not useful without a sample size of a billion So just keep jamming and having fun, making cool shit is the best you can do! Until next time amigos!

Tags: analysis, data, pokemon, PokEscape, stealth, tuism

TL;DR:

BOOOST Post-compo version is here!

Please compare it to BOOOST Compo version if you have time, and let me know if what I’ve changed is for the better 😛

———————-

Hey guys

It’s the last day, and I’m finally kicking my own ass to put this thing up! I’d been working on it on and off pretty much since the day after LD weekend, and… What can I say, it’s been a thoughtful couple of weeks.

Booosting the ship

I spent a lot of time tweaking the flight physics again, that being the thing that really defines this experience. It was a real struggle getting it between satisfyingly drifty and satisfyingly responsive. This new version is much more responsive in some ways, but does not let you do anything you want. It’s.

A big change was to the fuel system – instead of two bars, there is now one. Left and right flight does not require fuel, but thrusting directly up does. This lets the player manoeuvre when needed without worrying about fuel, but the regeneration and cost is higher than before, striking a new balance.

The top of the game field also expanded, affording the player more time to react to incoming ships, if they’re not invincible. You’re not always invincible while flying up – you’ll only be if you have 50% on your fuel meter and continued burning after the initial boost.

Booosting the enemy

The big bad changed from the wall of flame to an actual ship with armour and engines. This gave the player something to focus on besides what’s ahead. In the earlier levels, interacting with the boss isn’t really necessary, but later, the boss’s speed picks up, and your escape would be made easier if you blew up the boss’s engines, slowing it down.

The idea was to have more variety in the boss’s composition and components, but I haven’t gotten that far yet, and balancing the numbers on this has proven to be very, very very hard. I would love some input on how you perceive the difficulty of the game in its current state!

Play BOOOST Post compo!

Play BOOST original LD entry!

Getting ready for Ludum Dare 😀 Unfortunately we weren’t able to get a venue this time (again) so I’m jamming from home – which is okay, since my best LDJAMs have been from home >_<

But I really enjoy the group jams…

Anyhow, this time around I’ve only got one vague goal to shoot for.

I wanna make a game about decisions.

Being an avid boardgamer (and designer), I want to make something that’s less about reflexes and real-time skill and more about decisions and implications. I know this isn’t a new idea, but looking back on my previous LD games:

• A game about a landshark shooting missiles in bullet time.
• A game about crushing friends with deadly accurately tossed boxes.
• A game about a cop piloting various mecha.
• A game in which you are a pokemon and must eat to not starve but your food is also your cover and trainers are out to catch you.
• A game about… Pooping shots to escape.

I feel that’s one area I hadn’t explored yet. So here we go!

Excited for the return of #LDJAM 😀 A bit sad that I don’t have access to a Vive, and kudos to all ya’ll Viver bastards who sneakily got this theme in

Idea spam time!

• Rotate a room in 360 degrees AND navigate your character in it. A la Blast Chamber
• You’re stuck in a room but can manipulate time to change the room to navigate
• Solitary confinement simulator
• Escape Room but you’re a dog
• Escape Room but you’re a cat and can only do cat things
• 2D platformer in one room, and can pick up a VR HMD and becomes a 3D game
• Air traffic control officer who’s actually an assassin
• Crossing the seas in a shipping container
• Crossing the seas in a ship as a slave
• You’re in a room that tumbles around the world like a big block thing
• One room murder mystery

Darnit no nothing sticks with me yet

Hey there fellow LD jammers :D

So I've gotten a couple of comments on the physics of my punchy mech game Assault//Battery, and I thought I'd give a brief run down of how damn hacky it all is :)

The mech can jump like this:

It looks like it actually walks and jumps and whatever, but really it's just a bunch of low-drag objects that kinda flail about with joints and limits:

• The most important hack is the big ball at the bottom of the mech. It's a collider + rigidbody with no renderer, has a relatively high mass, and low drag. It is the anchor on top of which everything else is joined to. Physics layers are set up so that it collides with the rest of the world's solid geometry (the ground), but not with any of the mech's own parts (which all still collide with the world). It literally props everything up, no need to mess with legs and whatever. Because that's super higher-grade Boston-Dynamics stuff.

• Everything else is joined to each other by various joints, some hinge, some spring, depending on what's needed.

• The "wobblejoint" gameobject is the thing that keeps everything kinda upright, it's a hinge joint with a default position that leans forward a bit, and a high spring value. That lean drives the whole thing forward because of the weight distribution.

• From the side you can see another hack - the left and right shoulders are not in line with one another :) This is because if they were, the fist behind wouldn't be as visible.

The walking is done with some code that gives one of the legs some torque upwards alterantively. So the logic is if a feet is far back enough, it'll put on some torque for like 1 second or so. Then the next one will when it gets far enough behind, and repeat.

That's it really. Go forth and hack your own mess of joints! :D

And please give my game Assault//Battery a play and rate if you haven't already! :D

Clickbait title!

The newish notifications thing we have access to is pretty useful, do you make use of it?

Going to the full feed can be useful:

But it can get very crowded and difficult to go through when every single comment in a game you've commented on gets shown. So I use two find on page searches to find the ones that I care about quickly.

Search "mention" to find people specifically talking to you

Search "their" for authors messaging on their own project, this is useful as sometimes authors give replies without mentioning the intended recipient.

That's it, hope this has helped you and hope we all make use of this cool feature more :)

Hi all!

For this LD I've made CRAMMM: Totally Accurate Studying Simulator, the idea being that you run out of space in your head while you're studying.

The game levels features "textbooks" - right now you're cramming such classic subjects like Maths, Trumpology, Video Games, and Communism :)

I thought it might be fun to get some ideas from the community about what would make a fun textbook to cram from? :)

Also check out and rate the game? Thanks! Much appreciated!

I sometimes/often see people begging for ratings. But they haven't fulfilled even these two basic things.

If you're not building for OSX and WebGL (but you can because you're using unity), WHY NOT. It's free accessibility. FREE!

And if you haven't rated 20 or more games, DO IT. It's the simplest way to get more ratings.

Posting stuff here helps a little, tweeting helps a little, but doing the above two fundamentally shifts your rate of being rated WAY up.

Good luck to everyone getting the ratings they deserve! :)

My #ldjam results: broke top 100 in everything, so I’m grateful <3

I ran an analysis over the stats over my 9 jams, while the dataset is tiny, there were some interesting observations:

First off, I think scores and placement isn’t the most important thing about #ldjam. Enjoy the community, making games, and getting valuable feedback! Don’t judge your jam just by numbers!

First, the raw data, scores and placements, plotted into charts. On the surface, nothing interesting other than I've seen constant improvements in my jams, yay.

BUT let's dig for some insights...

Fishing out correlations: Since what I care most of all is the overall score, I looked at the correlation between other categories and overall score.

Surprisingly, the #ldjam category most correlated to the overall scores: 1. Theme 2. Graphics 3. Innovation 4. Mood 5. Audio 6. Fun 7. Humour

The top 3 of theme, graphics and innovation were 80%+ correlation, while the rest hovered around 70%, and audio falling off the 42% cliff.

I never thought theme would be THIS important to #ldjam jammers, but I guess it makes sense since we tend to look at people who may have joined the jam with a pre-made game/idea with crooked brows.

But that FUN being among the LOWEST correlated was a surprise to me. I always thought the enjoyment of a game was the most important thing. But apparently not?

I also tried to find correlation with ratings given/received, and comments received. The data there were incomplete due to the old site not keeping those data and I didn't record them from earlier #ldjam events. But the correlation was weak at best.

So that's my analysis of my #ldjam historical data. The sample size was way small and some data was incomplete, but it was interesting nonetheless. I'd love to see other people's data to see if these were results very individual to myself!

Thank you all Ludum Darers for giving me 200+ ratings! <3

I haven't LD'd in years even though I regularly cite LD as the best game jam in the world, and ya'll have proven why it is the best jam in the world! Having people actually playing your prototype is just the best, thank you thank you thank you all! <3