Hey all! I'm looking to try some of your games! Just comment below with a link (preferably browser games, but Mac downloadables are also okay)!

I'll try to give you some feedback.

All I ask is that you consider giving some feedback for my game too! It's my first game jam game and our team was formed through Reddit :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

https://twitter.com/mikekasprzak/status/858852885874003968

FYI :)

Judging has started, so please check out and rate our game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

(btw, key controls: ENTER to fast forward cutscene, ESC to skip any scene, SHIFT to sprint. main level is also skippable by pressing 'P' if you can't beat it and want to see the ending)

This was my first game jam, my first complete Unity game, and our team was formed through Reddit(!), so I'm very proud of what we accomplished! :smile:

Hey all! I’m looking to try some of your games! Just comment below with a link (browser games only)!

I’ll try to give you some good feedback! :smile:

All I ask is that you consider checking out and rating my game too! It’s my first game jam game and our team was formed through Reddit :)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

(I made a post about this before, and still going through those ones, but the downloadable ones were a bit of a hassle to set up)

optional additional question: how did you achieve most of those views/downloads? including most successful marketing strategies etc.

Here is a word cloud created from the 50 comments of feedback on our game so far (the bigger the word, the more frequent that word was used in feedback)!

Got the idea from @egordorichev. If you wanna try this too, this is where I generated it: wordclouds.com

Our game is a half retro visual-novel / half chaotic action-stealth game with an 8-bit / jazz mixed soundtrack, and our team was formed through Reddit :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

I had a great time making a game and working in a team for Ludum Dare 38. Whilst we wait for the results (and Ludum Dare 39), why not do another one? :thinking:

I'm looking for Unity (C#) programmers for a game jam this weekend. Key requirement is that you're free for the large majority of the jam, which only goes for 48 hours. It even has a prize if we win, but either way it'll be a good experience. :)

If interested just leave a comment below with some contact info / message me on Twitter https://twitter.com/XAVIER_GAMEDEV

Hey all,

This was my first game jam, and the first game I completed and published in Unity.

Our team was formed over Reddit, with 3 sound guys, 2 artists, and 1 programmer/writer (me - the other programmer dropped out).

For a 3-day game jam, with a remotely-communicating team, I am very proud of what we achieved! :smile:

So without further ado, here are my key lessons from this game jam!

What went wrong: :thinking:

• Level design. This was a time thing mainly. Originally the game was meant to be broken up into 5 smaller, more strategic levels (Monday to Friday), with more stealth elements, less enemies, and using object environments to strategically block line-of-sight, but with the other programmer not showing up I had to focus on finishing the programming for the story section, resulting in just one big level instead.
• Difficulty and pacing (or: the 'I can beat it so they can too' illusion). I'd been playing the game for so long that I knew exactly how it worked. Unfortunately this meant I underestimated the difficulty of the game. Since no one else was familiar with Unity, there was little testing of the game either, except for my own testing! In future, I'll make sure everyone at least has Unity for the purposes of testing, and for future game jams I think it'll be much safer to be on the lean towards the easier side of difficulty.
• The long intro. This was meant to be an interactive 2nd half of the game and was assigned to the other programmer, but he ended up not showing, so instead it became one long story intro. The plan was to have it weaved between each of the 5 levels. I definitely should have made it click to skip past dialog though, instead of having it time-based (I fixed this in the game jam I did following this one :) ), and should have a skip intro button on the UI (you can press ESC but not everyone knew that).
• Clearer indication of when you were about to die (incl. coordination with art about colours - choosing a colour palette). There was a lot of confusion about what conditions were causing players to die based on our feedback. Again, I can probably attribute this to a lack of testing by others apart from myself. The enemies changed colour from green to purple to red when they spotted you, and there were audio cues too, but it still wasn't super clear to new players. This issue was amplified by the sheer number of enemies on screen, and how some enemies were already darkly-coloured making it hard to spot the colour changes. I probably should have included a circular radius of where you could be spotted by each enemy, and a 'Bust-O-Meter' on the UI showing how close you were to losing.
• Colour palette and consistent resolution - with all the different artists that I found on Reddit, there was some inconsistency with the colour scheme and sometimes the resolutions of each image didn't match. That being said, it turned out fine and it was only a game jam, so I'm not too worried about this.
• Clearer indication of controls - a lot of people had no idea that they could use SHIFT to sprint. This should have been introduced in-game through the UI, not on a controls screen that pops up before the game starts (as no one will read it). This was also a time thing though.
• Get to the action fast + no one likes to read (even the essential controls) - you have to SHOW them in a controlled setting. The feedback / watching others play the game really helped realise that even if you tell them the controls or what to do, they won't necessarily do it. It hasn't to be introduced to them through gameplay, and we would have done this through a tutorial and a gradual introduction of mechanics if we had more time.
• Scope - I think we had a very ambitious project, as we planned to have an interactive story section as well as an action-arcade section, with 2 distinct art and music styles. I think we probably could have completed it if the other programmer showed up. Regardless, having a smaller scope would have caused a lot less stress for me.
• Animations (still confused about this. didn't work out how to do up down animations) - I couldn't get the Unity animation system working for up and down movement, so we had to scrap the up and down movement sprites and just use left and right. Definitely need to learn this properly.
• Team availability and time zones - I found the team through Reddit, so naturally we were all in different time zones. Although I tried my best to minimise sleep and stay online (as the only programmer), it made it a bit difficult. I think it's okay having the sound guys in a different time zone as the work is quite independent, but it would be great to find coders and artists in future with synced time zones for more productivity.
• Losing a team mate - didn't foresee this happening. Actually, 1 programmer and 1 artist dropped out, and some of the other teammates also had a family so they weren't there the whole time. I took this into account in the game jam that followed, by over-recruiting (2 teammates dropped out, but we still had 6). This probably would have been less of an issue if I reduced the scope of the game.
• Team familiarity with game engine (I was the only one implementing) - I should definitely make sure the team knows how to use the game engine, because it helps with quicker implementation of the game assets, allows me to focus on the code rather than importing assets (from 100 different places... we had individual dropboxes and google drives haha...), and of course so everyone can test the game!
• File sharing. Tying in with the above, no one knew how to use Unity so no one imported the assets directly, and we had a mix of file sharing across Discord, Slack, Dropbox and Google Drive. It got chaotic pretty fast.
• Optimising for speed - I didn't focus on this because it ran fine on my computer, and it seemed to run fine for the large majority of players. However, some people found it lagged a bit. I definitely should look into ways to minimise the possibility of lag in huge levels with lots of game objects. This was also a problem with tiling - it was hard to align all the different tiles in the game, so lots of overlapping was required, and since each tile/sprite was so small there were heaps in the scene which may have slowed it down a bit.
• Full screen (optimizing for streamers) - I disabled the full screen mode because I didn't want to / didn't know how to optimise for different resolution screens / I thought it would look bad fullscreening 8-bit graphics, but didn't realise that people would want to fullscreen it anyway (particularly people who were doing let's plays or livestreams of our game).

What went right: :innocent:

• Teamwork. Despite us all working remotely, we got along instantly, and were very productive, dividing up the tasks efficiently and playing to ours strengths. We found a way to include everyone's work is some shape or form, including making additional scenes around cool music our team had made.
• Humour - Almost all of the comments mentioned the humour, so it seems we did quite well in this department. Partially this was due to the concept of the game itself ('Superbad' the game), but largely it seemed because of the cutscene dialog at the start, particularly the 4th wall breaking. I enjoy game writing and I will definitely continue it for future projects (as I did with the IRX Game Jam - see link at bottom!).
• Making a 'complete' game - in such a limited time, a lot of the feedback praised us for having a game with a start and an end, and I'm very happy that we accomplished this too, as the game can stand on its own.
• Having a browser-playable game - it makes it much easier for people to play the game and give feedback, and was part of the reason we got so many plays and comments. If you're using Unity, definitely make a WebGL build for others - more will play it!
• Art style - the retro graphics tied nicely with the youthful theme of highschool and the 8-bit music. The cutscene graphics also set a really nice mood.
• Audio - we had a very strong audio team of 3. Our sound guys created some top-notch 8-bit melodies, as well as a really moody jazz track with live recorded double bass!
• Theme - with all the games that were literally just involved a small-sized planet, I'm happy with our creative interpretation of the theme, going along the lines of 'what are you doing here? what a small world!' as well as a small world from the perspective of a teenager in a small town trying to start a party.
• Variety and innovation - following on from the previous point, and compared to many of the other games I played in this jam, I believe our concept and gameplay was very unique, combining a comedic visual novel with a chaotic action-stealth collect-em-up with trashcan physics!
• Core gameplay elements were fun. I built the game to have 'emergent gameplay'. Each enemy had its own A.I. and a number of obstacles that you can interact with, meant that creating new levels would be very doable given enough time. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time so some things could have been clearer, but I'm happy with its potential.
• Marketing. I wasn't promoting the whole time, but our game got a lot of exposure (stats below). Things I did include: contacting YouTubers and livestreamers and getting them to play our game, giving useful feedback to others and linking to our game, looking out for posts where people wanted to play Ludum Dare games, making posts on Reddit (the official LD reddit as well as /r/playmygame), sharing on Facebook, sharing on Twitter with the right hashtags, and making LD blog posts (like this one!).
• Feedback - tying in with the marketing, we got a very exhaustive list of feedback and its very clear what we would need to improve on if we continued the game, as well as things I need to keep in mind for future game jams (such as the IRX Game Jam which I did on the weekend - link below!).

Thanks for reading, and hopefully you got some insight out of this post!

Finally, here are some stats and charts, because who doesn't like stats and charts?

Views: 441 (and for some reason, 7 people downloaded our browser game)

Total Ratings: ~60

If you want to check out our game, you can find it here: :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime

Also I did a game jam after this (IRXJam17), taking into account a lot of the lessons I learnt from this game jam. You can check it out here: https://xavier-indie-gamedev.itch.io/literally-free-will

I've been watching it closely, and my game page hasn't seen an increase in views, and I don't have any new comments, but I've seen 5 new ratings in all categories, meaning people are voting without even opening the game page.

C'mon guys, kinda defeats the meaning of ratings for everyone if you do this, so please don't :)

Final results:

Overall: 467 (3.242 average in 68 ratings)

Fun: 426 (3.076 average in 68 ratings)

Innovation: 515 (2.879 average in 68 ratings)

Theme: 704 (2.515 average in 68 ratings)

Graphics: 553 (2.955 average in 68 ratings)

Audio: 199 (3.448 average in 60 ratings)

Humor: 75 (3.723 average in 67 ratings)

Mood: 355 (3.279 average in 63 ratings)

https://twitter.com/XAVIER_GAMEDEV/status/891546794311602176

https://xavier-indie-gamedev.itch.io/batteryman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH-6tpqeoos

You can play the game here! Enjoy! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH-6tpqeoos

You can play the game here! Enjoy! <3

Hey everyone! I hope you all had a great Ludum Dare!

I know some of you are keen for another jam, so I'm hosting the Music Game Jam in September, where you create a music-related game in one weekend!

It's not limited to rhythm games - you could create an 8-bit tribute to your favourite band, an interactive music video, a Beethoven RPG, or an FPS musical - it's up to your musical imagination!

So whether you're a developer, artist, or musician, if you've got an awesome idea, want to try something new, or if you simply like winning great prizes, it would be great to see you take part!

Please express your interest by clicking 'Join' on our jam page!

You can also stay updated with the official Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MusicGameJam

Cheers! :smile:

Hey everyone! I hope you all had a great Ludum Dare!

I know some of you are keen for another jam, so I'm hosting the Music Game Jam in September, where you create a music-related game in one weekend!

It's not limited to rhythm games - you could create an 8-bit tribute to your favourite band, an interactive music video, a Beethoven RPG, or an FPS musical - it's up to your musical imagination!

So whether you're a developer, artist, or musician, a complete beginner or a seasoned pro, if you've got an awesome idea, want to try something new, or if you simply like winning great prizes, it would be great to see you take part!

Please express your interest by clicking 'Join' on our jam page!

You can also stay updated with the official Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MusicGameJam

Cheers! :smile:

Hey everyone!

I know some of you are keen for a post-LD game jam, so I'm hosting the Music Game Jam in September, where you create a music-related game in one weekend!

It's not limited to rhythm games - you could create an 8-bit tribute to your favourite band, an interactive music video, a Beethoven RPG, or an FPS musical - it's up to your imagination!

There'll also be ~$100 in game prizes!

Including: - Telltale's The Walking Dead - Worms Clan Wars - Geometry Dash - Devil May Cry - Undertale - and more...

Everyone will have a random chance to win these prizes just by participating!

PLUS there'll be content creators waiting to play your entries and give you great feedback!

So whether you're a developer, artist, or musician, a complete beginner or a seasoned pro, if you've got an awesome idea, want to try something new, or if you simply like winning great prizes, it would be great to see you take part!

Please express your interest by clicking 'Join' on our jam page!

You can also stay updated with the official Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MusicGameJam

Cheers! :smile:

Hey everyone!

I know some of you are keen for a post-LD game jam, so I'm hosting the Music Game Jam in September, where you create a music-related game in one weekend!

It's not limited to rhythm games - you could create an 8-bit tribute to your favourite band, an interactive music video, a Beethoven RPG, or an FPS musical - it's up to your musical imagination!

There'll also be ~$100 in game prizes! :video_game:

Including: - Telltale's The Walking Dead - Worms Clan Wars - Geometry Dash - Devil May Cry - Undertale - and more...

Everyone will have a random chance to win these prizes just by participating! :trophy:

PLUS we have a long list of content creators waiting to play your entries and give you great feedback!

So whether you're a developer, artist, or musician, a complete beginner or a seasoned pro, if you've got an awesome idea, want to try something new, or if you simply like winning great prizes, it would be great to see you take part!

Please express your interest by clicking 'Join' on our jam page!

You can also stay updated with the official Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MusicGameJam

Cheers! :musical_note: :smile: :microphone:

Hey everyone!

I know some of you are keen for a post-LD game jam, so I'm hosting the Music Game Jam in September, where you create a music-related game in one weekend!

It's not limited to rhythm games - you could create an 8-bit tribute to your favourite band, an interactive music video, a Beethoven RPG, or an FPS musical - it's up to your musical imagination!

There'll also be ~$100 in game prizes! :video_game:

Including: - Telltale's The Walking Dead - Worms Clan Wars - Geometry Dash - Devil May Cry - Undertale - and more...

Everyone will have a random chance to win these prizes just by participating! :trophy:

PLUS we have a long list of content creators waiting to play your entries and give you great feedback!

So whether you're a developer, artist, or musician, a complete beginner or a seasoned pro, if you've got an awesome idea, want to try something new, or if you simply like winning great prizes, it would be great to see you take part!

Please express your interest by clicking 'Join' on our jam page!

You can also stay updated with the official Twitter here: https://twitter.com/MusicGameJam

Cheers! :musical_note: :smile: :microphone:

Just want to say, thank you so much to everyone who took the time to play our game! :innocent:

One of my personal goals this jam was to reduce scope and focus more on the fun, and I think I can safely say we succeeded with that!

These were the results for my Ludum Dare 38 entry No Minor Task: Party of a Lifetime (which I'm still very proud of):

And this is we got for our entry this time for BatteryMan Recharges The World:

which is quite a big improvement in rank! Hopefully this shows how improvement will come naturally with time and not to give up and all that motivational stuff! :joy:

Still need to get around to playing all the great entries from this jam.

Anyway, see you next LD :blush: