Best Ludum Dare so far! I was incredibly lucky to score 1st place in a Fun category, and pretty good scores in all the other categories as well. Had a great time making the game and watching others play it. Here are the final results:

Past results

This was my 4th Ludum Dare. And here is how my past results compare to the current ones.

LD39 - Westwood Hills Hospital

First Ludum Dare was also the first time I made a 3d game. I went for a creepy/horrorish game since the theme was "Running out of power" and I got an idea that the player is at an abandoned hospital and his mobile phone is running out of battery life. Nothing innovative, I know. And the scores reflected that. But! I scored 4th in the Mood category, so I was happy that I succeeded at creating a good atmosphere.

It seemed like people enjoyed playing it, so I tried developing it post-jam. I never got to the final version... Maybe some day!

LD40 - Imbalanced

I didn't like that my first Ludum Dare results were so scattered between the categories. While Mood rating was pretty good, the game wasn't as fun and Overall rating was pretty low. So I decided not to leave any categories behind and do a little bit of work for the each one.

The theme was "The more you have, the worse it is". The result was a species simulation game, where you have to control population of plants, rabbits and wolves so as all species would stay alive for as long as possible. As you can see from the score graph above, I succeeded at not letting any category fall behind (almost all of them were rated similarly) and the highest rated one one being Innovation at 112th place. However, the ratings overall were pretty low and I didn't do any post-jam development.

LD41 - RPG Shop

Try harding to get good scores in all categories didn't paid off the last LD, so I this time I had to do something differently. I made a shop keeping simulator with bad physics (in a funny way) crossed with a story based adventure and called it "RPG Shop". I decided to go with the gut feeling and throughout the development didn't think about how to get better scores in what categories. I just tried to make a funny little game with many fun characters one change at a time. And I think it worked! I got pretty good scores: overall 16th, humor 20th, mood 14th.

I was happy with the way people accepted the game and so I decided to work on this post-jam. This was the first Ludum Dare game that I worked until full version and released it on itch.io. Check it out if it sounds like something you would enjoy playing.

LD42 - SWORD1

And here we are now. For Ludum Dare 42 I made a 2d aim and click fighting game. This time I just wanted to have fun while making a game and decided to put most of my effort into polishing the "game feel" and balancing the difficulty and level progression. The game in its core is pretty simple: it's just hitting things with your sword until they die or fall off the platform. I had the core mechanics in first 6 hours (it looked like a gif below).

And I spent the rest 42 hours playing these levels over and over again and eliminating every little thing that I found not fun until the experience was smooth enough. I'm very happy that players noticed that and that scores reflected the same. Here are some gifs of the final game.

If you haven't played it yet, you can try it here: https://lawrence-laz.itch.io/sword1

Let me know what you think. :slight_smile: I still haven't decided on whether to continue development of this game post-jam.

If you read all of my ramblings then kudos to you for the patience and hope to see you in the Ludum Dare #43!