Hey jammers! Chiming in with some reflection, lessons learned, and a little bit of art as we send off Ludum Dare 50.

What went well

• The aesthetic. I think my game had a more cohesive visual and thematic identity than usual. The city-skyline-sunset background was a pleasure to create, although it led to some interesting problems with contrast, etc. I ended up adding a colorblind mode partway through after a friend couldn't make out the player in screenshots, and liked the improved visibility enough I just left it on by default. Also, a tip: use more parallax in your backgrounds!

• The juice. I put a fair amount of time into particle effects, player movement, and projectile physics. I think it showed in the final product and this seemed to be something that landed well with players based on comments and feedback. For anyone looking to juice up their games, I can't recommend enough watching "The Art of Screenshake" talk by Vlambeer (search it on YouTube).

• The gameplay. I've been making art and music longer than I've been making games, and for quite a while I made games that were pretty, but mediocre. It's been really validating seeing my games slowly improve in the Fun category and resonate with more and more players. One tip in this area --- get a working version with the core gameplay as soon as possible! I actually front-loaded the graphics this time, and the final game had a few kinks that would otherwise have been ironed out with more incidental playtesting (notably, your projectiles tend to accumulate at the edges of the screen, which are very dangerous).

What could have gone better

• The onboarding. I ran out of time for a full tutorial, so I just added an instructions screen to the beginning. I don't recommend this. Players don't always read the instructions, and when they do, they rarely have the context to understand them fully at the point they're reading them. Watching my game played on screen, it almost always took the player a few confused runs to realize how all the mechanics worked, and for a jam game, there's a chance a confused player will just leave and move on to the next game.

• The scope. Frankly, the game doesn't have very much content. I was originally hoping for more enemy types and a boss-like enemy at the end (where you disarm the bomb referenced in the intro). Ultimately I had to choose between skipping the extra content or rushing through audio, and chose to make a smaller, more polished experience. I think this is generally the right call for game jams --- but I still wish I had time for both.

The results

Purely in terms of rankings, this jam was wildly better than I expected.

Thanks so much to everyone who played the game and gave a rating, and so I'm happy to have made a game that resonated so well with people. I remembered watching the top 15 countdown thinking maybe I could be in the top 15, but figured I had no chance after seeing Flameline (how could I possibly have ranked higher than that one?). It's been a surreal couple of days!

I will say the following about ratings:

• Ratings are inherently random. You only get a small sample of people to play your game, and based on the genre, difficulty, and theme, you could have a lot of variation. I personally don't think this game was my most fun game (that would be Spinnerets) or my best overall (that would be Broken Threads), but 35 players clearly liked it a lot.

• Ratings are correlated. It's often hard for reviewers to disentangle the various categories when giving scores. Having punchy audio will make your game more fun, and having cohesive art will improve the mood. If you score less well than you expected in one of your "strong" categories, know that as you improve your other skills you'll likely see gains there as well.

• Ratings aren't everything. It can obviously be highly validating to see a high number on your game, and track your improvement from event to event, but it's good to remember that the important part of Ludum Dare is to make a complete game in a weekend. There's time afterward to make it good, if you want to (hell, the Ludum Dare version of Hollow Knight wasn't great).

Fan art

I was excited to see so many games I rated in the top 15, so decided to draw a quick group picture!

Featuring: - The ninja kitten from my game, Eleventh Hour - Claustrowordia by @antti-haavikko - Flameline by @holyblackcat - The Lars Mission by @elysiagriffin, @brainoid, @spacey3d, and @honest-dan - Healer's Handbook by @lushboy-studios, @chris1919, @raytendo, and @javi7

Thanks everyone for a great Ludum Dare 50!