Over the years I’ve had plenty of assumptions on what kind of games tend to do well on Ludum Dare, but I’ve never actually really looked. So, with a bit of free time over the holiday, I took a quick glance at the 10 most recent Jam category winners. The sample size is small and there are not many conclusions that can be drawn, I did find some interesting things.

Edit: Just as a disclaimer: I'm not in any way suggesting that you should try to mimic these games, or that trying to win is the best way to participate (it isn't). The sample is also way too small to say too much about what kind of games tend to win (to do that you'd have to probably take in at least top 10 and try to find some larger trends)

First Off: Team size doesn’t correlate with rating success

This is maybe the most counterintuitive one and I would have assumed the best rated Jam games to at least have a couple of members per team, but in truth half of them are by solo developers. I didn’t look into reasons why they have been submitted to the Jam instead of Compo, but I would guess it’s mostly to either get one extra day of time, or to be able to use third party music. Only one game had what I’d call a large team, that of The Not Very Golden Age of Piracy with 7 members.

Second, most winners have an average number of reviews

There was one very clear outlier here: The Shotgun King with whopping 243 reviews, but most get around 30-60 reviews, which I would assume is a pretty average number for any Ludum Dare game (I don’t know if there’s data of this anywhere). Some have voiced complaints that game with review numbers barely above the required threshold can game the system, but I don’t see much evidence of that here.

Third: puzzle games seem to perform pretty well

I’m not sure if it’s because they are relatively simple to make and thus leave more time for polish, or if that nice feeling you get for solving a riddle just makes people rate higher on average, but 6 out of the 10 games could be categorised as puzzles. There was plenty of variance within that category, but with platformers being another popular choice, two of the winners were a combination of those two.

Most of those puzzle games were still rather arcade-y, and only 3 games did not contain any action or coordination elements.

Fourth point is the about the visuals

If you thought most games in Ludum Dare utilise pixel art, you are probably correct, corroborated by the winners. Only two of the games were 3D, and even on of them (Dark Points) was low res in presentation. I think this comes down to pixel art being relatively fast to produce with a good quality, and a big portion of participants falling into an age range that has either fond memories of pixel art or is active in the indie games scene where the artstyle is still popular. It should be noted that two of the games fall in the subcategory of NES pixel art, with Burning Ravager being especially faithful to the old console’s limitations.

Finally, familiarity with a twist seems like the winning concept

Most of the games relied either on established genres or popular games as their basis and usually added a small twist in the gameplay. Most of the games needed little or no tutorials, and got you to the ‘beef’ of the gameplay very quickly. The notable exception here is Fallumns, which you need to play for a few minutes for it to reveal it’s hand, but the twist was clearly good enough to elicit high ratings for anyone who sacrificed a few minutes of their precious rating time. It doesn’t seem like the length of the game had much effect on the final scores, as the playtimes ranged from around 10 minutes (Lost in Translation) to practically unlimited play (Shotgun King) with no trend towards either end.

Some final thoughts:

• None of the games were especially story-driven. Not if stories are just too divisive to get an all-around high rating, or tend to make the games a bit too unwieldy
• There’s a strong correlation with high overall score and the rating in all other categories (with the possible exception of Humour, which was not applicable to all the games)
• Sounds and music were mostly 8-bit/chiptune, which was to be expected. The voiceover of The Not Very Golden Age of Piracy made it standout and contributed to a very polished feel.