My friend @drazil100 and I have been maintaining a spreadsheet of our Ludum Dare scores. Our data also includes scores for my son, @jason-higerd, since he's participated a couple times. Drazil started participating in LD35 and I started participating in the LD36 mini-jam, so we have 20 games in our combined stats now. (Though only 18 have scores, because LD36 was a mini-jam that didn't do ratings, and my LD50 submission was too late to get any feedback.)

While looking over these historical scores, I noticed that the games where I participated solo tended to have pretty poor Fun ratings. Our first collaborative game in a scored jam was Diminishing Lands in LD38, and its Fun score of 3.551 was the best Fun score either of us had achieved up until Drazil knocked it out of the park with Loading Zone, his LD53 entry, with a Fun score of 3.684. But by contrast, my only solo-developed game to do better than 3.1 was Lily vs the Swarm in LD46 with a score of 3.429 -- respectable, but also an outlier compared to all of my other games between LD41 and LD55 ranging between 2.52 and 3.079.

Even my son's first game that he made when he was only 11 years old, Running Out Of Space (LD42), got a 3.444, beating all of my solo games. (This stung particularly badly because my submission for LD42 got my worst Fun score ever.)

So I set a goal for myself for LD57: I wanted to get at least a 3.5 Fun rating.

I knew I was going to have to really focus on what makes a game fun if I was going to break away from my usual ratings. I couldn't get distracted by flashy effects or deep game systems. So I looked at classic arcade games that needed to be fun the moment you dropped a quarter in the machine and thought about what they had in common. I saw that it would need to be easy to pick up but with a moderate challenge, relatively fast-paced, with tight controls. I knew I had to boil the mechanics down to a solid core and make sure that the basic interactions felt fun.

When the time limit ran out, I felt pretty good about it. I felt like I had done the best I could. I hoped that the best that I could do was actually good. And I waited for the rating period to end.

3.761!

I didn't just meet my goal -- I blew it away.