This was my first Ludum Dare and I really enjoyed it. I have played some truly amazing games and was stunned over and over by the creativity, talent and sheer amount of effort that everyone has put into their entries.

Now it's coming up to my first "Results" reveal ... do I need a suit?

Good luck everyone! You all did awesome!

Go on. Post something. You have about 4 hours before the site will be filled with the results and post mortems. Promote your game, promote playing danger zone games. You have to sleep? Too bad. Post anyway

Congratz everyone, we all have new games!!! Good luck with your ratings!

@leorid Asked if I could share how I approached the jam for my game! So I made a 23 Minute video for everyone :smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_emuh9rZnZA

There are many reasons to feel overwhelmed when participating for the first time in a game jam. Not knowing your tools properly, participating with a team you don't really know, having little time to do everything you want to have on your game, panicking on the last few hours, seeing veterans doing amazing stuff. It may be a lot.

Yet, here you are. You participated, you did your best. Regardless if you completed all of your goals with your game, you should feel proud of having been part of the experience, and I hope you had a great time checking out other games, getting to know others. This place is a great community, and you get to see some regulars as you participate more and more.

To me, game jams are opportunities to experiment, to learn, to have fun with the rest. Some people participate to get great ratings, and that's fantastic! Others try to get a prototype for something to work in a longer term. Fantastic! Others try to have their first gamedev experience rolling. That's great too! Everyone has a reason to participate, and all skill levels should be welcome.

We were all first time participants at one point, and this event and community thrives because of both veterans and newcomers. Don't give up, and keep that creative spark shining.

Regardless of how things panned out for you, congratulations! You've made a game! Come next Ludum Dare, and make a new one!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/screw-it

Thank you!

Lots of super awesome games out there in LD48, congrats guys! We definitely want to see where your games/studios progress to in the future, so drop us some links here in the comments, and we'll be sure to follow your work!

And while you're at it, if you want to stay up-to-date on any updates from our own studio, or updates to our LD48 game: Where's my dynoMITE? , you can keep in touch with us here:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RubyGrueStudio

Discord: https://discord.gg/4CbEU6Ketq

Cheers, and congrats you guys!

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present...

That's right! Trapdoor in the Garden just got that massive post jam patch I was talking about here and there!

Epic new stuff:

• AI that makes sense!
  • What if slimes didn't jump across the entire map?
  • What if Knights were nice enough to tell you about their intent of rushing into you?
  • What if the bat was a non horrible enemy?
• Gameplay balancing!
  • More control over what you're doing!
  • Additional drops in levels!
  • Removed at least 3 frustrating things!
• Other cool stuff!
  • Don't like my button mapping? Well, now you can come up with your own!
  • Gamepad support? Why not!
  • Not losing your ears on game start? That's nice!
• Seriously, a lot changed. If you want to see the full changelog, you can find that HERE.

If you want to play the basically completely reworked version of my game, you can find the new download links on my GAME PAGE!

This update changes the format of the config file quite a bit. If you have played the LDJAM version before, you should go into the options and remap your keys once to make sure everything is working properly. (You can use the same keys you used before, the game just needs to update your config once.)

This has been a wild ride, and I loved every minute of it. Determined to do better than my 3 hours of sloppy work from last Ludum Dare, I worked hard and spent 32 hours of the Compo just sleeping and working on my game. In the final seconds before time ran up I finished my game, and managed to make an HTML5 version despite having export errors and desktop exports in the submission hour. This was a big milestone for me, since I had never used 3D shapes (still a brand new Construct 3 feature at the time), or made a narrative game, or used my own art or music apps.

As I received so many notifications about games that I broke the notification system, the nostalgia of when I was but a beginner doing Ludum Dare came back to me. For three weeks I rated 77 games and enjoyed playing every single one. I laughed, I cried, and I had so much adrenaline pumping through my body I was shaking.

And while I was having a blast playing fan favorites and saving games in need, I received feedback on my own creation. Whether it was criticism of the font (🙇‍♂️ I'm so sorry about that, everyone....) or praise for the fact I made a working game in only 20 hours, it made me so happy that people enjoyed my game. It just warmed my heart when people said they actually legitimately enjoyed my game, because as a developer who has only joined 2 Ludum Dares and is just now preparing for the release of official apps and games, it makes me happy to know that even if I never earn a single cent off of my creations, people enjoyed playing something I've made.

Here we are at the end of the ratings period. Since I joined Ludum Dare for the excitement of having some inspiration and motivation for making a game, not because I want to win, I don't care about the ratings of my game. (Not going to lie, though, I am interested to see how I place in Mood since this was my first time making a dark atmospheric game.)

So what now?

As proud as I am of Aftermath, I will not be giving Aftermath a full game adaptation, but rather a small update that adds the features that got cut due to time such as flashback scenes, fixes the text, and enhances the graphics (thanks @moski). If you're interested in the Aftermath 2.1.1 update, I may make it even more advanced and enjoyable than I plan on and add it to my future Itch.io page alongside my future games and apps. I'll also be updating the source code post-Compo to add some comments, because I create code terribly under pressure and at 2 AM in the morning. Even after the post-Compo 2.1.1 update, I will continue to keep Aftermath as an open-source game!

I will also be releasing my custom apps as free downloads you can run on whichever system you use! Peace Of Cake Art Maker! and Peace Of Cake Music Maker! were just small projects I constructed in only 2 hours each for accessibility purposes on my PC, but I have been enhancing them and making bug fixes to prepare them for official release.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Ludum Darers!

The Aftermath protagonist, Clara, also thanks you for letting her do stuff.

Remember that it isn't important if you came in 187945th, just that you enjoyed making your game and are happy with the end product.

Well, that really was a fun challenge! Good luck to everyone.. and remember. results does not mean anything! Just enjoy it.

Hello.

LD48 is over and I think it will be fair to update my game now. So, I made an update not limited by the Compo restrictions: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-deepest-space (page on itch: https://robotex.itch.io/the-deepest-space)

It was a first Ludum Dare in my life and it was amazing! Thank you all for your warm words. I didn't expected that so many people will like my game.

So, I decided to make commercial version of this game.

I plan to add:

1. Planet landing
2. Trading
3. NPCs
4. Quests
5. Piracy and police
6. etc

There is few screenshots how it will look (and how is demo looks now):

Coming soon ;)

It was my twentieth LudumDare. This is the end - as sung Jim Morrison, my beautiful friend. It was an amazing jam session with many interesting projects. Now I am waiting results, but in fact, it's not really important. Despite the lack of time, I had many fun playing your games. Again I learnt many things from me (and you) and I really appreciated those who had leaved some ratings and comments about my own project. Thank you everybody. I wish you the best - until the next LudumDare. Bye ++

7.880 teams had signed up in total 3866 of those managed to release a game in time and 2811 got enought ratings. So even if you'll finish last, you are basically already in the top 35% 😊

I'm hyped for the results too although I did not manage to make to this LD jam, but I did finish my LD47 game last week and put it on steam (Ring Racer if you want to check it out). I wish I would see more games making out in the world from ludum dare, there are a lot of cool ideas that deserve more polish and attention :) . I'll definitely play more LD games even after result, I'm sure there are hidden gems out there. So even though the jam comes to an end you should try to polish your game and make it shine! :D

Hello, everyone! I really enjoyed participating in LD48 and I liked many of your games. Also, it was my first Compo try and my first try into RTS games. So, what I've made on this game jam was really raw and unpolished. Now I made many improvements into my game to make it more fun to play.

Changelog:

• Controls update. Move your camera with arrows, speed up with Shift key and jump to your selected unit with Space.
• UI update!
• Multiple unit selection! You can try it with holding your shift key or with new unit box selection (just hold your LMB and draw a rectangle around them)
• Advanced unit control - Attack, Move, Hold position and Stop orders are available via UI buttons. Also, with hotkeys ('A', 'M', 'H' and 'S' respectively)
• Medical building, which heals your dwarves around it.
• Population limit mechanic instead of increasing cost of dwarves. Build additional power plants to increase your unit limit. Now it should be easier to play.
• And many more minor improvements...

There are still some pathfinding issues, no tutorial, and more things to fix. Also, I have huge plans how to improve this game, so stay tuned and check my itch.io page from time to time, if you are interested!

Try new version of game (Compo version (Windows) is still available to play) on itch.io: https://smeljey.itch.io/deepestmine

My LD48 submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deepest-mine

P.S. 'Play' button on WebGL build is still not working in non-fullscreen mode.

Now that ratings are over, i published a version with new features for Dome Romantik and cleaned the itch page a bit. Finally the flying monsters are in, posing a new challenge. To compensate, the double laser is also available now, which needs about 4 times the brainpower to be controlled right (they move mirrored). I'm happy to say that @cameron-paxton added some great tracks that will play from time to time, really boosting the mood. We'll also keep working on Dome Romantik to make a Steam and Itch Release. If you want to see what happened so far, bring in your ideas, give feedback or help us decide on certain features, please join our Discord :)

It was our tenth jam and pretty special for us. The feedback was amazing, we'd have never expected to have so many players - we started out to make a humble little game. Also, special thanks to my mom who won't read this, but took care of our toddler on the weekend, so we (wife + i) could actually go and make a game together :D

As always it was so much fun to be part of ludum dare. Thank you all so much, i'm still suprised each time by the creativity, breadth, quality and crazyness of the games being made by you. Wow!

Congrats to everyone that played Deep Descent, and enjoyed it! A special congratulations to the top 10 high scores!

Here is the final scoreboard before the game rankings are finalised today.

Hello all! I've seen a lot of these retrospectives since I began doing Ludum Dare, so I've finally decided try my hand at writing one while waiting for results to come out. Hope you enjoy!

What went well

• Premise: I wanted to come up with an original take on the theme, and I think I may have succeeded - I have yet to see any other entries that use "going deep" in the context of throwing a pass. Additionally, I think a lot of commenters found the basic premise of a football player who runs off the end of the field and keeps going far more amusing than it has any right to be.
• Flexible scope: The game was composed of several independent biomes that the player runs through, so if I had run out of time at any point I could have just ended the game there, or if I'd had extra time it would have been easy to keep adding more biomes and fun Easter eggs.
• Music: I think my music quality has been gradually improving each time I enter Ludum Dare, and this time I am fairly happy with it. The orchestration is still very simple, but it has an appropriate feel and doesn't get too repetitive (in my personal opinion). As one commenter suggested, varying the orchestration depending on the biome would have been a really cool addition, and might be something I try to incorporate in future game jams.
• The Boat: The part where the football player reaches the ocean, climbs into a boat, and starts frantically paddling was personally my favorite moment of the game.

What went poorly

• Difficulty: I typically end up making my games too hard, and this one was not an exception. I tried to err on the side of overly forgiving hitboxes, based on the reasoning that it's more fun for the player to survive because of a bad hitbox than to die because of one. However, the lack of any checkpoints (a planned feature that was cut due to time constraints) also meant that few players were able to beat the game. This was made worse by the difficulty of the first two biomes (the football field and the city streets), so in practice some players never even made it to all of the biomes.
• Art: This game concept required a lot of graphics because of the sheer number of biomes and obstacle types. As a result, the quality was far from consistent. While I was pretty happy with a couple specific images (e.g. the football players, the penguins, one of the cacti types), others like the houses and trees were pretty lackluster.
• Water Effects: I tried out a new approach for the river and ocean effects, using multiple image layers moving relative to each other. However, in practice this honestly looked pretty terrible. For next time I will definitely be looking into other techniques.

Conclusion

Overall, I think a lot of players found the idea of Touchdown very entertaining, and I had a lot of fun making it. There is definitely room for improvement, especially with respect to graphics, but I am generally happy with how it turned out. Thanks to everyone who played and left comments, and anyone who hasn't can try it out here. If you have any other feedback or advice please leave a comment, I'd love to hear it!

When the theme was announced, I felt that my initial ideas were either too close to prior works like Terraria and Minecraft, or too big for the little time window of the jam, so I hesitated to pursue them. I spent most of the first day building a completely different game about shapes and zooming, but it didn't feel good enough to continue.

Eventually, time running out, I settled on an ocean game. Something I would have fun building, which turned out to be the most important criteria.

The goal was to allow the player to dive deeper and deeper into a mysterious, hostile sea in search of treasure. The deeper your diver got, the more you would find valuable loot, but the depths would also host increasingly strange creatures. Fish-monsters that grow interested in your glowing morsel.

Check out the full devlog here!

Thanks to everyone who played my game, and I hope everyone enjoyed the jam!

Thank you so much for playing my game <3

A postjam version is coming in the following days, I am porting it to mobile :)

New map, weapons, Day & Night time transition, recruit mobsters... It's a big update ;)

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