7th At Theme and 25th at Fun!!! So happy about the result and receive so many positive feedback!!!

this was my first LD game jam, and i think it went pretty well! Out of the few other jams i've attended, this was probably the highest scores I've ever got, and i was really surprised to get 14th in innovation! I've also played some really good games so good job everyone :) I wonder if i could've gotten an higher score with more time, since i couldn't really use the last day of the jam, but i'm still pretty happy about it!

Thank you for another great Ludum Dare! We'll see y'all in the next one :)

Read our post mortem blog post here!

We are so thankful for the support and lovely comments left by this community! We had a unforgettable Ludum Dare jam creating our little Bug Driver 3D game ❤️! We’re so happy to share the results of our hard work, receiving 24th place overall with an exciting 2nd place in audio!

To continue supporting us, find us on itch!

https://youtube.com/shorts/OWk3JXVOY5M?feature=share

From top-8 LD humor game to steam release!

Damn

I just realised that this LD was my personal best basically in every category

The other ones were in some hundreds overall and had like 1000+ places in some categories, this is what was the best before:

And it was done in a small but, like, a team nonetheless, while this year is my second compo in a row (wasn't in a good mental state last time to give any ratings sorry, I actually still have a couple of games from it I wanted to check open in my browser somewhere lol)

While this is what I got this time (I posted it already but for the context)

Now I'm left to wonder if participating in stuff like GameOff is a good idea considering my tight schedule (full time job as a game designer + masterate with semester ending in mid-december, I have some considerable works to do + occasional activism + chronic mental stuff as you could see in my game lmao).

I'd really like to finish a game demo we had to drop at ShovelJam this summer because miscommunication and broken promises (assets were a little bit rushed but basically ready to be used in game, then dev failed to communicate with me about anything and just ghosted me till the very end, I barely can code something complicateed, so I couldn't do it by myself and gave up at the deadline hour) but my team might be busy af as well :(

ngl LD is always inspirational and I actually feel that I chose a right field to work in but severe AuDHD burnout takes its toll

So glad I made Tiles Collector for ludum Dare 58!

I’m really grateful for Ludum Dare in general (thanks @pov!). I’ve participated in LD32, LD46, LD48, LD51, LD56, LD57, and LD58. I wish I could have joined even more, but work and life often get in the way. And even when I do participate, I rarely have the full 48 hours to myself. I feel lucky when I can participate!

This event is always a breath of fresh air — a moment of pure creativity that frees me completely. There’s something deeply satisfying about making something from scratch in such a short time.

I tend to focus more on technical and original ideas than on polish or content. Between jams, I often let small technical concepts grow in my head — like a shader (LD48) or a map generator (LD56).

This time, I finally made a game I’ve had in mind for at least eight years! The idea of making sequences of tiles with the fewest repetition ever of pairs always fascinated me, but I never saw how to turn it into a playable, fun experience within 48 hours. I’m glad I waited — and even happier that I did it for this theme.

🏆 Tiles Collector earned 5th place in Innovation, my personal record!
(Even if proportionally 15th / 898 in LD48 was slightly higher, I’ll take it!)
It’s also my best result in Overall and Fun categories.

Tiles Collector Post Mortem

The Good

• I made a game!
  It’s functional, it looks clean, and I’m proud of it. I have come a long way from my first entries that avorted or were just toys...

• Tiles collector has a tutorial!
  One of my goals for this LD. A proper tutorial helps turn a concept into a real game. Most reviewers found that cool as well!

• I made multiple game modes you can choose from!
  The game includes a tutorial/story mode, daily challenges, and a sandbox mode — a first for me after usually doing single-level games like Find Ten Seconds. That plus the tutorial really push this entry from little proof of concept to the real game territories for me.

• Cross-platform support!
  It runs smoothly on both desktop and mobile. I tried as much as possible to have interactions that work on both platform and an UI that could fit both. I always try to make games and UI that are responsive. Which is super hard. Next time: Make a game with a fixed-size UI

• A proper GitHub repository!
  79 commits, a clean README, and even my first 10 stars ever — thanks to others sharing and starring LD58 entries.
  (Check out the list of LD58 repos I starred! and give them all a stars. Or let me know if you want to be included in the list)

The even better next time!

• The lonely leaderboard.
  I made an online leaderboard (one of the other goal for this LD)... and only one person used it (thanks @doctor-zeus!). It was hidden too deeply — I should have placed it on the main page. But with three daily challenges it was too much. I should have opted for one daily (like 2D-3-color) would have been enough, with others as extras.
  I wanted the leaderboard to give the feeling of a shared experience — a small community around the game.
  Next time, I’ll also add a “share result” feature, like Wordle screenshots.

• Limited time.
  I really wanted to do this idea justice. I didn’t overscope it, but between family, cooking, and taking care of the kids, time was short.
  I’d love to dedicate more time to game development in the future. That's always a bit of a struggle, cause if I really commit 100% I'd be extra disappointed if nothing comes out of the 48h (not only that would set the expectation of beating this entry ! but just making something (see #1 making a game is a success in itself))

• UI struggles.
  Making UI in p5.js is painful. I ended up mixing HTML and p5 elements, but not fully committing to one system, which led to a slightly janky interface.
  I later saw a clever approach where the canvas sits under HTML elements, creating a clean blend between UI and gameplay. I’ll definitely use that next time.

Goals for the next entry

• Keep progressing in the Innovative areas; This is my strong point and also my pride!
• Make a fixed-size game, with an overlay UI.
• Make the score sharing/leaderboard a focus point! I want a game that people play and challenge the other with.
• Commit more! The kids are growing so its easier, but also I should plan for help in the house. Also this edition I had made preparation (well, mostly about music! which I ended up not using at all). Going through the tools, making small proofs of concept before the LD and so on.

💭 Final Thoughts

This Ludum Dare reminded me that I love creating something. But what I love the most in Ludum Dare is the sense of community that I get from the reviewing process, sharing ideas, and talking with other creators! I was really busy and only reviewed 21 games this edition :( But I really spent time playing and leaving reviews on those 21. I am also super grateful to the 43 people who reviewed my game, and for the super comments I got. You really help me advance my game-making abilities.

Hopefully see you in April!

The results for my first COMPO and third entry in Ludum dare have finally come out, here they are: In this post I am going to break down each category and share my thoughts on it while also comparing them to my last Ludum dare entry from 2 years ago "Project Minima"

Fun was one of the games strong point and a ~0.14 stars increase in ratings from the last game. This was definitely my top priority when it came to the game. I tried my best to make this game as balanced as I could within the given deadline.

This games innovation ratings is a giant improvement from the last game, almost a 1 star increase. This is my first game jam where I actually got out of my comfort zone and didn't just make some basic platformer and it seems that it paid off greatly.

This is another category with a lot of improvement, an increase of just a little over 1 star. I don't know if people noticed this, but I attempted to implement the theme in two different ways: First are the tax collectors and second is the market where you collect various trinkets in order to profit off them.

Unfortunately Graphics is one of two categories that actually saw a decline in ratings, about 0.35 stars. It's also the one with the lowest placements. Graphics definitely suffered the most from the tight deadline. The sprites themselves aren't bad, but the house that makes up like 1/5 of the screen is very unfinished and the game lacks any form of foreground meaning there is a lot of empty blue space coming from the background. There is also the fact that the game uses the default font and some default Godot button UI which does not fit the pixel art aesthetics at all.

Audio is the games weak point when it comes to pure ratings, it's also another 0.35 starts decrease from the last entry. This makes sense since Audio is the category where I have the least amount of experience. It's a bit of a hit or miss if I make a decent song or not. I spend like 30 minutes just trying to relearn how to use beepbox lol. There is also the fact that initially the music was very quiet meaning some people might have missed it and given the game a lower rating because of it, which honestly does make me a bit frustrated.

Humor is by far this games strong suit and it's the first time in any game jam that I get a 4 star rating. It completely blows my previous entry out of the water with a ~1.3 starts increase in ratings. I think this comes from the humorous premise of the game and from the occasional humorous descriptions of some of the purchases in the game, though I'm not exactly sure which one has had a greater impact. Honestly this ratings surprised me the most as I didn't expect it to be this high.

Mood is like a 0.031 stars increase from the last game. Honestly I blame this relatively low rating on the graphics, since if there was more stuff it would've given the game a bit more "world building". I don't quite know what else to make of it. Ironically this leaves my first ever entry the one with the highest mood rating.

OVERALL Technically overall is an improvement of only 0.008 stars but honestly if you take the average this game's ratings were significantly better.

LAST THOUGHTS

It's hard for me to quantify how "good" these ratings are but I can definitely quantify the fact that this was a significant improvement from my last entries.

Honestly I think the games scope was too large for just the 1 and 3 quarters days I had available. Even for the full three days jams it would've been quite ambitious. I think my main problem was being unprepared for both the jam and my exam, I should've planned things way in advance to have the full 3 days available. I am confident this game would've been much more polished. There is a lot of good stuff that didn't make it to the final version. Though even the time I had could've been used more efficiently, I spent way to much time rebuilding and uploading the project after every little flaw I found in it, I should've play tested inside the editor until I was confident that the first build would be the final one. Art was a bit slow as there was a lot of different stuff to draw but the programming went incredibly smoothly compared to my other jams. Aside from this I need to finally get to learning how to make some actually decent music lol.

The results are in! Taking a look at ratings and playing some highly rated games on stream at https://www.twitch.tv/vorceshard.

Wishlist now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4128880/DEMON_POSITIVE/

Hello fellow Ludum Darers. Not sure if anybody is still lurking here after the event, but I've had some time on my hands, and I have created a set of Ludum Dare 58 wallpapers for you to put on your desktop, phone, or to use, or to do whatever you want with it.

There are different resolutions and formats. If you're interested, you can grab the wallpaper from here (Google Drive link). Enjoy, and thanks for participating!

Big thanks to @pov for making the font available on github. And for, well, the events.

Resolutions:

• 640x480
• 800x600
• 1024x768
• 1280x1024
• 1920x1080
• 1920x1200
• 2560x1080
• 2560x1440
• 2560x1600
• 3440x1440
• 3840x2160
• 7680x4320

Types available:

• wallpaper_horizontal_raw_LD58_* - horizontal orientation, not processed, small sign bottom-right
• wallpaper_horizontal_LD58_* - horizontal orientation, processed (opinionated), title in the middle, small sign bottom-right
• wallpaper_vertical_raw_LD58_* - vertical orientation, not processed, small sign bottom-right
• wallpaper_vertical_LD58_* - vertical orientation, processed (opinionated), title in the middle, small sign bottom-right

Our game GRIBNIK received quite a big post-jam update, which you can check out on itch.io.

This includes better understandable (hopefully) progression, bugfixes, QoL improvements, improved graphics, animations, audio etc.

As some other games made for LD58, it may serve as a spooky Halloween experience you can enjoy in the coming days 👻

It still ended up to be not that much of a game, rather a horror-like exploration experience. As it often happens on jams, initially we had much bigger plans that during the course of development have changed from implementing a series of bad-trip-like mini games to telling a mysterious and terrifying story, where the main character would slowly uncover what have happened in that forest. After realizing that we won't manage to do it in the given time constraints and a lot of feature-cutting we ended up with much simpler experience. And we usually polish our games after jams, but without much of the core gameplay changes, just trying to improve what we had already, and that's the case here.

Also, my teammates (or at least one of them) insisted on making this exploration as mysterious as possible, without giving almost any kind of hints to the player. I wasn't always on the same page with them, so at least in this post I can tell that there are two separate endings in the game, and, unlike the jam release, in the post-jam version they are quite easy to find. I just have to tell this because people playing the jam release often thought there's no progression / goal in the game.

I updated the game with some more bells and whistles and mobile controls, it breaks a little with the minimalistic style now but has some nice effects i think. Loading could be slow as its running on my pie. The tutorial on mobile is also not existing tap the sun to brake and hold the earth to launch satellites.

https://type2.dynv6.net/

I took part in LD58 (Extra) and got 20 ratings, but unfortunately my game didn’t receive an overall ranking.

Does anyone know if this can be fixed or if there’s a way to make it count for the results?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/pay-or-die

Hi everyone! I made a small post-jam version of my game "Monsters in Jars". If you’re interested, you can check it out and play here: https://t4ran.itch.io/monsters-in-jars

I’d love to hear any feedback!

Hey guys, we just released Goblin Goopmaxxing yesterday after doing the most recent ludum dare game jam. It was a hell of a grind (we developed it for 3 weeks) but it turned out really well and people love it!

If you guys wanna check it out then here's the link:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4107470/Goblin_Goopmaxxing/

It's been well over a year and I am happy to announce a full release of my LD55 entry on January 13, 2026. This community is one of my favourite things and I've been glad to be apart of it over the years and all the great games I've played, thank you! If a small chesslike roguelike game interests you a wishlist would be appreciated!

Wishlist now

This is the third time I have written an article about the game I made to celebrate my 10 years anniversary making jam games. And sadly no one have played the game, unless you count myself. So once again I hope, I even begs some of you to give the game a chance. It's not perfect, but I spent way to much time on it, and I want to share it with you because I love you - the game jam community.

The game is called "The Love Sheriff", and it's a total remake of the first jam game I have ever made. The game was made for Ludum Dare 32 and the theme for the jam was "Unconventional weapon". This new version is made after the classic compo rules, beside I give my self much more time to make it. So I have made all the music, visuals, voice over and programing. The game is made so it is a mix between the way the game was made then and the way I try to make games today.

I really hop some of you will give the game a chance here

Good luck and have fun

My game jam journey

This time let me also tell you a bit about my game jam journey, and this might explain why I want you to play my game.

Game jams has become a big part of my life. I have made more then 80 jam games. A bit over 20 of those games I have made for Ludum Dare. And even without knowing an exact number I guess I have played about 2500-4000 Ludum Dare games. And I have given a bit of feedback and ratings to most of them. And with all the jams I have taken part of I guess I have played at least 10,000 jam games. So yes this is a lot of games played and a lot games made. But I have only done this because I love making the games, and because I love playing your amazing, weird, funny and interesting games.

So I have made more then 80 jam games, and I have been the winner of zero of them. Okay a have a couple of second places, but those I have gotten for making something so weird that they thought it must be very innovative. But none of this matter because I have always tried to make the games I like, even if it's not something many other people would like.

I could here write a long list of the games I have made, and I could write a long article about them, but it's not very interesting. And by the way the most of them is not super great, but hopefully I learned something from making them. And the main part of the jams for me, is to try ideas and having fun making games. And some times I have made games I have liked, and I have also worked a bit more on some of them, but I have never made a super big commercial game.

But just as important as making games for the jams, I love playing the games. Okay when you have played 10,000 jam games, there are a lot of games that is very similar, but I still find games that do something fun and interesting. And playing jam games is super fun, and sometimes also a pretty weird experience. But I still love doing it, and I always tries to give my honest feedback.

So for me this my short summery of the first 10 years with game jamming. I still have fun doing it, so I believe I will make many more jam games.

And 'The Love Sheriff' is my way to show what I have learned from making all of those games, and from all the things I learned and been inspired by from all your jam games.

I’ve felt contemplative lately and wanted to write a short-ish post about my team’s Ludum Dare history. Ludum Dare 58 was our 17th, dating back to LD 30. We started out creating our games in Stencyl, which at the time I jokingly called “programming with LEGOs”. The downside today is that our first four entries (Melody’s Long Ladder Home, Icy’s Trivial Travails, Dial M for Monster and Driven Insane) were made exclusively for Flash and aren’t publicly playable anymore.

We transitioned to Unity for Box ‘n Bash in Ludum Dare 34, taking that jam as an opportunity to learn how to make a game in Unity. Yes, our LD entry that year was our first attempt at Unity. Really, cramming for the jam and then turning out something at the end in an engine we’d never used before was super satisfying, and highly recommended. There’s nothing to lose by not completing your project on time, and the impetus of a surprise theme and the tight deadline can be invigorating.

I grew up watching Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars and the like, so I love the on-the-fly improv that comes from a short deadline and a surprise theme. Take what you know, use what you have, manage the clock, and create something special. The short timeframe stops projects from spiraling out of control and keeps you focused until the end.

One of the things we’ve never successfully done for a game jam is a multiplayer game. We’ve had some that started with multiplayer in the design doc (Needle in a Neighborhood comes to mind), but it always gets cut.

Our most common genre is the side-scrolling platformer, of which we’ve in five of our 17 jams. The next most common with three are FPS and what I’d call ‘falling games,’ where you control an object falling from the top of the screen and guiding it to safety. The fact that we’ve done that in over 17% of our jam entries (stacking crates in Box ‘n Bash, guiding a bell pepper into an oven in Get Baked, and helping a squirrel catch nuts in Grab Your Nutz) is a little weird, given that it’s not that common a theme.

Speaking of Grab Your Nutz, it just got a high-res release on Android this month. New graphics, but the same basic gameplay. Here’s the original from 2020, compared to the new version from this year:

If you’re interested, you can download it for free on Google Play.

finally having time to draw a celebration picture >///<