I don't think I should be able to see this, right?

EDIT: Seems to be fixed now

Finished just in time for the extra format. I'm really glad I could finish my first 3D game and I'd love some feedback. Drop your games in the comments and I'll play them :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/cat-liverycat-delivery

Time sure does fly.

Press the heart button every ten seconds to keep him alive, grow from a baby to senior and make life choices such as job and marriage. Game is literally only 5-ish minutes long and for Android and PC devices.

I know voting and everything is over, I just wanted people to try it if they hadn't seen it yet.

Thanks, till next time.

I just have to say congratulations to everyone for another great Ludum Dare! We've had a lot of fun playing and rating as many games as we could. But there are so many that we couldn't get to! Ratings will be announced in just 15 hours ... and no matter what, everyone should feel a sense of achievement. After all, the experience and the lessons are why we're here :)

See you all again soon! We're working on a good update to 'Dragua', so we'll be back next week!

- Hawkin

Thanks to everyone who rated our game "Where is that kitty going???" and even made our dreams come true, at some point.

This is our first game that has been released and therefore we are ready to improve it according to all your suggestions! So if we can change something or make something better in the last hours PLEASE write it in the comments :heart: This was also our first Ludum Dare and we are SO thankful for your LOVE for our kitty game :two_hearts:!

Please rate our game if you haven't seen it yet :star: :star: :star: :star: :star: we are sure you'll like the theme ha-ha :cat:

My first Ludum Dare was in 2014. Long time ago. Since that time I have made a lot of games on LD. Some of them get high scores (not the highest yet), some of them are not so good. Now I had an option to make the game without thinking about ratings. To make a game not to compete, but to express something from myself. And I put my fears of ongoing war into gaming form. Not for judging, but for experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA0o27WXPFc

Play game here

Thank you all, LD people! I'm happy to stay with you in this dark times.

Now our kitty jupms much more easier (especially on the android) Go and check it here!!! We will read all your suggestions in comments :hearts:

Ludum Dare #51 is about to end and I hope you enjoyed your time. You can play the game I made for the Compo right now. It is a shop keeper game with physics and mayhem. Hope you enjoy your time.

Also all of the assets I used makin this game is avalible on the itch.io page

Assets: https://denisaras.itch.io/monsters-dungeon-shop

It took me a while, but I finally finished and published the PostJam Version of Gravity Crush!

The game is now a full blown (if very small) roguelike! Here is a short list of stuff that has been added:

• PAUSE MENU!
• New Enemies
• New Items
• New Weapons
• Unlockable Characters
• Bossfights
• An actual Roguelike structure to the game
• Skipping empty floors
• Tracked Stats

I would love to get some feedback on the new version and see some screenshots of your unlocks!

This is a screenshot of someone who played my game.

I already have enough ratings and I honestly didn't rate enough games after five days or so since I was busy but... you know... last spurt I guess. Play and rate my games, maybe?

I think I spent enough effort and time on this game for it to deserve a little bit of love from me.

hi can someone explain to me what happens in the top 15 results ? why is it seperated from all results and where can we watch them "Live" ?

also what happens to the "Extra" format ? is it still available ? can we now start to vote for the extra games, I'm confused ?

thanks'o'plenty :smile:

Hello! Just about 6 hours until the results, I want to say thank you to everyone who played and left feedback on my game. This was my first time on Ludum Dare and hopefully won't be the last.

I know I most likely am not going to get a good place but I don't really mind that, I joined to have fun and see if I can make a working game in just 48 hours and I achieved that!

Excited to see the top games :>

Oh btw there is more coming to my game, will share soon hopefully, until then check out the post-ludum version :)

https://ldj.am/$298024! Finally the rating season ends. Wonderful days! First time in LDJ, first time make a complete game. Knowing what i'm good at, knowing what i'm lacking, seeing many brilliant ideas, and make new friends! Improved my game for a little, adding Chinese language. Thanks all for playing, thanks all for the precious comment!

The Update

Our first Post Jam Update for Blind Jump is now live on itch.io

The first update contains several fixes and some QoL features, such as: * Fixed corner stuck bugs * Tweaked gravity and character control to make the jumps more lenient * Redesigned most levels to fit the new character control * Added a new portal mechanic that didn't made into the jam entry * Added closed captions for people having difficulty hearing audio ques * Added an option menu with volume controls and pixel scaling settings * Added a chapter selection menu * Added visual indicators for success and failure states

Future Plans

We would like to at least attempt to put the game on Steam with more mechanics and levels. Also we would like to make a level editor with workshop integration for this game as the "endless mode".

Please consider joining our Discord for information on future updates.

Between doing the pixel graphics for our game I also had the honour of composing all the music and sounds for our wario-ware type entry Dubious Arcade

As it was a multi-game entry I ran into an interesting challenge: To make individual 10 second music themes for (almost) every game in the arcade.

My solution: Make an annoying tic-toc sound (as it also fits the timed-theme) and have that as the common theme throughout.

This pushed my output rate a lot as the tic-toc-sound was super-annoying over time when played by itself which meant I that I had to work to blend the tic-tocs into the music so I didn't have to notice it anymore. And as soon as a track was done I went back to the clean tic-toc sound and pushed me again to drown it out with a new song to keep my sanity.

A great whip/carrot and it pushed me to make 12 individual themesongs in different styles for the Jam!

Super happy to get to use a bunch of aucustic instruments as well! When heading to the locale where our team does the jam, I managed to carry with me a number of fun instruments ranging from a guitarlele to a mouth-harp to a Xiao-flute. And all got used! They also came in clutch for many of the sound effects in the game as well!

Had a great time and I'm already looking forward for the next jam!

Feel free to pop into our game and listen to the music! :musical_note:

Our entry: Dubious Arcade

SALAZAR APPROVES OF THIS MESSAGE!

Great day to everyone of you Ludum Dare enjoyers! Our game studio Beebo Studios has released v2 of our entry for the Ludum Dare 51 extra category:

Can you help Lucy find Duke and unravel the story that occured within the walls of her home?

We at Beebo Studios have all put a lot of effort and love into this game and we are glad to share it with you :) If you haven't already, check out the game: I Need to Be With Him (The game is available for download for all platforms)

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

If you played and rated Frogwatch your a legend cheers and thanks!

https://twitch.tv/kuviman

Checking out results and playing top 15 games :eye:

:red_circle: Grab your snacks and join us on https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis

Come hang out :)

https://twitch.tv/badcop_

It physically hurts to be up this early, but we're live and ready to stream some LD games over at https://www.twitch.tv/coleslawski

Hope to see you there! :pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:

Sadly life got in the way and I wasn't able to make much more progress on my game :(

Had lots of fun though, and I'll be back for the next jam!

Here's a work-in-progress tree that I was having fun drawing:

@PoV where are the top 15 results please

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You're all invited ❤️ BYOB

I bet I did really bad since not a lot of people played my game but it was pretty fun! Thanks to the people who got it to 20 votes!

Hey guys, first ld jam here! These are the tools I'll be using:

• Godot 3.5
• Aseprite
• Beepbox
• Audacity

Good luck everyone and let's have a jammin' good time!

Soooo everybody is waiting for the results to appear. Meanwhile you can check our post-jam update on our game - SONAR: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/sonar

Right before the theme reveal, we put together a keynote video because there wasn't an official one! Though, because of the theme reveal, it didn't get too many views. Maybe check it out now? <3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAoNN22vE

It looks like we might do an unofficial Top15 results if we can't wake Mike up soon :D

I know everyone is waiting for the results, eager to play the top games of the jam. Wait no longer! After careful thought and consideration, I have deduced that my game is the best. There's simply no other game that comes close to the auditory, graphical, and entertainment excellence of my game.

Feel free to play it while you wait for the rest of the results: https://bit.ly/3CXJtoF

where are the top 15 results at?

https://twitter.com/ludumdare/status/1583829371647045632

"Where is that kitty going" is a game made special for our ever FIRST jam, where you can play as a kitty who is riding somewhere on a skateboard. We fixed everything you commented so now we have the most pleasant version just for YOU :heart:

Till waiting for the results you can check our really cute game! Our kitty is waiting for you :timer: :kissing_cat:

What is your political opinion on capybaras

Yes everyone like bubbles & particles! no? x)

Whoops! I didn't realize I had set the countdown clocks wrong. Results were supposed to kick-off ~~3~~ 4 hours later (I quite literally just woke up, lol). :sweat_smile:

To keep you from waiting, we'll be honouring the "all results" time. Simply visit your game page to see your personal results (in about 30'ish minutes).

We will go ahead and tweet the top 15 as planned, since I think there's still value in sharing the games on Twitter. I'll be updating the clocks, and the "results" post will go live at the end as usual.

My sincere apologies for the mix up! :sweat_smile:

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

I'm very pleased, 64th in humor!

in terms of raw ratings, it's probably best I've done 3.1 in fun and overall is great to see. Got top 1000 at least, wonder how many games received 20 ratings.

https://ldj.am/$298024 is it because I upload a new version? but I upload it after rating season! that, should be fine right...? at least I really want to know my grade before that upload, pllllllllz! @pov

I really wanted to get to top 100 this time and... well... Wish was resolved in very accurate way :DD

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

I'm still live on twitch! https://twitch.tv/badcop_

come join if you want to see the top 15 compo games, or head to https://twitch.tv/kuviman to see the top 15 jam games

38th in graphics, that's insane and a testament that I sort of know which direction I'm going.

Althought it's 'just' 36 reviews, I can definitelly call my 5th LD as a success and a good benchmark on future entries.

I near all categories, I haven't been that high in the ranking yet. (Closest was LD 49 I believe)

Thank you all that played and enjoyed my entry.

Results are in!

Pretty cool to get 30th place in a category in our first gamejam. Top 300 overall feels pretty good too. I wonder how many games participated overall.

As always, you can play the game at timesli.me

Had such a blast guys, thank you all so much for playing and making our first ever LDGJ such an amazing experience!

Not too bad for a first game!

Our results! To be honest, I was planning to get into the top 50. But the top 100 is not even bad and better than our last project "The gallows" :smirk:

.

Why did I plan to get high results? Probably because of the comments that our game is the best or one of the best in the comments. haha :smile:

.

Many thanks to everyone who played, evaluated and supported our project!

.

Are you satisfied with the results?

Haha funny number

Wow 7th in innovation!! Thank you all for playing and rating!

you can play here https://ebbdrop.itch.io/heat

I was looking through the results for the jam and there is a NINE WAY TIE for 212th.

Honestly I didn't think I would be ranked below 500 I'm really proud thanks to all those who give love/rating & feedbacks for my game Speedrun for Light !!!

And of course congratulations to all the participants & the LD community !

Hi everyone - I've never done a blog post here, but I am beyond excited and thankful for these ratings:

I started learning game-dev 5 or 6 years ago, specifically to be able to enter game jams and achieving this level of success feels surreal. That said, Ludum Dare is about so much more than ratings! My team's first jam in 2018 wasn't even finished in time to submit (and if we did I'm sure ratings would not have been great haha :laughing: ) But it started a love for this event, and a drive to keep learning. If this is your first time (or your 10th time) I hope you keep working and find a team that you mesh with. It's incredibly fun when you and your team gel as well as we did for this event.

I'll try to work with the rest of my team to put together a post-mortem post/video on how we achieved the visual style that we did, to hopefully help others learn similar techniques.

Thanks again to everyone who played and rated our game, I'll see you at the next LD! Play Clock Caper here

Sushi Panic didn't do too bad! Congrats to everyone else!

Top 10 for Theme and Top 50 for Fun!!

I'm honored and so excited that people enjoyed our entry, thank you so much to folks who played/rated! I was worried I wasn't going to be able to do LD51, and I'm so glad I decided to set aside time for it. Congrats to everyone who made something they're proud of or grew their game making skills over the last few weeks!

Follow https://twitter.com/gkgames if you're interested in keeping up with any of my future work :)

I made people maaaad, bro... I was expecting to be placed higher, but the annoying things I did to make the game harder were mayyyyybe a bit too much (:sweat_smile:)... Still proud of where I ended up, thankfully! Just next time, I need to make a game that people can get good at! XD

Thank you to everyone that played and rated my game! I'm glad people enjoyed it! :smile:

No particularly high placings, but I did get my best ever scores for Graphics and Audio, and my best scores for Theme and Innovation since LD46! I'm thoroughly pleased with that.

As I've mentioned before, LD52 is scheduled to begin on my birthday, so I'm unsure whether I'll actually be taking part in it, but I'll continue honing my skills regardless and I'll definitely be back for LD53, with my sights set on even better results. See you all then!

For my first game jam and second attempt at making a game in general, I'm pretty pleased with these results!

It's pretty much average across the board (besides innovation, although I did not expect high marks there ngl :laughing:) and I think that's solid for this attempt. I like to think I could maybe have got slightly better marks with more reviews, but sadly I've spent the last week bedridden, so I actually just feel lucky I got the minimum 20 reviews lol.

I've also learnt a lot in making this game and received some very solid advice and feedback which I appreciate immensely. Looking forward to the next one for sure :smile:.

are extra games all supposed to be 0 average? i understand being N/Ath place because i know it's not supposed to be ranked against the other extra games since it's the casual format but it's wild to not see the average of the ratings on your own entry when it's still possible for extra games to be rated in the first place, like i've seen some entries with 100 ratings but it just says 0 average like why have it be functionally possible to opt in to ratings if it does nothing? :thinking: all those opinions going into the void lol

Edit: Forgot that Jam and Compo have different rating categories! :face_palm:

@pov, I'll check back in a little bit to see if this fixes itself automatically, but at the moment the grades appear to be off for the similarly rated entries! :sweat_smile:

The left side is rated lower in every category (other than the theme), but the right side has a lower grade by a *substantial amount in each and every one of them...*

Good luck on figuring this out, and thank you for another great Ludum Dare! :beers:

Here are our ratings. We are a little disappointed with the result. We got a lot of good feedback on our game in the comments, but we got an average rating of 3 in all categories. So we don't understand if people liked the game or not. And now we don't know whether to start developing a full version of the game or it will be a waste of time.

Every ld my results are overall better than the year before, I was afraid that this one will be different but I somehow still nailed it lol. this was a lot of fun, thanks everyone!

Pretty disappointed with everything but Audio/Humor/Mood. But that only fuels my drive to make a better text adventure next time >:D (With those percentages 100% = first place, more details here)

Nice! Wish the overall rating was better but there was a lot of jank and a lot of people seemed to think the graphics looked outdated. Still it seems like people really enjoyed it!

Play the world's 22nd funniest jam game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/growth-spurt

Thanks to everyone that played and provided feedback for Weirdo Words. I was very happy with my result and I think these are the best scores I've received on an entry to date.

Weirdo Words isn't over, you can still play it today and get a new set of jumbles every day. I'll leave it up for a while but will be taking it down in the near future when I do the actual game release.

The new version will have a new name, some interface updates, an expanded dictionary, support for anagrams, and several new play modes and difficulty settings. The thing that has really surprised me is the number of visitors that my dashboard says I'm getting to the game. Far more individuals are playing than rated and lots of repeat visitors. I honestly didn't expect so I think it is definitely worth putting some effort into a full release.

Again, thanks to everyone! I got to play some really cool games this round. Looking forward to the LD52!

This was our first Jam, and we never expect to even finish! I think this is a great score tho

Still gunning for that top ten! I'll get there at some point. Scores over time ->

First time ever top 10! Feels especially nice since everyone kept bitching about theme being bad haha https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-we-switch

So after a long, long wait for final results I finally see what I have. Don’t know if I’m happy with that, but I guess for first entry and even in Compo this is pretty good. Thank you, LD, for the opportunity to create something that I want to finalise and show to world. See you in LD52 and devlogs of Switcheroo!

I really, REALLY, didn't care for the theme "every 10 seconds". Which is at least partially why I ended up making the kind of game that I did. It was just intended to make fun of the theme and make fun of how inspiration less it made me feel.

At least most people thought it was funny too, which is honestly just primary school all over again. If you can't make something brilliant then make something that makes people laugh. I can't really say that I disagree with the score, the game ended up getting.

It was certainly a very juvenile and cynical game, it was basically me doing this:

And to some extent I think I need to outgrow this, it's not conducive to become a better artist and developer, or just as a person in general, if I just continue to make mean spirited and pessimistic art. At the same time I don't know where else to go?

Am I just an angry old fucking idiot? Can I change? should I change? isn't there plenty of reason to be fucking angry?... Definitely questions I need to work on.

ON A POSITIVE NOTE:

It was really interesting learning Godot during the weekend as well, it has a really interesting approach, though I'm not sure that it's actually THAT fundamentally different. Like it seems that the scenes are just another word for a composition class and so on... either way, it won't be the last time I work in Godot, especially since yoyogames has gone over to the subscription model and the CEO of Unity has revealed himself to be a massive dickhead. (I do not hold it against other developers who use these engines btw. this is just my principled stance).

I do like a lot of the built in features in Godot, especially the text handling using bbcode to do animation and effects and so on. Definitely looking forward to 4.0!

Also, see ya all in January for LD52!

It was the December of 2014, and a Unicode snowman almost won the theme vote. A friend of mine who has been around since Ludum Dare 25 was showing me a game they created for Ludum Dare 31. At the time I had been wanting to get into game development for a while. I've downloaded Unity and followed some tutorials, so I had a grasp on what I was doing. My friend introduced me to Ludum Dare, and I gave it a go.

Ludum Dare 32

The theme was An Unconventional Weapon. After spending the first day on an idea that I eventually dropped, I came up with a better idea. My weapon shall be planets! With my incredibly limited knowledge of unity, I made an endless survival game about throwing planets into asteroids to prevent asteroids from crashing into the sun. I wrote the music in LittleBigPlanet 2's Midi Sequencer, and all the graphics were just default spheres with some poorly made unity materials.

Having never completed a game before this, the deadline was incredibly exciting! Before this point I had never made a title screen before, and I know it sounds goofy to say it, but after adding a title screen, it felt like a complete game. I still have incredibly fond memories of showing this game to all my friends, and them all competing for the high score. In the end, I scored 41st in innovation for the compo, and I was hooked.

Ludum Dare 33

I'll keep these short and sweet. Reflecting on my previous Ludum Dare, I was going to need a lot of extra time programming to fix things, so I spent exactly 20 minutes on the art for the entire game. You can imagine how well that turned out.

To avoid giving the main character a walk animation, he has Heely's so he can just slide around. HA!

Ludum Dare 34

At this point, I have moved on from LittleBigPlanet 2's sequencer, and upgraded to LMMS. In hindsight, I should've done that before the jam started. The music I wrote for LD 34 is bar none the worst sound you could ever experience.

This uninspiring endless runner about being a ninja pair of pants was a disaster, and the comments seemed to reflect it. Despite that, one comment really stood out:

The joy of reading their first sentence left a huge impact on me. My game sucked, sure, but it was enjoyable in its own stupid absurd way.

Ludum Dare 35 through 37

This was when I seriously started reflecting on the feedback I was given from the previous games, though it took a little longer to really understand the notes on difficulty. Looking back, it feels like I was trying to beat the players, which is stupid. My Ludum Dare 35 game even says "I didn't really expect anyone to get this far" in the victory screen, just to show how bad that mindset had become.

Ludum Dare 36 wasn't judged due to website maintenance, but I wrote some real good music that jam, and I always wished I could've got a score for that just to see how much I had improved.

Ludum Dare 37 was the first game I made that got a better score than my first Ludum Dare. 34th in Theme, and 39th in innovation. For "One Room", I made a game about running around a pillar in the center of the room, and behind the shadow the pillar casts, a new procedurally generated room is created. Despite the game doing great in innovation, it had the least memorable main character of any game I have ever made.

Looking back, I was making too many endless games, and nowadays I'm simply not a fan of the genre.

Ludum Dare 38 through 42

The current website has arrived! At this point I've decided "I know all there is to know. Now I can screw around and make whatever I come up with". A bold statement. It definitely is the time where I became more ambitious with my LD games. I was no longer getting comments about the games being impossibly difficult, I was now getting comments about the game being impossibly confusing. All around, these games were creative, yet terribly explained. An era where my ideas far exceeded my execution, resulting in some real big messes. In one of the games, as an effort to prevent it from being confusing, there's a "Things you should know before playing" option on the title screen, leading to a stupid-sized wall of text. Great work, buddy.

So I was starting to understand that my games needed better direction and tutorials, but I wasn't quite figuring out how to do it. On a related note, this is where I started finding my art style. I played around with it a lot in these games, and I really enjoyed cute characters with no outlines.

Oh- and LD41's "Combine Two Incompatible Genres" is still the best theme I've participated in. Every game that jam was unique and amazing!

Ludum Dare 43 through 45

Okay, yeah. I have really found my art style.

These are games that I really look back on fondly. I think the game I made for Ludum Dare 43 was my first "Good game". It was actually fun! I made a game where you play as Mary, who had a little lamb, and you throw your lamb at enemies to kill them, Steal their money, and buy more lambs. Its like absurd Pikmin, and has a synth-heavy rendition of Mary Had A Little Lamb playing the whole time, and ah! It's this kind of absurdism that I fell in love with.

What about a game where you mine for money and spend it all on a bunch of ladders? Sure! Why not? I also learned a lot about mixing audio, and found some more cool synths. My music was starting to get better, and I wanted to show off.

This was also my first game to include a speedrun timer at the end, and wow let me tell you it's the best idea I've had yet. Not only do people enjoy winning games, people enjoy bragging about how fast they beat the game. Why would I ever want to make another endless game ever again? Every time someone posts a screenshot of their speedrun time, I want to give them a hug.

My first top ten in graphics was my LD45 game, "Ultra Quest". I spent a lot of time on the music as well, trying to incorporate a leitmotif. This game is about going on an adventure, nonsensically killing everything in your path, becoming king, and slaying a dragon. At the end of level one, you start a forest fire, and the fire is visible on the map used for selecting levels. After level two, the fire on the map is bigger. It's one of my favorite visual gags.

Ludum Dare 46

Overconfidence? What's that? Okay yeah so this was the first Ludum Dare I ever submitted where I don't think the game was complete. If Ludum Dare 34 was my first failure, then this was my second. I created a super edgy gardening simulator with turn based combat, dialogue, cutscenes, a unique crafting system, and a final boss. All within 48 hours. And none of it was polished. It didn't even follow the theme! I think maybe two or three people actually beat the game, due to the insane amount of softlocks. That said, I learned my limits.

It's definitely one of the game's that I don't tend to replay. I usually avoid showing this game to any new friends, ha!

Ludum Dare 47

Second place in Innovation. This game hits different. Ribbon was the game I created for the theme "Stuck in a loop".

It's my first top 3 score, and in innovation, no less! If Ludum Dare 46 was a complete flop, then Ludum Dare 47 was a complete 180. I had a lot to reflect on from LD46, and I wanted to show that I learned my lesson. The music slaps, the artwork slaps, no softlocks, (it's not unreasonably edgy), and I paced myself. I had plans for more content, but scrapped it so I could polish the main mechanic. The steering mechanic was incredibly buggy until the last hour. It's a lot of math that, looking back, I have honestly no idea how I made work. The end result however, is a game that didn't have a single negative comment, except for wanting more content.

Ludum Dare 48

So how do you follow that up? Well, before Ludum Dare 48, I participated in Discord jam! Outside of game development, I was playing around with the concept of Arbitrary Code Execution in Super Mario Bros. 3, and thought it would be fun to make a game about lining up bytes in the game's memory and "Executing" them.

Still being in the mood to make a game about memory manipulation, I had an idea for a game where data will get cleared if it's not written to within 3 seconds. For instance, if you are running on a flat floor for 3 seconds, your Y position hasn't been changed, so you snap vertically to a Y position of zero. I called it RAMnesia.

Something I wanted to focus on was making the music very long. This is a puzzle platformer, and if a player is stuck, you want to avoid repetitive music. It wasn't high-energy, but it was more than a 3 minute loop, and I was proud of it. That being said, the game didn't follow the theme at all, so uh- whoops!

Between this and the next Ludum Dare, I once again participated in Discord Jam, this time coming in first place overall!

Ludum Dare 49

I parodied Donkey Kong! I really struggled to come up with an idea during this jam, so it doesn't quite fit the theme, but I enjoyed the concept of dodging barrels while building the scaffolding to reach him yourself. And oh yeah, the music goes hard. It's one of my best original songs, and halfway through I incorporated a NES audio chip emulator and added the iconic donkey kong loop as another instrument. (as well as some 8 bit noise channel for some "snares")

Ludum Dare 50

My second time scoring second place, this time in Humor. Also 4th overall! At this point I have taken the absurdism of my games to a new height. It's a game about managing a blockbuster video store, but you also need to murder dinosaurs and netflix employees by shooting lasers at them so you can harvest their bones and use them as scaffolding to prevent your video store from sinking into the ground.

I picked up a bunch of 80s synths, and wrote the most bangin' music for this one. I had over twenty comments compliment my music, and it's no surprise it was the best I had ever done in the Audio category. I mean, it slaps.

Then I participated in Discord Jam again, but whatever.

Ludum Dare 51

With this being my most recent game, I have lots to say.

Once more, 4th Overall!

Reflecting on the success of Ribbon, I wanted to try my hand at another 3D game. Despite having very little experience making them, this game really came together and significantly faster than I expected. I had way too much time for polishing this one, and I used every minute I had to fill this game to the brim with details. Looking at my previous games, I had yet to score a top ten in audio, despite how great I perceive my own music to be. I asked around for some tips, and was suggested to add voice acting. Now, VA is great and all, but why not take it a step further? That's right, baby! I added an acapella track to my Ludum Dare game!

Recording all the layers for the acapella track was the most awkward I've ever felt. It felt cringy and bad, and I was nervously shaking the entire time, wondering if I could've been spending this time to make a better song, ha! Somehow it really came together though! Don't get me wrong, it's a disaster full of flat notes and awkward nervousness, but wow I had fun! And I finally met my goal of Top Ten in Audio!

I also wanted to go all out on accessibility. My previous game, which scored 4th Overall, didn't even have a volume slider, so this game has one for the music and one for the VA. I have a colorblind friendly mode, and you can enable/disable subtitles for the VA. It also came in 4th, so I must be doing something right.

I was joking with some friends that I'll have to do acapella every single jam now, and in 20 more jams I'll be some sort of acapella master. I probably won't do that, but it's fun to think about.

Closing Thoughts

Oh snap, 20 down. I haven't missed one yet, and I sure don't plan on missing any in the future. It's honestly pretty great looking at the old games compared to where I am now. Especially how much I have grown as an artist and composer. I mean, you can see the screenshots, and with how bad my music was in the first few jams, perhaps it's a good thing I can't share that here, ha! I've certainly done a lot better than I could've ever hoped for, and I'm only planning on getting even better.

Onward to the next 20. It's gonna be a wild ride.

☃

I was pretty happy with ETERNARC, but certainly wasn't expecting it to hit Compo top16 overall and top8 fun. Man, what a shock!

This is by far my best jam. From my games dwelling around top 10% in these categories, to removing that modulo altogether... The dopamine rush isn't calming down anytime soon!

And not just dopamine; motivation, too! Like putting a whole can of gasoline in my gamedev flame! An irresistible urge!

So before I go and drown in Unity again, here is my game:

-> ETERNARC <-

Oh by the way, do you think I should write a post-mortem?

Congratulations to you all and see you in 6 months! I promise I'll make music in time for a change :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

Nice! Honestly I didn't thought this thing would make the top 500 taking into account it was my lowest effort so far. But with that said, this was also my highest score yet for LD. Let's see if I can beat it next time. See you in January.

If you haven't had a chance to catch a wizard yet (or if that boss fight was just too dang hard), there is a much more polished post-jam version now available!

You can check it out here! :heart:

to highlight a few of the changes;

the lava shield now has a fancy shader

Torches now have some fancy lighting effects

*There's also a new easter egg to find... :musical_note: *

Special thanks to @Brainoid for creating the new music in the post-jam version!

Post-Jam version of To Catch a Wizard

Phew! And Ludum Dare 51 has ended.

Thank you everyone that joined us over on Twitter and my sincere apologies for the results schedule mix-up! :sweat_smile:

Results

The results for each category can be found here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/results

You can check your game page for your individual results (via the My Game link up top).

Congratulations everyone! You made a game!

Schedule for 2023 is live! 3 events!

We're trying something new next year. We've added an early January event and adjusted the other dates accordingly.

• Ludum Dare 52: January 6th, 2023
• Ludum Dare 53: April 28th, 2023
• Ludum Dare 54: September 29th, 2023

I like the end-of year events to be as early in October as possible, but lol, we again have a year where October 1st is on the weekend. Gee thanks calendar. :sweat_smile:

Next event: Ludum Dare 52, January 6th-9th weekend

A Ludum Dare in January?

That's right! I was curious how early we could realistically run a Ludum Dare event. Then one thing lead to another and ... :sweat_smile:

I am a "new years resolution" person, and I'm also well aware how common it is to abandon resolutions by the end of January. I don't yet know how practical January 6th is so close to the holidays, but it sounded like a fun experiment, and we wont know until we try it.

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed.

https://newsletter.ldjam.com :mailbox:

Or follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ludumdare :bird:

Thanks to our Sponsors

Big thanks to our sponsor Akamai Technologies, and especially a big thanks for their help adding uploading to Ludum Dare.

I learned so much about securely embedding games, and I really appreciate everyone's patience, especially the Godot users. I'll have this cleaned up and streamlined for January's event. :construction_worker:

Thank you for a great 2022!

Phew! In hindsight, I definitely bit off more than I could chew this time around. Who knew getting married, having your car die, and "health stuff" would eat up so much time? :sweat_smile:

Personally, I feel I missed too many of my goals for Ludum Dare this year, but the year isn't over and I'm excited to take another stab at that.

See you in January!

Written some words again (~2500), read on itch.io

This LudumDare was very fun, see you all next time <3

I was worried sick for didn’t get my rating, I can’t even sleep. But finally I got it! And I’m soooo exciting about it! Almost got to top 100! I didn’t even dream about it! Well, guess I’m have another trouble for my sleep.

Made it to top 100! Well, you could try playing the POST LD version, and see if it deserves a better rating.

https://xk.itch.io/10-seconds-to-dungeon-post-ld

Improved and extended.

omg, im so stupid… apparently, on one of the page updates, i accidentally opted out of all ratings. :seenoevil:

Being my fist jam on here i just assumed i couldn’t see how many ratings i received (thought it made it more neutral/mysterious) thats why i didn’t wonder. In 2022 some assumptions are just too risky, it seems.

Thank all of you who played and critiqued it anyways and everyone on here for cool games and nice conversations, was lots of fun. Next time i/we try to actually take part in the rankings :sweat_smile: :joy:

brace yourselves :smiling_imp:

After a lot of helpful feedback, I turn my game Blades of Doom in to a full game!

*You can get the Deluxe version here: *https://benjamin-halko.itch.io/blades-of-doom

The Deluxe version has these cool new additions:

• Powerups
  • Invincibility
  • Ice (Slows down platforms + spikes)
• Coloured warning bars across the screen to indicate attacks
• Improved difficulty curve
• More saw blade patterns

Gameplay

https://youtu.be/Bx7KOFc08J0

Thank you to everyone who played the game and left feedback! It means a lot! I can't wait until next Ludum Dare!!!

Would like to thank everyone who played Burger Rush, and gave a review. It's great to be near the top 5% of all the entries today, as well as 73rd in Fun. If you haven't giving it a chance, feel free to play Burger Rush now.

And now looking forward to the next jam!

Hey guys! So basically we are really glad with the final result of The Potion Shop - an LGBT story! Thank you so much everyone that played our game, unfortunaly I couldn't focus so much in the production this time because I was working really hard on the DLC of Phil Alone, a game I developed on Ludum Dare 47!

I released a DLC of Phil Alone these days, hope you guys enjoy it because it's a game that was first developed here in the Ludum Dare!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2129820/PhilAloneGameDev_Book/

Here are the results for 10 Second Painter!

Honestly, not too shabby for something I threw together in an hour of dev time. Thanks everyone for playing and rating!

:)

Here's a pixel art time lapse video of some art I made for our LD51 submission. Check it out! https://youtu.be/CMevBE4Ju5M

Trying to evolve my game into a mobile version what do you think about the evolution?

Let me know if you like or dislike the design.

From

To

My team's project ranked 21st place out of 1703 entries!!!

Super proud of everyone that helped out with the project!!!

• Scott - Our programmer guy who worked long and hard to make sure that the music interface worked and was timed correctly (it was way harder than you think, and it took until the second (out of THREE) day before things got solidified.

• Jasper - Programmer/Network dood and one of the main visionaries for the game and overall UI and helped work on all the sounds as well!

• Nate D - Sound maestro and kept track of ALL of the things that had to be done, making sure everyone's time was well-spent.

• Hanna - Helped me with the art, made all of the stage dressings and textures and helped create some of the characters (and it was nice to not be the only one doing all the stuff!).

• Cless - Made our 3D stage and made sure that the textures Hanna made looked good on that stage!

It was exciting and fun to work on another jam game, despite the crash that happened after, and I think one of the best parts this time around is that I went and joined many streams to show off our game and in turn met SO many awesome people!!! Everyone was so nice too ; _ ; I really appreciate all you doods that made friends with me!

I even got a little unlockable skin and item in AndideBob's game "Gravity Crush" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

No kidding, I got to the end of the game on my first run with the skin on LOL

GO check out the post-jam stuff! There's so many easter eggs for some of the other doods I met this Jam event.

It was fun to cheer for everyone else's projects as well and I really hope some of these games get further worked on to something bigger -- although if that doesn't happen, I will just play the jam game and cherish my time with it!

Make sure to check if your favorites have any post-jam updates (I know that Badcop's "To Catch A Wizard" has one)! I'm trying to see if I can get a "Mixtape" of the top ranking tunes from the game. I'll let you know if that's possible/I get around to it!

Congratulations to everyone that put their best effort in, and I can't wait for the next one!!! :D

I want to bring some topics up for discussion before LD dies down for another couple of months. The core aim of this post being to improve the future jams - since I and many others care a lot for this jam.

The Finale and Content Creators

@pov I appreciate you apologised for the finale situation and that accidents happen. However, when combined with the events that lead up to it this LD, I think you can do better. If you don't want the community to come together and put energy into creating content around LD, that is your call to make. But at the moment it seems like you DO want to support content creators, yet it's often delivered in half measures which can lead to frustration and disappointment.

• Less than 12 hours before the scheduled live-results show, you tweet about not being sure if you're going to actually do it or not. From my perspective, this doesn't respect the time of those who planned to take part / made arrangements so they could stream / watch it. I'm also unsure why you were planning to cancel it?
• You got the timers wrong, leaving streamers, viewers and general LDers in the dark. Mistakes happen, though I did tag you in a post a few days ago on LD asking about the time of the results show. Not sure how many tags you get, but as the organiser I'd hope for you to check them. You don't have the option open to DM on twitter.
• Once the time was wrong, you then cancelled the live show element and then released the general results ~15 mins earlier than scheduled. It wasn't a black and white decision to make, so I know it's up for debate who'd be more upset: those who were already streaming / watching the live results show vs those who were planning to refreshing their game page to see where they placed.
• The side bar that shows live streams doesn't work well anymore. We've posted about this during the jam but it didn't get fixed. Essentially it'll just show random software and dev streams it seems. It's only by clicking the "..." in the stream panel that it'll take you to a useful filtered list of LD streams on twitch (though some LDers may assume that no one's streaming LD content if it's not listed on the first 3 thumbnails on the site).

No one will argue with the fact that you put a ton of work into every LD. Despite this post probably coming off as a negative post by me, I personally really value the time and effort you put in; I've hosted a few games jams that are 1% of the scale of LD and even those absolutely drain me. Also for the record - I wasn't able to stream the results show this time around, so this post isn't about me being personally impacted by what happened. However, I did see that there were at least 5 streamers (many with 40+ viewers) ready to stream the results at the scheduled time.

The future of Ludum Dare

I am just not sure where it's going wrong. A year ago you told us you were hiring someone to help, which many of us were pleased to hear as we sense this jam is too much for someone to orchestrate alone. But I am not sure if you still have someone helping or not? My gut feel (backed by no evidence) is that you still work on LD alone, and it is just one of many balls you are juggling in life (alongside work, relationships, side projects and recovery time). I imagine you have great desires and goals for the jam, but a lack of time / energy to deliver them all.

I'd just like to see one of two things really: 1. Allow other people to help, so that there is more time for you to deliver things that are needed 2. Prioritise improvements that will benefit the LD community

To elaborate on point 2, I think its fine that you've always wanted to have games embedded onto the LD site, but really as a feature I'm not sure how much it really benefited the LD community. Clicking on a link to itch to play in a new tab is low effort, and I don't think I've seen anyone ever complain or post asking for this to be improved. Yet that seemed to be the main new feature that was focused on in the weeks leading to jam. It still sadly ended up being buggy - with most games not loading or being cropped incorrectly - bugs which are 100% natural in software dev - but if anything it probably detracted from communities experience in the jam. All the while, there are many other things that the community have probably suggested being improved over the years that remain untouched.

There's plenty of good things that have come in recent years, including the re-work of the karma system, LD extra, the live results tweets, along with many hidden things - such as reworking the backend of the site. But then there are things that have not happened too - and I'm concerned that, with your decision to backtrack on reducing the number of LD's per year, your work load will only increase. There are likely many volunteers (myself included) who would happily help with aspects of the jam, even if not on the technical side but just from an organisation / communication perspective.

I appreciate it is very easy for me to sit in an arm chair and point out things that could be done better. The comments section are open for anyone to discuss what I've said above, whether you agree or disagree - but please remain civil and respectful 🧡

We made a fun little jam game and got 63rd overall; check it out if you haven't already, I'm sure it will be almost as fun as we had making it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/road-txtr

The game has now been updated with some post-jam enhancements, including unlocks when you beat or perfect the game (no bad texts, no pedestrians killed), so that's something cool to check if you are looking for a challenge!

Here comes a more polished version of Line Momentum! This update aims to be more accessible to every players, and smoothen some aspects for a more pleasant experience. If you had trouble completing the game (or even the first level), this version should be way more enjoyable.

• Less punitive difficulty: Losing no longer makes you start from the beginning
• More available controls schemes: arrow keys and gamepads
• Adaptive resolution: the game plays now in your native resolution, and you can even resize its window
• Accessibility mode allows you to keep the visual help
• Smoother transitions between levels
• Reduced the input lag on Linux (and hopefully other systems)
• Fixed some bugs (one on level 4 notably)

I hope you will have fun playing this version of the game! You can find it on itch.io.

As for those who desire more challenge (or who liked the high stakes of the original), don't worry, I have a little something coming for you. The next update will be focused on new content, with a very special unlockable mode for those who aim for the perfect. Be patient, it will come probably in December, or early next year.

Since there was a glaring issue with the gameplay, namely the game restarting from the very beginning when you make a mistake, I decided to make a post LD version. Hopefully this way more people can enjoy all of the levels.

And to celebrate the #1 Audio (!) rating, this version also contains an endless free play mode where you can program the ~~drum~~ dance machine however you want, without any rules to follow.

>> Post LD version available here

Ludum this year was way more difficult than I expected so thanks for this amazing score. All the entries I saw this year were awesome, congratulations everyone on your games.

This was a fun event. Thanks to everyone who played and rated my entry. It's an improvement over last time on the ratings and hopefully I'll be able to do a lot more in the time for the next one.

I've just started working on the tilemap I made for my compo entry to redo a few things, polish up others and add some new tiles. I'm quite pleased to have something to take away from this that I can use in future projects!

I may even see if there's some nice communities for all this stuff that I can find in the meantime!

Thank you so much 💖

Thank you to everyone who played our cute little god game!
It was something quite new for us, both in terms of gameplay implementation and art style, and it seems it turned out great. That's the best place we've ever got in a Ludum Dare!

Post Mortem

Itch page