Yall did good

See ya next LD

I used this LD to test an easy but cool looking art style, because I have a 3D game project but almost no experience with 3D.

The shader is an homemade -unfinished- shadergraph, it's basically just cellshading with a texture for shadows, and two sobel filters for contours (on normals and depth).

I learned the theory behind color palettes but still struggle to make good ones, so I tried using generators. After trying several ones I settled on huemint.com and I'm quite pleased with the result.

Getting 3rd place was very encouraging. I intend to continue working with this art style.

My only regret is on the gameplay, althought it's not a big deal as gameplay wasn't my focus for this LD. I thought about making a racing-ish game, that would fit the art style perfectly. But I didn't as I wasn't sure to be able to handle the physics on time in a 48h compo. So I tried to make a puzzle game, but ended with a physic game with junky physics anyway.

I think this wasn't my worst game but it's the worst rated by far xD

877th overall I think is second worst after my first attempt on the old LD website >_<

Regardless, it was fun and I look forward to participating again in the future.

See you!

"uhhh, aplove! we missed the ludum dare top 15!!" "we're not aiming for the top 15"

awesome submissions everyone, keep up the awesome work

see you in 130 days

Congratulations everyone on another successful Ludum Dare! Now that results are out, I'll reflect a bit on my game (Holding Out). I also realized I never formally wrote a post-mortem for last event's game (Fallowtide), so I'll include that here as well.

There is actually a surprising amount of overlap between the two events, despite how different the games are, so I'll summarize into a few shared takeaways:

1. Make the player feel something
2. Play to your strengths, but maybe not too much
3. Utilize base code
4. Plan ahead
5. Sleep

Here goes!

Make the player feel something

Both Fallowtide and Holding Out are built around delivering a particular emotional experience to the player, but they do it in different ways.

Fallowtide is intended to be mysterious and uneasy. This is supported by art that is visually dark, a mysterious NPC with his face hidden by shadow, a spooky music-box soundtrack, and dialogue with ambiguous intention ("May you dream of fire and warm things"). The mechanics support this as well; the player is free to play slowly and carefully while the game gradually reveals more to the player.

Holding Out is intended to be slightly frustrating and absurd. It's built primarily off of one joke: contrasting the frantic, high-energy nature of a zombie survival situation with a comically sluggish and unhelpful customer service line. The goofy animations and stereotypical hold music add to this feeling.

Actual customer feedback for Gary was mixed:

We'll go over this feedback at Gary's next quarterly review. (Thanks @jcmonkey, @jdeedubs, @jvolonte, @yorsh, and @mpk90 for your amusing and varied comments)

One important pitfall here is to avoid accidentally undercutting the emotional experience with contradictory aesthetics or mechanics.

For instance, Fallowtide probably suffered a little bit from a lack of a lose condition; the fact there was no risk for the player limited how effectively it could apply tension. Contrast this with Sacrifices Must Be Made, the Ludum Dare precursor to Inscryption, which does the dark mystery reveal more effectively because the player is also struggling to stay alive in game.

Holding Out has almost the opposite problem; it relies a bit too much on players learning the underlying systems (like how enemy spawning/movement works and which upgrades are most efficient), and is easy to lose if you don't. Losing means you are forced to restart and hear the same jokes again, which isn't very fun. I probably should have added checkpoints or reduced the overall difficulty so most people could beat it in one run.

See also Fade, where I unintentionally made an emotional story-based game brutally difficult so that many people couldn't actually finish it to experience the story.

Play to your strengths, but maybe not too much

Everyone has different goals for Ludum Dare. Maybe you want to build a portfolio; or learn a new engine or framework; or test how well you work with a new team; or grow as a game developer in some other way. What your specific goals are will highly flavor whether this section applies to you or not.

I have two goals that have been somewhat consistent throughout my Ludum Dare experience:

• Make cool games. Test my mettle as a developer to deliver enjoyable, polished games in a short period of time.
• Try something new. Learn and grow by tackling different genres, visual styles, and emotional experiences.

Holding Out was really my first attempt at a humorous game (not counting the "so bad it's good" game I made in five hours for LD49). Since humor was the "something new," I felt okay falling back to standard 2D shooter mechanics as the base gameplay. For Fallowtide, the "new" was the visual style (non-pixel art, with a large character illustration) and gameplay (tile-based farming deckbuilder).

I think Fallowtide was probably more useful from a personal growth perspective, simply because it was so much different than my past games. For next event, I might try to focus on Innovation, which has historically not been one of my highest categories.

Utilize base code

I use PyGame for most game jams, which is a relatively lightweight Python wrapper for SDL 2. As a graphics library, it's missing most of the features available in game engines (animation handling, particle systems, physics, update/render loop). So, it's particularly important to utilize base code.

Per the Ludum Dare rules for Compo:

You’re free to use any tools or libraries to create your game. You’re free to start with any base-code you may have.

Frankly, I haven't been very organized about building base code prior to the event. However, I will reuse some code event-to-event as needed:

• Fallowtide and Holding Out both modified versions of a dialogue manager originally built for Broken Threads
• Holding Out uses some primitive objects and a particle base class from Launch Party
• Holding Out uses a sprite and animation manager I built way back in LD42 for Rampart and upgraded for GMTK Jam 2022 for Six Shooter
• Fallowtide and Holding out both use an image manager and sound manager class that I originally built for Spellcraft

Ludum Dare is about designing and building a game in a weekend. If you find yourself writing the same boilerplate every event, you probably aren't learning anything new, and it's stopping you from using the whole time efficiently. For next event, I might try to consolidate the various pieces I reuse often into a starter project.

Plan ahead

48 (or 72) hours is not a lot of time. It can be tempting to rush through the ideation and planning phase so that you can dive into the "real" work of programming your game without wasting any time.

Do not do this. You will very often make a worse game.

I'll often spend at least the first 2-3 hours weighing ideas and planning how the game will work on paper. You should have a good idea of what your main mechanics are and roughly how the game will look. If you're making a puzzle game, you don't need your final levels, but you should probably think up one or two to make sure the mechanics are actually viable for making interesting puzzles. This might feel like a lot of time, but it's way better than realizing 24 hours in that your entire game idea doesn't work and you need to start over (that said, you should pivot if you need to --- Spinnerets was originally going to be single-player, and it would have been a much worse game).

I had a long planning period for both Fallowtide and Holding Out, and I think the games benefited from it. I probably should have gone a little deeper in the initial planning for Holding Out, since I ended up making some odd design decisions on the fly (like giving the player a dodge roll when it really wasn't useful in combat with the enemy designs).

Sleep

In my experience, it's not worth sacrificing much sleep during a game jam. If I get less than ~7 hours of sleep, I'll lose that extra time in reduced productivity anyway. And be more miserable.

Conclusion

Both of these jams have been an amazing experience, and I've gotten some personal best scores in multiple categories:

Thanks everyone who played my game during play and rate. Comments and feedback are what completes the loop and leads to iteration and personal improvement. I absolutely would not be where I am today in my development journey if it weren't for this community and the support and insight it offers.

Cheers, and here's to an even better Ludum Dare 54!

This jam has probably taught me the most about practical game development. The main thing though is focus on gameplay. I decided to derogate the gameplay to the bottom of importance which left me with a glorified walking sim. This was a terrible idea. I next time need to just make a good gameplay loop and ignore story because im a terrible writer and if I wanted a good story I would just read a book.

Oh wow! For a game I tried to keep simple to avoid repeating missing the deadline, I'm quite humbled to get in the top 10 in one category for the very first time I believe.

I'm also very happy to get 36th overall, especially when applying lessons I've learned last Jam. My last few entries were trending downwards, so I was actually thinking of trying out different styles in the last two jams. I decided to go with a more action-oriented, arcade style to it. I've tried doing that in LD52, but scope creep and unfamiliarity with doing this kind of genre for a Jam ultimately doomed that project. For The Convoy, I therefore decided to do it very simple: Run around a delivery truck and shoot the enemies. And it actually kinda worked! Well at least good enough for me to be able to ship the game in time :D

However, after shipping it, I still realised there are two main areas that kinda hurt the game:

1. Players struggled to figure out you could shoot diagonally

This one really surprised me! In my mind, I thought that was something everyone would assume, but nope! But then, looking at Contra (Which inspired the control scheme), there are subtle cues to let the player know that shooting in all directions is indeed possible. Let's look at it shall we?

youtube.com/watch?v=2mWZlNOzdv8 (Sorry for the raw link, couldn't figure out how to embed and don't feel like figuring out)

When you start the game, two things come to mind. The guy on the bottom shooting at you, which would instinctively make you try to shoot downwards, and the bonus capsule hovering around, just enough to coax you into aiming up. And of course, since that game had more memory than mine does (Mine fits in 24 kilobytes... Yes, kilobytes!), they could add more aiming animations to let the player know this more easily. Visual cues are important, obviously, but next time I should not just assume everyone would naturally know something that is a fairly central mechanic. Which brings me:

2. Testing...

Ah yes, that part that always brings my games down. I always tend to focus on developing my games, but never let someone else test them. Partly because I'm too busy making the game in the first place, but also because I'm reluctant to do so since the Compo stipulates you must work alone. I don't know to what extent it would be okay to let someone else playtest the game, but I'd certainly think about allocating some time to get someone else try the game during development, so that I can iron out any design cues like I've pointed out in 1.

And with that said, I think that's gonna be a wrap! See you next LD.

I remember somebody created an analytics page, where you can compare your results with previous games and other participants. Does anybody have a link to this?

I just spent the day going through every jam I and my friend @coda-highland have ever participated in (both as a team and independently) and throwing everything into a spreadsheet. Turns out we crushed it this time around. Loading Zone ended up topping the charts on Overall, Fun, Innovation, and Theme.

Here is how we did:

(Entries in orange are games we did not get 20 ratings on. It is also worth noting that both Running Out of Space and Game Over were done by Coda's son.)

This jam was admittedly a bit of a weird one for us. I started jamming with Ludum Dare 35 and started jamming with Coda in LD36. By the time we got to LD41 I had burned out while Coda kept jamming without me. After years of not participating I finally convinced myself to participate again and we were ready to go, only to find out the week before that we missed the notification that the event date had changed and that Coda had scheduled the wrong date off work.

I almost didn't participate in this jam. It wasn't until Dawn (8pm) of the final day that I actually came up with an idea I actually liked and I ended up pulling a complete all-nighter to actually make the thing in time. On top of that I did it in html52d, Coda's own custom HTML5 game engine, which I had no prior experience with. While Coda was able to help towards the end, I am used to him carrying the majority of the work load. This time however I programmed almost all of it while he, funnily enough, was the artist!

Overall I am extremely happy with how this turned out. Not only did I manage to pull through with 1/3 the time everyone else had in an engine I was completely unfamiliar with that has no documentation, but I managed to beat every other game the 2 of us have ever worked on in the process!

Thank you to everyone who played and rated this game. I look forward to participating in the next jam!

|Links|| |-|-| | Loading Zone: | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/loading-zone | | My Games: | https://ldjam.com/users/drazil100/games | | Coda's Games: | https://ldjam.com/users/coda-highland/games |

...and if you ever need to train for delivering news irl - the game's right here for you to go back to.

Now that the judging period had ended, does anyone know basic stats of the jam such as:

-How many people/teams competed in each format.

-How many games were submitted on time.

-How many games reached 20 ratings and were scored.

-Which games came top 5 in each category.

If anyone knows even a single one of these stats please post them in the comments section.

I am new to ludum dare so I don't know if @pov is going to post these stats.

I believe this info is extremely important for competitors to gauge how good their game has performed relative to other game jam submissions and also so that the top performing jam entries and their developers are greatly appreciated and are given the attention they deserved for all their hard work making such a good game in just 2 or 3 days all from scratch :).

Not too proud of the game this time, but I guess it can serve as a mistake for me to learn from. I'll try to plan a bit better next time around.

Anyways, see you in September!

Eventhough Dungeonfalls is not my personal favorit in my LD entries, it became one of my best rated games. I'm esspecially happy with rank 29 in Innovation. This is great for me because I often think, I'm not a very creative game dev. Thanks a lot for playing and rating!

Play Dungeonfalls on itch.io

Cause we had a lot of fun doing the jam, our team decided to give it a shot and continue to develop Maily Melo !

With the feedback we recieved thanks to the jam’s participants, we are happy that most of you have experienced the fun factor we’ve tried to build. We took note of your suggestions regarding the consequences and the lack of clarity in the game and we might have some plans to solve it c:

Your advices have given us even more ideas and plots that can be build for a full, silly and just as relaxing experience.

To make it easier for you to follow us, we made a Twitter for the game :

https://twitter.com/MailyMeloGame

Thanks again for the love and support ✌️

This was my second Ludum Dare and third game jam I've ever completed!

My game was a compo submission: Rat Delivery Service

Given I have no professional work experience, I'm pretty pleased with this! 180th may not sound too impressive, but it's still top 40%! Top 100 in several other categories is cool too!

I wanted to focus on conveying a unique idea, since I felt the theme was relatively closed-in and would cause a lot of samey ideas. Plague rat delivery is pretty unique, so I think I was successful in this regard! I don't know when I'll get around to releasing an update or full version for this game, but I have been working on it! No promises though, especially since my studies resume soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this "lit :fire: undefined" rat that I accidentally created due to a loading issue while working on updates:

Also!

I saw people shouting out other games so I figured I'd do the same!

Special Delivery Jam game by @/ismael-rodriguez

This was a really good one! Very fun gameplay and cool visuals; I especially like the 2.5D box and how it affects the physics and gameplay. This submission got 8th overall which is super deserved (if not better), great job!

Legal_Transactions.bat Jam game by @/arcling, @/calamador, @/fgkeiji, and @/johjoh

Criminally underrated in my opinion, and quite possibly the most unique game I managed to play in this jam. Very interesting gameplay, with an extremely well executed visual aesthetic to boot. Memorable! I'd really recommend giving this one a try if you haven't already.

Boxbrawl Delivery Compo game by @/cruise-elroy

Super good NES/arcade style game! Despite its obvious inspirations, it manages to have gameplay that is unique enough to give it its own identity. All around a very complete and solid experience (top 50 in almost every category), and likely the game I sunk the most replay time into.

Last Stand Delivery Jam game by @/yx0884, @/sheng-mai, and @/yuriscat

Another super underrated gem. There's a lot here! Very charming graphics and dialogue, 8 well designed levels, and an intriguing twist to push-puzzles make this game great. Please give this one a try too!

Moonshot Jam game by @/koolruz

Very fun and satisfying take on a platformer! A little bit biased as a golf enjoyer though haha. The movement mechanics here are great. Quite the challenge too! This submission got 9th in fun, a testament to just how enjoyable it is!

And that's all I really had to say!

Once again, good haul all around. Many fun games were made; so much great work from the community! Take care yall!

Hi guys!

Thanks to everyone who played The Infernal Trail, my compo entry where I tried to put Vampire Survivors on rails, really appreciate it! :)

In the past 2 weeks, I've been working on its post mortem, and finally it's done! :)

I hope you enjoy it, let me know what do you think! :slight_smile:

Sadly I still can't post links, so here it is in plaintext and its thumbnail:

youtube.com/watch?v=5wXzGgvJpTA

I didn't expect much from the ratings of my game, so I'm surprised to have hit top 100 in most categories.

Play Rogue 'n Royal in the browser

What's next for Rogue 'n Royal?

There are a lot of design choices I'm not too fond of: the limited time to explore, the roguelike-ish world design yet not being a true roguelike, and the mini-games in general. Adventure Jam 2023 is coming up next week, so I might take the good parts, the tile-based world map and the graphics, and try a completely different approach. A procedural generated open world maybe? Follow me on itch.io if you're interested.

See you next Ludum Dare!

Thanks to everyone who played our game and left feedback. We’re the 68th funniest jam game thanks to you! We made a post jam version called FedUp - Express Edition that fixes somethings we ran out of time for plus added a character select, an endless mode that uses all the characters, and leaderboards. Check it out if you get the chance.

https://roguebrain.itch.io/fed-up-express-edition

DDRKirby's postmortem writeup for Goodnight, Meowmie was one of my main motivators for participating in the Ludum Dare 53 game jam, so my experience wouldn't be complete without a postmortem of my own!

First off, let's start with the scores:

Scores: - Overall: 883rd (3.297 average from 39 ratings) - Fun: 1181st (2.473 average from 39 ratings) - Innovation: 567th (3.365 average from 39 ratings) - Theme: 625th (3.892 average from 39 ratings) - Graphics: 579th (3.703 average from 39 ratings) - Audio: 469th (3.389 average from 38 ratings) - Mood: 113th (4.162 average from 39 ratings) - Average Score: 3.469

My rating for fun was the lowest, which isn't surprising considering the nature of the game. Most of the ratings circle around a bit of a "meh" rating of under 4, but I'm pretty pleased with mood having the highest score.

For my first jam game and first game altogether, I'm happy that I got enough ratings to receive a ranking. It's easy to get competitive and feel disappointed for not getting a higher ranking, but I have to say that for what I put in what I got out is entirely fair. It motivates me to make something better in the future. In addition it felt really good to have some influence over how many people would play my game depending on how much effort I put into other participants' games. Getting to play other people's works and comment on them was a really enjoyable part of the process, but also made me feel, for the first time in my life, that playing a game was "work." It's a different attitude to have towards what you're playing when you know that you're going to be giving it ratings and leaving a thoughtful comment, and it was an interesting role to take on.

The Creation Process

As for what went well during creation, telling a lot of people I knew about the game jam and setting myself the goal of creating something (anything) even at the risk of making something bad helped me to keep going even as I wanted to quit because I didn't want to feel ashamed in front of others or myself. With a schedule to adhere to, I HAD to create, so my brain juices were flowing a lot more freely than they have in a long time. I think I was extracting inspiration from every piece of media or moment in my life that I've experienced ever, which is a level of intense creation I don't think I've had before. As soon as the theme was announced, I lay in bed (it was quite late in my timezone) brainstorming for about an hour until I could fall asleep with an idea I was excited about. After it got to marinade as I slept, I woke up with more ideas and a zest for creation. And finally, because I was in charge of the entire game, I got to switch between tasks and do whatever I was excited for at the moment.

Regarding what went badly during and after creation, the main thing is that my workflow was entirely without structure. I kept sleeping, procrastinating and then staying up all night full of excitement, torn between wanting to give up, forcing myself to continue and being entirely giddy with excitement. It worked out fine regarding the creation of the game, though I'm sure many people could have created the same in 48 hours and much fewer breaks, but for me the issue was how much it ate away at me in the following days. I think it's normal to need to recover a little (and going by the blog posts on the Ludum Dare website it would seem others experienced a few days of fatigue as well), but I don't think this workflow is sustainable if I want to participate in multiple game jams a year in the future. On top of that, I severely underestimated how much a topic that was so close to my heart would end up affecting me. For one thing, I hadn't expected to feel so giddy and terrified to send my baby out into the world (no pun intended), but more than that I think my own game genuinely triggered something in me that I wasn't prepared to deal with. In the future I definitely want to have more of a social net and some self-care plans for the following days to recover more healthily both mentally and physically.

What Worked Out Well

Positive aspects I'd like to mention include that it proved to be extremely beneficial that I learned the basics of RenJS at the last minute instead of opting for Ren'Py, as people overwhelmingly chose to play in-browser. As for my game's content itself: While keeping in mind that those that commented are probably from a baseline of people that don't mind unsettling plots, I was still very pleased by comments from people who enjoyed my spin on the theme and the dire atmosphere. I have my doubts that anyone interpreted the story the same way as I did, but that's perfectly fine. I enjoyed keeping it abstract, and I think I was still able to convey the overall atmosphere which seems to be reflected in the mood scoring. I think that the atmosphere did make my game stand out in its own way as something different. On top of that, I think (and hope) that the game wasn't boring! which is the sin I'm the most afraid of committing, so that's a huge relief. A few people said it was quite a ride, and a friend told me that it gave them goosebumps midway in. What surprised me the most was that aside from one ear-strainy bit (which I did leave in intentionally, but admit might have been a bit much), people seemed to find the audio decent, and some even enjoyed it. Since I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as I threw it all together I can't really feel proud, but it definitely makes me feel like I must have been on the right track about something. Before my next game I hope to learn how to compose simple melodies instead of relying on noise so heavily. Feedback on the minimalist style for the graphics was generally positive, so while I think there were a lot of parts that would have been improved with more illustrations, and there are some illustrations I'm pretty unhappy with, the overall style appears to have been the correct choice.

Improvements

I'm extremely grateful for all the comments I've received on what I could improve in the future, and I've split up the ideas into small and big fixes.

Small fixes: - text should appear about twice as fast - a CTC button when images only are showing to indicate how to proceed to avoid confusion (I'm not sure how to implement this on RenJS aside from a hacky technique of making text the color of the background appear, but it should be possible) - settings menu (I actually made one but couldn't figure out how to have the buttons align properly in the GUI builder, so I settled for a single "start" button) - Some things I personally want to fix: I hard coded every single voice blip because soft coding wasn't working out (technically I wanted them to appear continuously Phoenix Wright style, but for the atmosphere of the game a single blip seemed to work as well). I'm also not sure why the title screen won't play music despite implementing it in the GUI builder. For the next Ludum Dare game, I'd also like to learn how to embed directly on the website (this time around, I kept getting error messages).

Big fixes: - While I did regret not being able to add in more branches due to time constraints, I'm not sure why it came as a surprise to me that people strongly desire a sense of agency in their gameplay. I suppose I just thought that for a self-contained story like this it would work out, but in retrospect the comments helped me see that the story COULD take on a few different turns and lead to different endings. - Personally, I would really like to redraw the art, add illustrations to the parts that are missing it, and possibly add short animations in some parts as well. I'd also like to use better sound effects not made by me, especially a real heartbeat sound.

Closing Remarks

Altogether I felt like a complete hack during the entire process, and was forced to give up on a lot of things I would have liked to put in, but it ended up being exactly what I wanted it to be: a good learning experience, an opportunity for me to prove to myself that I CAN create something if I set my mind to it, and a motivator to create more in the future!

I'll round this off with some of the amazing works of art that helped make my first game possible (and some additional ones, because a few days after releasing the game I sometimes went "huh... that's actually a lot like X when you think about it"): - mili's songs, especially Between Two Worlds and Extension of You - Serial Experiments Lain - Welcome to Nightvale episode 220 - A Radio Jupiter Holiday Special - lots and lots of indie games (including Victim Doll, Greaser, everything by etherane, We Know the Devil, Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk)

Serum Run is my most successful Compo entry to date (got 19th in Mood, and personal bests in Overall and Graphics), and I've released a post-jam update with some music, bug fixes, UI improvements, and a bit more content.

I have more ideas for narrative content, but part of me feels like continued work on the game will have seriously diminishing returns, because who's gonna play it now that the ratings period is over? I mean, unless I'm willing to put serious time & money into developing a "product" that can be marketed, kickstarted et cetera, what are the odds that enough people actually play it to justify the additional effort?

Maybe it's different if you make the top 10 or have an existing online following, I guess. But it seems like after the rating period ends, sharing your game around online stops being part of a pro-social community activity and starts to verge into unwanted marketing/self-promotion, and the quality bar to justify this sort of marketing is so high.

What do y'all think about post-jam updates and diminishing returns in terms of potential viewership?