I finally accomplished my dream of reaching the top 25 board in audio!!! This time, I totally flunked on everything else, mainly because I didn’t care about the other aspects of the game, I focuses solely on audio, and how I could make this games audio stand out. So to set myself apart, I decided to feature in this game, something that hasn’t been done often before. I decided to revolve the game around vo-coded voice acting. I figured probably nobody else would have that in their game, and it paid off. My biggest regret this Ludum Dare, was I failed on the gameplay and the theme. I loosely based this game on the theme to allow a deeper story, which would give me a better frame for voice acting, but people didn’t see the correlation between the theme and my game very well. Next LD, now that I have accomplished my goal, I plan on focusing more on the gameplay, and having a good interpretation of the theme.

Here’s my game if you are still interested.

And here is my newest collection of tracks I just released!

Thank you so much guys for making my dream come true!

I was totally expecting results like last LD, hoping to get results that were a bit better than LD32 and LD33, but I didn’t expect these results!

I’m pretty proud of the results and this game, as it feels more like a “proper” game than my previous entries, but I’m still not satisfied with it, because it still feels rushed to me, and I’m planning to juice it up as soon as I can, beyond the post-jam version of the game, taking all the feedback I’ve received from the comments into consideration!

Thanks for everyone that played the game, Thanks for everyone who made a game! I hope you’ve enjoyed playing and making as much as I’ve enjoyed it too! 😀

And, specially, Thanks to my GF because, without the special present she gave me, this idea would’ve never happened!

See y’all on the next LD/Mini-LD! :3

My second Ludum Dare. I believe that is not bad.

TheSeed says to you THX !!!

Thank you my dear friends for your vote. You have allowed to me to do my best score since I participate to Ludum Dare (414). I am very happy to see that my game received a honorable rate on the Innovation section (137). This is for me a great encouragement so as to continue the work. With your advices I know how The Seed could be improved with other features. This LudumDare session was for me the best since I started. I wish you the best. See you later ++

!!!! THIS IS AMAZING

best LD so far! Thanks for everyone who played and rated!

Here are my Results for my entry, Arc.

Lots of votes doesn’t always mean Awesome Ratings. I got 203 votes, which makes me really happy! Thank you guys! You guys rock. 😉

I was kind of disappointed with my results but that’s okay. The more votes, the more real your results are. You will have a better evaluation with 800 votes than 40 votes, see what I’m saying? So yes my results aren’t bad, but I just expected more. I’m a perfectionist, so I’ll always be wanting a little more. This was my 8th Ludum Dare and I just expected better results. But overall, I’m pretty happy with the Audio and Innovation. Again, thank you all who checked out my game. The Ludum Dare Community is awesome, I love it! Those who made a game, or even just attempted to make a game, you rock! c:

So, based on the available ratings for my games, it seems that I’m improving steadily.

Theme, Audio, Fund, Mood and Humor show a steady improvement while my graphics skills and overall ratings are growing on average

(Outliers removed. I didn’t vote during 2 of the LD’s I’ve participated in and one was  a disaster…)

It would be really interesting to how I did compared to the other jammers as a percentage instead of an absolute number. Given that jammers can now opt out of categories.

Play the LD32 game

Play the LD33 game

Play the LD34 game

Thank you all! It has been amazing!

Here are my 5-star “Fun” games that I simply could not stop playing:

• Rapunzel by hissssssssss
• Arc by ChuiGum
• Tri-Fission by Reisen
• Little Big Dash by Evannex
• Grow big or go home by Jeroenimoo0

As you can see, I might have a peculiar preference. But believe me, they’re just pure fun. I think we should all have a fun with this jam. If you want to have a fun, go play these games.

I had no idea that it will turn out this way. I just wanted to do something nice and simple. After receiving so many positive comments I started to expect good ratings at least for graphics, mood and theme. What I didn’t expect is to get into first hundred anywhere. Thanks!
Next time I will try to make a game with a funnier game play, I promise. =)

Have a look at my game.

Now I am off to play the best of the best.

Thanks for #1!!

Thanks everyone for the kind words and generous votes for my game, PsychoTennis, which placed #1 in the compo for Fun.

I am already expanding the game so that it offers a deeper experience rather than just the fun quick play that it has now, and this gold metal is a real motivator.  If you’d like to hear when a new version comes out, then follow me on twitter @pkenneydev and I’ll keep you posted.

If you haven’t seen the game in action, you can get a quick idea from this shot here:

Shooting for Fun

Since I’m just a programmer (and I guess “designer” too?), Fun is always the category I’ve focused on across my 6 compo Ludum Dares.  Learning enough art and sound skills to get by has been a fantastic experience, but I never had a goal to win those categories.  So it really is a huge thrill for me to land in the top spot in Fun.

I learn new lessons every single time I do an LD, but as you can see, it has not been a straight upward trajectory:

Failures and Lessons Along the Way

A few comments on the 2-game downward trajectory may be worth making.

In LD31 my fun score started to go down, but it was a valuable lesson.  That’s one my own favorite games, but I made it too confusing.  That game was actually my biggest success after I dramatically streamlined it in a post-compo build, as it was featured on GameJolt and got a small write-up on RPS, drawing several thousand players to try it.  So it’s a dip on the graph, but one I’m very happy with.

LD32 on the other hand was a total unmitigated disaster, and showed me that a GameJolt feature didn’t mean I couldn’t still get my ass kicked hard.  The core mechanic simply was not fun in that game, and honestly the ranking there was maybe a bit generous from you fine folks.  I think my main takeaway from that experience is that indirect methods of player control risk being too uncontrollable, and they can tank the entire experience by giving the player no agency or control.

So I was a bit scared with the tennis ball interaction in Psychotennis.  Could I make it FUN to hit the ball?  Could I make it CONTROLLABLE?  I spent an awful lot of time in this LD simply hitting the ball against the wall, over and over and over without even having any bricks, and trying to make the impact feel really good, sanding off any rough edges, and trying to create visibility into the way the ball was coming off the racket and why.

And apparently it paid off!  I feel like I slayed the demon of my LD32 failure with this win, and I’m excited to see what happens with a bit of an update.

Post-Compo Goals, and Call for Comments

My goals for the update:

• Reward a longer play session with a more meaningful feeling of progression
• Smooth out the difficulty curve once you’re past the first few levels.

I have some concrete ideas I’m in the middle of implementing, but if you have some thoughts of your own I would love to hear them in the comments below.

Also I’m having a kind of “now what?” feeling in terms of what to do with an updated version if I make a nice one.  I welcome any wisdom about that as well.

And is there something I can do to kind of bump the art up a level?  I’m somewhat happy with it but it’s not great.

Thanks again for the honor, everyone!  Don’t forget to follow @pkenneydev on twitter if you’d like to hear when there’s an improved version to play.

I noticed that some of the top entries only got 10-15 comments. I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I can guess that these entries didn’t get that many votes. However, they were very successful in captivating their first score of voters. I always thought that getting to the top meant more votes — Turns out I’m wrong. I wanted to hear your thoughts on this guys. Do you prefer less or more votes on your game?

Many Votes
I prefer to have more votes on my game, because the more feedback I get the better I learn from the experience. Plus statistics tells us that a larger sample always gives us better confidence in our stats (namely “mean game score” in this case). With a big sample, outlier bad votes should not affect the overall score. An example outlier comment on my game:

Few Votes
If you’re confident enough that your game will land at the appropriate player base, you may want to take the risk. This may not be totally due to luck though. If you take this approach, you have to perfect the game so that it’s accessible to a very wide player base. A good thing with not trying for many votes is that you don’t have to look like an “attention seeking dev”.

Again, those those are just some random thoughts.

Com o resultado da #LD34, fechamos 2015 muito felizes!

With the results of #LD34, we close 2015 very happy!

pic.twitter.com/Qyi3NIRgr0

— Reversal Mirror (@mirror_reversal) 5 janeiro 2016

This game was a total disaster. It wasn’t fun, had bad graphics, confusing controls, and a bug making the first level more difficult than intended(but still perfectly winnable) by making most of the flies disappear.

What went right:

• Kongregate statistics API – it let me know that nobody except for me has beaten the first level.

What went wrong

• Confusing controls / missing tutorial – the black walls were climbable by pressing  D / right arrow when climbing a wall to te right, and A / left arrow when climbing a wall to the left. Players often couldn’t figure that out.
• Lack of balance – the first level was way too hard.
• Collision detection bug – collisions were resolved in the wrong order, which wasn’t apparent with normal walls, but became apparent with the red blocks randomly making you fly to the right and white blocks sometimes randomly refusing to break.
• Ran out of time before replacing the placeholder tileset.
• No sounds
• Arrow keys scrolling in Google Chrome for some reason

The offending part, because of the trampoline at the bottom, players couldn’t figure out how to pass this.

I’m very happy with my results, and also, I want to share with you guys my evolution process


And, the results I got with Inferno

And, the card info

• A bug which lead to the army size to go below zero.
• A long and steep (for ludum dare games) learning curve.
• The inability to move forward in some situations.
• Lacked sound and feedback to the player.
• The reasoning for the battle system was arbitrary and confusing.

• The graphics. The graphics do not have a unified theme throughout the game. I could have added some more animations.
• A interactive tutorial. While I did manage to make a tutorial it was not clear enough.
• Added in audio feedback and music.
• The game design lacked basic balancing. The other buffs had little effect compared the the advantages of moving forward.

• RadMcCool said that he liked the “weird dissonance” of the game and between it’s move set.
• MorganLeFay stated he enjoyed that it was a “Very complex game”.
• PowerSpark remarked that it kept him “hooked!”
• Neoludo thought that I had “invented a new board game”.

• The 3D graphics were good to look at. Especially with my first time to properly use Anti-Aliasing.
• I thought the game was several times simpler than my last two.
• It was accessible to web users, making it quicker and easier to play in the Ludum Dare playing environment.
• It had depth despite being somewhat simple in it’s control. A challenge of the theme I chose.
• I managed my time somewhat effectively.

1. Remove the tutorial and replace it with an interactive tutorial which contains a character to allow me to speak to the player. This would allow me to include the story and relate it back to the gameplay despite the abstract graphics.
2. Address the disparity between the text and the UI and the styling of the 3D models.
3. Balance the other buffs / debuffs, making them as useful to the game as the “Move 1 Forward” Buff.
4. Restructure the Battle system, possibly including an animation of the two armies fighting – which can be skipped.
5. Animate the game. I think this would add bundles of character to the game.
6. Transition it to a mobile platform.

So the results are in aand…

These ratings isn’t bad it kinda underwhelmed me at first as I got such high praises for the game by some in the comments.

That adds up to my earlier results of an mess of results that you can see here.

If you are more intrested in me trying to untangle my mess of ratings I wrote a bigger post about it https://xgorblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/forever-cursed-being-a-3 

That being said I still love the game and top 10% in fun is pretty sweet, I’m still not sure if I will finish my game but I do think it’s my best Ludum dare game. If you are curious playing it you can play it here. http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=18652

A short post mortem for my ld 34 game, Pointless text based quest .

During this ludum dare I was going away to Costa Rica to spend the holidays, but I couldn’t miss ludum dare. I “solved” this by creating a shitty unity plugin for text making text based games with simple code. This made it possible for me to create a game that was going to work using little time. I should probably add: the only program I used during this ludum dare was Notes on my iPhone 4 as that was the only device I could bring.

A friend of mine at home compiled and uploaded the game for me, but when I got home from Costa Rica I realized that there was a game breaking bug.

I had already gotten 20 votes, and this was mostly for the record so I didn’t bother fixing it (shame).

The funniest parts and the ending of my game wasn’t experienced by anyone because of this, but I’m really happy with my entry anyways. I’m happy I got just to attend!

#443 Humor 2.44
#785 Mood 2.42
#788 Innovation 2.57
#882 Fun 2.40
#910 Overall 2.57
#934 Theme 2.45

I’ve had better scores than this, but I don’t really care, I didn’t expect high votes anyways. I got a lot of good feedback, so thanks for that everyone that commented!

See you all next ludum dare!! 😀

Warning: Don’t use the unity plugin. Don’t. For your own safety.

I was not entirely satisfied with my entry for this Ludum Dare, however it would appear that the numbers disagreed with me.

While not my most highly rated game (that goes to I am Sigma, my second LD entry) It wasn’t quite as close to my worst rated entries than I’d originally thought.

Granted, none of the Rankings broke the top 200 this time, but at the same time none of them really fell below the top 500 (okay, I got a 506 for theme even though I covered both the themes). If anything this is my most consistently ranked game.

But the rankings only show how well the game did against the other games in this jam. The raw Star-ratings (out of 5) show the real improvements.

Despite Theme being my lowest ranked metric in this game (at #506), and it’s the second lowest ranked for theme of any of my games, it’s actually the second highest starred rating, coming in at 3.7/5 (compared to 4.3 for I am Sigma, ranked #50 in LD 31 and Kaiju at 3.53, ranked #371). So what the hell does that mean? Well, for one it means that more people in this Ludum Dare followed and better executed the theme than ever before. Which is either amazing considering the challenge posed, or a direct reflection on how easier it was to implement one or both of the themes.

Interestingly enough, despite my generally cack-handed programmer-art style I actually broke the 3/5 barrier for my graphics! Hurrah! They’re now officially above average! (Also broke top 500 for the first time too)

Audio also almost matched the rating and ranking of I am Sigma, getting a 3.11 and sitting at Rank #263, but consider I Am Sigma had an entire day devoted to nothing but the soundtrack, and having the layers of the BGM get layered the deeper you go in the game, I’m actually kind of surprised that Eva Ness got such a good reception. I ended up using the Eva Boss music as the music for the intro screen, as I ran out of time/energy to finish the actual intro music.

Both Humour and Mood got a high ranking this time, though Sigma beat it on humour by 0.03. The music, again, likely contributing a lot to the mood, and the fact I had you shooting at demonic veiny penis monsters likely contributed to the humour.

For Innovation and Fun, well, this was my second most innovative game (next to Sigma, naturally), and my most fun.

Most Fun. Good god you people are masochists. 3.38/5 compared to Sigma’s 3.31. It even ranked higher, by 44 places (311 vs 355)

In conclusion, I feel I did refreshingly better than I expected. From a completely idiotic premise: A 2-button action platformer, to a not-entirely-shat-upon Ludum Dare entry that I’m fairly happy with.

Here’s to the next Ludum Dare, perhaps a slightly saner Theme implementation, and to the next Mini Ludum Dare!

I’ve included the spreadsheet screenshot below

Ludum Dare #34 has come to a close, and my score is (drumroll):

• 570 overall (out of 1232 compo entries)
• In the top 30% “fun” category.

My thoughts? Being that this is my first LD, and my first attempt in getting something out in Unity, I am happy. It’s also a baseline for LD35.

Thanks to all who played Retro Rebound Challenge.

Thanks to the LD Team for an awesome compo!