I just want to say thanks to every one who rated Newton's Cannon! It now has over 20 votes in every category which is honestly super rad :smile:. Also a special thanks to @jupiter-hadley for featuring Newton's Cannon in her Ludum Dare 38 play through series. Best of luck to all!

I'm really sorry for spamming, but our game is just one or two votes away from being ranked!..

With just a tiny little effort, we'll be able to share with you all the joy of having the results...

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/hopeless-void

They are also a couple of game that just need 2 or 3 votes to join the party :

https://ldjam.com/games

And thank you everyone that has already voted and left comments for our game! You gave us hope, and even if we don't manage to get ranked we'll have something to keep. :)

I like making games, but so far they've just been these little crappy 48 hour games. What if we had 480 hours??? We could make TEN crappy games!!! I'd love to step up my game making, and create some medium-sized web games. With other people even. For that, I need you, the creative type.

You: Talented 2D artist, or composer. Must have a solid portfolio (or at least a pretty jam entry). No flaky people please.

Me: 20+ years of experience with rich interactive application development. Formerly of Riot Games, currently Indie. My crappy game for LD38 - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-best-game-ever-conceived Another tech demo: http://www.dev2.nbilyk.com/spinetest/

Us: Good synergy, collaborative, unpaid, equity sharing for our creations.

If you're interested, DM me through here, or contact me here: http://www.indiepig.com/contact.php

I can't stand the waiting. I am going out for a coffee, if anyone want to kill some time with a simple puzzle game that you can play on newgrounds, go ahead.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/bug-to-the-footstep

From 39 to 48 votes in a single day! You guys rock!!! In case you've been living under a rock, here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/lil-planet

This guys made a very fun and interesting video playing my game! Thanks!!!

PS: My game starts at 12:57 :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyjpYj0-yLU

If you didn't player them yet, here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-space-explorer

Aahhhh... its a long time waiting for the results. But till it doesn't ends... cant loose the hope of getting some more ratings. So guyzz ... if you haven't played my game ..... please play the game and give your valuable reviews and ratings.Thanks !!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/sunken-mystery

Hey guys, I just want to say all the best to you guys since the results are finally going to be out. :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

Alright, all the best :thumbsup: and see you at the results then :slight_smile:!

I had a great time participating in my first Ludum Dare! Results are going to be posted soon but if you want to try my game, here it is:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/polyville

Thank you for everyone who voted and participated to make this the most successful Ludum Dare to date!

As pictured above, @daanvanyperen, myself, @meatmachine and @troop want to thank you all for coming out in droves and handing us a veritable buttload of ratings. Little Fortune Planet was a lot of fun to make, and to know so many people gave it a go is immensely satisfying. I did not reach my own goal of rating 100 games this time, but I gave it a good shot and hopefully the actual feedback (68 comments according to Feedback Friends) I've given has been useful.

For those interested, we are working on a post-jam version of Little Fortune Planet that is quite different from the jam version. Stay tuned!

Hey folks! I did not want to advertise my game too much during the last two weeks as I have had almost no time to play or rate other games, but now that the rating begathon is finally over I thought I would write a few words. This was my first game jam ever and I am fairly happy with the game that I managed to produce, Land Ahoy! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/land-ahoy

The original plan was to team up with a few other people and make something in Unity or GM2 or some other fancy tool people usually use for this kind of thing. However, as the date grew nearer people bailed out and I was suddenly left with a choice; make something on my own or skip this LD altogehter. As my wife had already arranged other plans for the weekend I dedided I would try to make something on my own.

I have spent a considerable amount of my free time during the last few years writing my own game engine, so I decided to use that instead of an off-the-shelf tool. As I was to be the only team member this time around there would be no need to teach the tech to other people. Instead I could just jump in and start developing. Here's how it went.

What went right

I decided very quickly on what to make

I woke up on Saturday morning and checked out the theme for the jam. Unfortunately "A Small World" was not among the themes I had hoped for. However, I decided not to think about it that much but instead make the first thing that came to my mind. Somehow I thought about Christopher Columbus and how people used to be afraid they would fall off the world if they sailed too far. The gameplay kind-of organically formed around that idea. My tip is to not think about the theme that much. Even if the idea of the game is stupid, a nice execution can save it. (Not saying my execution is all that nice, more on that later).

I played to my strengths

I am a programmer, not an artist nor a designer. Because of this I made the gameplay mechanics very simple (maybe too simple?) and the art very basic. Since I wrote the tech that is running the game I knew exactly what to avoid and what to include. Also, I recently made the terrain editor for the engine (screenshot of the level editor below) and I was excited to try that out in an actual game. Eat your own dog food and all that...

For the art I went with a very simplistic approach. Low-poly, fairly quick to model and texture. The animations are all code-driven (the movement of the ship, the movement of the waves, chimney smoke particles etc).

I had a lot of fun!

I know this is not something you just "decide to have". However, the whole point for me was to have fun and develop my game making skills and I feel I did both of those. It was especially fun to make the art assets for the game, as that is something I don't get to do in my day job.

I finished it.

I made a game and released it, and within less than 72 hours I might add. I made due with what I had and came up with, sometimes hacky, solutions when required.

One example of a hacky solution involves the green arrow pointing towards the goal. I wanted to have a nice light pillar rising up from the goal, clearly signalling where you need to go. However, I had no time to do that as it would have required a special shader so I ended up modeling a big green arrow instead.

After adding the arrow to the level and making it move up and down I realized it is not visible enough. However, my engine's material system is really bad (I am rewriting the renderer as we speak) and making a glowing material is not really supported. To add to that, the front side of the arrow was in shadow. One easy way would have been to rotate the sunlight 180 degrees around the up-axis. That did not really work because the sun on the skybox was on the other side and rotating the skybox means swapping out the individual images which is error prone and would have taken too long.

At this point I was really tired so I did not think of the fact that the camera is locked to a top-down view and you only see the sun in free camera mode. Anyway, I did the thing that required the least amount of work and added a spotlight to the scene that makes the front of the arrow light up.

Tadaa! Nicely lit arrow. This is probably the worst possible way to make such an effect but I did not want to break anything at this point. It might be a small performance hit but who cares.

What went wrong

I completed the core loop too late

The core loop of Land Ahoy! goes something like this:

1. Consider where you want to launch the ship
2. Aim and launch
3. See how and where the ship went
4. If the ship went over the edge of the map -> game over
5. If the ship reached the port on The New World -> you win!
6. Repeat steps 1-5.

At the end of day 1 I had almost none of that working. That was a very bad thing as I could not really call what I had a "game". Because of this I made it my top priority to finish the core loop as one of the first things on day 2. However, the core loop of any game should be one of the first things you make, to see if the game turns out good. I did finish it, but there was literally no time to iterate on the mechanics and I had to cut a few features. The biggest reason for all this is that I spent so much time during the first day on the art assets. The end result is a relatively nice looking (well, probably my nicest looking) but gameplay-wise fairly shallow game.

I spent too much time on non-essential art assets

Did I really need to make those fences? Or those shipwrecks? No, no I did not...

I left too little time for level design

The original plan was to have one large level with many paths and objectives to complete. Once I realized doing that would fight against the "small world" theme, I changed my plan to have 3-4 smaller levels where you would progress from one level to the next. This is one of my biggest failures with the project: I spent a few hours coding the system that would allow me to easily add levels to the game and chain them together. However, I only had time to design the one level.

The level that ended up in the game was made during the third and last day of the jam. I made no changes to the code at that time, save for a bugfix or two, and the design process was not nearly as fun as when I made silly test levels to try out newly developed features. In the end, the level turned out OK but it is fairly uninspired and easy to complete. Many people have finished it in three launches. Has anyone done it in two?

I had to drop too many features

I planned to have other ships in the levels, friendly ships that you would simply bounce off, as well as pirates that would sink your ship. I planned to have sea monsters that would throw you towards the edge of the map. I even planned upgrades, eg. the targeting computer system (yes) that would allow you to see the effect of wind on your trajectory. I wanted to have more animations, eg. the ship would visually fall off the world instead of simply stopping, I wanted to have water particles fall off the world at the edges.

And I wanted to have audio. I feel a game like this really should have a nice soundscape to help build the mood. After some consideration during the third day (which was a normal work day for me btw) I came to the conclusion that I should rather have no audio than bad audio. I am really very bad at making sound effects myself so I have to go through the slow and painful process trying to find good ones on the internet that I can use. This time around there was no time for that. I feel the end product suffered a lot from this.

Conclusion

I am glad I took part in this Ludum Dare. The end result may not have been what it should have been, but I am glad I released it. You people have been wonderful in your response, so thank you for that! Most of you seem to think there is potential here, which makes me very happy.

Until next time!

You know what's good for you? Leucocytes that fight malicious bacteria inside your body! You can help "Leucos" with his job by playing my game that you can find here!

Just waiting for Michael to row the votes ashore...

There is a Llama that wants to play with you!

Try our game: Llama's World

Finally results are about to come.... All the best everyone 🤘🤘

Dear colleagues,

I will keep it short.

I am looking for a coder (e.g. unity or game maker), who would like to work on a similar projects as LD is. Small simple games with complex story and dialogs. Mostly RPGs. I would love to create something similar to Dwarf Fortress in the meaning of complexity, but simplicity in the same time (omg, my senteces are so confusing).

If you are interested, leave me a comment :)

* Last nights post :*

I decided to track the voting process, and make some graphs. This is surprisingly easy to do, with google app scripts and this sites api. It hasn't been running long so there isn't any interesting trends too see yet but the bar and pie charts still look good.
* First nights post :*

:bar_chart: Live graphs of all stats can be found here

But were being dossed :/

You can see you rankings on your game page.

You can view the response time of the site here

This Ludum Dare:

Overall - Top 23%

Fun - Top 23%

Innovation - Top 25%

Theme - Top 38%

Graphics - Top 16%

Audio - Top 17%

Humor - Top 32%

Mood - Top 15%

Ludum Dare #37:

Overall – Top 33%

Fun – Top 29%

Innovation – Top 8%

Theme – Top 28%

Graphics – Top 38%

Audio – Top 43%

Humor – Top 40%

Mood – Top 38%

In general, I did way better this time. :P

My results! Out of 1104 Compo entries, I placed in the top 20% for everything except overall (26%) and fun (39%, due to the difficulty I assume). This being the second complete game I've ever created, I'm super proud of it and I want to thank you all again for your honest feedback!
Thanks to @pov and his little elves for getting the website going, and for running this awesome event!

Results are in! If these are final! Top 100 in Humor! :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus

Well based on the comments, the game was too short in length which I agree with. I spent most of the time designing new levels post-jam and thinking of new obstacles to implement. Around 2 people in the comments said graphics were poor and judging by the ratings they were right, I scored in bottom %20 of games in graphics. It was mostly squares after all I thought the various animations would help my score and maybe they did, not sure.

Many complained of the controls and I agree. Post-jam I made them more tight. I used a control scheme that was not appropriate for this particular game. I also made the stupid mistake of activating the rotating and elevator platforms with a mouseclick while you were standing over the button zone, post-jam I changed it to a keyboard button but now I am thinking that the elevators and rotators should just activate when you move over the small white spaces.

The difficulty was also said to be incredible easy and truthfully I always struggled with adding challenge to any of the games I made. One guy found the game too hard but it was 1 out of 20, an outlier but I suspect it was because of the games controls.

The instructions of what to do were not clear and confused some people, I should have included them ingame but I feel since it's a jam it was probably not number 1 priority and I forgot to put it in. In non jam games I should definitely make an ingame tutorial and list the controls.

Another complaint was restarting from the beginning of the level after death, I feel that was the only complaint that was wrong. The levels were short(10-30secs usually), but if I ever design long levels, a checkpoint system might be a good idea.

Results

Final results

Overall: 705 (2.697 average in 35 ratings)

Fun: 542 (2.875 average in 34 ratings)

Innovation: 603 (2.697 average in 35 ratings)

Theme: 752 (2.152 average in 35 ratings)

Graphics: 677 (2.455 average in 35 ratings)

Audio: 501 (1.852 average in 29 ratings)

Mood: 695 (2.464 average in 30 ratings)

Now lets look at the rating in comparison to my previous games(I made 6 ludum dare games now). 705 is my best ever placing but considering only 800 games got rated this time(huge drop from recent years) it probably means nothing, I am in bottom 10 percent of rated games. Also my overall rating is worse than almost all other categories, remember the saying greater than sum of its parts well this game is opposite of the saying, depressing.

Fun was my best category which is good but still 542nd out of 800 is okish and fun in general is my strongest category in every ludum dare i've been in.

Innovation was better than almost all previous games I made which took me by surprise, only good spot this ludum dare.

Theme was terrible score but at the end of the day this game didn't follow theme and I deserved nothing here really.

Graphics rating were the worst in any game I have done so far, I guess it makes sense, I need to improve my art a lot.

Audio 501st place, sounds good but considering majority of games don't have audio I wouldn't be surprised if I was close to last overall, my only audio was the movement.

Mood I don't even know what this category means.

And now to address my title, according to the ratings my game was in the bottom 10% of all rated games, everyone in comments was saying, cool game, nice game, good game, ending all sentences with exclamation marks. Then these guys proceeded to rate the game 2/5 sometimes less on each category, why? Why lie in comments? I really don't get it. Is it cause the devs feelings or you fear backlash on your own game if you critisize too much? Anyway...

Now a shoutout to most truthful and constructive commentators. @pkenney @rubyleehs @g12345 @spacedoubt You guys laid out the games flaws pretty nicely, plus gave me advice on how to improve the game. I appreciate above all else your honesty and helpfulness. Your opinions closely matched the ratings I recieved.

And now shoutout to the rest of the commentators.

@kabalatrance @scornz @samurai-spark @bram-ve @mutfak-studios @nilead @camilo @tdennist @steve @meenners @pecolyte @jk5000 @mcjammydodger @noddingtortoise @tuomo

You'd think after doing this nine times I'd do a better job :neutral_face: Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun, and came away with a lot of ideas for how improve my game post-Jam.

I'll just take solace in the fact that last I checked I took 6th place for Feedback Karma. Woo!

Ayy, that's pretty good! Top 15% over all, and top 7% for theme (which is insane btw thank you all so much!).

Ratings! A lot better than expetced and an awesome * 11th place in innovation *. My first LD ever, so i'm really really happy. I expected to be in the lower third, seeing the game was hardly finished and quite unintuitive. :)

Still working on the game, this is it currently. Still looking as before, quite ;)

so the results are in, but i know there are some issues with a DoS attack. are these correct? there is a 2 in humor. does that mean 2nd place?! that cant mean 2nd place can it??

.. and everybody seems to try get on the site right now :D Been refreshing myself the whole day already xD Anyway, here are my results (Jam):

For me it was really hard to see how the places compare to everything sent in, so I converted it to percent % (from 1840 entries in the "Jam" category):
Overall: 13,09%
Fun/Humor: 27,34%
Innovation: 23,75%
Theme: 4,84%
Graphics: 8,26%
Audio: 3,2%
Mood: 1,25%

I'm especially happy about the mood category. It's sth I actually love about games the most, the atmosphere, the feel. I made most of the game myself, with help for the music (TrisNQuads) and the monster voice-over (AsmoGrimae). The Audio category is really the team category for us - I added the water sound. And I think they both did a pretty good job :) Thanks to everyone who played the game & left a comment! I always learn so much reading them :)

Enjoy a graph of my 3 Ludum Dare scores:

I've scraped the results from the site API and put them in a spreadsheet for easier browsing:

LD38 Scraped Results

Happy to see littleBLASTplanet get into the Top 100 in at least one of the categories. Let's hope next time I can get into the Top 50 or Top 25 of a category (I got close on Ludum Dare 37 with a #27 in humour).

I gotta say, this is definitely the best Ludum Dare I've participated in so far, ratings wise. Thank you to all that voted on my game and gave feedback. I'm glad you all enjoyed my game!

This was the first event where I tried to create music (which is not the easiest thing in the world), and that got me way up in the top 100 for audio, so I'm satisfied about that. I also was able to create much better looking graphics thanks to my practice in creating some custom sprites for a Kirby fangame I've been working on. However, my goal this time was to create a game that made people laugh, so I directed all my efforts into making one big joke game that no one can actually lose, and it definitely seemed to work, considering that my game placed #4 in humor!

If you haven't already, check out my game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/super-plumber-man-vs-the-evil-elf-king

So I thought this ld was a god one. Awesome theme. I'd actually been waiting for a theme like this for a while and here it is. And I guess you guys thought my game was fun, which is pretty important to me because the fun category is always the category I care about most. Well, besides perhaps the overall category. Which I didn't do to shabby in either. Either way, GG everyone!

Sorry that I didn't end up rating very many games though /: I tried for the first few days and then forgot about it until a little while ago. Good job on the games I played though!!

Give it a shot here if you want

Thanks everyone who play and rated! And congrats to the winners!

Give Space Hummus a try here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-hummus

BTW these are not much worse than my previous LD entry, levelone:

Which you can play here https://dietzribi.itch.io/levelone

We didn't do nearly as well as we'd hoped. We're all divided on "What happened?" with a few categories.

Congrats to all the medalists, and thanks for giving our game a shot!

1286 Ranked Games / 1840 Total Games

Category: Result: Percentile Ranked: Percentile Total

Overall: 311 : 24.18% / 16.9%

Fun: 504 : 39.19% / 27.39%

Innovation: 223 : 17.34% / 12.11%

Theme: 304 : 23.64% / 16.52%

Graphics: 247 : 19.2% / 13.42%

Audio: 164 : 12.75% / 8.91 %

Mood: 156 : 12.13% / 8.48 %

My first ever game jam of any kind and I finished 20th in fun and 68th overall, and I couldn't be prouder!!! Thanks everyone for your generous ratings, I've had an absolute blast doing this and will 100% be doing more in the future! Now, to turn this game into a mobile app and then take it from there, wish me luck!

Thanks again everyone, well done to all who entered!!

So, here's what I got from you guys on my first little jam game. * Mood: #279 (top 16%). This makes sense. I didn't spend a ton of time checking the mood after all. The game had a nice board-game vibe though which I think some people appreciated. * Humor: #530 (top 29%). Well, to be fair 100% of my humor was trying to come up with silly names for cards. I'm not a super funny person, so I absolutely think judges were right on this. * Audio: #66 (top 4%). Aww, that's disappointing, I was hoping to do a bit better on this one. One or two people mentioned fitting the music better to my theme and there was one sound effect I never got around to making. Still though my goal was to be in the top-50 of all jam games, and I do think my game deserves to be there. * Graphics: #528 (top 29%). This one, on the other hand, I agree with. I know I have a long way to go with making graphics! I'm learning and I'm far from perfect at the moment. * Theme: #598 (top 33%). I'm a bit puzzled by this one. Not 100% sure why my score is so low... will need to reflect more on that. Maybe there was too much freedom of movement? * Innovation: #130 (top 8%). Cool! This is an ok result for me, and something I always try to build on. * Fun: #175 (top 10%). A lack of a tutorial probably hurt me a lot here. I want to improve on this and I can definitely see what was missing, which is always nice because that's how you learn. * Overall: #154 (top 9%). This is better than the average of the rest of my scores so I'm glad I made an impression!

Some thoughts: * Even though this was a jam entry, I did everything without a team. Maybe if I had a team I'd have scored higher on a few of these points. For example I spent a lot of time making graphics that sucked anyway. Seems like all the best jam entries were made by teams! * So nice to have meaningful constructive feedback on a lot of these points! Some reviewers really put in a lot of effort! * I am still going ahead with making an awesome version of the game that I hope to release soon. * And I hope to do this all again later!

Thanks everyone for an AMAZING experience!

Thank you for your support and ratings. This LudumDare was great - as usual. I noticed a good average for mood, fun and graphics - but unfortunately nothing in the top 100 (almost for the mood). Also I am continuing the development of Abaddon so as to create a full game. This is not my best score - not the least ...

See you later for the next event. I wish you the best - my dear fellows ++

Дорогие друзья, я почувствовал огромную радость и гордость участвуя с вами в этом LD событии. Я поздравляю вас за то, что вы сделали, независимо от того, какой был результат. Надеюсь вас увидеть в недалеком будущем. Вам желаю успехов. До свидания ++

Voila - comme dit la chanson - c'est fini. Merci à tous pour votre soutien et votre participation. Il y a tant de choses à dire. Bravo (et quel que fût votre résultat final). Dans l'ensemble, ce fut très bien - comme d'habitude. Je vous souhaite le meilleur pour l'avenir. On se revoit pour le prochain LudumDare. Ciao ++

Hello there! Maybe this function is already existing - or just in plans - but will it ever be possible to see the whole list of LD games from 1st place to the last place?

The team behind Super Metroario say thank you for all the nice comments. Our Results are I created this 100% run to show you all the secrets and also a difficulty jump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKZW25H-Mdk

We don't know why but it was our worst entry from all Ludumdare game we have created.

We thought it was one of our best and we have improved. Very disappointing!

I you have some ideas please let us know!

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Well, I had a conversation with Dr. Blackcraft and he agreed to an extended version of A Relatively Small World! This new version will still be fairly short, but will have some new mechanics, new levels, new characters, and a lot of new stuff!
As to the old stuff, I'll really spend time on the puzzles to make them a little more understandable (the old ones are pretty hard).
Thank you all for giving me feedback on my entry, and I look forward to competing again in Ludum Dare 40 (I won't be doing 39)!

If you are converting your ranks into percentages, please state the number you are using as a base (for example: number of JAM entries, 1840) or your computed percentages are completely useless. :)

Woooooo! We've reached the collective finish line everybody!

To celebrate we released an optimized sandbox version of Little Fortune Planet (HTML5) for you to play around with!

Look! Look how much fun I'm having!

Play it here and send us your amazing planets!

:mailboxwithmail: Dear planet ower,

We acknowledge receipt of the survey's results you have been asked to fill after your contract term. In the interests of improving the quality of our services, our company will take into consideration all of your remarks and suggestions. We are glad to see that your satisfaction grew up since the last time you called upon our services :

We would like to thank you once again for the time you spent on our planet owning system : Place Them All

Best regards,

The Universe Rental Agency

Never thought my game would do this well, thank you to everyone that rated :)

10th in fun?!

If you're curious:

Play here (Direct link to GameJolt)

Link to Ludum Dare game page (Ludum Dare site is slow atm)

:astonished: I am amazed. I am so suprised at this result, and I am just speechless. I've only been taking part in Ludum Dare for barely any time now, and I never expected to get within the top 100 for any category, let alone top 50. Thank you so much to everyone who rated my game I have also decided to create a full length post-compo version, however progress will be slow, so if you want, follow my updates on the game on my facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PorcusPie/

Overall: 463 (2.805 average in 43 ratings) Fun: 384 (2.85 average in 42 ratings) Innovation: 531 (1.925 average in 42 ratings) Theme: 530 (2.175 average in 42 ratings) Graphics: 398 (2.854 average in 43 ratings) Humor: 262 (2.548 average in 33 ratings) Mood: 450 (2.556 average in 38 ratings)

I have mixed feelings about my ratings. On one hand I feel they are pretty average across the board, and on the other I feel that I did really well with what I made for a compo entry. While platformer may not be innovative this is my first time doing one even after several LDs. I also got the feeling from the comments that very few who rated actually finished the game.

One biggest complaint I have is Theme. The overall theme of my game was a kid in a small town doing things for the people in the town to be rewarded by his mother with cookies. But to him the world is big, thus the tall trees and larger than life platforming arena. A small town to a child is as big as a small world, or at least that's what I tried to convey.

Probably go back to simple arcade style games for the next one. Overall, it seemed to be a decent entry, but not good enough.

So over most of my Ludum Dare participation history, I've never gotten much for ratings. After all, my projects are usually woefully unfinished, for one reason or another. Being as this time was no different in that department, I didn't expect any difference in ratings, either.

And by and large, I got what I expected. A three, mostly twos, nothing too huge.

Then I saw that.

For me, that is huge. I have never done that well in any category at all in any of my previous entries. Even without that score, this entry did a better than a good half of my previous attempts at minimum.

I thought of this idea within the first two hours. It was my backup plan; I was trying to think of something better. I expected 3 at best. A four? I don't think "color me surprised" does it justice.

Huge thanks to everyone who played my game, by the way — not just for the ratings, but the comments. Plenty of them, and almost every one had plenty of excellent feedback. A post-compo is still coming, and I've kept what you all have said in mind!

I'm super excited to see that my ultra-minimalist Space Snake graphics came in 3rd. I'd love to see lists of rankings so I can play the games that came in above me - anybody know where such a thing is at? (does it exist in this new version of ludum dare?)

This came as a huge shock to me but it looks like my team's game, Honey Home, came first in the Overall, Fun, and Mood categories among the jam games. After 2 years of doing Ludum Dare, this is the first I've gotten first in any category (let alone three). I'm really proud of my team and my game!

My teammates and I are concerned that we're overshadowing really, really awesome games because we just barely had enough votes to qualify for a ranking. School started for us recently so we've been terribly busy - we're also all Mac users and couldn't play a bunch of Windows games. So we didn't get around to ranking nearly as many games as we would've liked. I'm holding back on celebration until the results are officially announced, but we wanted to thank everyone who got around to giving our game a shot, and everyone who submitted a game for inspiring us to make what we made!

Final results:

Overall: 467 (3.242 average in 68 ratings)

Fun: 426 (3.076 average in 68 ratings)

Innovation: 515 (2.879 average in 68 ratings)

Theme: 704 (2.515 average in 68 ratings)

Graphics: 553 (2.955 average in 68 ratings)

Audio: 199 (3.448 average in 60 ratings)

Humor: 75 (3.723 average in 67 ratings)

Mood: 355 (3.279 average in 63 ratings)

I was considering writing some post-LD thoughts up earlier, but now that ratings are up, I should probably get it done now. So, without further ado:

Overall: 118 (3.714 average in 23 ratings)
Fun: 157 (3.476 average in 23 ratings)
Innovation: 230 (3.238 average in 23 ratings)
Theme: 134 (3.762 average in 23 ratings)
Graphics: 108 (3.905 average in 23 ratings)
Audio: 76 (3.65 average in 22 ratings)
Humor: 272 (2.5 average in 16 ratings)
Mood: 247 (3.167 average in 20 ratings)

Here's the game, but I'll try to explain things so you don't have to play it.

What Went Right

I was really lucky to find a good idea for a game fairly quickly, and I could start building right away. Previous jam projects have either had me floundering for something solid, requiring time for brainstorming, or salvaging an old game idea. I think I was inspired by one of the losing themes, "Island," and wanted to make something like Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. I've never actually played it, but I know the core concept is just moving your character from point A to point B in a small, self-contained level, and that's what I lifted. Instead of per-level puzzle elements, though, I decided to set it on a grid and add a Minecraft-like gimmick of destructible terrain.

For some reason, I also knew I wanted to focus on polish early. One of the first things I did was make character movement feel good. After all, that's the primary means of interaction. Once I had level loading in place, I also spent some time to add an interesting transition animation. Normally I wouldn't think that polish is really something to worry about in a prototype (and, actually, it shows - the level transition animations still have a few janky frames), but for a competition judged by internet strangers, I think it paid off.

This game jam turned out to be a test of my level design skills. Or rather, lack of them. Despite not having enough time nor any interesting gameplay mechanics, I spent lots of time making tutorial levels that I tried to make teach you how to play, without telling you how to play. And apparently that worked; very few players had trouble grasping the basic mechanics. I'm also really proud how few words are actually used in the whole thing since I used symbolic control descriptions. Maybe someone who doesn't know English could play it.

Graphics. Having control restricted to a grid doesn't actually do much for the gameplay, it just made it easier to program and to control. But it does easily lend itself to a block-y art style, which is great because I'm a programmer who can't do sophisticated art. I like the blue color that I eventually settled on for the ocean. I'm not really sure where I was going with the main character, but at least it's vaguely humanoid. I think I was inspired by Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora that also has a monolithic main character. When developing the movement mechanics (especially turning), I realized I was having a really hard time telling which way was front. I didn't want to add a face or other detail, because everything else in the game is untextured. So, that's where the backpack came in! It lets you intuit your direction, and fits in with the adventuring archeologist narrative that started to develop.

Audio, apparently‽ The score isn't as high as the other categories but it ranked well somehow. I was definitely happy how well just putting an envelope over some pink noise worked for an ocean wave swell. The jump and dig sounds were made in bfxr. The level complete jingle is just a sine wave with a soft envelope climbing up fifths and octaves. I put less effort into the main menu music than the music in any of my other jam games. In fact I even disabled it for the main gameplay, since I thought it might be too distracting. That plus the fact that the melody doesn't start for two bars leaves me wondering if people who rated it actually listened to the whole 30 seconds. I wanted a "tropical" feeling of course, but I couldn't decide between bongos and shaker for the percussion--so I used both! And saxophone, for the lead, apparently? It doesn't make much sense but it sounded good. No bass or accompaniment because I didn't want it to be too complicated for a "small" game. The main theme used the SGM soundfont, and both it and the level-complete jingle were made in LMMS (yuck).

What Went Wrong

The theme. Somehow I kept confusing the theme with the older one, "tiny worlds," and one of the losing themes, "island." Really the only thing keeping the game in theme is the title and narrative that I threw on top--there's nothing inherent that makes the world small, other than I guess the number of blocks on the islands. No part of the gameplay other than the self-contained level design really ties into the theme either. Finally, what I created was multiple small worlds, when the jam theme was singular. Regardless of all this it (somehow) didn't score too poorly in the Theme category.

Multi-platform testing. I developed the whole thing in Windows, and since I knew moving diagonally would be confusing on digital keyboard cursor keys, I intended it to be played with a gamepad with joysticks. So, because of that, the mouse camera control is way too sensitive, and I definitely got docked for that. I could have even added a sensitivity slider to the main menu to give it some purpose. And because I used Unity, I was able to publish a web version along with the Windows build, and builds for Mac and Linux. I didn't have time to boot into those systems to try them out, though, and I suspect they don't actually work at all because Windows doesn't have an executable bit flag and Unity exported them directly to the filesystem instead of an archive or something. And while the HTML export worked well (way better than the junk Unreal gave me last time), it didn't support my joystick (at least in Firefox). Because I used the default Unity keybindings, one of the controls is ALT, which actually takes away focus in the browser. That's annoying.

Is it really even a puzzle game? I thought I had come up with a good game idea that could lead to some interesting levels. I even had a feeling some cool emergent design could come out of the tree blocks, which have the unique ability of not being able to climbed on top of (and they're unbreakable). Unfortunately, I also didn't want to have any failure states, and that meant to enemies or hurtful obstacles, and no undo's or resets. And that means every puzzle has to be designed to be impossible to lose, which in turn means a level has to be playable with all of the blocks missing, which finally means there isn't actually a puzzle mechanic if you just remove all of the blocks. Opportunities to improve here would be to either include a non-destructive action, or going ahead and allowing undo's, resets, or hazards.

No reset. Related to that, I never tested thoroughly to make sure the levels have to stuck spots. An early tester got stuck on one level, which is when I had the realization above. I fixed some levels to make sure they were playable with all of the blocks removed, and also added a reset button just in case, but this was all after the deadline. I probably should have kept the earlier version but I had already deleted the old builds (though I could have still gone back in version control).

Invisible mechanics. There are two ways of digging: below the character, and in front of the character. The problem with that is, which way your character is facing is not nearly as obvious an indicator as which grid cell your character is standing on. You can turn your character, but only if they can't move in the direction you tell them to go. It isn't obvious you need to do that, or how to do that. On the other hand, I thought it was going to be a real puzzle element, where in some places you wouldn't be able to face the right direction. That falls apart because if you can't face a direction you can go that direction and dig below you. Since it's not a puzzle element it works out alright, but if I were to make that a problem it would need some more thought.

What is and isn't tutorial-ized. This I think is something small that could have been fixed with some playtesting. I had one or two levels to teach the player that they can fall down multiple blocks without trouble (that is, no fall damage), but there's no need to introduce the lack of a mechanic, especially since there are no ways to get hurt at all. On the other side of things I forgot to tell the player which blocks can be dug and which can't (stone, trees, and layer-1 blocks can't; sand, dirt, and grass can). I guess I was relying on some Minecraft knowledge, but even that game lets you break stone and trees with ease. Really, the distinction is arbitrary, there's no difference between the dig-able blocks, and color-coding that way is not an accessible-friendly design choice, anyway.

Optimization. Okay, so it's really not a priority in a game jam, and I got away with it pretty easily, but I still felt pretty gross making a GameObject (with pointless collider) for every single block, and destroying and re-creating the whole level any time a single block changed.

Levels. There really aren't many of them, even though I left myself plenty of time to make them. Probably related to the poor puzzle mechanics. One player also pointed out that they expected the final level to be a final accumulation of all of the mechanics taught so far, but it was just a big dig search (just like real archeology, I guess). The levels with lots of digging and one shaped like an inverted cone also hurt from the limited camera movement.

Graphics. I think the graphics turned out okay, but I could have done better with the color scheme. I wanted a carefree cartoon look (I think, plus the turn-based grid mechanics, inspired by Snakebird's Island levels), but some of the colors are very desaturated. The whole thing is very chaotic, palette-wise. Also the trees look like something you'd find in a cold forest, not on an island. I could have gone with palm trees, but they're not as block-y. I think just upping the saturation again would have helped. Finally for the title screen I just chose some tropical-looking font ("Hanalei") and put the title in objective-gold color on top of some representative vignette. The title that I ended up with doesn't really look good with that font though, and as I already mentioned, the main menu doesn't really serve any purpose.

Playing games and feedback. I think I only got enough ratings to qualify because I got a spot high up in the "danger" sorting. I would have liked to have played and rated more games but a combination of the late voting window and me getting sick in the middle of it prevented that.

Level building. I thought the easiest way to make levels would be to have a simple text file format, with a grid made of characters and separated by paragraph breaks for vertical layers. Unfortunately, not only is that format very hard to parse, but it actually turned out very unintuitive to build with, and some levels took multiple iterations just to get the blocks to go where I expected them to be. I'm not sure what a better solution would have been.

Streaming. For this jam, I live-streamed the first day, but not the second, and didn't make a timelapse like I have before. Streaming makes me way nervous but it keeps me on task. I feel like there is a balance that I haven't found yet.

Learning experience. I really wanted to use this opportunity to learn Phaser, but alas the idea I came up with was 3D, and there was no time to find anything else, so I went with what I knew.

Conclusion

WOW I was not expecting to write that much, heh. Maybe I'll come back to this game someday if I can come up with more refined puzzle mechanics, but I think some other ideas probably have more value. I hope some people enjoyed playing it. Special thanks to modernmodron for suggesting the title and for getting stuck while playing it. (fun fact about the title: it was originally spelled "mini-ana jones", but change the spelling to MiniAnna, and ta-da, the main character is female now.) (oh, and the original project name was MiniDigger, hence the post title).

SPOILER: None of them are mine *runs away crying*

I'm pretty disappointed in how our game did, not going to lie. From our comments I thought we'd place way higher.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cosmic-cleaner

• Overall: 151 (3.798 average in 106 ratings)
• Fun: 93 (3.825 average in 105 ratings)
• Innovation: 265 (3.363 average in 104 ratings)
• Theme: 316 (3.559 average in 104 ratings)
• Graphics: 266 (3.827 average in 106 ratings)
• Audio: 139 (3.663 average in 103 ratings)
• Humor: 155 (3.347 average in 103 ratings)
• Mood: 319 (3.343 average in 101 ratings)

It was our first Ludum Dare, and we had a great time participating. We seemed to have way more ratings than comments which was strange, having gotten 10-15 comment-less ratings in the last few hours. I hope when the final page is done we can see what our rating distribution was.

Our game wasn't as intuitive as it should have been, and I know this hurt us. It was so hard to not update it with better instructions as the event went on, but we held fast to the rules and went with what he had. This is the result of that!

Thanks everyone who rated us and commented - we learned a lot! It just seems that the comments didn't actually reflect the ratings - which is kind if disappointing. =)

Happy LD38, maybe we'll see you at the next one.

The results are out, and here are the ones for my game (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/supernova):

I got in the top 100 for mood, and in the top 50 overall and for audio! Thanks to everyone who played, rated, and commented on my game. I supposedly got #38 overall, but I looked at the spreadsheet and saw that a bunch of other people also got that rank:

I assume this ranking will be combined with the other categories to generate a final ranking. Until then, congratulations to the other members of the #38 club.

I'm kind of overwhelmed honestly. I'm 15 years old, and this is my 3rd (technically 4th) Ludum Dare. My first game got about 250th place, followed by around 500th in the Jam, but this time I did so much better than I could have possibly expected!

Thank you to everyone who played and commented. It meant the world to me! I'll be back for LD39, and in the meantime, I'm gonna start thinking about a possible post-compo full game. I had a great experience with this Ludum Dare, and I'm so glad that I participated!

Well after embarrassing myself again by forgetting the distinction between Compo and Jam, here's the updated list with Jam and Compo games separated. Cheers!

Guys, i really apreciate all your votes here! i am happy to say that my compo project got a satisfying result here at this ludum dare!! here it is! ^^

Overall: 85 (3.818 average in 35 ratings) Fun: 22 (4.063 average in 34 ratings) Innovation: 37 (3.97 average in 35 ratings) Theme: 246 (3.471 average in 36 ratings) Humor: 154 (3.033 average in 32 ratings) Mood: 210 (3.267 average in 32 ratings)

I am really surprised to got to 22o position in Fun category and 37o position in Inovation and 85o at overall category! Thanks again everyone who voted at my game and found it really good!

Here is my game page one more time, in case youw want to know more about it or just try to break your old score record there! ;D

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/anthills-multitask

I am simply amazed by the performance of my first LD compo entry. I got into top 100 overall and top 50 in fun. the results were beyond expected. It was a great experience rating and leaving feedback on the games. I hope that I can beat my score on the next Ludum dare. Thanks for the feedback and ratings, also congrats to whomever participated in this LD. :slight_smile:

Well, at the end of the day, this is what came of everything. I'm over the moon about it. :smile: Sure, they may not be the best numbers you've ever seen, and I didn't have a ton of reviews or comments on my game, but I was trying something brand new this time and am ecstatic with how it turned out. The feedback I received was immensely helpful and I learned a ton moving forward. Considering that the game wasn't completely panned is a major positive. I have continued work on the game with full intention to release it as a mobile idle game and the feedback has pointed out everything I needed to focus on and fix. I could not continue my work in the right direction without this LDJAM going exactly the way it did. I am very happy with my numbers. Thank you all again!

Wowza! I didn't expect to score even close to the top 100 ANYTHING, much less top 20! :D

Although, do folks happen to know how ratings are weighted, based on how many votes were counted for a particular game? I know there are games that have gotten twice my number of votes AT LEAST, and if it's just an average of (# stars / total votes), it seems like it would kind of disadvantage the more popular games...

Regardless, I'm SUPER happy that folks seemed to enjoy my silly little toy with terrible audio samples and beat synchronization...Thanks to everyone who took the time to play it! I really appreciated all of the honest feedback, and I plan to use it to improve on this project in the future (bookmark the link to the Web Build if you're interested!).

It's been real, guys! See ya next LD!

I know some(including myself) may not be too satisfied with their ratings, but just remember that regardless of rating you had at least 20 people playing and leaving feedback about a game YOU made. How awesome is that? Exposure and getting feedback is one of the hardest parts when making a game, but also the most rewarding and Ludum Dare + everyone who entered made that possible. Thanks for creating! :grin:

Everybody's doing these, and even though no one cares about me, I'm doing one too. :-)

When getting scored, I'm most interested in seeing if the balance of my effort was well-spent. On one level, a game either works or it doesn't; in 48 hours, you get on a path early and it's hard to get off it if something isn't working, and that's at least 50% luck no matter how good you are! So ultimately, scores are most useful as measuring sticks of your relative effort in each category, rather than as a global rank.

Here's my commentary for Rogue Basement. (Compo game, so rank and percentile are out of 549 games with scores.)

Category | Rank | Percentile | Score | # ratings ---------- | ---- | ---------- | ----- | --------- Overall | 135 | 75.4 | 3.667 | 47 Fun | 179 | 67.4 | 3.409 | 46 Innovation | 379 | 31.0 | 2.841 | 46 Theme | 398 | 25.5 | 2.977 | 46 Graphics | 374 | 31.9 | 2.932 | 46 Audio | 24 | 95.7 | 4.000 | 44 Humor | 157 | 71.5 | 3.000 | 42 Mood | 94 | 82.9 | 3.659 | 43

Overall: 135 / 3.667

Not top 100, but about what I was hoping for. I made sure to make something "finished" and put thought into every category.

Fun: 179 / 3.409

I've got some real mechanics and good loops, so from an academic game design perspective I call it a success, but other games are definitely more fun than mine.

Innovation: 379 / 2.841

I made a very by-the-book roguelike with some very minor innovations. Frankly I'm surprised this isn't lower.

It's my lowest score but not my lowest rank, so I'm guessing the innovation category skews low in general for Ludum Dare.

My last LD entry (LD26, We Dreamers) got 6th overall in innovation, so I know I can do this category well! I just chose not to this time.

Theme: 398 / 2.977

My lowest rank but not my lowest score. I will admit to not worrying too much about the theme, because (a) it wasn't a great theme, and (b) themes are really just for inspiration anyway. Going into the compo, I knew I was going to make some kind of roguelike, because that was just what I was in the mood for, and the theme was just a framing device for that.

Graphics: 374 / 2.932

I don't care at all what I got in this category. I've always hated worrying about graphics for LD. Seriously, this is what I did last time. So players will either say "you did ASCII pretty well" in the 3-4 range, or "ASCII sucks" in the 1-2 range.

Audio: 24 / 4.000

WOO WOO OH YEAAAAAAH

The audio for this game is a 15-minute original soundtrack I wrote between midnight and 1:30am the second night of the compo. I guess people liked it!

I'll be putting more thought and energy into audio for my next LD game. It looks like this can be my superpower.

Humor: 157 / 3.000

Humor in my games has always been about covering for a lack of content or unbelievable set of mechanics. "I only have one level for my roguelike. Why? Because...oh, it's some idiot wizard's basement." I am pleased that people liked that aspect of it, but I put in essentially no effort.

Some of the humor scores might have been because it's possible to punch flying rocks out of the air, and some of the flavor text is not correct English...

Mood: 94 / 3.659

I would attribute this good score to music, consistent decent ASCII feel, and title screen art. I've always thought of this category as "how much does this game feel like the game it is trying to be?" and on that axis I was happy with how Rogue Basement turned out.

I just wanted to say thank you all for playing and rating STACK! Not only was it my first LD game, but it was also a compo submission. While I am surprised that humor is my highest placing rank, I am none-the-less happy with my results. :)

Again thanks for playing, but most importantly, THANK YOU FOR SUBMITTING SUCH BAD-ASS GAMES! No matter what your ratings are, you have come closer to reaching the stars than many others have... ;D

The results are in!

Wow, this is better than I could have ever expected! I've been doing Ludum Dare for four years now and not only is this my highest overall placement, but this is my first four star rating in any category (graphics). Looks like spending all that time animating the mouse's tail really did pay off! This also marks my highest placement in any category, with my previous bests being 88th in innovation and 87th in humor. 71st in graphics is going to be hard to beat, but I'll try. I'm so glad that everyone enjoyed my game so much and I hope you'll all enjoy the next one even more!

Let me first thank everyone who has played and rated and commented for my game, it was very insightful.

Now that LD 38 is finally over, I should write a post mortem for what went well and what went wrong for me:

• I've started my game on Sunday instead of Monday, but i still didn't had any inspiration for the theme and instead I just started on Sunday doing "whatever".
• I finished the game, but there was a lot of last minute stuff, like "programmer graphics" because I really ran out of time. No sound or time for testing too; would have ironed out some bugs.
• I think I got rank 150+ for fun, but the rest was way worse.
• I've played and rated a lot of games (about 50), but this time voting doesn't really gives anything but bad scores.

In the end, this Ludum took me 3 weeks of playing/rating/commenting and 1 week of preparation.

For what? for a 500+ place overall???

Also, the site worked against me... uploading images was a mess (and probably still impossible unless i install a new browser), couldn't really opt out for categories until many people voted (which affected overall score...)

For me, the conclusion is that I might make games during LD for fun, but this rating part is so not worth it... for me at least. I won't spend 3 weeks playing LD games and rating and commenting on them... it feels just a waste of time. (And I know I'm not very good at making games under pressure.)

Don't worry, I will still make games (probably), just not in 72 hours (but, never say never)... This format doesn't work for me. And I will still play LD games by other people, but it won't feel like work any more.

PS. Well done everyone! and Thanks for the comments!

Thank for everyone who played and rated my game, that was definitely a huge surprise to me, since i was failed to complete my compo on last jam, this is definitely my first completed compo game! And i got my first top 10 rate of ld jam in my whole life!

I'll start writing my ld postmortem after i finished my hand job, hopefully every failed moment i met will bring me go further! C you guys on next LD39

The results for my entry, Nucleu, found here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/nucleu/

• Overall: 110 (3.739 average in 25 ratings)
• Fun: 283 (3.13 average in 25 ratings)
• Innovation: 244 (3.217 average in 25 ratings)
• Theme: 16 (4.304 average in 25 ratings)
• Graphics: 145 (3.783 average in 25 ratings)
• Audio: 8 (4.348 average in 25 ratings)
• Mood: 2 (4.455 average in 24 ratings)

Once again, Mood is my top category; I got second place! I was also very pleased with my scores for Audio and Theme; those categories in addition to Mood were my focus for the entry. Thank you to everyone who voted, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

If you're interested in some more in-depth information about where your game ranked, have a look at these bar charts:

The above graph is only for Compo games. You can get Jam games and all other categories here:

https://infogr.am/ld38resulthistograms

How to read them: These so-called histogram charts group games with similar ratings together, so all games with a rating between 3.5 and 3.6 go together in a bin. The higher the bar, the more games are in that bin.

You can use these charts to check out where you are in the distribution of the entries. The highest bar can be (more or less) seen as the average score, and the further out your bar is the more unique (for good or bad) your score is. You can also see that getting a very high score is really hard, as only a select few have reached that score.

Edit: I used this scraped table as a basis, but it appears to contain some errors: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PkQfN3QQ2Gk6-IcJI9je28SHvPUnLCEfTDEUjUF-o/edit#gid=0

I'll be back when I got those charts fixed with the correct values.

Edit 2: Turns out the scrape was correct, but I read it wrong: A lot of entries were empty so I figured that would be the unranked games, but apparently the unranked games also appeared with scores in the table. Long story short: I fixed my filter and the values should now be correct (updated the picture above and the linked graphs accordingly)

This was our first jam and first Unity game.

We didn't expect that much!

First of all we are amazed by the number of ratings * and by your *great feedback.

9th position in humor means a lot to us, and 98th in music is an awesome result too.

We discovered the most incredible community of game developers here.

Meeting you guys was definitely the best part and it pushes us to go on *, learn more and come back with some new crazy game for *LD39 ;)

play Spermicorn here

Well, here we are, at the end of the race. This has been quite the experience for me, it's made me think about a lot of things. To cut to the chase, here's are my thoughts and reflections.

During The Jam

I had a very rocky start, because I just didn't like the theme very much. I spent a lot of time just trying to come up with a good idea, but everything I came up with at first was stuff I felt sure a lot of other people would do as well. So I wasted pretty much the first half of the first day just sitting around being frustrated at my lack of ideas, and I even spent four hours making a prototype for a game idea which I ended up just completely scrapping. At the end, I took a good hard look at Floppy McFloppyface and I decided that I just really didn't care much for what I'd made at all.

Results

Then suddenly, people started giving feedback. Which has been pretty overwhelming for me, because I've gotten almost nothing but positive feedback. To my great suprise, it seems people actually enjoyed my game.

Understandably, Audio and Graphics are my weakest categories. I'm not an artist, so shitty programmer art was all I could do. And heavens forbid me from ever touching FL studio again. This was the first time I ever tried using a DAW to make music, and it should clearly be the last as well!

However, my game has been ranked 137th in "fun". I've been looking at a lot of my favorites from when I was judging, and the "fun" department is where a lot of the high ranked games are lacking. Given that observation, I'm really happy with getting such a high rank in the fun category. It doesn't matter that much to me that my graphics and audio weren't too amazing, because despite that people actually enjoyed playing my game. Which is something I never expected.

Then there's the big kicker. I got 9th place in Humor!! This is utterly mindblowing to me, but holy hell did it make my day! Obviously I did try to make it funny, but even in that regard I felt like I'd failed. Y'all are making me blush, I don't deserve this! :smile:

Conclusion

Clearly, I'm not a very good at judging myself. I've had people dislike the things I've felt good about before, but now I've also experienced having people like what I've felt bad about. I think I need to take a good look at myself again, and I also need to brush up on my game design knowledge. There's obviously still much for me to learn when it comes to understanding what people actually enjoy in games.

All in all, I can't begin to express how surprised I am by the rank I got in humor, but I'm also just really thankful to everyone who voted for me. I'm really happy you all liked what I did so much, you all liked it a lot better than I did myself, and that means something to me. I hope to see you all again for the next one, I'm gonna do my best to improve my skills (especially my art and audio skills) and see if I can do even better next time.

Peace out!

Hi guys! It's been a wonderful jam. I didn't able to play games as much as I hoped because of my final exams. But I'll definitely attend the next jam. I had so much fun. I saw some people saying their game doesn't "deserve" the ratings. But they're missing the point. Jam is about have fun and learn stuff.I just hope they'll get it someday.

I'm pretty happy with the results. I usually inclined the programming part of gamedev but this time, I stepped out my comfort zone and made a really simple game with high graphical variety. That's why you see a lot programmer art in this game :smile: So that was new for me and I learned my capabilities. Maybe I'll polish my jam game and release for android if there is enough demand. There is something bugging me. How many compo games out there with more than 20 ratings? Could someone answer that?

Thanks to @sgstair and @avavt for making all this cool data accessible! I'm a statistician, so this is super interesting to me. :heart_eyes::nerd:

I just noticed there are a bunch of ranked games that didn't hit their required 20 ratings mark on this list. The website has them ranked (but also marked red) and still says that a minimum score of about 20 is required. Plus, the "Danger"-Filter had us all play games that were close to 20.

Was the low 20 ratings mark lowered even further to around 12 at some point? Or is this just a display error?

The last Ludum Dare I participated in was Ludum Dare 34. That was the one with Double Themes: Growing and "Two Button Controls".

I thought my entry was terrible but the numbers seemed to disagree. It was my second-highest rated game. So I wanted to figure out why.

I compared it to my Highest rated game, I am Sigma, for Ludum Dare 31.

So, the question I keep asking myself after these Jams is - "Am I improving?"

After LD34 I took a 'break' - Not intentionally. I ended up having other things to do on those weekends. Instead, I did some other Jams. So asking, after a year of crunching 10 game jams in 12 months, should yield some interesting results.

Ludum Dare 31 had 1364 48hr Compo entries, Ludum Dare 38 had 1104 Compo entries, so a higher ranking in 38 is actually worth significantly more than in 31.

Mood

My main point of contention with this category is that what it means is really really subjective. Especially with Humour existing. It's not a category I try and target. Still, Sigma hit rank 341 with a score of 3.18 and Mallow hit rank 227 with a score of 3.214. So apparently a globetrotting Marshmallow has a better mood than a tortured robot in a space-based Argos.

Humour

Humour was a category I was targeting. The game is about a Marshmallow who goes around the world, trying to save his brother trapped in a block of ice, discovering the topographical map of Sri Lanka looks like an avocado and giving his pet Guinea Pig to someone who wants to eat it.

Mallow ranked 155 with a score of 3.028, beating Sigma's 313/2.88 significantly. So yes, Mallow is funnier.

Audio

I've always tried to set aside time to work on the soundtrack for my Jam games. While Sound Effects are generally just made with BFXR, I do try and hand-craft the music.

I am Sigma had a multi-layered sound track that added more instruments the further you got in the game (Link).

Mallow ended up with 4 30 second loops for each area type (Link).

Personally I prefer Mallow's over Sigmas, mostly because Sigma's was a very simple loop that added instruments, wheras Mallow's added more to the atmosphere of each area and aided with the players navigation of the world.

Sigma's experimental layered approach hit rank 201 with a score of 3.32, Mallow beat it, coming in at rank 111 with a score of 3.471.

Graphics

I've definitely improved my artwork over the course of these Jams. It's one of the easiest things to ignore and half-arse for a programmer like me, but also the place I can improve on significantly.

Sigma's graphics came in at rank 637 with a score of 2.96. Mallow came in at 309 with as core of 3.11. The score itself wasn't much better, but its rank was. Being around the 3-score I'd assume (though without the figures of everyone I can't be sure) that both games are near the middle of the bell curve, where a small increase in score equates to a much higher rank.

Even so I do think my graphics have improved, but Mallow is not my best work. For that I'd probably say one of my non-LD games, such as The Ninjas Garden where I had a bit more time to work on it.

Theme

I am Sigma was in the top 50 for the theme "Entire Game on One Screen" with a 4.30 rating. This is the highest rating I've ever had on any category, and is such a statistical outlier I don't think I'll ever top it. Mallow's World Adventure was at rank 257 with a 3.431 rating. Considering the theme of "A Small World" was incredibly limiting (half the games took the word 'small' and half took the word 'world' and it was rare to find a game that fulfilled both. By trying to actually take the phrase 'A small world' and apply it to the whole game I think it gave me a nice boost, but my absurdist implementation of it may not have been obvious to some.

Innovation

As with Mood, this is an incredibly subjective category. It's rare that I try and make any kind of innovative game mechanics, but Sigma's zoomy-fly-through-previous-rooms thing seemed to have boosted my Innovation score, coming in at rank 127 with a 3.86 score. Mallow is probably the opposite of Innovation, being, as it is, a Dizzy throwback. Mallow came in at rank 418 with a score of 2.6667. I think perhaps next time I should attempt something other than a platform game.

Fun

Games should be fun. In one way or another you should be entertained by a game. While both Sigma and Mallow were platformers, Mallow was designed to be a chill, easy experience while Sigma was a balls-hard death-filled platformer. While Sigma ranked lower, at 355 vs 311, it scored better 3.31 vs 3.068. I think it's hard to compare the two, as they appeal to different types of people. It's hard to say if I've improved the fun aspect of my games, but I believe that people found Sigma significantly more fun than the too-easy Mallow. if anything it's indicative that LD38 games weren't really that fun.

Overall

Sigma ranked 124, with a score of 3.71 while Mallow ranked 295, with a score of 3.264.

From the comments on Mallow people seemed to get frustrated and confused with some of the puzzles, and still ended up getting lost despite the small size of the world. This frustration likely affected the overall score and navigation is definitely something I'm working on addressing in the sequel.

Sigma was clearly a simpler game, with the goals more obvious and the only obstacles being the players platforming skill. I think people were more willing to rate it higher because - while they may have died a lot - they didn't give up because the game wasn't helping them.

Perhaps next time I don't make puzzle the core of the game.

First of all this was an awesome Jam! It was also my first Jam ever. I learned a lot and I'm very surprised about the results. The ratings are overall pretty awesome but I'm amazed about the Theme category! Thank you guys so much for voting and obviously playing my game! Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/planet-spin

Overall: 78 (3.958 average in 50 ratings) - Top 4%

Fun: 23 (4.083 average in 50 ratings) - Top 1%

Innovation: 285 (3.313 average in 50 ratings) - Top 15%

Theme: 207 (3.755 average in 51 ratings) - Top 11%

Graphics: 23 (4.64 average in 52 ratings) - Top 1%

Audio: 90 (3.837 average in 51 ratings) - Top 5%

Mood: 202 (3.609 average in 48 ratings) - Top 11%

Thanks :)

I know I've been spamming you people a lot about my game, but this is my last post for this Ludum Dare - I promise! So, I'm really satisfied with the results and therefore I would like to thank everybody who game my game a chance! This was my first Ludum Dare and my first time going solo; and I'm very happy with how it turned out!

The results are as follows:

Lately I've been on a never-ending quest to find out what makes a game "fun". So, seeing that I did so well with Leucos really made me believe that I am on the right track. Maybe if the controls were a bit better and the camera was not so suckish, it could be even better! But either way, I'm really happy it turned out as well as it did.

Overall this has been a really great experience. Not just because I had the chance to participate in a jam and make something in 2 days (which I always enjoy), but because I also got to see really clever and innovative games along the way. Whether the game jams are online or in a physical space, I love them because of the people participating and the amount of creativity they bring.

Whether it's going to be a compo or a jam, you'll definitely see me in the next LD! Congratulations to all who participated; regardless of the rating, you put an effort to create something, and that's the most important thing.

See y'all in the next one!

Wow, that result is amazing! As this was my first Ludum Dare I am very happy about the outcome! Thanks to everyone who voted!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/marbleverse/

Next time I must :

• Be really ready and work each hour of the weekend for finish a complete game.
• Book more time to test and rate the other creations.

This event allowed me to discover a lot of great games made by passionate people.

And it was a good exercice for make a little demo with Kinjin Engine.

This is the beginning of a new project for me that continue here :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLNKMgvH9wY

Thanks to Mike for all his hard work on this new website.

See you all for Ludum Dare 39 !

The results are in:

• Overall: 168th (3.75 average in 82 ratings)
• Fun: 150th (3.63 average in 83 ratings)
• Innovation: 127th (3.7 average in 82 ratings)
• Theme: 121st (3.913 average in 82 ratings)
• Graphics: 92nd (4.358 average in 83 ratings)
• Humor: 109th (3.573 average in 77 ratings)
• Mood: 265th (3.461 average in 78 ratings)

Scores in percentage (rounded):

• Overall: 75%
• Fun: 73%
• Innovation: 74%
• Theme: 78%
• Graphics: 87%
• Humor: 71%
• Mood: 69%

I'm quite happy with the results and would like to thank everyone for playing and voting! :smiley:

If you haven't played my game yet feel free to still do so!:wink:

Game page (Window and WebGL version available)

Thank you all for playing and rating The Z Axis! I am truly humbled my little puzzle platformer was 27th in the Fun catagory and 78th in Innovation. This was my first ever game jam of any kind and had no idea what to expect.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-z-axis

If anyone is interested, I am working on an extended version with lots more levels and puzzle elements. Follow me on Twitter @JamieHolub for periodic updates!

Results Final results

Overall: 133 (3.829 average in 37 ratings) Fun: 27 (4.059 average in 36 ratings) Innovation: 78 (3.853 average in 36 ratings) Theme: 690 (2.588 average in 36 ratings) Graphics: 581 (2.879 average in 35 ratings) Audio: 237 (3.344 average in 34 ratings) Humor: 605 (1.957 average in 25 ratings) Mood: 192 (3.633 average in 32 ratings)

:astonished:

• #### Game page - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$27648 play if you haven't yet!

'World on the Tip of a Ballpoint Pen' did pretty well, ratings-wise! Thanks to everyone who played it. I might revisit this little world some time in the future, you all really took a liking to it!

As mentioned before Little Fortune Planet was a bit of an experiment with non trivial, non optimized game design using LibGDX and GWT. Loads of nested loops O(n2), and dynamic textures. The game ran horribly slow on web, so we set out improving performance post jam.

Disclaimer: Food for LibGDX/GWT devs, but still got some meaty bits for others. We used LibGDX, a java game development framework that targets a wide variety of platforms. Keeping a couple of gotchas in mind, it transpiles your Java game (using Google Web Toolkit) to JavaScript fairly effortlessly. While the tooling is pretty good, it can be a real pain to profile.

Goals

Ideally the game would run at a steady 60 fps. Let's see what is eating all our performance. If you are using artemis-odb, grab the excellent profiler plugin made by @piotr-j for low cost profiling in game.

A target of 60 fps means we have ~16ms to spend per frame. Currently on my high end machine frames take at least double that to render on Chrome. Firefox and IE are even worse. Throughout optimizing Firefox generally seemed to struggle with our game.

Profiling Your (LibGDX) Web Game

So how to proceed? We'll run Chrome's built in profiler (F12 - Performance tab). Firefox and IE dev tools have similar features, so use whichever you prefer. Let's see what a couple of seconds of record button yields:

Oops! Looks like our function names have been obfuscated. We could use Google Web Toolkit's superdev mode to solve this for us, as it provides bridge between your Java naming and the browser dev tools, but since I'm not 100% sure on the side effects on profiling, we'll keep things vanilla and disable the obfuscator instead.

Add style PRETTY or DETAILED to html/build.gradle in your libgdx project.

java import de.richsource.gradle.plugins.gwt.Style compiler { optimize = 0 style = Style.DETAILED }

After redeploying the game and rerunning the profiler we get:

Now we can read the function names! We'll run the profiler for a couple of seconds, and then sort 'Bottom-Up' to find hotspots in our code. In our case we're interested in functions that have a large amount of 'self-time', these functions are eating all our valuable frame time.

In our game we've identified two possible areas for improvement: Simulating and rendering the planet.

Improving Simulation Performance

Improving performance is relatively straightforward. Find the functions with the highest self-time and the least amount of effort to reach your set end goal.

In this case it seems the GWT random number generation is the culprit of bad performance. We use RNG heavily throughout the simulation; What direction does water flow this tick, where does stream spawn, etc. Since all simulation logic is run within a loop, this ends up being extremely expensive.

We could limit the uses of RNG but we don't want to rewrite everything or break the sim, so instead lets just precalculate our random numbers and see if we can fake it!

```java public class FauxRng {

private static final int PREGEN_COUNT = 10000;
private static int[] pregen = new int[PREGEN_COUNT];
private static int cursor = 0;

static {
    Random random = new Random();
    for (int i = 0; i < PREGEN_COUNT; i++) {
        pregen[i] = random.nextInt(Integer.MAX_VALUE);
    }
}

/**
 * Returns a random number between 0 and end (inclusive).
 */
public static int random(int range) {
    return nextInt(range + 1);
}

private static int nextInt(int i) {
    cursor = (cursor + 1) % PREGEN_COUNT;
    return pregen[cursor] % i;
}

/**
 * Returns a random number between start (inclusive) and end (inclusive).
 */
static public int random(int start, int end) {
    return start + nextInt(end - start + 1);
}

public static boolean randomBoolean() {
    return nextInt(2) == 1;
}

} ```

Don't show my boss.

Besides this change we limit the neighbor checks needed for each cell where possible. There are also some things that won't hurt the simulation much if they are run less often, like updates to the heat map.

Improving Rendering Performance

On LibGDX dynamic textures are generated using a Pixmap, which is fast on desktop, but slow as a snail on the browser. Lets check LibGDX's Pixmap implementation on web platform to check out what is so costly about this.

```java this.ensureCanvasExists(); if(this.blending == Pixmap.Blending.None) { this.context.setFillStyle(clearColor); this.context.setStrokeStyle(clearColor); this.context.setGlobalCompositeOperation("destination-out"); this.context.beginPath(); this.context.rect((double)x, (double)y, (double)width, (double)height); this.fillOrStrokePath(drawType); this.context.closePath(); this.context.setFillStyle(this.color); this.context.setStrokeStyle(this.color); this.context.setGlobalCompositeOperation(Composite.SOURCE_OVER); }

    this.context.beginPath();
    this.context.rect((double)x, (double)y, (double)width, (double)height);
    this.fillOrStrokePath(drawType);
    this.context.closePath();
    this.pixels = null;

```

Yikes! Pixmap is backed by a browser canvas. Since we draw tens of thousands of pixels, a fat loop won't perform very well as a tight one would.

If we could push an array of color data straight into the canvas it might perform better. Google Web Toolkit allows you to directly hook into Javascript, so lets write a little function to feed the canvas our pixel buffer. This ended up fixing rendering times to 4ms on Chrome, but Firefox still struggled. Dang!

Take a Break or Educate!?

Ultimately reading the google scriptures on the matter would help, but I tend to end up with too many browser tabs of interesting topics and no work done. Sometimes taking a short break and giving your mind a rest can be as effective; got an idea! Lets try something else.

Since only a small amount of particles in our sim change each frame, why not keep track of those and only do the expensive pixel plotting calls when we need to? We use an in-memory buffer outside of the GPU to track pixel changes, and plot changed pixels to a persistant FrameBuffer in GPU memory.

Delta's visualized looks something like this:

Success! We managed to drop rendering time to 1-4ms on our target browsers.

Final Results

We've managed to get the time to generate a frame down to about 6-10ms, which is pretty good. We still hit the 30ms sometimes but overall the simulation is pretty smooth.

Wanna try it out yourself? You can play the sandbox version here (WEB). Press P to open up the profiler.

My first ludum dare (and my first game published more widely than to a group of friends) went well - at least I think so. Big thanks to all that took time to play it, and leave the great feedback I got. Cheers to the great creators behind the open source graphics and music that made it possible!

• Overall: 340 (3.441 average in 113 ratings)
• Fun: 180 (3.55 average in 113 ratings)
• Innovation: 718 (2.243 average in 113 ratings)
• Theme: 671 (2.636 average in 112 ratings)
• Humor: 145 (3.387 average in 108 ratings)
• Mood: 387 (3.231 average in 110 ratings)

With so many great games I'm chalking that up as a success :D

ENTRY PAGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuCQwZIAZMQ&feature=youtu.be

Max is still angry, and waiting for a big post-jam update.

Cheers, this was a fantastic experience!

In a world where everything is subjective, it's hard to dispute that Ponywolf and Mutated Software took 35th place in the 72-hour #LDJAM for Flat Earths!

We really enjoyed making it, and now we have the heavy burden of deciding if this a high enough finish to make a post-jam version.

You can play it on itch.io or play it on Gamejolt or read our postmortem.

* I really surprised. I wasn't able to send my game to Compo (because of time) and I was a part of the Jam. But I made everything (even music) in three days all alone, so my game "fought" with games made by three or four or even six persons. All in all I get 32 place! That's amazing! Thanks to everyone who rated my game! *

* If you're interested here it is - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/last-day-of-the-woods *

My first dares results? Overall: N/A (3 average in 3 ratings) Fun: N/A (3 average in 3 ratings) Innovation: N/A (0 average in 2 ratings) Theme: N/A (0 average in 2 ratings) Graphics: N/A (3 average in 3 ratings) Audio: N/A (0 average in 2 ratings) Humor: N/A (0 average in 1 ratings) Mood: N/A (0 average in 2 ratings)

Everyone knows all about being a first-timer. We hear of the thing, watch attentively for years as it happens around us, crafting glorious tales of human transformation, painted-to-sainted whores and the other way round — or to quote a lovingly racist cartoon version of Hercules, «from zero to hero, just like that!». And we want in on the thing.

I speak not of sexual discovery or dalliance, although the metaphor certainly fits, but of Ludum Dare, whose low-hanging fruits I’ve been enjoying for many, many years now — I've only recently begun building up skills in computer graphics and attempting to teach myself game development; progress has been slow but steady, although what you people refer to as rapid prototyping, I still call an excruciatingly painful childbirth.

And so it was that I became resolved to pop my LD cherry. At the event’s quinceañera. With a non-game.

Well, the results are in, and everyone’s been super excited since the big reveal. I am too. The feed is positively burning, and I feel obliged to point out the extreme levels of rationalization going into the multitude of self-aggrandizing result posts being shared right now. Jam and Compo winners are obviously happy, but everyone else seems to be scratching their heads and looking for ways to present their results under a more favorable light. This has led to a variety of number-fudging tactics and statistical spin-jobs, in what seems to be rather "alternative" math for a programming crowd.

It's actually pretty fun! The worse your basic calculus (or that of your target), the better your results turn out. For example, watch my Theme score teleport from the bottom 2% to the top 25% as I check its relative position in the Jam against the total amount of LD38 submissions (see Total Abuse).

Relativism is all well and good, but please stop lying to yourself, to others, and to me. You've completed the Dare! Be proud of what you made and humble enough to own what you got in return.

:octopus: rules all datasets equally.

Sooo, I have been using the wrong link on my page for some time, however, now it should be fixed so people can rate my game!

Results are finally in and they are interesting ! I'll make this post to conclude my participation to this Ludum Dare.

Ratings

When I submitted this game, I really didn't believe in it, there were a lot of things I could not make properly and I thought I would get very bad ratings. But in the end this was great ! Not my best ratings overall, but I still managed to be #10 in the Theme category :smiley: . Not really a category I was looking for but I'm still happy !

Here is my evolution from previous Ludum Dare participations :

Unsurprisingly, my Fun score is the worst : there is not much to do in the game, it is slow, it is full of bugs... I was really hoping to find interesting game mechanics but was not very inspired. I also got a smaller rating in Graphics than last time. From comments I thought it would be a bit better, but it's not so bad :slight_smile: . So overall my previous games were better games. But...

I got a much better score in Theme !

My idea was to have a world which is getting smaller and smaller, and to have the player go through the same level day after day, but with differences due to the disappearing of the world. In the end I didn't manage to create that as cleverly as I wanter gameplay-wise, but I guess people liked the idea !

I have better audio !

Okay, not a big increase, but still, I keep improving little by little. I get most of my points from sounds, as I never made music. This time, I wanted to have some music. I made some 2-3 notes game over and opening "musics", which I quite like. I actually also tried a longer melody which was only in the title screen but I sadly didn't have any comment about that. People probably skip it directly :slight_frown: . Still, this forced me to actually create some music and I really hope to have something better next time !

Better mood !

Okay, from what I read a lot of people don't really know how to rate this category and I'm not quite sure too. But this is my best rating in this category, which means people liked my little story and narration. I'll come back to that.

The story

I usually do games which are not serious at all, with bad jokes and all. This time, I was inspired to do something more serious and personal, and it was very interesting. My game tells the story of two lovers living in a lovely house. One day, the world around them disappears and it keeps disappearing everyday, confining them in their house. At the end, the player has the choice to leave or staying stucked with the girl. As I explained, it was kind of metaphorical and personal.

Here is my interpretation of the story, which I didn't give : the boy is in love with the girl, but there is actually something wrong. The rest of the world disappearing represents what the boy is losing day after day because his relationship with her is taking all of his time. While the boy tries to fix that, the girl doesn't care. Some people complained that the girl wasn't helping in the game, but it was intentional. I wanted to show that despite all the love showing, there was actually something wrong : the boy sees his life escaping him and looks for help but the girl does not understand.

Now it was really interesting to see the interpretation of other people. Some comments I got : "I think I grasped the metaphor, it has some meaning to me too", "Nice that you offered a choice at the end! Wasn’t too easy for me, I could relate to the situation! Thanks for making this game!", "I’m not sure why you hate the player so much in a game about the perils of love. Maybe that’s the point. Hmmm…", "I thought the partner seemed really passive [...] It made the last choice pretty easy for me. Maybe that was the point, but the partner would have been more likable as a character and the loving relationship more believable with some teamwork in the gameplay[...] Love takes two sides working together.", "Despite the fairly short buildup, the ultimate decision has a lot of weight behind it"

These are really unusual comments and I loved reading them. This really pushes me to keep in that direction for future work, as it's something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. I'd like to thank all the people who let a comment : @sgadrat, @gozz, @simonhutchinson, @bunnery, @diegoctorguet, @r8berto, @blinry, @kevtukk, @mandarad, @willowblade, @ryte2byte, @tweedle, @smiling-cat-entertainment, @rixud, @shiitman, @zeriver, @davidthelazar, @nedmakesgames, @gaiusjulius, @feltip, @axoona, @stuntddude, @sparrow, @m-1 . Sorry for those who died in front of the phone booth :sweat_smile:

Some lessons learned

• Test the game more and fix major bugs. People won't necessarily read your warnings in the game page, so it's better to have something with less content but that does not frustrate the player.
• Same thing for graphics : it's better to keep it small and have everything perfect than a lot of things with inconsistent quality. I saw lots of games in the top rankings of Graphics which are very simple but clean. While I don't want to abandon the hand-drawn style, I think I can do better.
• I need real music if I want to improve in the Audio category.

See you in Ludum Dare 39 ! :grin:

Results:

*Overall: 209 (3.667 average in 20 ratings)
Fun: 70 (3.889 average in 20 ratings)
Innovation: 251 (3.389 average in 20 ratings)
Theme: 611 (2.889 average in 20 ratings)
Graphics: 501 (3.167 average in 20 ratings)
Humor: 18 (4.222 average in 20 ratings)
Mood: 138 (3.765 average in 19 ratings) *

So I have got 18th in humor? In my first jam? OMG thank you all so much!!! I really appreciate it!

I guess cows are really funny today :D

This was my 12th Ludum Dare in a row, so I've accumulated quite the data set in terms of entry ratings. Here's the graph of all 11 of my rated entries (LD36 had no judging):

As you can see, I've generally gotten better over time, with a few entries that received standout ratings in certain categories. I'm still super pumped that I finally got a 4 star this LD! That being said, I feel like my progress has been a bit slow. I've gotten better, but it's taken 4 whole years! With school and all, I usually don't get to devote a lot of time to game development. I feel that if I just spent more time working on my craft between Ludum Dares, I could make a really standout entry. My other regret is really playing it safe lately. At first, I was more willing to try different genre and more radical ideas. Lately, however, I've been sticking to my 2D platformer comfort zone. 2D platformers are my favorite, but maybe I should branch out.

Anyway, this was a great Ludum Dare and I can't wait for the next one.

It's exactly what I strived for - my life is complete.

As a "thank you" I updated The Treachery of Game Dev so it should run on Mac now. If not, please tell me!

I'm happy with the results of my second ludumdare:

But have I made progress?

In my first ludum dare I used 3d models what seemes to be better, but now the game was more fun with simple graphics and got better overall. Both games I made were a bit to hard, because while developing I thought they are easy, so next time I have to make the game easier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUf9Lu5ZDVs

The results are in and wow! I never thought I could rank this high in my first game ever developed. I took this as an opportunity to learn some coding, which is something that always kept me from making my own games... I have worked doing art for games but I never had the confidence to take on one project on my own. Now I do!

All the feedback and entries were simply amazing, I can't believe the amount of talent and vision that is gathered here. You guys are all great, this is one experience that made me grow and I totally enjoyed being part of this.

I am still working on further improving the concept of Planet Bash, so keep around to watch it evolve into a finished product for I will be uploading the updates of the post-jam version. I put what I have so far in a public alpha so you can check what's new: https://killerkun.itch.io/planet-bash

Alright, results are in. I am thrilled that I got close to 100 Overall. After placing 446 and 263 in my previous attempts, and now 112, a place in the coveted top 100 is within reach, just you wait Ludum Dare!

I even got my first 4 star rating with a category in the Top 40:

However, what should I make of it? A really good score for Theme? What does it mean? Looking at how many people did the "guy on a round world" I thought that my game wasn't so special in that respect. It's an achievement and I'm super happy that I got it, but I would like to interpret this for the future. Any ideas?