Well, the results for LD42 are in, and this time, I am extremely surprised and pleased...

• I placed in the top 100 in 7 out of 8 categories!

• I placed in the top 10 in 2 categories!

I felt Johnny's Flipbook Space Adventure was good, but I had no idea how it would rate.  Many thanks to those that played and rated.

As I mentioned in a previous Post-Mortem blog and video, this was a LD I almost sat out, but decided to jump in about 12 hours late. I am glad I did!

Looking at the graph, I normally rate somewhere in the middle of the pack, so the LD42 results really stand out. Some things that I find interesting, looking at the scores:

• All audio was done by speaking into a microphone, and changing the pitch to make it sound more like a child. No computerized bleeps, bloops or tools to create sound effects. The results were obviously favorable.

• Top 5 in Humor! I did try sprinkling in some funny things, so I am glad that it was noticed and appreciated.

• Mood.  I always score very low here, and I guess it was because I am not sure what this is exactly... until now. Did the player feel like they were playing a flipbook game? Answer is "Yes"!   

Continue Development?

After every LD, I feel that I should continue development on my game, but I never do for various reasons. With this game, I am still undecided. The high score is motivating me to continue development, and I feel that this may be a good Nintendo Switch game. I do have some enhancement ideas, like adding additional enemy types, but I also have an idea to add this style to the game I am currently developing, SMS: The Next Mission as a bonus level for early adopters. I would be interested in any comments around future plans.

In Conclusion

For a game that was almost never written, it scored beyond any expectations I had, and I am seriously considering continuing development as a stand-alone game as well as a mode in the game I am currently developing.

I also hope to keep the momentum going for LD43!

So, it was fun! I think the theme was great (certainly better than I originally thought, haha)

Here are my results:

Some of the things I learned from making my game and playing other games: - The final game may be very different than original idea - Minimalistic art is better than bad art - When I design levels, they seem much easier to me than to other people - The game should be as easy to follow at the beginning as possible, initial confusion is important

It was a great experience, se y'all in the Ludum Dare 43! :)

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

Results

We are very happy with our results, thank you so much for voting and playing our entry. We got a lot of valuable feedback and have created a Post Jam version that contains both content, bug fixes and balance changes. If you like RTS games, give it a try :smiley:

Patch notes

• General

  • Added Health bars to buildings.
  • Improved minimap: Has more information, can be clicked to move camera there.
  • Added difficulty levels. Standard, significantly easier than the previous difficulty of the game as well as Hard and Insane that will really put your skills to the test.
  • Upgrades to units and buildings apply to already existing ones.

• Added controls

  • Holding shift allows you to add more units to your current action-group.
  • Pressing CTRL + 1-9 adds the currenct action-group to a control group.
  • Pressing 1-9 will select all units in the corresponding control group.
  • Double tapping on 1-9 will center the camera on the units of the corresponding control group.
  • Pressing Space will center the camera on the units of the current action-group.

• Balance changes

  • Enemy turrets now has the ability to move (slowly)
  • Hover-tank
  • Deals more damage
  • Maximum targets set to 3
  • Has more 50% more health
  • Mine-layers
  • Now places mines spread around itself.
  • Mines now have a duration (30 seconds)
  • Heavy infantry
  • Increased damage by 30%
  • Increased health by 50%
  • Light infantry
  • Increased damage by 20%
  • Upgrades
  • Each level now costs 100 Crystals more than the previous one

• Bug fixes

  • Fixed build button bug (Player would place a building when pressing the build if a building was selected)
  • Fixed a rare bug that would cause units to visually remain after dying.
  • Fixed a bug causing some text going outside of the dialog box.
  • Purple Goo will no longer spread outside the map.

Thanks to all of you that reviewed my game, I feel like I've grown as a dev' love ya ! see you in 83 days ;P

Results Final results Overall: 450th (3.232 average from 30 ratings) Fun: 381st (3.204 average from 29 ratings) Innovation: 241st (3.411 average from 30 ratings) Theme: 368th (3.556 average from 29 ratings) Graphics: 557th (2.778 average from 29 ratings) Audio: 379th (2.833 average from 29 ratings) Humor: 282nd (2.591 average from 24 ratings) Mood: 334th (2.978 average from 25 ratings)

The best i got so far :smile:

My placements are okay considering that I feel like putting much effort into this LD because I absolutely hated the theme.

When effort is accounted for, there's still an upward trend in my gamejam scores. (The AKJ is another game jam I enter with the same rules.)

My goal this year was to work on my audio, which is clearly going well. In the charts, this LD looks like a failure when you look at the averages, but the scores pulling everything down are my theme and humor scores, which say almost nothing about the quality of the game itself.

Hopefully the next theme won't be terrible (almost never happens, but this is my least favorite theme out of every LD I've entered). I really liked the last LD's theme, but I underscoped the game which resulted in a weak entry. I haven't gone "all out" on an LD since LD 40 (my second least favorite LD theme). If I think I can do it with the theme, next time I'll put way more effort into my next entry. My pixel art skills also improved almost immediately after the game jam, which is a bit frustrating, but it's better than not improving at all. xD

I mostly improved in the areas of trees and terrain.

Here's some of my work from after the improvement:

Here's a pic from my LD entry (before the improvement):

@drums @axoona @coomzy @mykola @dancan @oberon @johnyf @timbals @paulo-augusto @rahim-pxr @brandon-napky @fakefirefly @oneiros @erikiene @antti-haavikko @pepelumen @punisherXA @cristihkj @himadri-sekhar-mahanta @unknownevil @ghastlymicrowave @dom-harris @watdowtal @keebleryestime

Check out our shiny new Twitter page! We'll make sure that the page receives the latest development news, so if you're interested in the Koala Squad's projects, drop a follow and stay tuned!

https://twitter.com/squad_koala

At the risk of sounding like I am complaining. I am seeing a pattern with a number of games where they had a very low number of ratings (under 30), yet they scored in the top 20% for many of their categories, and thus ended up with a higher overall score. It seems like some of us who have more people play (over 60) had a lower mean score, and thus were rated lower.

Again, not trying to complain but it seem like there is a penalty for advertising and getting more people to rate your game.

Maybe I am missing something in how it is scored? Is there a post that explains it?

Thanks all.

Wow, I got like 400th place, which is pretty awesome considering there were around 3000 submissions

I know it's already been a couple of days but I've been way to busy lately with summer vacation going on, part time job and the likes so I was only able to check results now.

Overall I've mixed feelings. I couldn't play many games so I didn't receive much ratings, that's okay though, as I said, almost 0 time lately, but overall I was happy with some of the stuff I did and a bit disappointed with some other.

This one time I decided to do some humanoid models on Blender 3D all by myself and that took quite a bit of time since I'm everything but an expert with it. Also animating took some time as implementing the animations and rotating the characters properly while pointing became a huge pain in the ass. Now that I've sorted that out it shouldn't be a problem anymore.

Aesthetics were also much simpler this time around, lots of plain colors because of the time, and some really simple stuff made it look too "paint-like" so I can get while it didn't gather much attention because of that. In this aspect, my entry for LD41 seemed much more clean and "beautiful" and as such was often told about it. Nonetheless I was able to pretty much fixed my biggest flaw from LD41, controls. This one time I went with something that seemed quite simple, even after all the animation trouble it gave me, yet it seems the Blood Bros gameplay is not really popular nowadays xD

Overall, programming-wise I'm pretty satisfied while aesthetics wise was a disappointment when compared to LD41's entry. I know I've learned lots from the experience and I expect to be able to get the best of both things for my next LD entry.

See ya all in LD43!

Best Ludum Dare so far! I was incredibly lucky to score 1st place in a Fun category, and pretty good scores in all the other categories as well. Had a great time making the game and watching others play it. Here are the final results:

Past results

This was my 4th Ludum Dare. And here is how my past results compare to the current ones.

LD39 - Westwood Hills Hospital

First Ludum Dare was also the first time I made a 3d game. I went for a creepy/horrorish game since the theme was "Running out of power" and I got an idea that the player is at an abandoned hospital and his mobile phone is running out of battery life. Nothing innovative, I know. And the scores reflected that. But! I scored 4th in the Mood category, so I was happy that I succeeded at creating a good atmosphere.

It seemed like people enjoyed playing it, so I tried developing it post-jam. I never got to the final version... Maybe some day!

LD40 - Imbalanced

I didn't like that my first Ludum Dare results were so scattered between the categories. While Mood rating was pretty good, the game wasn't as fun and Overall rating was pretty low. So I decided not to leave any categories behind and do a little bit of work for the each one.

The theme was "The more you have, the worse it is". The result was a species simulation game, where you have to control population of plants, rabbits and wolves so as all species would stay alive for as long as possible. As you can see from the score graph above, I succeeded at not letting any category fall behind (almost all of them were rated similarly) and the highest rated one one being Innovation at 112th place. However, the ratings overall were pretty low and I didn't do any post-jam development.

LD41 - RPG Shop

Try harding to get good scores in all categories didn't paid off the last LD, so I this time I had to do something differently. I made a shop keeping simulator with bad physics (in a funny way) crossed with a story based adventure and called it "RPG Shop". I decided to go with the gut feeling and throughout the development didn't think about how to get better scores in what categories. I just tried to make a funny little game with many fun characters one change at a time. And I think it worked! I got pretty good scores: overall 16th, humor 20th, mood 14th.

I was happy with the way people accepted the game and so I decided to work on this post-jam. This was the first Ludum Dare game that I worked until full version and released it on itch.io. Check it out if it sounds like something you would enjoy playing.

LD42 - SWORD1

And here we are now. For Ludum Dare 42 I made a 2d aim and click fighting game. This time I just wanted to have fun while making a game and decided to put most of my effort into polishing the "game feel" and balancing the difficulty and level progression. The game in its core is pretty simple: it's just hitting things with your sword until they die or fall off the platform. I had the core mechanics in first 6 hours (it looked like a gif below).

And I spent the rest 42 hours playing these levels over and over again and eliminating every little thing that I found not fun until the experience was smooth enough. I'm very happy that players noticed that and that scores reflected the same. Here are some gifs of the final game.

If you haven't played it yet, you can try it here: https://lawrence-laz.itch.io/sword1

Let me know what you think. :slight_smile: I still haven't decided on whether to continue development of this game post-jam.

If you read all of my ramblings then kudos to you for the patience and hope to see you in the Ludum Dare #43!

Alakajam! is a sister community to Ludum Dare, founded by moderators of the old website. On top of regular week-end jams, we are hosting more unusual things, like the current AKJ Tournament :smiley:

How it works

For two weeks, everyone gets to play on a selection of 6 games (mostly from the 3rd Alakajam) on which we'll try to make the highest scores/best times as possible. Using screenshots as proof, players will battle to enter (and remain in) the leaderboards.

Leaderboards points are awarded to all players that enter the top 10 of a game. At the end of the event, on September 23rd, the player with the most points wins the tournament! Check the 1st tournament winners to see the current title holders :)

Of course, there's no prizes to be won other than bragging rights. We're just here to have fun!

Current leaderboard

We're only 2 days in, but the competition is already strong! Come by and see if you can make yourself a good spot in the rankings :wink:

https://youtu.be/sWrxt9zkFRk

We have a ranking

Thank you for your feedback !

Hey everyone.

As a big time Ludum Dare fan I'm always looking forward to the next one and I don't want to wait 3 months. Are there any other game jams that have a similar 2 day all online format. The only other one I know of that I think is worth doing is Alakajam.

I'm really thrilled to announce that I've remade the game that I made for the LD42 compo. It took about 4 weeks of "spare time" to make this new version that you can download and install from Google Play. It's currently an open beta that you can test and this is the first game I'm releasing on mobile so I am treating the publishing process as a learning journey.

You can download the open beta here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Imphenzia.ParkingSpaces

Screenshot from the new Android version:

FINALLY RELEASED!!! My game "UNISAVIOUR" has been released.It is a 3d shooting game about aliens attacking earth and the universe and you have to save them.it has 15 levels+3 bonus levels+5 guns.IT IS REMAKE OF MY LDJAM ENTRY.It supports gamejolt score boards and trophies.so you can share your highscore and achieve trophies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OryHNHbm3Bo

available on: with scoreboard : https://gamejolt.com/games/unisaviour/366828 without scoreboard : http://prajwalatyoyogames.itch.io/unisaviour

LD42 was the second time i entered the jam. This time i got help from my brother for the sound and music. I wrote down a few words in this blogpost: https://supernapie.com/blog/ludum-dare-42-post-mortem

I'm sorry you guys, but we could not finish the videos with the other games we rated. We did rate them, but it is already long past the end of the jam rating, and we still have a lot of work to do. If you asked us to rate your game on YouTube and you still want it rated, we can post the unfinished and highly unpolished videos, but we don't plan on posting those videos or working on them more. Don't worry, we still gave all the games a rating in the jam, but this simply would take way too much time, and it is already very late.

I'm extremely humbled and pleased to see that Closing In: Barney's Daring Escape managed to place 42nd overall in this past Ludum Dare. (Top 5% of compo entries!)

I have had my doubts that an old console could get this much love, so this is really exciting to see. I was also really happy to see some other retro entries, including Running out of RAM for the Commodore 64, and Rad Rhino for the Genesis/Mega Drive. For bonus points, there's also a game that runs entirely in the browser's address bar!

This gives me a lot of motivation to keep going with these quirky games; it seems like people really enjoy them. Plus, as a first real test of nes-starter-kit I see this as an overwhelming success.

Thanks to everyone who played or made games; this was a great Ludum Dare!

PLAY HERE (Sorry for quality. I wish I could upload a crisp 400kb WEBM instead of a shitty GIF)

I added more stuff to Asteroidvania: Two optional powerups, a map layout that makes a bit more sense, and bigger caves to explore. Right now it's a bit empty, but the next update will have more environmental hazards, power-ups to deal wit them, and new, more varied environment art.

play it here and tell me what you think or comment on the LD submission page