8 is my favorite number, and it just so happens that 8 digits in my 8 rankings are 8, and it is the first digit in 6 cases (and I note that 6/8 = 0.75, and 0.75 rounded up is .8). What more can I ask for? Thank you everyone.

Overall: 828th

Fun: 894th

Innovation: 807th

Theme: 835th

Graphics: 805th

Audio: 300th

Humor: 833rd

Mood: 286th

My third Ludum Dare game got quite a nice rating and amazing feedback! Thank you so much for playing my game!

See you all in a couple of months! :stars:

I have to say coming into this was rather intimidating as I've never made a game let alone participated in something of this scale and type. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who gave encouragement, idea's, and criticisms through this month long ride. Cant wait to participate in the next one!

unrelated to thank you's I was pleasantly surprised with where I placed as well

on a more unrelated note if you want to try out the same game that I've been constantly working on to see how far its come its here: https://himegized.itch.io/spaceflightofsurvival

see ya in 170!

Double digits in FOUR categories? That's a first! I bet that would've changed if I got more ratings, but I'm flattered anyway! Holy cow... Well, see you all in April for LD46, and let's hope I don't go the same route as this one and actually think up some interesting mechanic instead of "grindy platformer with lots of enemies"

Here's the link to my game, in case you're curious

:scream_cat:

Thank you everyone who voted! And than you to the members of the team I was part of!

I was actually fairly bummed at the end of the jam because I thought I didn't do all that well. I thought I had a good concept but that I didn't quite pull it off. Looks like I was a little too hard on myself! :scream:

Thank you to everyone who played and provided feedback! :smile: :rocket:

wow this amazing I wasnt expecting to rank in top 100 in anything but top 50 in mood, thank you so much!!

Overall: 372nd Fun: 371st Innovation: 388th Theme: 402nd Graphics: 484th Audio: 110th Humor: 316th Mood: 41st

I was quite surprised I got this good results, especially about the overall-score.

But more than anything I'm really grateful to everyone who came and gave valuable feedback. Folks here have been really supportive and the observations and constructive criticism is crucial if one wants to go forward as a game-designer.

I think I've learned a lot every time I have participated, and gained much perspective regarding the elements in my games that work and those that need more effort put into them.

I've also learned a lot simply by playing other submissions and reflecting upon them. I think it goes to show that the living and breathing community here is unparalleled when it comes to developing your own skill-set and self-assurance.

I will continue to play and give feedback to other entries whenever I have the time, and I hope you will too. I think it's the best way to give back to the community.

See you next jam!

Thanks to all of you, guys!

It was my first ludum dare. That was awesome!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make the completed game during the jam, but I decided to finish it soon.

I want to add: * animations * sounds * new gameplay

Follow me on Twitter.

See you in April 2020.

Thanks to everybody who played and rated my game this go-round. It was a ton of fun to read your comments and desperately try to fix game-breaking bugs before the looming deadline. Haha fun!

Anyways, it was all worth it I think. Here is my game if you still would like to play it. It looks like this:

Here are my results for "Ex Nihilo". I finally got in the top 3 for Audio!

Successes

• The procedural music!
• Completed it within 24 hours. It's better when I actually have the time to work on it some more, but if I'm going to have that restriction I might as well embrace it.
• I'm getting better with particle effects, and in particular I came up with a particle-based thing for the planets to give them a random "texture" when they are generated (actually a paused particle system).

Opportunities

• Despite some successes in the graphics, it's still one of my worst categories. Not THE worst (this time), but it could have definitely used some extra flourishes or interesting visual effects to go with everything else.
• I realize that I didn't communicate the beginning very well. I really, REALLY wanted above all else to literally start the game from nothing on a blank screen. The problem is that you have to hold down the right mouse button to create the first planet, and it's very difficult to do that by experimentation (nobody ever HOLDS a button when they're testing controls; they just click). This clearly caused some confusion, and I'm sure my Fun category suffered a bit from it (it was my worst category).
• I really wanted to have more things to click on and do, and more music (maybe just a little more would have even pushed it to 1st place in Audio). I'm happy with what I made in 24 hours, but there's a LOT of room for improvement.
• I didn't quite learn my lesson from my LD 38 entry, "Nucleu" (actually a very similar entry to this in a way, even down to completing it within 24 hours). The problem with both games was that I had very specific goals in order to progress, which of course were not communicated to the player per se, and so it was possible to miss them and get stuck or just take longer to progress than expected. I should have had things advance automatically at some points, especially once the comets started to appear (you have to click on them 4 times in order to progress, but I should have just made it also progress after a certain number of them pass by, like 8). The Fun rating clearly suffered due to this.

All in all, not terrible. I'm still pleased with how it came out. Thanks for everyone who played it!

I've been creating games for years (almost 10), including ludum dare games. Something that bothers me is my lack of progress on the ludum dare ratings... Why I'm not making a lot of progress?

If you want to check all these games: https://ldjam.com/users/unidaystudio/games

This was a monumental Ludum Dare. I actually followed the theme without just making a stupid pun!

Still didn't reverse my nosedive trend in theme though...

Hey, I finally got around to record my Post Mortem & Timelapse of the making of I Have Nothing =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUb1mOihEqY

See previous blog entry - I can't delete this one.

So first of all this has been Amazing, I loved making the game I loved seeing people play it and I can't express enough gratitude for all the nice and critical comments I've received. I was aiming to be in the top 500 in atleast one category for my first Ludum Dare, so I'm well pleased with the results! I'm very aware scores are a very unreliable way to judge yourself and I would have judged myself much worse so I'm very interested how you guys set yourself goals and what you're trying to achieve with each Game Jam you enter? For the next LD I definitely would love to incorporate the theme much more and focus on play testing to make the whole experience less frustrating for the player. I had a blast and I hope you guys had lots of fun aswell, till the next jam! :)

Just a friendly notice: it looks like ldstats.info has been updated to scrape ratings and scores from LD45! Check it out if you'd like to view your rankings and scores from all LD entries (including from the old site).

Here are my rankings for the 22 LD games I've worked on:

(Nice to be back on the audio medal train again...)

hello everyone i am a 15 year old a need a 3d modeler (not paid cause i don't even have work but when we make a indie game he will get paid) if you are interested this is my discord https://discord.gg/AaqeCP2

HOLY COW GUYS! We DID NOT expect to get #2 on humor. More like... in the hundreds. So yeah, THANK YOU for playing and rating! Hopefully you enjoyed this game as much as we did :]

While it was far from being the best game... or perhaps even a good game, for nearly a week we got addicted to the dopamine release and found ourselves playing almost every hour. Once those muscles started growing... it was instant satisfaction. In my ~10 year history of making silly games this has NEVER happened, so maybe... maaaaybe we got something special here.

Anyway there's a loose plan to polish the game, then in a few months - if the stars align - perhaps we'll think about a sequel. But first we gotta finish our existing commitments. For anyone interested: Updates shall be posted on itch and indiedb.

Development process

1. Sit around a deli or pizza place while we pitch stupid ideas
2. Finally one "clicks"
3. Devise a loose plan for what needs to be in the MVP
4. Unleash the creative freedom
5. Someone crams everything together at the last minute

Obstacles

1. The Blender -> Godot 3D animation workflow is a pain in the butt
2. Satellite internet
3. Poor lighting
4. Being hungry, sometimes
5. A relationship that stole away our precious dehydrated squid at a critical moment
6. Laptops without number pads

Thanks for reading... and good luck with your future game stuff.
-The Muscle Typer Team

Hello there!

I've gone ahead and whipped up a quick post jam version of my LDJAM45 entry, 'Nothing'. You can check it out here.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to everyone who rated and commented on my entry, this has been probably the best outcome I've had to date. I managed to get in the top 10 for theme which is huge as nailing that category was my main goal this time around.

Lastly I want to take a moment to throw out a couple of things I learned from my entry, and from playing the entries of others. Kinda a post-mortem if you'd like.

Let people cheat

During this jam, I discovered possibly the single best thing anyone can add to any LDJAM entry. A skip/level select/cheat button or command. In my case I discovered how useful this is because I accidentally left in a "debug" button I was using during development to generate a large number of resources immediately. When it was brought to my attention I'd left it in, my initial idea was to remove it and make a note of the change (it arguably falls under the kinda change that's allowed for a LDJAM).

Shortly after though I had a thought. A common issue I personally come across (and having taken part in multiple LDJAM play streams also observed) is that a lot of LDJAM games have one of two major issues that can be helped with the addition of some sort of level select or cheat button. Of course fixing the real problem is better but this can be quicker and that's the name of the game!

This one's self explanatory, the game has difficulty issues and thus it becomes too hard to continue. The player may feel dejected enough to simply give up and/or may feel the game isn't as good as it otherwise might've been. As well as that they may miss out on important content that was hidden away behind the difficulty. This is incredibly common as I bet, like myself, you probably just tested your game yourself. That means you're way better at the game than anyone who's picking up for the first time, and you fall into the vicious cycle of making your game harder to "balance it".

So when testing a game, follow the below rules:

1) Don't be your only tester

2) Seriously, get someone else to test your game

Of course, you could just add the ability to cheat and ignore all sense of game balance. I am joking, don't do that. But allowing the ability to skip difficult parts is a valuable option. What's easy for some is difficult for others, and in most cases, you yourself will be the worst person to decide on what is "too difficult" or not.

This one is a big issue that I see far too much. If your game is long, and really for a game jam even 5 minutes can be long, players may simply get bored or otherwise find themselves needing to move on. They might be busy people with busy lives after all. A game with no checkpoints is even worse however, as replaying the same section over and over just to get a little further can have a negative impact on how players perceive the game. Of course, the game might be in an "arcade" style where the game resetting is normal. If a game is built with the idea of restarting often in mind this is perfectly fine! But any game that isn't can suffer greatly from the lack of a checkpoint. This doesn't mean that players shouldn't get to see everything your game has to offer though! Adding a level select or other cheat mechanic might just be the solution to guaranteeing that every player gets to see that cool final boss fight, you spent far too long on!

This was actually a big factor for my game, as some of the more fun content (the gambling mechanic, the achievement joke and disco mode were near the end of the game). The first half of the game being mostly to frame the theme and game idea, I wanted the latter half to just be fun stuff. Giving players the ability to generate a lot, but not infinite, amounts of resources proved to be a very practical solution for this, allowing people to skip a little ahead when they lost interest. It's worth pointing out however that many people who didn't cheat felt the pacing in 'Nothing' was fine, please don't use such a thing as a crutch for bad design. Use it as a way of saving people time, as most will appreciate the option if nothing else. See what I did there.

When your game goes from this to this, you have to make sure that players get to see as much as possible! It's literally the whole point in some games, especially with the theme "Start with Nothing".

Making sweet music

The second point I want to bring up is something of a personal gripe of mine. I played a decent number of games this LDJAM, over 50, and I noticed a lot of them had little to no audio and more often than not a message by the developer something along the lines of "didn't have time to do audio".

Yes, a game jam is massively stressful at the best of times. Time, the ever present forward motion that plagues us all, is always in short supply when you've trying to make something from scratch. But audio is so important to the overall feel of a game. In almost every case I found myself far more invested in a game that had any audio whatsoever over one that doesn't. It gives a weird emptiness to a game, and not in a good way. I can wholly understand avoiding music. Music is scary to make if you don't know how or if you don't have the tools. SFX can be the same way. But it makes such a marked difference in the perceived quality of what you make that it's always going to be worth the time to look up and learn how to get audio into your game.

Look into music & SFX software before the game jam, and make sure to give yourself enough time during to make the audio your game deserves! As a starting point I'd recommend BFXR/SFXR for sound effects and for music I used to use BoscaCeoil back before I got into writing music proper. It's relatively intuitive, not too difficult to learn at least, and very easy to whip up a simple short song. A great starting point if you're unfamiliar with writing music.

A bad UI is a bad idea

Hey. Don't make a game that almost exclusively uses Unity's UI. Really. That said, if your game has a HUD or other form of information you want to get across to the player make sure that you make it clear and concise. Possibly the biggest problem my game had was that I made the cost for some things appear visually different to other things.

In the above example, how in the hells are you supposed to know what improving your resources per second (or resource on key press) costs? This was a huge mistake on my part, mainly caused due to my previous point of don't test things yourself. I knew that each of those represented the resource that matched the first letter. A for Atoms, B for Bytes, etc. Pretty much no one else did, at least immediately. On the flip side, the costs for the game upgrades on the right hand side were obvious from the get go. Don't do what I did.

I wasn't alone in this, some games I had played during the jam had UI that was blurry, obscured or otherwise difficult to read. Using the right font is important, making elements large enough to read is very important, contrast between UI and the rest of your game is damn near vital. It's something that's surprisingly easy to check as well (he says using the power of hindsight).

Try this. Take a screenshot of a scene within your game. If your game has a lot of movement/action make sure the picture is during that. Send the picture to someone and ask them to, preferably within a few seconds, answer questions like these:

1) How much health does the player have?

2) How much does purchasing x/y/z cost?

3) Is the player able to use ability x/y/z?

It's a simple test, but likely to be effective. I used this very test to make a couple of minor changes to the UI for this very game. Subtle font size changes, adding the word cost and changing the actual way it's shown to make the specific resource a little more obvious. Is it perfect? Probably not. Is it far better? Certainly.

Anyway. That's all I've got to say really. This jam was great, probably my favourite so far. I hope you enjoyed it as well! I just wanted to share some things I'd learnt so that maybe you can learn some stuff too. Let's keep learning together.