Come and loop with man’s best friends! Whales and Games will introduce you to the magnificent Woofice Chair!

Welcome to Goodboi Park! A dog haven so good that it’ll make the best friend of man bark for the park! In fact, it’s so good that it even attracts the wrong audience. I swear, those body-builders really are a pain in the tail.

But the park is not without its defenders! Hoop, Lupe and Carl are up to the challenge! And since Goodboi Park so happens to be next to an office chair disposal, they’re not without mighty chariots!

So pick a pal, get on the chair, and spin faster than a dog can chase its tail! Throw your very buff enemies for a loop!

Our team had a great time making this game happen. As we always like to do during Ludum Dare season, the game is playable in Windows/Mac/Linux and Web, so you can pretty much play it anyway! So make sure to take it for a spin! :seat:

We hope you have a romp while on this Ludum Dare rating season. Don’t forget to review all the games you can! In fact, leave us your game in the comments, and we’ll check them out in the first opportunity!

If you wanna hang out, chat or share your games, be sure to give our Discord server a visit!

That’s it for the time being! Go get your ratings! :whale::dog:

Hey there! :wave: Ludum Dare ratings have just closed! For everyone that was still rating games out-there and trying to save some last games from the danger zone, you did an amazing job and we're extremely glad you've took it upon yourselves!

Since the time is almost up, we wanted to highlight some of our favourite games and developers that we’ve found around here this past month! :trophy: While we haven’t rated as many games as some of our previous participations, we still found a fantastic set of gems!

Without further ado, here’s our favourite games for Ludum Dare 47 that are sure to make you a fantastic whale-of-a-time! :whale:

Dude Ranch :horse:

Let’s start off with the most hilarious-one! Dude Ranch by @coleslaughter, @ruddgasm and @ruddiculous is a funtastic time!

Wrangle some dudes at Dude Ranch, keep an eye out for buff and golden dudes, and score that money! Undertones aside from all of that, it’s all fun and challenging! Depending on how much you try to aim for that highscore, your carpal tunnel is sure to love it! :moneybag:

Satelloop :milky_way:

Another fun and challenging pick is Satelloop by @diptoman and @pranjalbisht, featuring very-clean visuals and a fantastic background track!

Power your satelloop by mining resources from asteroids, but destroy them before they hit your ship and damage it! It’s a constant gambit between which asteroids to mine and which ones to destroy, especially when you have to manage your power to produce more drones! :stars:

Roller Richers :roller_coaster:

If we had to pick a favourite clicker for the jam, the award would go to Roller Riches by @jacobingalls and @dxk2294!

In this short tycoon-themed incremental game, you add parts of a roller coaster to make it longer and with even more loops! And the good thing about the loops is that all of the riders money will fall right off their wallets! And you get to keep all that money! As you keep going, you can also buy incremental upgrades that boost just how much money you make from your ride! :moneybag:

Beat Bash :crossed_swords:

Beat Bash by @overlook-studios is a fantastic mash-up of both combat and rhythm where you place runes that play out to the game’s music beat!

Pick between melee and magic runes to damage the opposing enemy, all in while you also defend against theirs with your own defensive runes! You can also purchase extra runes at the end of each stage, giving you healing and stunning runes too! Our favourite detail is that everything in the background also moves according to the beat! :musical_note:

Gene Cycle :microscope:

A genuinely surprising game was Gene Cycle by @joh, proving to be a nucleotide connecting madness!

While the tutorial makes it seem complicated at first, there’s a really fun connection-setting puzzler here that had me playing it in the background during meetings! You break and make connections to create loops that eventually lead the sequence of nucleotides that you’re asked to assemble. I can also boost the fact I got the highscore for that game for how much I liked it! :sparkles:

Smells Like Chlorine :office:

Smells Like Chlorine by @bas-hoogeboom and @thegreenworm is a short but strong narrative adventure that will throw you for a cleaning-loop!

It starts off like a normal day doing your job as a janitor, but things quickly take an interesting turn. Reality quickly begins to crook until madness is all-but-inevitable. It has a fantastically well-written scenario, and for a team fond of experiences like Stanley Parable, we really commend this one!

Time Loop :bat:

While simple, Time Loop by @bbqgiraffe and @kassjak quickly gets very frenetic!

Loop around the interior of a clock, as you flip-gravity to jump between sides! Avoid loose gears that will damage you while you fend-off against pesky clock bats! Grabbing the bolts that the bats drop will not only heal you, but also grant you points for that sweet highscore! :clock2:

Never Gonna Lose Again :crystal_ball:

And finally, last but not least, we recommend embarking on an epic quest through Never Gonna Lose Again by @garywiss, @arista, @dragongaze13 and @harusame!

Take a mage across impressive looking lands onto a journey to defeat a mighty monster! However, the lands are dangerous and the enemies are vicious! If you're slain, rather than just dying, you'll go back in time! This gives you new opportunities to learn from your mistakes, and try again! In our opinion, it's one of the most impactful games of the entire jam! :knife:

Thank you for this Ludum Dare! :blush:

In addition to all of the previous games, we’d also like to make some honourable mentions to Spinnerets by @jeremy-ryan; Fancy Trash by @sebastianscaini, @del-nordlund, @robert-mh and @donovan; Monkeys On Fire by @lapersila and @argon; and NEONWISE’89 by @merwaaan and @fmdkdd! All of these are also a great time overall!

Thank you for the fantastic time we had this Ludum Dare and for also rating Woofice Chair! It’s great to be back as a team to the event and it was great to finally make another 72-hour game. We’ve spent the last year trying out different commercial projects and we think we finally found our calling! :sparkles:

While we still don’t know if we can participate in April’s Ludum Dare because of some of our team’s other plans, we certainly would love to! Meanwhile, you can look forward to a development insight about our game’s juice and polish in the next hours, as well as our typical post-mortem sometime after the results are out!

Meanwhile, we’re preparing for Whaloween over at our Discord and our Twitter! It’d be fantastic to keep in touch after the jam is over, so you’re more than welcome to join, share your game and talk about your favourites there too! Cheers! :whale:

Whenever we participate in a game jam, one of the core aspects people always compliment us on is on polish. During the rating period of Woofice Chair! those compliments came back around and we are very proud of receiving them again! :sparkles:

But what is this dark magical art that people call polish? And what about juice? While both are regarded as something to highlight in jam games, we believe polish is deeply connected with gameplay. Polish not only helps give a game a more complete-feel, but also helps making gameplay more satisfying to the player!

Despite ratings having already closed, I've written a development insight covering some of techniques we've use to give some extra polish and juice to our game! This includes various topics such as using screenshake and smoothing cameras, using trails and particles to give extra oomph to the player's movement and even using FMOD to add extra depth to the audio! :eyes:

While our intention was to originally cross-post this development insight here into Ludum Dare, the final article ended up with over 28 videos, some of them requiring sound. Fully converting each of the individual video into the 4MB limit for GIFs this site asks for would be an enormous time-consuming task for a lesser reading experience.

Therefor, as a first time exception since we've started writing development posts about our Ludum Dare games here on the site, we have to ask you check-out the post in our main website's blog instead! We apologize for inconvenience, but we think this is the most practical way to get around it. :bow:

Click here to read the development insight at Whales And Games!

Of course, if you have any comments, questions or things that you'd like to add, feel free to do them through the comments here!

Just two days ago we made a post about our results this time around, and we're very happy with the ratings that we've got! While our artist has already congratulated everyone of you in his post, I'd like to future reiterate his words! Congratulations to everyone that participated this time around, and we hope that you keep it up for future jams! :muscle:

We'll certainly keep an eye out for some of the folks we've highlighted this year, and we look forward to participating again! Cheers! :whale:

What would an omniscient creature of the abyss do with all that knowledge? Well, host a trivia game, of course! Join the challenge of the Thing Of The Void (or Thothev for short) in Vast Trivia Of The Void and go deep into the abyss to win big! 👾

Put your knowledge of several topics to the test! Sports, history, science, anime, videogames and more! But since Thothev thought that just knowing wasn’t fun enough, move around in his playground, collecting cards and increasing your combo! Cash out or go deeper, for higher rewards but possibly higher risks! Monetary, of course!

Do you have what it takes to make it big? Will you come out as a winner in the biggest game show from the darkest pits of the universe?

Vast Trivia Of The Void is our brand new entry from Whales And Games for this Ludum Dare! Those were three hectic days of game development, and we’re only posting about it now because we just finished the Web and Android ports! And all of that was right after our release of Townseek from last week! We may be super tired, but that’s not stopping us from hyping it around!

You can download the game, play it on the web or, as surprise, play it on your android mobile devices over on our entry page!

In addition to our own questions, we’re also experimenting with allowing for users to make their own questions! For that, we’ve made the User Questions Manual with instructions of how anyone can make their own question packs! Neat!

Joining us for audio this time around was @zachary-blystone (Twitter) who has previously joined us while making Super Sellout and Petty Puny Planet, and his synth music fit our trivia game show like a glove! 👏

We’ll be taking the next few days off from any IDEs, engines and art programs to recover from all this jamming and play some of the jam’s games, so make sure to link us yours over in the comments! You can also come hang out with us over at our Discord for some casual after-jam talk.

Enjoy Thothev's crazy game show, and enjoy deepening your transdimensional trivia knowledge! 🌌

Another Ludum Dare season has come to an end and the show’s over! However, we still have our results to look at! How did our game, Vast Trivia Of The Void, perform this Ludum Dare? :whale:

Game jam results are always interesting to analyse. Should we be worried if we went down on stats? Do the ratings show actual improvement? What can we learn from the results we get at the end of the jam?

Before we do that though, we want to thank every single one of you! Whether you played our game, submitted questions for our trivia, or just did your part to keep the Ludum Dare experience running, you’re amazing! Thank you for making this a great experience for us all, and regardless of your own results, we hope you’re proud of the game you’ve created! :clap:

Now then, let’s see what happened this time around! :point_down:

Not bad at all! We got over 100 ratings on all the categories, which means that the results should accurately portray the average jammer’s opinion towards our game. In previous jams, we have made a Google Sheet with all the results we’ve got across Ludum Dare, so let’s add in this jam and compare how we stack up!

Our highlights this time around were Graphics and Audio, and the Overall is pretty fantastic! The Theme rank was admittedly a complete disaster, making it the first time we’ve landed ourselves a sub-1000 rank. But to be honest, of all the categories, that’s the one we tend to concern ourselves the least about. The most important thing for us is to have a game done at the end of the jam, even if the theme’s interpretation is a bit of a stretch!

But the important question is, how do the ratings themselves stack up against our previous entries? Did the lower ranks mean that we didn’t do as well as on previous jams?

Turns out that Vast Trivia Of The Void actually scored the highest rating of all our previous Ludum Dare games in four categories: Overall, Fun, Audio and Mood! Basically, when it comes to design, programming, music and sound, our team knocked it out of the park.

For a more fair comparison, in our sheet we’ve added a new average that weighs only Fun, Graphics and Audio. We can associate these with the tangible skills of the team: Programming, Art and well, Audio. With that average being of 4.36, Vast Trivia seems to be our best constructed game for a Ludum Dare to date!

This is why it’s important to always take into consideration not only your ranking, but also your ratings! If we only look at the ranks we’ve got, it would seem that our performance was not as good as previous games. However, when we look at the game’s ratings in context, the improvement becomes clearer and much more measurable

The lower ranks don't mean you did worse, but rather that there were many more high quality games this time around!

Nowadays, a lot more games that are created during Ludum Dare make it to commercial releases in the post-jam, regardless of the ranks and ratings they had during the event. Did you know that both Dorfomantik and Friday Night Funkin’ started as Ludum Dare entries? And look at the massive following they have nowadays!

If you’re proud of the game you have and want to continue working on it, please do! Take the feedback from the comments you’ve got, and push your game even further! :muscle:

All things considered, we had a great time seeing what you and the community have made this time around! Genuinely good stuff left and right! Seeing all of these inspiring submissions and community is always a treat!

Finally, we’d love to stay in contact with y’all! Some of you have already dropped by our Discord server to say hello, but everyone is welcome! But if Discord is not your thing, we have our Twitter profile as well! We’re really eager to show you more we’ve got in the plans for this year!

Thanks a lot for reading! Here’s hoping to see you around next Ludum Dare! :sparkles:

(TL;DR We've couldn't participate on the jam because we were busy announcing the Steam page for our Global Game Jam project!)

*Hey everyone! 👋 *The first day of this weekend’s Ludum Dare has come to a close, and I hope you’re all having a fantastic time working on your respective projects!

The theme sounds really challenging this time around, but quickly scrolling through the feed, there seem to be some fantastic game ideas coming together! Really looking forward to seeing what some of the regular folks (ahem @coleslaughter @mateusboga @peace-of-cake-games) are working on! 👀

Unfortunately, our team isn’t participating this time around. We were really looking forward to participating, but we had to focus on a major announcement for our team and studio instead. My colleague @moski did post a few tips yesterday for newcomers though, and I definitely recommend giving them a read!

*Remember that there’s no right or wrong way to participate, and if you feel like you need to drop off due to being stuck, mental health, or personal errands, it’s fine to do so! *Whenever you’re ready, there’s always next time to pick up and try again! At the end of the day, we’re making games. If we’re not having fun while making something that’s meant to be fun, what’s the point? 🙌

While we’re not participating, I do want to take the opportunity to talk a bit about that major announcement I mentioned earlier! I feel free to use this moment you’re taking to read this post as a little break or procrastination from your work if you want. 😜

Up until now, our team at Whales And Games has mostly been around because of our work across several game jam projects. *We have participated in _8 Ludum Dare’s_ up until now, and earlier this year we also participated for the first time in _Global Game Jam_ and _GMTK Game Jam_ together. During _Global Game Jam_, feeling some hangover from not being able to travel during the pandemic, we created an exploration-trading game called *Townseek, where you travel a map discovering landmarks and trading with towns.

After the game jam was done, we started working on a post-jam version of the game, and were expecting a mostly quiet release to follow as is common with most our jam entries. The reception blew our expectations, and Townseek became our third most played game in the time-frame of a month! We received many comments with praise for the game, suggestions for more features and towns and even got featured on itch!

This week, we released The Star-Seeker Update as the final update to the jam version of the game. *Today, we’ve announced that we’re working on a full-release version of the game for _Steam_ and beyond! *It marks a huge step and a new voyage for our studio and team! While we were working on a bigger project with Bunny Splash Casino (and continue to do so on the background), following on Townseek and doing a full release just made the most sense to us. It allows us to get more familiar with the Steam release workflow, better setup at marketing, and other important things on the grand-scheme of setting up a studio!

If you have the time, we definitely would appreciate it our Steam page a look! If you like what you see, we’d even appreciate a wishlist (and a retweet too)! 🐳

While not every game jam needs to be a full-release or needs to have a life cycle after you’re done with the jam, if you do happen to come across a project with good reception and that you enjoy working on, it might be interesting to keep working on it! And if it doesn’t work out, it simply wasn’t meant to be.* I personally like to believe that there’s no such thing as lost life opportunities. Even if you miss an opportunity now, another one will show up later! *Indie development tends to be so demanding and crunch-based at times, that it’s good to remember to stay positive every now and then!

While we had to sacrifice joining in this time to focus on making the Steam announcement across our social media,* we’re definitely going to be around _Ludum Dare 50_! That’s a promise! We would want to lose on such a milestone edition for sure! 🙌*

For those of you who are participating this weekend, I wish you the best of luck, work and fun! *I’ll be on the lookout for your games! *Cheers! 🐳

(We actually updated the picture this time, hah!)

Hey folks! :wave: Back on Wednesday we did our first stream ever showcasing your games, and today, me and @moski will be picking up from where we left off! Come watch us over on Twitch!

We'll begin in about 15 minutes, but meanwhile, you can submit your games through this form! You have to be in chat for us to play your games though! Additionally, if you submitted your game on Wednesday and we didn't get to it, check the queue, and if you appear in chat, you'll have priority!

We didn’t have the opportunity to make a game of our own this time and as a result, we can’t rate your games. However, we'll still be giving you feedback while on stream, so make sure to join us and have some fun! :whale: