I was trying to think of a joke involving thousands of potatoes and Ludum Dare, but 2346 games is nothing to joke about. That’s incredible. I’m at lost for words. Lets just get to the results:

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

My Results: ludumdare.com/…/?action=me

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 100 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

Compo Top 100: ludumdare.com/…/?action=top
Jam Top 100: ludumdare.com/…/?action=top&cat=Overall(Jam)

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Categorical Top 25s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

Categorical Top 25s: ludumdare.com/…/?more=1

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 100 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 27 – August 2013

Whew! What a dare! You had a good time right? Great! We’re doing it again in August! We don’t have a specific date chosen yet, but stay tuned for that. Follow us on Twitter or join the mailing list to stay informed.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/01/09/suggestion-post-2/

Thanks everyone for coming out and kicking off an amazing new year for Ludum Dare!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

 

This month’s Mini Ludum Dare is a special one: it’s the Mini LD #42, and it’s also being held on the weekend of May 25th (Towel Day). Thus, we’re celebrating with a tribute to Douglas Adams!

The theme for this month is “Earth will be Destroyed“. I believe there might be people unfamiliar to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, so I decided for a more broad theme. In any case, you’re encouraged to create something inspired by Douglas Adams’ work (or don’t, feel free to do whatever you want =P). As usual, everything goes!

The de facto period for the jam is May 24-26 12:00 AM UTC, but you can start before if you want to, and submissions will be open until the end of the month, in case you need some extra time.

DON’T PANIC!

[ View | Submit ]

The folks behind IndieCade got in touch with me to tell me they love what we’re doing here at Ludum Dare. So much, that they want to offer you a discount off the usual submission fee. To take advantage of the deal, do the following:

1. Visit indiecade.com/submissions/ and fill out the entry form.
2. Mention Ludum Dare in your description.
3. Use coupon code “dare13” in the payment section to receive 40% off.

Early submission deadline ends May 31st ($80), and the late deadline is June 30th ($110).

I’m simply stunned at getting 20th place in compo results; even more so at 25th for graphics and 48th for audio (seriously I wrote the music by banging notes out on a piano at random until things sounded right).  I want to thank everyone who played my game and gave such wonderful feedback.  I’ve taken you comments in to mind and have started working on turning this entry into a full game.  I have a long road ahead of me, but with such wonderful people looking forward to it, this journey will definitely be worth it!

Thanks to Emscripten, you can now play my game in your browser with a bloated 10MB download over HTTP, awful framerate, and NEARLY ONE SECOND of sound lag… on Firefox, and absolutely NO sound on Chrome!

Hell, I don’t even KNOW if it works on Chrome, but here we go:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32094129/em/rebellion/em.html

Let me know how badly it works!

So the results for LD26 are out and I must say, despite some of the obvious faults my game had, I was pleasantly surprised with what I got so without any further ado, here are the results for my entry, Only One Shot:

Ratings

	Coolness	100%
#67	Theme(Jam)	3.92
#83	Innovation(Jam)	3.58
#239	Audio(Jam)	3.00
#245	Fun(Jam)	2.98
#281	Overall(Jam)	3.11
#350	Humor(Jam)	1.85
#365	Mood(Jam)	2.66
#464	Graphics(Jam)	2.47

Anyway, according to bvanschooten’s percentile maths, I’m actually in the top 14th percentile for Theme and top 17th percentile for Innovation out of all rated Jam games.

Strongest Category – Theme: Minimalism was probably an easy theme to interpret so no problems here.

True Strongest Category – Innovation: Now this one I can definitely be proud of as a lot of the positive comments on my game were to do with the core mechanic of my game.

Weakest Category – Humour: Wait, what? My game hardly has any humour 0_O

True Weakest Category – Graphics: I’ve probably said this before so many times during the rating period but I’m more of a coder than an artist and I can’t even draw to save my own life but regarding the theme, I just sorta lucked out.

Category which took me by Surprise – Audio: Apparently bfxr and a few randomly placed squares in Otomata somehow managed to get me a 3 in Audio.

Category I nearly managed to break through – Fun: Was only 0.02 away from 3 stars and possibly making top 100 for fun.

Overall, I would say not too shabby for my first Ludum Dare. I’ll try and possibly make some time over the weekend as I’m pretty busy at work during the weekdays but I might start on working on an improved, fleshed out, post-compo version of my game.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who rated my game and gave nice comments about it and to everyone who submitted an entry of course.

See you in August for Ludum Dare 27

Hello all! I had heard of the Ludum Dare a while ago, and finally decided to participate… well I’m making a game for the Mini Ludum Dare #42, but still, I’m excited because it’s my first! I’m writing my game in python and using Tkinter for graphics. I started learning python a little while back, and thought I was ready to make a whole finished game… well I now know that was a mistake seeing as I keep getting stuck on everything I try to add. However, with my problem solving skills, and lots of help from friendly forum-goers, I seem to be able to sort things out.

Anyway, this wasn’t a real update or anything, I just wanted to let you all know that I’m excited to compete with you, and am looking forward to the many Ludum Dares to come.

Thanks.

-baconbot

Howdy, My name is Ethan (ENP) And this is my minimortem of Minimal Theory! er … Minimal Mortem!

A big thanks to sirfireknight and thatonefunnyguy for voice acting!

And another big thanks to all you lets players and gamers for being such an awesome audience!

---

Pre Ludum dare 26 :

I began before the timer approximately 3 hours before configuring the UDK engine perhaps to late as there are allot of UDK based bugs and issues in the game now *Lack of an original loading screen / Options*

UDK primed and all the game types set it was about 30 minutes away from the theme announcement. I am on NecessaryGaming.com / Twitter / Ludum Dare and a few other social media sites preparing to post updates and announcements. I have no plans for voice acting and have contacted no one as of now for lines. I am also conversing with developers on the ludum dare IRC.

*Notch announces his attempt in the ludum dare later not completing a game but a trippy animation*
*SoS begins preparations for a C64 port of his game later called Ponk!*

—

*ENP is having dinner preparations and has successfully re-codded the essential parts of UDK*

---

Ludum Dare 26 Day 1 :

The theme Minimalism is announced the site is down due to traffic I panic … then remember to check my email. 1 message was in the inbox with the theme I sigh of relief I will start immediately.

I begin to conjure up an idea of a game designed around the minimalism of human thought and experiences in an environment + Limited understanding the idea of a thoughtless test subject was preferred due to a nerdy love with portal hence the similarities.

The goal? :

Design a game with minimal aspects and puzzles quick and short though visually appealing with the ability for people to quickly play and take joy in.

I coined the phrase or title Minimal Theory in correlation to the spectrum of visual thought being limited the fact that you were even in the experiments to begin with itself being up to perspective. Ever wonder why there was a chair in the title menu and at the end? In effort to play around with perspective in the most minimalistic way I simply chose to give an unanswerable question in about the length of 10 minutes.

Minimal Theory is announced on twitter and several other places the following are the first screenshots :

About 4 hours have passed.

Day 1 continued as constant level design bickering over kismet accuracy and level design detail, I went on to do a livestream however it was not saved and the footage was lost .

Miniaml Theory was developing a new element horror … I added this to test out what I could do barely trying to create an eerie scray environment … It worked flawlessly.

I slept at 2am, beside me my laptop cooling my face and warming my bed.

---

Ludum Dare 26 Day 2 :

Progressive level design leads to this iconic screenshot

I am going to skip a bit here at the end as allot of it was just confusing code bugs and level design issues however it progressed nicely.

Until …

I ran out of time!!!

though all was good

There was an extra few hours for submission time THANK GOD.

I was able to submit the game without a hitch and quickly get people to play it / rate it.

---

Aftermath :

Minimal Theory has over 450 downloads! And that’s only what I can count through my mirrors!

The game has a Mac release and is currently awaiting Desura publishing approval.

There are a ton of great lets plays to check out on youtube as well!

The game preformed exceptionally in the competition!

---

Whats next? :

Minimal Theory : The 48 Hour Edition is done and over with however I would love to come back and explore the concept after I have completed my other 2 projects.

Minimal Theory will have a bigger release sometime in the future … one you sure as hell can look foreword too.

---

Thank You For Playing

Created for Ludum Dare!
Developed with the UDK in 48 hoursLudum Dare Game Page 
If you make a lets play feel free to post it on our page!There will be 1 final update to the Ludum Dare version of this game this week that will cover more sounds and a little level design after that I will begin wrapping up the demo for Nightmare: Among Shadows.Thanks for playing and for all the support!

OVER 400 DOWNLOADS (LD+IndieDB)

 

This was my first LD.  My entry was total rubbish and I sincerely apologize to anyone who played was exposed to it.  As many pointed out, my “game” wasn’t really a game, more of a toy.  So imagine my surprise when the results rolled in Shaving Quest: The Razor’s Edge actually placed in the top 25 for Humor(Jam)!  Yay!!  Thank you, LD!

Can’t wait for LD27!

 

so this was my first LD and I’m rather satisfied with the results. I wasn’t expecting too much but I was hoping to break into the top 100 and it turns out I did !

Highlights in my ranking include#45 in fun and #74 overall. Every other score is rather average, my game’s worst ranking being #459 in innovation. One small disappointment was my theme ranking of #371 as I felt using “minimalism” as a gameplay mechanic was a good idea, but oh well, I’m never very good with themes.

I was glad to see a lot of constructive comments about my game. it seems the main gripe with the game was the controls and i can get behind that to an extent. some also complained about the difficulty and, again, I can understand that; I’m terrible at balancing things.

One thing about rating though is that apparently some people don’t like using “N/A” ? I mean BLM ended up #247 in humor even though there is *none*. no dialogues, no story, no nothing. I find that kind of demeaning to the people who actually put effort into that aspect of their game. but aside from that, no major complaints.

at any rate this was fun and I hope to do it again next time !

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Index of games 1|2|3|4

The last part is released, it’s a bit shorter than the others but still full of good games! And that’s all for this LD! We have a total of 455 games featured on those videos. That’s not bad at all! So many creative games!

Thank you for participating and my apologies if somehow your game got left out (I hope I got everybody).

As my first LD, I wasn’t expecting much, and with so so so many entries I’m glad to have finished at least in the top 10%.

Check out Proxy here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22132

I must add that I am a bit disappointed to see the ratings look a bit wonky. As an example, I’ve seen some games that are little more than moving a square with the arrows keys in the top 100 of innovation. Don’t get me wrong, simplicity can be fun, such games can still look polished and make for an overall great game experience, but perhaps innovation should not be where they’re scoring highest.

I also saw a user share an anecdote about his game being bested on graphics by a text adventure.

 

Nevertheless, the overall top 100 certainly look like entries that deserved to be there. Congratulations to the winners, and all the best to all the game devs that took part, and good luck to anyone who will be continuing there game post compo!

 

Cheers,

Dan M.

My entry to LD #24 : Tiny World seems to be mostly better, except in terms of graphics..

After 3 weeks of judging here are the results!
This was my first Ludum Dare ever and i couldn’t be more astonished! I think i did pretty well with Earth Defender, i’m so happy my game has got these results. Now i’m ready to do better in the next LD… YEAH!
Congratulations to all the participants, and thanks to everyone who rated my game!

Give it another play!
And Sign in HelkeGames’ official website for updates and other projects!

See you in another LD!

Ratings

	Coolness	100%
#253	Humor(Jam)	2.24
#380	Graphics(Jam)	2.81
#391	Fun(Jam)	2.57
#396	Audio(Jam)	2.19
#427	Theme(Jam)	2.77
#434	Overall(Jam)	2.72
#448	Mood(Jam)	2.37
#527	Innovation(Jam)	1.94

Ludum Dare results should be front page on reddit, let’s make it happen!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1erkci/ludum_dare_26_results_are_live_link_to_top_100/

Top 100 Finish?

#77 overall?

I couldn’t BE more astonished.  I’m so happy people enjoyed my game that much, and there’s nothing more encouraging than that.  I think I’ve got all the motivation I need to work on the post-compo version now.

Congratulations to all of the compo and jammers that finished their entries, and thank you to everyone who rated my game.

You’re all awesome.

 Scores

  PLAY GURU

We got our first medal – in ‘Graphics’!! And as the artist I know how competitive that category is so I’m extra amazed at the result! If you just look at the scores around ours, 0.01 of a star could have tipped us over the edge into silver territory or knocked us out of the running for the bronze. So tight!

Thanks to everyone who voted on our entry!

We also beat all of our previous records apart from in the fun category (understandable, it was a very hard/cryptic point and click puzzle game), and almost came in the top 50 for everything!

And we trashed our previous scores for Humor, Theme and Mood.

Spreadsheet of our past 4 Ludum Dares + Graphs

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgqMypAQnKEYdGhUcXZLWjZ4MEtTazZjdV9hdDhtbWc&usp=sharing

Linux

We’ve also got our game working on Linux! – Does anyone have any idea if it’s possible to update the entry page with a new download link now that the contest is over? If not we’ll just post it with the timelapse that’s coming soon!

Social Networking

Join us on Facebook and Twitter! (I just made the accounts the other day so they’re looking pretty lonely)

 

I love Ludum Dare.

Mighty pleased with the 9th placing in the jam humor ratings, the fact the game was made as a satire joke makes it feel like a big win for us. Thanks to everyone who played our game. Roll on the next jam!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=19384

The reactions to the ratings are flowing in, and I noticed there are some misunderstandings on how to interpret the ratings, and how to calculate a percentile.  First of all, the ranking is based on the category.  That is, if your game is in “48h compo” it is ranked within a total of 1610 games, if it’s “jam”, within 736 entries.  But that is not the whole story.  A number of games have not been rated because the number of ratings fall below the threshold (which I believe is 12 or 14 ratings or some such).  Without knowing how many games were not rated, you can’t calculate your percentile.  As a first attempt to solve this problem, I took a random sample out of all games, and noted the percentages that were and weren’t rated. Figures calculated from all games would be nice to have, but these aren’t available afaik.

Percentage of 48h games rated: 88.9% (32 out of 36 in my sample)
Percentage of Jam games rated: 64.5% (20 out of 31 in my sample)

Note that the percentage for Jam games is much lower for some reason.  Anyway, this means the total number of rated games in each category is approximately:

48h: 1431 (1610*0.889)
Jam: 474 (736*0.645)

To get your percentile, divide your ranking by one of the numbers above and multiply by 100.

Also it makes sense to look at the absolute ratings (the number of stars) and to know something about the relationship between absolute and relative ratings.  In some cases, a 0.1 star change can drop or raise your ranking by 100 or so.  I’d also like to see a graph of this relationship.  Maybe I’ll make one myself.

 

The first thing I said to myself before the start of the Jam was this : “I will do my best to respect the theme in every aspect of interpretation or development.” Then the theme was announced : “Minimalism“. I was very frustrated because I knew that obeying THAT theme would kill almost every fragment of creativity I have could put into it my game. I wasn’t creating a personal game anymore, but a thing resulting of the maximum extrapolation of an invasive theme.

My thoughts are a battlefield with Conformism (C) against Anticonformism (A).
I do hate the C part, but it’s keeping me sane. This is how I proceed, talking to myself :

• A : What is the Minimal in a Game?
  C : Interactivity. Without interactivity, it’s just a show.
  A : But is a show a real game with unconscious inputs and inexplicit outputs?
  C : Don’t mix show and game or people won’t understand.
• A : What is the Minimal in Interactivity?
  C : An input, an output.
  A : It seems to be true with 2 people (considering Player and Game).
• A : What is the Minimal Input or Output?
  C : A click and displaying a pixel I think.
  A : Where are your arguments?
  C : In common games you just have to click and pixels are small and light.
  C : Remember, people need to understand.
  A : MAN, stop attacking your liberty of thinking by using understandability as a filter.
  C : Do a game for your yourself if you want BUT UNDERSTAND that shareability is primordial in LD.
  A : Go **** ******** C!

– Cerebral Meltdown –
I’m not going to show you everything, because it took hours.
And my head hurts.

• A : So… what’s the minimal game engine?
  C : Notepad.
  A : LOL, are you trying to mimic me? You’re bad at this, you know.C : It was a serious answer.
  A : It was unoriginal originality, around 10 people will have the same idea.
  C : So what’s your idea?
  A : No game engine.
  C : WHAT???!! We are NOT going to make a game??
  C : GOOD JOB, YOU’RE RIGHT : 0 octets, that’s Minimal!
  C : Who won? Everyone who did NOT submit a game.
  C : You’re going to be hated for that.

– Conformism ragequit — Long wait — Conformism comeback –

• A : Bro, try to understand me,
  A : I was saying : no “standard” game engine.
  A : Let’s use Ludum Dare website as a game engine.
  A : One possibility : Title = Question ; Download links = Answers.
  A : Let’s minimize everything
  C : Wow, you’re a genius, no kiddin, but can we?
  A : It’s not forbidden, I think. Let’s submit in “Jam”. In case of.

• C : So, what’s the minimal question for you?A : “How are you?”
  C : Answer links : “Fine, thank you” and “Not so well”?
  A : I don’t like this, the question must be more challenging.
  A : What about “X = 3 – 1“, btw : weird name, easy to see.
  C : That’s not challenging at all.
  A : Well, it looks challenging so people UNDERSTAND where the game is.
  A : Remember, there’s no downloadable game, no Flash, no HTML5!
  C : Why not “48÷2(9+3) = ?“, we will get more points in fun.
  A : Too hard, and minimalism has a difficulty interpretation.
  A : Note : We must do minimalism in the most diverse field of interpretations!
• C : Where the “download” links are going to redirect?
  A : Maybe to wikipedia, to the true or false page.
  C : I like the “true” or “false” idea, it’s very “game-like”.
  C : However, some people will not understand that wikipedia is a part of the game.
  C : They will say “the link is broken” or something else.
  C : I will write “you need a web browser” so people don’t search a “physical” game.
  C : And it’s funny at the same time.
• A : Good idea, hhmm, for the links I will write true or false in images.
  A : I will then upload the images and use their direct links.
  A : It’s important to lure people into thinking we spent minimal time and skill.
  C : I think you’re right.
  A : Haha.
  C : Be careful, some people will look at the URL, so upload the false image several times.

And that’s roughly how I got this :

	Theme(Jam)	4.65
	Humor(Jam)	4.40

 

 

Our first Ludum Dare, and I think we did pretty well!

 

	Coolness	73%
#14	Fun(Jam)	3.97
#37	Overall(Jam)	3.86
#86	Audio(Jam)	3.57
#96	Humor(Jam)	3.00
#105	Innovation(Jam)	3.49
#152	Theme(Jam)	3.63
#163	Mood(Jam)	3.31
#193	Graphics(Jam)	3.54

 

Go and give it a play!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18307

 

Because I like it. And I’m willing to make it.

Either that or it’s got something to do with the fact that I only rated about 7 games.

But lulzfish_4 rated many more games than I did yet performed bloody awfully. Maybe people are vicious when they see someone’s made a few mistakes. Or maybe they just can’t cope with 8 enemies firing targetted shots at them. I don’t know. (It’s pretty easy to dodge once you know your hit region.)

And he got 1.33 for audio? His game doesn’t even HAVE audio! DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO PRESS THE N/A BUTTON (obviously I had better people voting for mine because they knew how to press the N/A button for humour even though there was a bit in the game itself)

His game wasn’t even terrible. It was just a bit incomplete, and a bit rough around the edges. I’ve seen worse games that deserve worse scores, most notably a particular game which involved going around a huge-ass cavern picking up 50 identical things. It was not fun at all. I am neither naming this game nor this author, as everyone does duds every now and then and he doesn’t need to be remembered for such a dud.

Hell, his worst placing was in the theme department. I feel this is complete horseshit. If anything, this needed MORE things.

Come to think of it, if his game were some Unity hackjob, he’d get a much higher score because shitny*. I really don’t like that.

(* typo’d that, corrected that, decided to leave it in. It’s a new word, guys!)

If it’s any compensation, I at least did well in the audio department, and somehow did alright in the fun department.

MiniLD #42 is coming up. Provided my coursework doesn’t suddenly start kicking me in the crotch, I might take this time to learn how to use LÖVE, and then make a bullet hell shooter with it.

Alternatively, if emscripten decides to work, I might be able to make an asm.js port of my LD26 entry, and then I can gut the engine out and use that as base code. Hell, I might even stick in a few #define macros just to save my sanity (getting the texcoords right was somewhat tedious, lots of copy paste, thank you vim for being awesome).

And then I will make a bullet hell shooter.

Because I like bullet hell shooters.

And, to be quite honest, there are other people who do.—Maybe I’ll have enough time to stick in a few difficulty levels. I for one am not particularly good at my own game, but I can get a no-death run every now and then.At least I still find my game challenging.

But the music was literally just a 30 second loop that took me < 10 minutes to make. I’m ok with this.