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LD#23 results and conclusion
Posted by Orni
May 13th, 2012 11:04 pm
Asylum
- Coolness: nothing new here – I’m 100% cool and have earned myself a gold medal, hell yeah!
- Mood: that’s the category I was aiming for, and being 6th out of 1402 is quite amazing, it’s a bit sad I didn’t make it in the top5 though. sound would have surely put me at least third ‘sadface’
- Theme: 51th doesn’t sound so amazing – but – every game in the competition tried to score in this category so it’s really amazing being 51th: better than 96.36% of the entries!
- Graphics: I’m also very impressed by this – there were so many good looking games that I didn’t think of scoring something better than 300
- Overall: same here
- Innovation: this on the other hand is a bit frustrating since I don’t think there were so many innovative compo games this time – I feel like half of them took place on a small globe of some sort
- Fun: well – my game isn’t too much of a game
- Humor: wait … I scored better in humor than ~60% of the games? with a horror game? did I miss something?
- Audio: however, this is the real mystery. my game has no sound at all – how could anybody rate anything besides n/a?
Conclusion:
- I’ll participate again
- the rating system is seriously flawed – it’s impossible for my game to have scored place 762 in audio – with no audio at all!
- a lot of compo entries broke rules – most of them didn’t include the source code and some even used assets made by others. something has to be done about this – maybe a ‘report’ button and some helpers that read those reports and move a cheating entry into the jam category
- I have to focus again on one or two categories next time
- 12h is way not enough time to make a proper game – I’m going to use the full 48h next time
- flashpunk rocks!
- so does Ludum Dare!
Tags: results
Sometimes silence makes a powerful statement, or adds to an experience. Usually I score “N/A” for games with no audio, but in your case I believe I actually gave it a 3 as it accentuates the mood, and it would have been easy to kill the mood with cheesy sounds.
There’s another silent game where I gave the audio 4 stars as well. It created a tension of sorts, and of course the game was set in a space ship whose hull was breached. In space, no-one can hear you scream.
if silence adds to it, that buffs it’s overall quality, not the quality of it’s audio, if it adds to the mood you rate mood higher.
I think that voting N/A for sounds only works when the game is SUPPOSED not to have sound as part of its “character”. On games where sound is expected, but not implemented, no sound should actually lead to a low score: for example, think of a run-of-the-mill sidescrolling shooter.
I have not played your game in particular, so I can’t say which case it is, but I think it is important to stablish the difference between “not including sound as part of the design” (N/A) and “not including sound because I ran into problems during development” (1 star).
Cheers, and congrats on the nice scores!
That’s exactly how I think about it. I give a game N/A in audio if I really feel not having it worked for that game. (Same with humor). Otherwise, audio isn’t “N/A” it’s “conspicuously absent.”
Plus, I don’t want a game with no sound and a bunch of N/A’s to rank tops in audio because some nutter like dr_soda rated it high
.
I too feel a bit cheated by innovation, even though I came 58th. I found the overall lack of innovation appalling.
I only rated audio N/A if I played the game with my pc muted. If a game had no audio, it got 1 star. If the game used “no audio” to good effect, it might have got a higher rating, but most were “no audio because I didn’t do audio”, so… 1 star.