Me and my team have finished rating 200 games, and I’d like to take a moment to pick some of my favorites that I’d hope you’ll try out.

I’m going to present two different lists: one of games that I see as particularly well designed, and another for games that are awesomely weird.

5 Best games for normies:

Kumiho

A beautiful vertical-scrolling shooter with a wonderfully animated squid boss and a very well balance of difficulty.

Phobius

A puzzle platformer that has one of the more rare takes on the concept of “Tiny World” by having the game mechanics revolve around your blue nerd dude’s claustrophobia.

Tiny Garden Of Hope

MakHappy

Save Your Folks

5 best awesomely strange games:

Baby Farm

Plant those babies in the ground, build your own, baby farm.

Big Bad Dom Finds a Little Happiness

I really have to wonder what the combat system would have looked like. (The author has declared it to be Not For Human Consumption. I suggest you violate his wishes in a bizarre reversal of power roles.)

Eye Quest

Dino-Cab

Nobody

Classical myth meets pixel wang!

We now have a web version up!  Its been tested on Windows and Mac, and should work on Linux.

I wanted to show off some of the art that didn’t get used:

Originally there was going to be this delightful game over screen, but I decided at the last minute that I wanted something that took shorter between death + restarting

There was a couple of stuff that I wanted to do, and would’ve been  easy, but the last couple of hours were too frantic to put them in:

Yep, there was an ant walking animation all ready to go.  I didn’t think it was that important because the ants legs are a little hard to see against the background, but it is regrettable.

Originally the wasps were going to shoot stingers.

There was going to be a confusion expression when you escaped the ant’s alert status.

There were a couple of alternate ground tiles that were never implemented. Originally Chris really wanted dinosaur bones. “But everything else is tiny”. “This is the land of the tiniest dinosaurs?”

I felt like one part of keeping an artist happy is to make sure their contributions actually make it into the finished project whenever possible, and in this I feel some degree of failure. Did other Jam entrants feel the same way?

I uploaded Source Code + files to my entry. Feast your eyes on my sloppy code! One blob to rule them all!

With 3 minutes to spare.

Next up: Nap-time, Transformers g1, post-mortem?

I’m extremely happy with our artist, Renee Davis’s work. Once my sad little programmer art tiles have been replaced It’ll be even better.

This is my second game for Ludum Dare. I’m entering the Jam with a couple of my friends.

Engine: Lew-jiggle with Slick2D

Art: Gimp

Sound: Some combination of bxfr / audacity / audition

Edit: I made a small template for a state based game here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/74572404/Ludum%20Dare%2023/Java%20Workspace.zip