Hello… I didn’t write my post mortem yet, and it will be brief.

Here is my game – In the end it didn’t get too attached to the theme (minimalism), specially the post compo version.

I plan to add more things (stages… I need stages, and some enemies), but I don’t think I’ll be able to release anything like that before the end of voting. If you didn’t check it, please do.

The compo version is really buggy and you can’t actually beat the stage… Play it, vote and then go for the post compo

This video is not the last post compo version… Now there are lives scoring and a new “dying” animation (very simple). I might upload a video when I get home.

The ludum dare experience:

I decided to sign in less than an hour before it started… I was flirting with the idea for about a week. I was doing a top down shooter before that just to test SDL 2.0, and it served me as my “code base”.  A shooter as a code base for a platformer .

I just can say that I actually started to code a game many times… and I never finished them. Perfectionism, changing of mind, thinking too big and stuff. It was very nice to start and finish something (it’s not finished yet, but I have a plan to finish it).

I don’t think I went well in terms of compo, because the compo version was very raw. But I like the post compo!

What went wrong:

I’ve spent some time with stage reading and loading. Did a optimization code that wasn’t used in the end, and I submited the compo version with just one stage that couldn’t be beat (in the end you jump and your jump is higher than the spikes). Then I got obsessed with jumping mechanics and improved it preety well – but that was post compo!

I did everything in my mac, and when compo ended I didn’t have a windows version. I thought it was just about compiling it  (SDL is multi platform), but I had a bad time trying to make SDL 2.0 work. I had no PC at home because my power supply was burnt and This was the story for a week and some days. I tried to get a working version in my wife’s father PC. That PC is old… slow… has any sort of spyware and crapware you expect a non-Geek guy’s PC to have. In the end I couldn get it…

Post Compo talking – Many releases came out with (bad) msv*dll or without them. I think the last one will run everywhere, but who knows…

What went right:

The first thing that went right was: focus, getting it done, finishing a game. It was a raw experience. Editing cpp source files in Text Mate and compiling it with a makefile. After some time I got mad with textmate and went to Mac Vim. Sprites were edited in pixen and all sounds were made at bfxr.net.

In terms of Post Compo a good decision was to ditch SDL 2 and porting everything to SFML 2.0. SFML 2.0 is very nice to play with! I can call it “beautiful”.

Final words..

So that’s it. It was really a pleasure to code my game and to play lots of games… A guy there made an Atari ROM! I never expected something like that (I guess it’s called Tilt). There are lots of good quality games here. Many people could really follow the theme. I’ve played more than 40 games and really enjoyed many of them! I actually finished two or three of them!

Thanks and see you later!

Check my game here ;)

Thank you to those few who played my game, I don’t expect to do very well since i wasnt very active. But thank you anyway, doing the competition was very fun To anyone who hasnt checked out Flame Quest yet feel free to do so, I look forward to reading my ratings [If i get any XD]

This is my first Ludum Dare that I’ve ever entered, and it’s been an amazing experience. I came out of it with a finished game, and some really supportive comments that have inspired me to make even more!

The voting period is nearly at a close, so I’d just like to invite everyone to a last chance at rating my game “ASTEROIDS! (the side-scroller)“! I would really appreciate it if you have a few minutes to kill.

Other than that, see you all next LD48!

After 2 weeks of polishing, crying and level designing, the re-mastered version of … is now available on Newgrounds!!

You can play it & rate it here!

Sorry for the minimalist post

Only 9 hours to the end of LD #26!
This will be my last post for LD #26, so i want to thank all the people who have rated and played my entry: Earth Defender!
But the time has not expired, so come on people let’s rate my game, let’s get at least 130 ratings ^.^ !!

With just eleven hours left before judging ends, I guess it’s time to write an eleventh-hour postmortem post, post haste!

Hadron the Uniter

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22869

Results

This was my first Ludum Dare. It’s been a lot of fun! My game is playable, though it needs a lot of tuning yet. I’m very happy with how it looks. I expect to keep improving it post-comp.

What Went Right

1. Inspiration.

I woke up Friday morning with a game concept already beginning to form in my mind. As I warmed up my tools (Flash CS4, Bfxr) the idea got clearer and more compelling. When the theme was announced (Friday night here), it fit perfectly. That was lucky, because by then I really liked it; I’d have had a hard time throwing it away and starting over. (I threw away all my prototype code and started a fresh project, though.)

2. Concept.

I’d been reading about particle physics again — trying to grok our crazy universe a little better — and I was captivated by the elaborate, almost Art Nouveau spirals revealed when particles collide in a bubble chamber. These spirals are happening ALL THE TIME all over the universe, we just don’t usually get to see them. I thought a game that simulated these pictures would be fun to stare at.

At first I wasn’t sure what the gameplay would be: trying to create antiparticles? trying to avoid antimatter annihilations, or cause them?

Finally I settled on a simple, pseudo-educational approach: you discover elements by combining protons, neutrons, and electrons in the right combinations. You just hold them together for a while in some kind of magical field constriction, and poof, you make Hydrogen or whatever.

3. Minimalism.

As a competition theme, gee, that’s not too interesting, guys. Really. But it worked well for my game. I had been thinking about how hypnotic a simple old-school game like Missile Command could be. With simple controls and a simple task, you can really lose yourself in the gameplay. I wanted to explore that Zen style of fun.

The minimalism theme suggested taking that to extremes: I would make a no-button game! You would swish the mouse around, without clicking, as the game’s only control. (In fact you do need to click sometimes, but only to show and hide the scoreboard. That’s really a pause button, not part of the gameplay.)

I even thought about making the hero/cursor area invisible, except for the way it bends the paths of particles around it. But it was too hard to control an invisible avatar, so I settled for a very subtle one: a faint targeting hexagon and a fainter rain of neutrinos.

Furthermore, the gameplay is so minimal, it’s optional! There’s no way to lose. If you stop moving the mouse, your chance of discovering anything goes down, but the game just keeps playing itself. (Indeed, it will usually discover hydrogen eventually, without help; maybe even helium!)

There’s also no way to win, exactly. You just make as many discoveries as you can. Which is realistic: the periodic table doesn’t stop, it just trails off into tremendous impracticality.

(At present the game is very tough. Hydrogen is easy to discover. Helium is neither easy nor hard. Lithium is hard, and if you manage to make Beryllium, send me a screenshot of your scoreboard!)

Though players might (and do!) desire on-screen hints about the recipes for various elements, the minimalist philosophy led me to leave out that nicety. After all, the game is about making those discoveries yourself, so really you should just buckle down and experiment. (Or you can just look it up, since I used real atomic weights and numbers.)

4. Not Stressing.

I didn’t want to spend my whole weekend worrying about running out of time. That’s not fun. I made a deliberate choice to take it easy, and treat my first Ludum Dare as simply a vacation. I knew I could fall back to the Jam if necessary, and my game idea seemed pretty small, code-wise. I would follow inspiration and let the code write itself at its own pace, and focus on enjoying the process. And I certainly did: the code was fun to write, there weren’t a lot of bugs, and the game is kind of a neat little thing that didn’t exist before.

It was also fun hanging out on the IRC channel. I don’t think I’ve done that in about a decade, maybe two.

What Went Wrong

1. Not Stressing.

Despite the very real benefits of a relaxed approach…a bit more hustle might have helped. I spent a pretty silly amount of time polishing the game’s appearance before working on the gameplay, and I did run low on time at the end. Next time I might try recording a development time-lapse sequence, or blogging more often, so that I won’t feel as comfortable without steady progress.

2. Doldrums.

Sunday was, from a productivity perspective, a disaster. For some reason I just couldn’t get moving. I knew exactly what code I had to write, and I even knew I would enjoy writing it, but I found that I was mostly staring at the screen doing nothing, and the clock was jumping ahead an hour or two every time I looked at it.

I blame the weather. It was one of those rainy Sundays that seem to dampen everything, including enthusiasm. Bad luck…I’d been hoping to work outdoors, or at least take a walk now and then.

Still, I forced myself to make bits of progress now and then; the day wasn’t a total loss. Just disappointing.

3. Tuning, gameplay, lack of, total

I spent so long making the game look just right, and then sitting around uselessly for no good reason, that I ran out of time to tune the gameplay. So the controls feel about right, but it’s way too hard to make progress. Oh well, I’ll fix it up in a future version.

4. Preloader

Of course, when I went all weekend with almost no bugs in my code, I should have known something would go wrong at the last minute.

Although several early versions had worked fine when posted online, the final game froze halfway through loading the title screen. Sometimes. I think the increased file size from the title screen itself may have contributed. (Correct preloaders for Flash games are more arcane than you might guess, if you haven’t looked into the subject. Maybe even if you have.)

I’d already switched from Compo to Jam mode, so I should have just dropped in a working preloader from another project. In the end, that’s what I did, but first I spent most of Tuesday trying to debug the problem. Sigh.

5. Website

I thought posting my game on my website would be the easy part. I’ve done that sort of thing before without any problems.

Yeah, on my old site. I wanted to put this game on my new site, which runs on WordPress.org software instead of raw HTML. That introduced some complications, both technically and philosophically. (For example, I had to decide what the URL should be for an untitled work in progress. I already have a locked private-beta page, but that’s not the same thing at all.)

Anyway, it wasn’t anything major, but when I tried posting my game and blogging about it a little, I uncovered a bunch of website-maintenance issues that I suddenly had to resolve…which is why this postmortem is coming so late.

Conclusion

All in all, this was a blast. Ludum Dare was a great excuse for a weekend coding project, a pleasure I hadn’t quite realized I’d been missing lately. I’m looking forward to doing it again sometime soon. (Probably not in August, though.)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22869

Time for a little post-mortemy thing. I suspect nobody reads them, but in a few years, I’ll go through my old posts and find it and have a good laugh. Let’s use a chronological format for a change!

Hole in one!

Before the jam

As usual I didn’t practice for it, I didn’t do any gamedev or graphics or anything related since the previous LD :/ So I was rusty. At the end of last year, I had some time in between jobs to learn new ZBrush skills but I didn’t know how much I had lost since then. Three ludum dare per year is just not enough practice.

The theme is revealed!

Of all the themes in the preliminary rounds, there was only one I really hated, yup: minimalism.

I hate it because all LD games are already minimalistic by necessity. The whole point of participating in a Ludum Dare is to see how much you can do in a limited time. Choosing minimalism as the theme, is basically giving up before you even start. In my opinion, there are already too many minimalistic games in a regular LD. Games where the author instead of trying to work on all aspects of a game decides that colored squares placeholders are good enough. This isn’t about how good your skills are, it’s about at least giving it a try and learning in the process. Don’t aim for minimalism, aim big! It’s better to fail gloriously than to not even try!

Day 1: Anti-minimalism 3rd person shooter

After recovering from discovering that terrible theme, my first idea was to make an anti-minimalism game, I thought about a few ideas like destroying minimalist paintings and finally I chose to do a 3rd person shooter where you fight alien invaders trying to impose their minimalistic philosophy on Earth. I’ve never made a LD game where you can shoot stuff, my games tend to be peaceful, so this might have been the occasion to change that?

I spent half the first day working on the shooter mechanics and enemies and for the second half I worked on my main character.

Day 2: New game idea

After waking up, I realized that I was not very far along with my shooter game. The shooting part wasn’t really fun and I realized I would need a ton of custom animations for it to work with my character. And while I had some ideas to create a funny world, they didn’t really all fit together with the gameplay and I had no clear vision of what the game would actually be like.

At this point, I had implemented a way to push the aliens bodies once they are killed. And I realized it’s actually quite fun to just play with that and try to move them around. How about a game where you just have to push a ball around with physics?

So I already had my main character, the gameplay only required a trivial amount of work, the rest of the day was spent working on a few levels. At the end of the 48h I had something I could have released in the compo category if I rushed the final hours but I wanted to use the extra day to make the game a little bit better.

Day 3: Polish!

For the first time in a LD, I started the final day knowing I already had something that I could finish and release any time I wanted. Things I did that day:

Prettified the levels with some props and alternative textures and I added two more levels with a bit more elaborate mechanics (unfortunately the one with the bridge has a bit of a nasty bug, I didn’t notice it in my testing due to being biased as to how I expected the level to be solved. It wasn’t even a code bug, I just forgot a two-clicks setting in Unity How annoying!).

I tried to improve my character’s animation (without much success, animation is something I’ve never really spent time learning, I just fake it during game jams. I’ll work on that for the next LD).

I spent a bit more time than usual on the sounds, and even though the music is a randomly generated .mid file, I did spend some time in Reason choosing instruments and mixing it for a little extra.

In the end, I even had time to turn the code I had written for the minimalistic aliens into butterflies. A poetic way to end the conversion of what started as a shooting game in to a totally non-violent one

After the jam

I’m really glad I got lots of feedback this time. Over a hundred people played and rated my game, that was most likely due to getting an extra bit of spotlight thanks to my video compilation project but it’s nice to have my audience expand like that. That’s one good thing about making a game for a LD, you are pretty much guaranteed actual players!

Also thanks to the wonders of Twitch technology, I was able to see two people play my game in real time. I don’t usually see anybody play my games at all and that was really interesting as both did unexpected things.

For next time

• Animation has to be my priority. I have improved my character creation skills so now the animation has to follow or it looks a bit weird.
• Try to work on at least another game to avoid getting too rusty in between LDs

PLAY MY GAME HERE

My last minute picks!

We Dreamers
Dig your quote in a persistent world/wall. Instant classic.

Of Guards And Thieves
 Multiplayer team-game with gorgeous graphics. ‘Nuff said.

Potato Station
 Pixel art, good music, and potato!

Voice of Fire
 Dreamy runner game
 
 

 
 
Lunar Rain
 Little great point and click adventure, with great themes and multiple choices

Less is More?
 My game Physics/sandbox puzzle in which Mondrian floods away.

This is the third time I have joined Ludum Dare, and since people like post mortems I decided to write one

What went wrong:

- Framework choosing. After submitting my game I realised after a couple of people tried it that the game did not work on Windows 8. This was due to that OpenTK’s input did not work on Windows 8.

OpenTK is also not updated after windows 8 came out. Luckely Antonijn’s awesome framework did work on Windows 8. I have completely rewritten the game in 45 minutes to work again

- Planning. Once again I just sat down and started coding. I must force myself from now on to write some things on paper first so I can scetch out solutions to problems early and don’t have to waste time working on

something that won’t work, or scrapping a feature completely. I had more in mind for this project but I wouldn’t have made the deadline if I tried to add those features.

What went right:

- MultiPlatform. My game runs on windows xp with net framework 4.0, opengl 1.1 and up. also the game does work on linux if you have mono. This is a first for me and I can totally see the benefits over having more platforms to choose from

- Timelapse and gameplay video, The previous timelapse and gameplay video I made for Ludum Dare, which was for the LD24 challenge, was kind of screwed up due to encoding and youtube and wireless and what not.

Now both videos are crisp. The timelapse is a bit long with its 20 minutes. Hopefully the music makes up for this.

- “Thou shalt have playable quickly!”. The game quickly became playable, with all the advantages that brings.

Not that this post is written to advertise for a couple of ratings just before the rating process is over, but if you are somehow intrigued what kind of game I am talking about, here is a link to the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15675

Enjoy!

-Metal

I’ve been digging deep into the archive to ensure I’ve at least seen all the thumbnails.  I found some nice games which seem to remain mostly undiscovered.  One of them only has 6 ratings!

Stackman

Stackman

A puzzle game that feels like a programming game.   The first level is large and difficult.  I saw this game only has 6 ratings, which is a real pity.

A puzzling composition

A combination of puzzle and mouse dexterity game.  The puzzle element is a bit too easy and the mouse element a bit too hard, but some of the levels are great.

Gist Structure

Unusual game. It has one major flaw, which is the slow movement speed of the cells.

sn (yes the game is called ‘sn’) 

A very minimalist but fun puzzle game (as the author describes it: a 42-pixel one-button game).

Color treason

Fun and original game with interesting graphics.

Tilegrid

Complex but promising puzzle game.

Due to many ask of the music of my game, i’ve put it on SoundClound.

https://soundcloud.com/kalinarm/leak-tracks-ost

Entry here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21924

If you like the game, please vote before time’s up !!!

Its about music and stuff. Im going to be making my game have epic music that sounds awesome! http://ecoolsagamedev.wordpress.com/

Yes, those are napkins.

This is where Game of Rows was conceived and designed. Not in bytes but in paper. Some big, some small, some you use to clean yourself after a meal.

I wasn’t planning on entering this Ludum Dare, my first Ludum Dare. I would only have two days to make a game! I had seven to make a game for PyWeek—a Python game-development competition not unlike Ludum Dare—and I didn’t have anything close to a full game when the time run out. There was no way I could make something for Ludum Dare. One day before the LD, however, I thought ‘what the heck. Let’s give it a try’.

The competition started Friday night while I was playing Monaco, a fantastic indie game. I wasn’t very interested on participating so I wasted my very first hour stealing gold and knocking out guards. I spent the rest of the night coming up and discarding ideas for the game, discussing them with my boyfriend and my best friend. One-button game? That’s too hard! I can’t think anything that would use one button only. How about I  make a universe, and you grow smaller and smaller; into a planet, a person, a virus, a proton, and the mechanics change slightly each time? I ain’t got time for fancy! Maybe I can start with a beautiful looking game that gets more pixelated and retro as you progresses. No, what did I say about not being fancy! Maybe I can make a timing game. The player is in the centre of the screen and colour dots come him from all four sides: you have to change your colour to match the dot so they pass over you without harming you. That sounds simple enough!

I later thought of giving some more control to the player by allowing him to freely move and making rows of dots the player can shift to find his way around. Let’s start coding!

Type-checking makes fox-head sad! D:

I made my first prototype. It would display white dots over a black background and you could rotate them around and have different patterns. And then I got an idea. Maybe these dots are walls you can shift around! And lo, Game of Rows was born.

I started working on the mechanics.  Brick walls would soon replace the white dots, a player would follow as well as a goal. Then came obstacles, like deadly spikes, and dirt that would fall on your head. That last one may have been inspired by Minecraft, and I admit that I used Minecraft’s textures as a guide for my game’s final textures. Pixel art is still new to me. I planned on adding a rotation mechanic and some lava but I did not have the time, but after the compo I do!

In Game of Rows you play as this rough, nasty, angry pirate feared around the seven seas. Wait, no. You play as this silly, goofy pirate who hid his treasure in a dangerous cave, collapsing with every step you take, filled with traps. But how are you going to get your treasure later? What were you thinking! Better go get it now before it is lost.

I think I did a fantastic job with my game. Perchance if I had been more organised and I didn’t distract myself so much I would have created a more polished game, added more and better levels, or added a message for whenever the player wins a level and a menu.My only true regret is I didn’t have the opportunity to add some ambient sounds, like water drops, rain or thunder. Since I was entering for the LD48—a strategic decision because Jam entries could be done in groups, probably resulting in better games I alone could do—I had to create the sounds myself. I spent a few hours recording water falling on a pot and shaking radiographies, and then editing those recordings, but I didn’t get anything that sounded nice. That is all right though, I’m happy with the way it turned out and I have received some overwhelmingly positive response! Besides, there is always time to add more things later. I also greatly enjoyed myself playing other people’s games and I hope to participate again in… September, is it? I got to play, rate and comment (!) on over sixty awesome games (I was originally shooting for 100); Ludum Dare has a fantastic, amazing community filled with nice and creative people! ♥

And now, go play my game before the timer runs out!

Click me!

You can visit my blog (currently a work in progress): The Fox Lair

Check my source: Current repo, LD26 repo

Follow me on Twitter: @ZimDaFox

Or write me to zimthefox at gmail.com

Just 19 and a half hours left until voting ends, here are a few games I thought were pretty cool and definitely worthwhile checking out!

Super Clutter Blaster 2013 – Homletmoo

The Parasite – jahlgren

Tiny Runner – Jarcas Studios

Square Heart Flower – JonathonG

My own game is lingering just a few ratings off a hundred, please go give it a rating to bump it closer to that century milestone if you’ve got a moment ^^

Terminally Ill

This was my fourth time doing Ludum Dare, and I’ve written a brief postmortem about how it went.  Hope people enjoy the game.

Things that went right:

Theme:

Although I didn’t like the theme at first, it ended up working really well with my skill set.  I’m pretty bad at making art, and the theme required minimal art assets.  The final game ended up with only two sprites.  I’m considerably more confident with music, but the design I came up with for the theme also required minimal art assets.  One .wav file with a single note produces the whole soundtrack, with the player’s help.  The creativity this allows the player is one of the most important aspects of the game.

Lots of programming/design time:

With little need for art/sound assets, I figured I’d end up with a surplus of time for level design.  This was the main reason I decided to do a game with static levels in the first place; I wouldn’t have had the time for that if I were making more sprites/music.  This didn’t quite end up being the case, as programming took longer than I expected.  Still, this was a positive overall.  It let me fix most bugs and increased overall polish.

Quickly implementing key features:

Though I spent the majority of the competition programming, most of the ‘big stuff’ went pretty quickly.  The launchers, saving/loading levels, and the sound logic went smoothly thanks to past experience with XNA.  As noted below, physics bugs (and a couple editor problems) were the only real time-consuming issues.

Overlaps in gameplay/design:

When making a game on such a short timeframe, it’s important to get as much ‘bang for your buck’ with your time.  That’s one of the things I like about music games like this; the audio, game design, and programming are all tightly linked.  I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time making music tracks, because that was what level design was.  I could iterate on all three at the same time.

The same thing applies to Free Play mode.  I made a simple editor for myself, which was trivial to expose to the player.  This lets the player make his own puzzles/music freely, and it didn’t cost me much time to add.

Things that went wrong:

Physics bugs:

As many commenters have noted, there are some noticeable physics bugs in the game; the worst being balls getting stuck in platforms.  These bugs are extra annoying in my game because they can end up producing notes extremely frequently, producing really harsh sound.  I spent a significant amount of time during the competition trying to fix these bugs and lessen the annoyance when they do occur.  This did help in the end, but it was pretty demoralizing focusing on the issue so much and not fully fixing it.

‘Wasted’ time:

I spent more time not working on the game over the weekend than I planned going into it.  A surprise visit from a friend from out of town took up a few hours.  It was worth it, but there would have been many more levels if that didn’t happen.

Distribution:

Although the problem has been fixed, my initial release had a couple issues.  I didn’t include the XNA Redistributable so the game crashed for some, and others were unhappy that it required an install.  I’ve had similar issues in the past, but at least I did a better job fixing them this time.

Hardware issues:

One of my monitors failed comically early in the competition.  I spent some time trying to fix it, couldn’t, and was left with a sub-optimal setup.   Not a huge deal, but I’m sure it had some effect on my productivity.

Summary:

I’m really happy with the result of this Ludum Dare.  It’s a much stronger game than my previous attempts.  There are a few things I could have done differently that would have led to a better product, but those are just further learning experiences.  I’ve definitely improved my craft and look forward to LD27!

Leave a comment below!

Wow, my game Squares has 50 votes! Thank you to everybody who has played and rated my game. If you haven’t please click the link above an try it out. You won’t be sorry!

We set out to simply finish a small scope project within the time limit and ended up surpassing our own expectations. More than four hours was spent designing the concept and almost nothing went wrong during development. Our final product is remarkably similar to our initial ideas.

After we received emergency feedback from a number of friends, the game play was streamlined both by simplifying the mechanics and through tighter level design. In the final hours we rushed to add multiple levels and UI.

We took advantage of our team members strengths. Pupnik worked on the mechanical side of the game (scoring, tile interactions, backend), while Abregado worked on the graphical side (UI, tileset, sound).

The timelapse of the entire development can be found on our YouTube channel here:

http://youtu.be/AS3RPzdeTCA

Surprises

• The theme was generic
• only spent ~22 hours actually working on the project
• GOPRO batteries dont last long!

Hurdles

• bitbucket was broken
• more dramas with recording than with the actual project

Things we learnt

• proved to ourselves we can make something polished in a short time
• could have increased scope
• having emergency testers is awesome!
• cooking in advance or ordering food to save time
• more time spent on design initially saves more time later
• need better instructions, UI and tutorialization

Personal evaluation

• could have spent more time actually working
• didn’t do much for the theme
• fantastic teamwork
• team had a unified vision
• final product was as originally envisioned

There is so much talent in this LD it’s not even funny, and it’s sad that I won’t be able to play even a fraction of the amazing-looking games out there. Here are my lesser-known favourites after rating 100 games:

The absolute unquestionable champion:

SPACE TEST 48 – lazybraingames

At present, only 14 people have rated this game, and that is a crime. This game is so jaw-droppingly good at everything, from the audio and the humor to the phenomenal gameplay. It’s looks like an alien shooter, but plays like something else altogether, an amazing blend of puzzles, dodging and multitasking. Play this game.
Seriously, play this game.
Did you hear me? Just stop right now and go play this one. You don’t even need to read the rest of the list. It’s amazing. I promise.

Runner up:

*Humorous Title!* – Graf_Grun

Pass through holes in the tunnel without hitting walls…and after you’re done, level different aspects of the game up or down to change the experience! Add colour! Make the geometry more difficult to perceive! Make the shapes simple or jack up the gameplay to make the corridor rotate!

Other awesome games:

SLEEP! we have a long way to go – NicoJaujou

This one actually made me sleepy. It has a wonderful atmosphere.

Add Removal – StuStutheBloo

This is a creative and tricky puzzle game, where you subtract colours from images to find secret codes.

Tokyo Minimaley Land – junt74

A minigame collection of games themed around different Disneyland attractions, with tiny sprites of famous characters to match. This one had really tight theming and creative games, including a breakout where you control the ball instead of paddle.

———————
I hope you give all of those a try. I haven’t seen them highlighted yet and I believe they deserve the attention.
If you’re interested, you can also check out my game, Priorities. De-clutter your life by clicking objects to free them from your mind! I wrote a postmortem here.