The RNG is my friend, and he is rewarding my rating efforts! The games I rated and commented today were so good that I had some real difficulty choosing which 5 games to highlight. I ended up choosing the games with the highest degree of polish in the list. One of the picks only had 5 rates so far!

Without further ado, here are the reviews I want to share with you tonight.

Alone in a Cave — A turn-based puzzle game, you have to take your character through maze rooms while avoiding robots and picking up items. The graphics and sounds were well though out and fit well together, and the game is generally well finished, with animations, transitions, good controls (minus keyboard controls), etc. The challenge is another high point.

Blue Moon — A fantastic puzzle platformer. The main mechanic of the game is quite innovative: you can spend your life force to activate mechanisms, or drain the energy of mechanisms to replenish your life. Animations and story are also quite well developed. The game is initially quite challenging, but suddenly gets trivial. Even then, it is a well polished game definitely worth playing.

Split Party — This game is the king of polish so far. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a game like this come out of a DS cartridge. Sounds, controls, graphics, everything fits well together in one tight package. Everything is actually dead simple, but I say this is a testament to controlling the scope of your game. The only downside is that to win this game you must be a heartless bastard who makes cute boxes cry.

Solus — A beautiful side-scrolling shooter. The mood of this game is palpable, and everything was built around it. Even the kittens hidden in the game don’t break its aesthetics. It is not so difficult since you don’t return to the beginning when dying, but it has a very engaging boss battle.

She Loves You — A 3D Action/Puzzle game. A very creepy game. This game is not as finished as the previous ones, since it still lacks things such as intro and ending screens, but it is worth the pick for its uniqueness alone. The model for the girl in the game and the maze design are very good.

That is it for tonight! Check out my journal if you want to see the picks from my previous days, and feel free to plug your game in the comments! I’ll make sure to give it a fair shake and offer some suggestions for improvement. A shout out to THE HUG MONSTER who is also making a series of reviews in his journal. (-o^_^)/\(^_^o-)

See you tomorrow!

I’m in ur base, rating ur gamez!

This is the third in a series of posts that I have begun Monday. Every night, I try to rate as many games as I can, leaving each game a constructive message. I pick 5 of the games I played that night, and highlight them on a post. This has been loads of fun, and I have already found quite a few surprises. Although I’m not sure I can go through all 1000 games before the end of the voting period is done. So feel free to ask me to rate your game in the comments!

My picks for today are:

AB-Alone — Thanks Sonnybone for suggesting this game to me. This is an adventure/puzzle game with a very good difficulty balance. You will die a few times trying to figure out what to do, but you won’t feel hopelessly lost. There is some nice humor in the game, and the puzzle is nice too. The graphics are a bit weird, but all in all, a game worth playing.

Robotic Friend — A nice platformer — it has some rough spots in the beginning, like a badly placed intro screen, and no command sheet, but the map is extense without feeling too big, and the author made some nice decisions regarding the effect of water in the player.

Alone – WITS — The game is still quite rough, but it deserves praise for the unique gameplay and controls. The goal is to keep the “enemy” alone by moving the dots that you control away from it. With a bit of graphical and sound tweaking, it could be a game worthy of Orisinal.

Alone in the Rain — The most hilarious game I have played in LD so far. Better played when drunk. I won’t spoil the surprise for you. Just click play. Don’t read comments. Don’t watch screenshots. Just play this already!

Lloyd’s Tale — A platformer with challenging, but not frustrating, levels. The controls are very responsive, there is a variety of obstacles, and the authors even hid an Easter egg in the game (not kittens, unfortunately). Quite fun, worth a play.

If you want to check my previous picks:
Rate ALL the things! Part 2
Rate ALL the things!

See you tomorrow!

…also filter by platform

So, i quickly lost track of what i’ve played and it seemed a bit hard to find games that run in my platform (Mac OS X). To fix that i decided to code a solution: Ludrator!

This is just a simple html page that puts a sidebar with all the LD48/Jam games with a nice checkbox near them. Also adds WIN, MAC, LIN and WEB “tags” for each one (based on a small heuristic that seems to work) with checkboxes at the top to filter-by-os.

The checkbox for each game is supposed to be used to mark the games you’ve played/rated. Its state is saved using HTML5 localStorage so you can close the browser/computer and later come back to it and it’ll still be there.

How Ludrator looks like.

You can find Ludrator here: http://runtimelegend.com/pages/badsector/gimme/ludrator/.

There is both a zip version and an online version. Unless you have reasons, prefer the former since the latter will be slow and the former contains the Python script used to make the sidebar (so you can hack it for a new LD or whatever).

Another night well spent playing some great LD48 games!

I found some real gems tonight, and I want to share them with you. Also, if you make a rate/review post, make sure to tag it accordingly (with rate/review or something) so that other people can find it. I would love to know what games people are enjoying out there.

Anyway, the highlights for tonight go to:

The Love Letter — Out of every 10 games in LD22, 4.5 used a lone hero and called it a day (nothing wrong with that). Another 4.5 decided that “alone” means “I hate the world” and made an brooding, boring game. And then we have this game. You received a love letter, and you want to read it. But your classmates won’t let you alone, so you need to get away from them just enough to read the letter. Such a fantastic, and yet simple idea! The execution is also very good, even if the game is not finished (you can’t win yet).

Colorless Hope — A well polished platformer. Cute graphics, lots of hidden goodies, and smooth gameplay. You can feel the love that was poured in making this game

The Darkness You Wander Alone — Another platformer. This time the author aimed for a retro feel, and I think he was quite successful. Also, the game was devilishly hard, but in a way that made me want to take on the challenge, not put the game down. Worth it for the nostalgia value.

VOXTERIUM — Amazing. Fun. Addictive. Creative. A shoot-em up, where there is only one enemy, a growing virus, and you move around it. This is a take on the shooter concept that I haven’t seen yet, and I think this has a lot of potential. Also, kitten power-up.

Screaming — This game is not quite there yet, but it has a couple of features that I found interesting. A zombie apocalypse platformer, but you can type, and words appear above your head. If you “talk” near a zombie, it will try to mimic you. Also, sometimes you can talk to the mysterious entity that is following you. I think there is some untapped potential here.

I hope you liked my picks for today! Stay tuned for another selection tomorrow!

What is better almost as good as making a game all by yourself, from scratch, in 48 hours? Why, receiving feedback on your creation!

So I took the time to rate a bunch of games. I tried my best to offer meaningful comments and suggestions to all the games that the “rate” button put in front of me

Here are some of the best games that I played tonight:

Courage Quest – A very well polished game, a platformer with multiple mechanically varied quests. Nice animations, graphics and sounds.

The End – A neat game with solid controls and a very spooky and well executed mood.

Alone in all Elona – While this game is not very polished at all, it deserves a mention because of its unique and very fun mechanical premise. I liked playing with it, and would play more if the author takes the time to cut the rough edges from the game.

SleepWalker – This game’s text is simply hilarious.

Void – A very, very beautiful game. Just note that the signs don’t kill you, they indicate the end of the stage

See you tomorrow with more game highlights!

Rating entries is a damn hard job. I know many of you think very little about rating or even openly hate it, but IMHO this seems to also be an important part of LD. Especially commenting on people’s entries, giving some feedback to the community, some constructive criticism. And yet, I can still see many users with 0% coolness. There are 427 (71.29%) people with coolness under average of 3.523% and 190 of them didn’t rate any games… Why is that? I know everybody has a life and so on, but come on! You CAN rate at least 6 games or so! I mean, I’m not expecting everyone to leave their lives and rate games, but honestly – if someone has found the time to participate in LD, he or she should also participate in the voting (or at least commenting) process, even if just a little.

I spent on this more than a few days already, just trying to rate as many games as I can, because for a few days I’m not going to rate anything, as I’m gonna be without internet access (sounds horrible, I know).

A few days ago I was pretty bored and wrote a small program in Python to analyze stuff and help me pick games to rate faster, as I find the webpage with entries a little lacking. And because I like numbers and plots, too. Since I noticed that many of LD participants still have coolness around zero, I figured I could share this thing – maybe it will mobilize some of them to give some feedback. Or will be useful in any other way.

So, feature-wise, the script parses LD webpage with your ratings and generates a html file looking like this:

Here are the links:

• Windows binary package (py2exe) + source (tested on Win7 64bit) (py2exe site says it probably needs this)
• Python source only (clean Python 2.7.2, only native Python library dependencies)

Usage:

• Login onto the Ludum Dare site, and go to the voting page with ALL entries (not the one with screenshots, the one with all your ratings):
  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?more=1&q=
• Save source code of this webpage to file data.htm and save it in the same direcory as analyze script/ binary
• Run the script (see README.TXT for more info anyway)
• Analyzer data is saved to log.html in current directory. Open it with Firefox or something similar
• To refresh data stored in log.html, you need to repeat this process

When I started with my first LD, I was at first confused by the somewhat complex voting-system. So I thought I could explain it for anybody who’s interested.

This is what the voting-screen looks like. Here are the details:

1. The list of Developers. The entire list is randomized, to ensure equal visibility. At the beginning only 20 names are visible, but once a certain number of those has been voted on, the list extends, showing the next random batch.

2. Pressing this button will load the entire list. It will still be randomized, though.

3. The amount of votes this developer has gotten.

4. Coolness-rating. Hovering over this spot reveals the coolness-rating of this developer. Coolness is awarded for the percentage of rated games. Should this person rate ALL games, she would get a coolness-rating of 100%. The developer will get a medal displayed on the left, next to the name. Bronze at 25%, Silver at 50%, and gold at 75%.

5. Competition-rating. Games can be rated in the categories Overall, Innovation, Fun, Adherence to Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor and Community. The Community-rating describes the actions of the developer towards the community, for example by providing blog-posts, timelapse-videos, and other additional pieces of information. Ratings can be 1 to 5 stars, or “n/a”, should you feel you cannot give a proper rating in a certain category.

6. Jam-Rating. The same system as in the competition, only with games that have been entered in the Jam.

7. Text-Comment. An X appears should you have given a comment

I hope this helps

-Matthew