The last two days I’ve been trudging through the list of least rated games, rating and giving feedback as often as possible. More often than not, though, I had to go through dozens of “engine tests”. PROTIP: If you can’t dedicate the whole weekend for the LD48 because of family events, girl/boyfriends, finals, broken toenails, kittens; there will always be another one! Please think of the reviewers as well

I did find a few gems, like:

As a self reward, I’ll go rate some of the popular games and those suggested by others here. I guess I can’t stop

Drop a comment below if you want me to take a look at your game. I promise to give you some constructive criticism.

Diggy Dig — This is a very cute game about a naked dwarf miner. You dig away the dirt with your mouse, and try to grab the treasure. Beware not to paint yourself into a corner! I like games with novel mechanics like this one. But you also can’t win this one yet. Also: kitten power!

Alone with Zzzobmies! — This was the first LD22 game that made me actually scared! Great mood, even though problems with collision detection make the game a bit frustrating. Kill those creepy zombies with bricks! Oh, and this game DOES have an ending.

Squido does not like being alone — An addictive arcade, you have to control squido as he tries to make friends… unfortunately, sharks and zoidberg will kill your friends all the time, and you have to make MORE friends. Maybe a bit on the tragic side, but a very fun game — how many squid friends can you keep at the same time?

Alone in the Clouds — A very beautiful puzzle platform. You have to go to the end of the stage by managing your limited “superjumps”. In normal mode you can recharge your superjumps infinitely. In hardcore you can’t, and things get really difficult. Beautiful background and transitions + robot in a balloon. There is an ending, and a side door near the end that I didn’t manage to open.

Rating and commenting on every game is hard work. My hats off to those who have already rated more than 30% of the games! At my current rate, I don’t think I can make the 25% treshold, but I hope the devs enjoy my commentaries to their games. If you liked this review, make sure to check my journal for a few more.

Happy new year everyone!

That said, today was a bit slower than the other days. I have to take a plane to visit my family this weekend, so preparations for that means less games played . Even then, people in the irc and comments pointed me to some really amazing games. The picks for today are:

Arzea — A very well polished action platformer. Graphics and sounds work well together. The game is extremely fun to play — I had a lot of difficulty putting it down to rate other games . Levels have a nice challenge to them, although the spawn rates are a bit high at the moment.

Blind — A maze solver with a unique mechanic: You can’t see the maze! You navigate using sonar, that will warn you of walls (or, in this case, of corridors). This makes for a hellishly difficult game, but worth trying out for the novelty.

Comfort zone — Another maze solver with a unique mechanic, but this one is a bit more complicated to describe. Your interactions with the different objects in the maze will alter your speed and your ability to move through obstacles. The mechanics allow a lot of room for interesting maze design, and the controls are very slick.

I hope that you are enjoying these reviews If you want more, check my journal for my previous posts on this series. And if you want me to take a look at your game, feel free to drop a comment! I try to give suggestions/report bugs on all games that I play.

Fun holidays for all, and check next week for more reviews!

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).

CLICK TO SEE

The main question is how important is “escape” to your game? It’s very easy to start any game with a text box saying “you have to escape this XXX!”, but in how many of these games could you replace that sign with “you have to find the treasure” or the “…evil XXX hiding in his dungeon”?

Many, you say? Indeed. If you could simply exchange one or two dialogs and the game would still play exactly the same, that’s going to give you a lower Theme score. Not necessarily a 1, but low. Notch’s game is an example of this. Overall it’s a fun game and incredibly impressive for being made in 48 hours. But IMHO it’s more a game about killing monsters and gathering trinkets than an escape themed game. I’m not going to give him all 5s just because he’s Notch

On the other hand, if something is so intimately tied to escaping that it would be an entirely different game without it, you get higher scores. If you look at ChevyRay’s Flee Buster the escape (though technically, it could equally well be “chase” but I’ll let it slip this time) is very central to how you play.

And I might have to add, if you write a story driven game and it’s about escaping, it’s of course possible to get a high score – if the story actually is about escaping. But I’m not sure there are too many of that kind here, most games I’ve played yet focuses on gameplay and mechanics. Nothing wrong with that though, there are a lot of good games where the story is unimportant!

Finally, what do I consider perfect (theme) score? I had a look at my ratings and the only game that has a 5-star theme so far is Gjarble’s Beyond the Fourth Wall. In other aspects, it might not rate as high as Notch and ChevyRay, but it’s a solid mini-game 100% dedicated to an escape. Flee Buster could still be a cool platformer, but take away escape from BtFW and you pretty much have nothing left.

So there you have it. Luckily there are many aspects to give points for, and personally I’m basically focusing on humor and theme (guessing I’ll have pretty low scores for overall and fun, because as a game it really sucks). If you’re going for a high theme rating, or perhaps got lower than you initially expected, hopefully this provided something to think about.

Now I have to go back playing all your entries. Having great fun doing so! If you know any game that took good advantage of the escape theme, please post a link in the comments!

UPDATE EDIT:

I also rate [theme] based on how originally it is used. Bonus points for not using the most simple and common “escape from prison-like facility” and “escape from XXX chasing and trying to kill you”

http://www.spampudding.com/ratings.csv

As I was thinking about how to schedule this into the next two weeks I thought up some rough stats based on how past compo playing/rating has gone:

• You should play and rate 8.6 games per day of the two weeks if you want to hit the deadline.
• If you assume an  average handling time per game of 3 minutes you are looking at 6 hours of just getting the games to the point where you are playing them.
• If you assume an average playing time per game of 2 minutes you are looking at 4 hours of total play time to get through all the entries.
• Given the average handling and playing times above you could earmark about 45 minutes of LD time per day for two weeks to finish on time.

Phew.. well, I better get cracking.  I must admit I haven’t had much of a chance to play more than a few so far.  The rating and feedback is so important though.  I know I really appreciate the time people put into playing and leaving thoughts on my game so I try and do the same.

Great compo everyone!  I can’t wait to see what everyone created…