I hope increpare doesn't drop by..

Don't worry, the poll options only go up to 20.

Another potentially interesting poll would be - "In what game genre do you usually make your game?"

I'm guessing platformer would win, but still interested to see the results.

For me, it's:
RPG - 3 (one being RPG/Puzzle)
Building/crafting game - 2
Puzzle - 1
Action - 1 (game doesn't fit in any other categories as far as I can tell)
Tower Defense-ish - 1
Simulation - 1
Text adventure - 1
Music game - 1
Roguelike/MMO - 1
I have no fucking clue what genre this is - 1

Only the Tower Defense-ish game has platforming movement. No actual platformers.

I don't know how it works but I'm not sure that just letting the page open counts as time spent online, someone should clear things up about this, I'm curious

My time online is 5 days and 5 hours. My laptop is on almost 24/7 and I always have at least one TIGSource forum tab open (games I need to check out some day but never get to - most people store those in bookmarks, I just leave 300 tabs open). Unless you have an auto-refresh script running, it should only count the time you're active.

Do things like Ludum Dare games count if you've spent all weekend working on it?

Yeah. The idea was just to cull super-simple games that took only a couple hours to cobble together.

what about games that were finished, but never released? Do they count?

Yep. But that time you spent dicking around in Game Maker when you made a few contrived things that aren't even close to a finished game doesn't.

Hm. In that case, I wonder why there are so many people with 0 games. It takes only a single weekend to get that count to 1. Just join a single Ludum Dare or similar and you're set.

My total seems to come down to 13 (if I'm not forgetting something), though 11 of them are from game jams and 1 is a school project. The single big finished project easily has more time put into it than all of the other ones put together. And it still isn't released. Dammit.

How do you count '24 hours'? How active do you need to be during those 24 hours? Do things like Ludum Dare games count if you've spent all weekend working on it? I know I only got 7 hours of sleep total at the last Global Game Jam, so the total time spent should be a bit above 24 hours.

Also, the thread title says 'put out a game', but the poll just says 'finished'; what about games that were finished, but never released? Do they count?

Not sure if I'd count Terraria as a platformer; it's much closer to a metroidvania game. It's definitely really, really good, though.

For pure platformer, I recommend VVVVVV. It's a platformer where instead of jumping, you can reverse gravity whenever you're standing on a solid surface. It's short but very good.

Who here has ordered one?

I was a day 1 backer (international, two controllers, backer no #12,xxx). No 'your Ouya has been sent' e-mail yet.

Paranoia Agent had really good everything.

It didn't have a really good episode 8, 9 and 10. While 8 (suicide pact) and 10 (anime production) were great as stand-alone stories, they ruined the flow of the series and distracted from the main plot just when the viewer wants to know how it continues. And for 9 (housewives talking bullshit) there was simply no excuse; it was horribly boring and contributed nothing to the story.

Other than that, yeah, Paranoia Agent had really good everything.

I myself don't mind 30-day trials, though I still prefer normal demos. 30-minute demos give me a similar reaction to the one displayed in the GIF, however. ESPECIALLY if the game is any good.

While on the subject of demos, removing the save feature in a demo is also very unfun, and it's very annoying if you can't transfer over your demo save to the full game.

Finally I wanted learn more about how people rate Ludum Dare games. I noticed that the overall score is not an average of the different ratings, but just how arbitrary is the overall score? For starters I found that players almost always assign a higher overall score than average. I'm not sure what this means in practice, but perhaps thinking concretely about a game's graphics or humor leads players to rate a game more harshly than when remembering their feelings of playing the game

I think the reason is different: different elements of the game weigh more heavily for the overall score than other elements, which elements these are differ per game, and these elements are usually the highest rated elements.

For example, an ugly but really fun game will get a high overall score from me despite getting a low score for graphics (while the 'fun' score is equal to the overall score). On the other hand, a beautiful game where you do nothing but walk around can get a low 'fun' score as there was nothing to do, but the graphics made the overall experience worth it.

Finally, there's also the issue of certain elements just not being present as much as other elements. If a side-scrolling shooter only has a single generic shooting sound effect and no other sound effects, it'll get a low score in the 'audio' category, but few people are going to lower their overall rating for that. When taking an average like you do, though, that low sound score suddenly has the same weight as the 'fun' score, which in practice concerns much more of the game than the 'audio' category.

also, 99% is still only 99%, not 100%. consider this: you are 99% identical, genetically, to every other human who exists on this planet right now. it's the 1% of difference in the genes that matters

That's just being pedantic. If you compare the games' binaries in a hex editor, you'll notice they're completely different games with less than 1% similarity. Sure, it's true technically, but that's just not how we measure that stuff.

if not for all the unoriginal doom clones that were released shortly after doom was, there would be no fps genre.

Not to disagree with you on clones not being bad, but no, unoriginal clones do not make a genre. It takes original 'clones', games with lots of similarity which do significantly add and/or change elements, to turn a game into a genre. To this day, 'Tetris' is still not a genre, even though there are countless unoriginal clones out there which replicate its gameplay 99% identically. 'Falling block puzzle games', on the other hand, became a genre as games like Puyo Puyo and Columns started appearing, clearly borrowing from Tetris yet playing differently.

What difference is there between Game Dev Story Tycoon and the original? With how even the name will confuse the casual player, it seems like just an unoriginal ripoff clone to cash in on the others' success.

LUDUM DARE 26 - REVOLVENGARDE

Made a simple game about reflecting projectiles. This was my first Ludum Dare!

Would love feedback. :D

Just wanted to point out this game is amazing and people should play it.

[World of Minimalism]

I updated the game to fix some bugs, so you can now play World of Minimalism without restarting every other minute.



Pick the 'post-LD version' at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7284.
Of course, for judging you should still pick the buggy version.

Little-known fact: E.V.O.: Search for Eden is actually a radically altered remake of this obscure PC-98 RPG.

[World of Minimalism]

Fifth Ludum Dare for me.

World of Minimalism

This game has no gameplay.
The world is empty.
There is nothing to interact with.
There are no graphics except for the player character and a minimalistic interface.

It is up to you to turn this empty world into something.





http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7284

It's basically YourWorldOfText meets minimalistic pixel art. Currently kind of buggy (you have to restart the client frequently), will make an updated version to squash some bugs later.

[pixel art]

I want to be in as I have a hard time finishing projects and feel like LD is a good way to break that habit.  But everytime I think about trying I remember how much I cannot do my own assets and it all breaks apart.  Anyone want to jam?

Sucking at graphics is no reason not to join. All of my LD games have had badly made art, but I made up for it through a combination of style and simple pixel art; if you get the style right it can save a lot of graphics work (I even managed to use blurry photographs as style once), and simple pixel art allows you to make images that clearly represent certain things even if you suck at making art.

(You can even get high ratings with ugly graphics; my last game was #22 overall, ranking #6, #7, #7, #44 and #86 in Fun, Innovation, Theme, Audio and Mood respectively, while the graphics rating [even after the 'ratings inflation'; when people like a game in general, it affects their ratings in ALL categories even if they didn't like that part of the game] was at a distant #460.)

It's not badly drawn, it's pixel art!

For sound, you can generate sound effects using sfxr, and music is optional. (You could use randomly generated music like many people but it sounds pretty shitty.)

In the worst case, you could avoid graphics and audio altogether - if you make your game text based (either roguelike-style ASCII graphics or just pure text), you don't need graphics or audio and people won't expect you to have it. You wouldn't be the first to make a text-based game for LD.



As for myself, I will be doing the compo again as usual.