link is dead 
does anyone still have a build? this is one of my favorite obscure games ever 

A bit late, but also for anyone else looking for the game:
FreeIndieGam.es also provided a MediaFire mirror with their entry on Foam.
But as I don't trust MediaFire to keep the download up and because Foam is awesome, I've decided to mirror it as well:
Mirror #1
Mirror #2

[This was easily my biggest mistake this LD, if not my biggest mistake in any LD.]

I'm giving up. At my current pace the game wouldn't be remotely finished by the end of the compo, and with my declining motivation the pace is only going to decrease. If through some miracle the game could be finished by the end of the compo, it would still look like complete ass and suffer from massive balancing issues.

My idea was to make a deckbuilding game where the players are ancient civilizations, and cards need to be unlocked on the players' tech trees before they can be bought. Resources to unlock techs and buy cards come from territory cards which players fight over (the cards in deck are mainly military units and special effect cards).

A simple enough concept, but it required significant user interface work (not just in interaction, but more so in presentation). I figured that since Unity already has a lot of the features I need, it would be much quicker to do in Unity. This was easily my biggest mistake this LD, if not my biggest mistake in any LD. I found myself working less with Unity and more against Unity, and after a long struggle I got it to render the cards in hand, the deck and the cards in play...for one player. (Well, technically not even that, because I still haven't got the text to stop clipping through the cards.) Just getting the game to play properly would probably take all of LD, not taking into account content creation, AI, etc.

Overall my motivation seems to be declining over LDs, though. Every time I make the same basic things again I get more demotivated. (This was part of the reason for the switch to Unity, to shake things up a bit.) Maybe I've been making too many games, or maybe my full-time programming job is draining my motivation. This is my second failed LD in a row; I'm not sure if I'll even bother trying next LD.

I'll be joining as well. 12th/15th time for me, depending on whether you count failed attempts.

I can't really see how anyone would be incentivised to play the games if there's no rating system.

Really? Because games are fun.

Perhaps you, personally, will be playing LD games, but I'm sure overall there will be less people playing the games. My experience with other jams has been that nobody really plays your game unless a) they're forced to by some system like LD's rating system, b) you specifically ask them to; or c) they hear about it via word-of-mouth (and even in that case, having a good game does not guarantee a significant amount of people will play it).

Fortunately, there's a site named 'feedback friends' this time around which is a bit like the old rating system; this should allow us to still get feedback (and with the opt-in nature of the site, I'm actually having some hopes the feedback will be better than usual).

I'm dropping out. I guess this marks my third failed Ludum Dare (out of 14 LDs total).

My idea involved shapeshifting the game itself; it's normally a tile-based top-down graphical game, but by pressing 'Shift' it became a text-based game.





Unfortunately it was more of a gimmick than a game, and with 5.5 hours remaining there is still no fun core gameplay. I can do many things in 5.5 hours, but making this game fun is not one of them. I'm not sure if this is fixable at all, since it lacks a fun core gameplay component.

Lesson learned: Fuck gimmicks. It made me fail an LD before (LD30, 'Connected Worlds', I tried to have a game where the game world was formed by activity in an IRC channel) but I figured that was because implementing the gimmick took too much time. Next time I'll be staying away from gimmicks (even if I can implement them in a reasonable timespan) and focus on making a fun game first.

#12/#14 for me, depending on how you count. It'll inevitably be C#/XNA again.

What's the matter with people? There was a decent amount of good themes during the weeding but the first round of themes to vote for today was horrible. How did it end up like this?

People vote for shitty themes. It's how we end up with winners like 'Two button controls' and 'Entire game on one screen'. This time around, we have wonderful themes like 'two colors', 'no text' and 'you only have 3 minutes', as well as wonderfully new and innovative themes like 'one item, choose'. The choices are also wonderfully diverse, with unique themes like 'Upgrade', 'Upgrades' and 'Upgradable'.

I hope the winner will not be something retarded like 'no text'; how am I supposed to build a game around the theme of 'no text'?

Not my best, but not very disappointing either considering there were almost 3000 participants.

The rankings are relative to other participants in the same event (Jam or Compo; Jam in your case); the more accurate number is 1638. There are also unranked entries in the 1638 count; for Overall, this is negligible, but it significantly inflates Humor and to a lesser extent Mood, and Audio is also notably affected by it.

I'm more concerned about embracing the fact that some random part of your game will break for every player, the specific part breaking being determined by the specific browser the user prefers and/or other random environment factors. Plus the fact that you can't just dump random data into a file and read it, or handle saving by just doing 'StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(); sw.WriteBytes(myData); sw.Close();'.

Plus, I just really like C# for making games.

[SnakeRPG]

I had been pessimistic about the scores for my game SnakeRPG, but I ended up getting rather high scores:


Quite surprised at the high Innovation score. Combining Snake with JRPGs was a novel idea, but a lot of the actual gameplay elements were borrowed almost directly from very early JRPGs (pre-Dragon Quest and those that didn't adapt to DQ's style) and related games, and it plays a lot like them. Perhaps people simply aren't familiar with these kinds of games.

Most of all, I'm glad I got a good Fun score. The comments barely mentioned anything gameplay-related, so I was afraid I had made it so hard to get into as to be unplayable again. Good to see this wasn't the case.

[SnakeRPG]

My game is done as well.

SnakeRPG
A game combining Snake and NES-era JRPGs.

I wish I had more time to playtest, but it's a miracle I managed to finish the game in the first place. It ended up a lot better than I was expecting for most of LD.

I hope this tells people to submit better themes.

Plenty of better themes were submitted. They were just filtered out during Theme Slaughter while bad ones weren't.

Anyways, I like the theme. Growing is a good theme, and Two Button Controls as an additional restriction is fine (I'd only have issues if it were the sole theme).

I'll be in again, 11th time (13th if you count failed ones) this time. Have been really busy lately and I might suffer from lack of sleep, but let's hope it all works out.

The most boring part of LD is people complaining about the themes, tbh.
Twist them around and do something with them if you don't like them as they are.

Yeah, good luck twisting "Lose abilities as you progress" or "Two button controls" beyond using them as a thematic excuse to make a completely unrelated game. A good interpretation of the theme has its gameplay inspired by the theme in addition to its graphics or narrative, and a good theme facilitates that. "You are the villain" I could twist. "Lose abilities as you progress" or, to take an earlier theme, "Entire game on one screen", is a completely different thing.

I do agree with you. I was mostly refering with people who use the theme as the main excuse for their failure. The times I've failed was because I was unable to interpret the theme into a game that I wanted and could make. Not because of the theme itself : thousands of people got a game made with that theme. I didn't.

I tend to have high standards for the games I make, and the way I interpret themes. I failed two LDs because of the theme, not because I couldn't make anything with the theme (there were plenty of options), but because I couldn't make anything I would be satisfied with using the theme. Either I make something I consider worth people's time, or I make nothing at all.

Out of curiosity, what is everyone planning to develop their game in? I'm thinking html5 typescript with PIXIJS for myself since I've tried it out before and absolutely loved it. Prototyping with it is quick too.

Likely C# with XNA using my usual sprite library (VBXSE) and if necessary netplay library (GenericNetplayImplementation). They're the tools I'm most used to and as such likely to be the most suitable tools to make something good.

What software do people use for art and audio?

GIMP for graphics, FL Studio for music, sfxr for sound effects. Assuming I have them, of course.

#25   Fun   4.05
#39   Overall   3.95
#126   Humor   3.53
#145   Mood   3.57
#171   Theme   3.86
#435   Innovation   3.05

(The Slime's Journey)

This caught me completely off-guard. I knew people liked my game, but I thought I didn't even have a chance of making it into the top 100.

At this point I just have no idea what I'm doing anymore.

And you really nailed the description of the mechanics!  It's much better than I could figure out how to word... Would you mind if I added that in the game's description at the top?

Sure, go right ahead.

Prinsessa, do you still expect to need hosting space? (So I know I should pay attention to IRC and/or the forums during submission hour.)

[The Slime's Journey]

My game is done as well.

The Slime's Journey

Basically, you are a slime wandering around the world and growing stronger to kill the adventurer that killed your parents.

[I've got a little (re)quest(ion).]

I'll be in as usual.

I've got a little (re)quest(ion).

I've got no money ATM and I'm like three payments behind my web hosting, so in case I don't have it back up and running by LD (unlikely), would someone be happy to host my game on their server / web hotel room, or is there some good place I could put it for free?

What precisely do you need? If it's just some web space (for hosting files and/or web pages) without anything fancy (server-side scripts, database access, server program etc), I can provide that. The URL will be something like http://www.stack.nl/~vdz/prinsessa/. I can't provide FTP access or anything like that, so you'll have to send it to me manually (via IRC or a service like Mega or WeTransfer) during submission hour and I'll upload it.

Could you PM me a Skype username or something so that I can make sure to get in touch with you in real time when the time comes instead of missing you because neither of us was checking the forum often enough?

I'm currently online on IRC on the server AfterNet.org (the server with #ludumdare), nickname Mishra. You can also try VDZ on Rizon, SynIRC or AfterNet but I can't guarantee a fast response if you contact VDZ. (Mishra is my local client, VDZ is on my server.)

The theme is "you are the monster"

what a crap theme...

Maybe I should just re-submit my 'Your Are The Villain' game, it's exactly the same theme to me (except this one is even more limited).

Not happy with the theme.

[I've got a little (re)quest(ion).]

I'll be in as usual.

I've got a little (re)quest(ion).

I've got no money ATM and I'm like three payments behind my web hosting, so in case I don't have it back up and running by LD (unlikely), would someone be happy to host my game on their server / web hotel room, or is there some good place I could put it for free?

What precisely do you need? If it's just some web space (for hosting files and/or web pages) without anything fancy (server-side scripts, database access, server program etc), I can provide that. The URL will be something like http://www.stack.nl/~vdz/prinsessa/. I can't provide FTP access or anything like that, so you'll have to send it to me manually (via IRC or a service like Mega or WeTransfer) during submission hour and I'll upload it.

I would purposefully disassociate from you if this post is in any way representative of your everyday personality.

Given the lack of empathy you'd be doing him (her?) a favor.

Yeah, because why listen to someone who gives their honest opinion when you can instead listen to people who just say what you want to hear?

[17 votes]

Looks like I was wrong about the cutoff - 17 votes was the minimum requirement for ratings, not 20. This means only 555 entries are unrated.

Although I can understand your disappointment with your score, you should think about the people who didn't event got the 20 votes required to be ranked - I've tried to rate some of these games following "please save these games" posts on the last voting day, and some of them were actually quite good or interesting.

I don't know how games end in this state (I guess it's due to low coolness), but to me the most sad outcome for a game is no one playing it, isn't it?

Every single one* of the unrated entries' creators have rated less than 6 games themselves. 346 (62%) of them rated no games at all.

* The sole exception purposely unchecked all categories and as such did not receive any votes.

7 people got away with not voting on anything and still got into the ratings, because popularity trumps all and life is not fair.