Filed under 'Research'.

Kotaku has an article on The Ten Commandments Of Video Game Collectables. This may be relevant since this in a more free exploring (if not all out open world) approach to makro-mechanics.

I'm so tempted to participate!

Do it! Fall for the temptation!

Then next one is in the last weekend of July. It it's your first LD then be sure to do the warm-up weekend to.

I'd really like to learn how to draw better, But right now I think I should learn a more powerful programming language.

Drawing on the right side of the brain by Betty Edwards is a classic that you should probably read.

Beyond that learn, to draw from real life as early as possible. A common mistake (that I made) is to  learn to much from other artists. This prevents you from finding your own art style. There is also the overhaning risk of learning stuff wrong because the artist your copying learned about it wrong (because that artist learned from an artist that learned it wrong etc.).  Last but not least, if you only know how to draw from other drawings then you will run in to trouble whenever you want/need to draw a rare motif (photographies will be abundant, but other drawings sparse).

Finally, draw more or less every day. At least 15 minutes.

Which brings up another question... what engine should I use now that i'm ready to expand from game maker? what programming language? I was thinking maybe C# in Unity... but I'm afraid that may be to difficult. This forum has been very positive so far, what do you guys think? 

When it comes to programming languages and engines you should just

you can get your hands on.

What you really should conciser is getting a tutor with a few years of professional programming experience (does not need to be in games). So called "Self taught" programmers tend to develop a lot of odd (and often harmful) quirks in their coding style (like overuse of obscure syntax). A senior developer will be able to point out potential bugs and readability issues that you are probably not able spot yourself yet. Getting a Masters degree in computer science is ideal, but just having someone more experienced read your code and provide feedback is a good start.

Very interesting. Perhaps even a bit more off genre than the last one.





Having some sort of urban area social simulation mechanic trigger who gets accused of witchcraft by who (and how and when) is an interesting alternative to the traditional random encounter mechanic.

Engine development moves forward, even though a lot of new todo work is uncovered  in the process.

Story development on the other hand has never really gotten any further than a setting.
Traditionally JRPGs are very linear in nature, though that is not the same as to say that linearity is essential to their nature.
A more bite sized approach, with multiple small intermingling story crumbs, could definitely be worth trying out.

[#424]

Looks like some of you got really good placements. Cheers to you all.   

Here's how The world is (a) flat managed.

Overall:	#424	(3.306 average in 38 ratings)
Fun:	#606	(2.722 average in 38 ratings)
Innovation:	#321	(3.25 average in 38 ratings)
Theme:	#72	(4.057 average in 37 ratings)
Graphics:	#437	(3.361 average in 38 ratings)
Humor:	#157	(3.333 average in 38 ratings)
Mood:	#290	(3.4 average in 37 ratings)

Making #72 place in Theme is a personal record. My previous was I a #76 for Innovation. 

Looking at the more long term trend "fun" has been on a constant decline since my first entry. Maybe that's the toll I pay for insisting on narrative driven stuff.

A lot of games don't really have "Humor" or "Mood" (or even "Audio"), I'm get the feeling some participants missed to just opt out on those categories.

Something is clearly wonky with the code and/or meta this time.  Just look at the rating stats.

Ratings:
20+: 1233
15-20: 10
10-15: 50
5-10: 263
0-5: 1427

1690 games (57% of all submissions) still have 10 ratings or less. There is almost nothing left in the 10-20 range. Everyone either got lot of ratings or barely none at all.

My guess would be that the lack of proper on site filtering caused a lot of players to use itch.io instead. Since itch prioritizes already popular games, ratings accumulate  instead of being spread out.

There are now some "Advanced metrics" on the game page.
Does anyone "Classic Balance" and "Smart Balance" actually measure?

There is also a page for games in need of a little extra help (because they don't have 20 ratings yet):
https://ldjam.com/games/danger

Now that we're well into voting, does anyone have a list of the top games they've seen?

I've made a list of the 5 games I most easy recall when away from the whole Jam circus.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-world-is-a-flat/my-five-most-memorabel-favorites
(These five are all very good games, IMHO)

Might be a voting glitch. The Voting HTTP requests use GET (and not POST or PUT) for some reason. Perhappes this causes some caching issue (even though the HTTP Response says don't cache.

The LD site is still (in practice) sort of beta, after all.

The rating count is now public (for your own game).

My game is still under the 20 ratings limit, despite having having rated over 30 games. I'm probably being indirectly penalized by both LD and LDFF for not really commenting that much (a bit to shy for that I'm afraid).

How is everyone else doing?

[Just In case I'm not the only one that missed it]

Just In case I'm not the only one that missed it
The rating meta has been updaten in this LD: Liked comments now contributes to your coolness.
It's no longer just about spam rating, but actually about giving meaningfull feedback

This.. changes.. EVERYTHING!   

[Which Witch]

Filed under 'Research'.

Just a side note. Which Witch is is a Norwegian Rock-opera-musical-thing about the witch hunts and some of the songs are all out Ham and Bananas.

I'm not all too much into the RPG genre and turn-based battles (or really battles in general) personally, but it's always fun to see a twist like this on it. I'm sure you've already heard this to the point where you're tired of it, but there's a bit of an Undertale vibe there of course.

Actually, I think you are the first one to make a direct comparison to Undertale. It's in my steam-library, but I haven't even played it yet. I really should, shouldn't I.

RPG:s (of the Asian flavour) was my go to genre growing up. But the genocidal amount of killing has gradually turned me away from the genre in recent years. So that is why I want to "port" the mechanics into contexts outside of battle.

The writing honestly reminds me a little bit of how I imagine "true" roleplaying (again, not something I'm into, so I'm not too savvy) works in general, of course especially in text. 

The current writing is mostly a forth wall joke to try out UX, setting and mechanics. I haven't really settled on a specific writing tone yet. Can't be to serious, because even I'd get bored. There is inescapable dark humour in the witch hunts, like the concept of "Trial by ordeal" (short version: torture suspects without asking any questions, they will survive if they are innocent).

But LucasArst-style humour is not where I want to take this. Even though the premise is frankly bizarre, I don't feel that subject can be handled in a too goofy manner either. Hiding between the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, there is a lot of exciting drama in these times. The truth about human nature (especially in large groups) is not always pretty, and I want to catch that in some way.

Jord how was programming your own adventure game engine? Curious about the logic you use under the hood.

It's tempting to write a very long answer, but I'll be brief. There are to main types of things, Actors (that do stuff) and Rooms (that you do stuff in). Rooms and Actors both evaluate each other, creating a list of currently available Actions for the player to select from. Everything beyond that is really situation specific.
I wrote a longer rant about the engine a little over a year ago. It's some parts are a bit dated, like how time works, but the gist of it is still the same.

Reusing an my own engine for in a Jam worked mostly very well. It saved me a lot of time and also gave me quite a few ideas (and some code) to take back to my more long-term project. I will probably reuse it again the next jam.

And I'm done.





Ludum Dare page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-world-is-a-flat

Not quite done yet. Fortunately I was forward planning enough to take a vacation day.
The game is completable (and spell checked to boot, woho!), yet there are a lot of small tweaking left to be done (icons for all actions, more illustrations, etc.)

This is how far I got by the end of day 2.
http://superattack.se/games/ld-38/day-2/

Worked hard from 8:00-16:00 yesterday, then decided I needed a short break. So I sat down in an armchair to listen to the latest episode of 99pi. Apparently I fell asleep 10 minutes into the podcast and woke up 2 hours later. I'm getting older with every LD that passes.

I don't really have any screen shots since I'm doing a text adventure, but I've gotten a first solvable puzzle down. May have a playable, if incomplete, snapshot up later today.

[OK, LETS DO THIS! Battlecry!]

My usual approach to LD is to just build the first thing that comes to mind. This time however I've spent an hour mind-mapping and writing loglines for 8 possible games. That said, I'm probably going with the first idea I that came to mind.



OK, LETS DO THIS! Battlecry!