I wish the themes were more abstract eg. "a painting in a friend's house" or "the third album you listened to". Or less pointers and more concrete: "The theme is this photograph I took. Make a game"

https://www.flickr.com/groups/1641943@N22/ is very cool for this. Fake album cover challenge, we should do Jams like this

Yarrrrr, lad. It's seems "A game by it's cover" would be just your tankard of grog. Keep ye eye out and board that ship next time she sails by.

<insert traditional complaint about how this year's final themes are the worst ever before ending up doing something neat with whatever wins in the end anyway>

Actually I'm ok (or even happy) with most of the themes in the final round this time. A few of them seem like a bad fit platform/engine/toolkit I'm planing to use (so I gave them a -1), but other than that I can see good games coming from most of them.


With that said I may just have Jinxed it. Now we are going to get this really good theme that no one manages to do anything interesting with. In that case, my bad. Sry.

Slowly preparing and building up peppiness for this LD.

My "meta-goal" this time is to spend less time on code, favouring art (and possibly also them sounds). To do this I'll reuse the engine/toolkit from another project, but try to do something as different as possible with it. This will hopefully free up some time, and if successful also prove that the toolkit is as generic as i think it is.

If you've got an account on the new site you can already go and help prune away some of the worst of the 3000 suggestions and help keep the ones you want before voting rounds start!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/theme

Thanks for the reminder. I had completely forgotten about Theme Suggestions and Voting. Lots of good themes are still in the slaughter. Here's hoping one of them survives the final voting stages.

[Step Number]

Of the (9) people who've tried the latest release, only one gotten through a whole dispute. Almost half of players did not even get into one.

Step Number	Step Name	Users	Mean Duration	Perc Step	Perc Total
1	Init Ractive Gui	9		100.00	100.00
2	Present segment: StartDisputeNarative	5	54	55.56	55.56
3	Take action: DisputeArgumentAction	5	8	100.00	55.56
4	Take action: DisputeArgumentAction	3	99940	60.00	33.33
5	Present segment: EndDisputeNarative	1	41	33.33	11.11

The fall of is really steep, even when only looking at movement. Most players only walk a few rooms.

Step Number	Step Name	Users	Mean Duration	Perc Step	Perc Total
1	Present segment: ActingSituation	8	100.00	100.00
2	Take action: MoveThroughExitAction	7	13	87.50	87.50
3	Present segment: ActingSituation	6	3	85.71	75.00
4	Take action: MoveThroughExitAction	5	3	83.33	62.50
5	Present segment: ActingSituation	5	0	100.00	62.50
6	Take action: MoveThroughExitAction	4	11	80.00	50.00
7	Present segment: ActingSituation	3	0	75.00	37.50

The small amount of qualitative feedback I have been able to collect indicates that navigation is fairly confusing. So most people probably get lost on the way and give up. The presentation is also sort of dry. There is barely any illustrations and no sound what so ever.

Then there might also be the fact that this game probably does not work very well on smartphones. But neither does the TIGSource forum. Most page views come from 'Mac OS X' and 'Windows NT 4.0' computers.

I feel the call to action should remain in the upper panel and be explicit.

For example in 'Small harbor pier' have in the upper panel the options

 - Continue to loading docks
 - talk to Bernd

Then show the conversation options in the lower panel when I select 'talk to'.

So your saying it should go Verb first ("Talk.." -> "..to Bernd about Stuff"), not target first ("Bernd" -> "Talk about stuff")?

I'm not sure which is better; I think the new one has more potential for growth, though.

...

For navigating around the world, I'd put NSEW directions on go directions and maybe give the player an automap.  I could never get a handle on which "go" directions were leading me back to places I'd already been or when I was traveling in circles (and I had played the original for a decent amount of time).  I was never 100% which action choices were "go" commands in the first place, actually.

Navigation is still quite a mess. It definitely needs more attention.

I've been hesitant about NSEW because this is not how most of us navigate in our daily life. Some indigenous people actually think in NSWE, but most of us use left and right. But left and right will also be problematic when I start adding room illustrations, as it will be hard for the player to tell if "right" and "left" are relative to the view direction or the movement direction.

But perhaps I could express NSWE in a more subtle way. Not really mention the words "north" and "south", but still maintain some sort of direction indicator. And a mini-map would be great.

In the week that has passed since I uploaded the above release, I've been working on a new gui mode for the disputes.



This should do a lot help a players tell the difference between disputing and exploration.

It will also make some of the mechanics that would otherwise be to taxing on player memory.

Thank you for trying it out.

Is is the exploring parts (mostly green buttons) or the dispute part (mostly yellow buttons) that is most confusing?
I'm currently working on making a specific GUI-mode for the disputes part.

Stockholm, Sweden. Where I grew up I could practically walk to what's now apparently the worlds largest IKEA (=Our closest equivalent to Disneyland).

I'm currently testing this with two separate browsers, and a friend over Skype also tried to join in. The little dudes do not show up in each others browsers, so I'm guessing the server is down at the moment.

A server health/status indicator would probably be a good thing.
I'd probably give this a second try once the server is back online.

 

[NEW GUI]

I recently rewrote the entire GUI for my text based non-combat RPG 'Project NOM' (Working title). The old gui architecture had more or or less painted it self into a wall and it was not practically feasible to do a lot of the most trivial special cases I need. The new GUI has a mulit-mode system that allows every "page" of interaction to be handled in it's own unique way. This unlocks a whole lot of new options that should benefit future releases.

But when I rewrote the code I also changed the UX layout quite a bit. And although the code is more workable, I'm not quite sure if I improved or worsened the UX. So this is where I need your aid, my noble peers.

Instructionados
Please play the game in both versions. You don't have to play very long, but if you could get through at least one whole dispute (this games equivalent of a battle), by either winning or loosing, then that would be great. THis should take you a total of less than 10 minutes.

NEW GUI

OLD GUI

Questionados

• What improved in the new one?
• What felt better in old one?
• What works well in both or neither?

General feedback on the game is of course also appreciated (except perhapes for the story aspects, which are intentionally just a place holder made of straw and dry spit). But I'm mainly looking for UX and general layouting feedback.

Also, finally, if you put your forum handle in the optional 'Player name' box then I can match your feedback to what you actually did in game and that can sometimes help out tremendously.

K, thx, bi.
 

[Average]

This is a relatively small release. The only big change is that the new and (hopefully) improved UI is in place.

http://superattack.se/games/nom-rels/nom-r8/

New and noteworthy:

• New GUI

Most obviously missing

• Engaging storyline

Progress is like the movement of a crab, mostly sideways.

Aesthetics	10%
Story	0%
Mechanics	40%
Technology	90%
Average	35%

I think it's good to get something out of the door now and then, even if the change is quite small. It's always tempting to hide, avoiding feedback, until the release is "big enough".

So we shoot to try and rate at least 100 games each time.  That for sure gets us a 100% coolness, but i do know that actual number you need is less.  Unfortunately it can be tough to rate that many games while providing proper feedback.  The real work of LD is not the jam, it's the judging afterwards! 

True that. As someone who is on another operative system, It's also quite frustrating to wade through the all game that only provide windows binaries.

Here's hoping for the new LD site to have proper platform and genre filtering.

Yeah, I always spend some good time writing like twenty times more than most of the comments, which seem to average just a sentence or two... I don't know if people find that helpful or annoying, but it just comes so naturally to me to do so. q_q

There are only two true ways to complement a game. 1) Playing it through to the end and 2) finding it worth talking about. Oh, and 3) buying all the merch.

I remember rating roughly 20 games and that gave me a cooleness of 45%. If the relation between ratings and coolness was linear, then the 100% would be at 45 based on my result.

So there is probably not a linear relation between number of ratings and coolness. It might for instance be the percentile of people who rated as many times as one self. If my coolness is 45%, then 55% of participants rated more games than me.

Can anyone here who got a really high coolness tell us how many games you rated?

(edit: always with the splelling checking yes)

[EDIT:]

Dang, didn't notice the little link under your screenshot there, Jordgubben! Thought you didn't finish after all. Found it just now. Not on computer ATM, so might have to wait until tomorrow until I get to it, but will play (I know it's web, but, just in case something's odd on mobile)!

EDIT: Played, rated and commented!

Thanks. I've replied to the question in your comment!

I haven't tested it on a mobile myself but I'm fairly confident that it works miserably bad on a small screen.

That's it. I've take this as far as other practical obligations allow me. This was originally intended for the compo, so I'm already way into overtime.

TRY IT

This is probably my strange LD-entry so far. I await player reactions (and metrics) with a mixed sense of curiosity and dread.

(edit: Changed link so it points actually to the entry page, as I probably intended from the beginning)

The story is finally as good as it gets (with me as the author). There isn't really much "gameplay" here, more like linear interactive fiction. But I did manage to smuggle in a hidden "moral choice" that I'm quite proud of.
http://superattack.se/games/ld37-one-room/snapshot/

It's very calming that only surface polish (css and spelling) remain now.

I'm linking this shader more every time I see it. Does it work with the web exporter? (Unity has one of those right?)

[lawd jezus dat css color scheme!]

Ok. This is enough for today.






I had originally intended this to be for the compo, but I'll give it one more pass tomorrow and submit it to the jam.

The pacing needs to be polished better, most plot threads (if you can call them that) are currently left dangling, and a throughout spell check is still to be had and.. lawd jezus dat css color scheme!

The game got a lot darker than I thought it would be (in an odd sort of Coen brothers-way). There are some things I want to sleep on before considering this one done.

Afraid I don't know that one, but maybe after I play your entry I'll be presenting that game as "think of that elevator game" instead? c;

My design goal for the LD is now to make the above sentence possible true.


As usual I'm overwhelmed by how hard Literary writings actually is. About half of the (very short) story is now in place. Luckily I've found a workaround in my "borrowed" UI that makes it more usable, so thinks will turn out ok even if I do not have the time to replace it.


(The image above is a link to the most recently uploaded snapshot)

Is it like a semi text based elevator game or what? o: Not sure I understand the screenshot.

Yes, excellently. Think VA-11 Hall-A, but with elevator destinations instead of drinks (and with a less talented/experienced author).

I have a disputably working elevator going, with the notable bug that it will silently break if  you travel beyond the available floors. 


(The image above is a link to the most recent snapshot)

The GUI code is "borrowed" from another project, just to get started faster. It's a horribly bad fit, but I want to spend more time on content before doing anything about it.