The results for Ludum Dare 35 were out earlier this week and as usual I’ll be doing a quick analysis of how I did for my entry SHAPE.SHIFT(), talking about where I did well and where I didn’t (For the post mortem, you can click here).
Theme (427/1594)
A slightly lower score compared to my last entry but to make up for it, I actually did much better in terms of standings.
Innovation (967/1594)
A lower score than last time, which was pretty much expected as there was quite a number of entries that had “shape in the hole” gameplay concept (and mine was no exception).
Fun (777/1594)
This was probably the category that would have changed the tide in terms of overall scores if I decided to do things a bit differently because the game’s polarising hard difficulty. Whilst some people gave it a high score in fun because of how addictive the game turned out to be, there were others who gave it a lower score because they found it too hard to play. Along with that, there was also a number of people with mixed opinions about the game’s fun factor and ended up rating it 3 out of 5 as a neutral response.
Graphics (654/1594)
This was a rather nice surprise and a much better improvement compared to the last few times I entered the Graphic category for Ludum Dare since I’m primarily a coder and not an artist by any means. Despite using a combination of Unity’s 3D primitives and some simple modelling in Blender, I was glad people liked the retro cyberspace/neon aesthetic I ended up fitting the game with.
Mood (638/1594)
The mood category tends to be one of the two categories I tend to opt out of every Ludum Dare (the other being humour) since my entries don’t normally have some sort of story or emotions I want to invoke but with the neon/cyberspace aesthetic I was using for the game, I decided to opt in for mood this time which turned out to be a good decision as I ended up with a new personal best for mood.
Overall (751/1594)
Despite the lower than usual scores for all the other categories I entered, surprisingly I actually did pretty well in the overall category (coming pretty close to my first Ludum Dare entry). I think the reason why was that compared to all my other entries, this one felt like the most polished one so far.
The only other category that I opted out of (besides Humour) was Audio as I used a 3rd party asset for the music.
In conclusion, despite doing not as well as I’d expected, I should be considering this game jam as a success since my average scores throughout were the highest it’s ever been (As mentioned before, this would imply that it’s the most polished entry I’ve made so far). If I had balanced my game’s difficulty better then I probably would have gotten slightly better scores (particularly in Fun). Nevertheless, I would very much like to continue working on the game someday (as my next possible full indie project), adding in more features such as extra shapes, a reworked control system, gamepad support as well as rebalancing the difficulty and turn it into a fully featured title for PC and consoles.
Jason/Xanjos
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