Ludum Dare 19 Results
Well, Ludum Dare 19 is finished, obviously Discover the Way didn’t won any category, but at least we have some feedback.
The game made position 58 of 133, this is its rating:
| Inn | Fun | The | Gra | Aud | Hum | Ove | Com |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | - | 3 | - |
| 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | - | 3 | 3 |
| 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | - |
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 3 | - | 2 | 4 | 5 |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | - |
| 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 3 | - | 3 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 3 |
| 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 3 | - | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | - | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | - | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | - | 3 | 4 |
| 4 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | - | 3 | 4 |
| 2.88 | 2.75 | 2.25 | 3.25 | 2.40 | 1.50 | 2.94 | 3.38 |
Follow the link to the game page at the contest if you want to see users comments, remember though that people rated the first version which was not polished nor balanced enough.
Here you can see all Ludum Dare 19 results.
Some final thoughts:
First of all, I really liked the idea of the game, but on the other hand I knew it wasn’t going to win. However, I believe I made some mistakes that made the game have a worse rating.
The first mistake was the name, I named the game Discover the Name because I had no game by that moment, I was deciding what to do and though it was a funny name. After realizing the main objective was to discover a safe path between two points, then I thought to change the name to Discover the Way or Discover the Path, to give the player an idea of what he has to do, but I didn’t. That caused confusion to the players because they were expecting they have to discover a hidden name, not a hidden path.
Another mistake was to be to lazy to make some balance to the game before the contest ends, I finished the game about 2hs before but I was tired so I entered that version. The day after, I took less than 1hr to balance it a bit, and the game changed a lot, it became more playable and it gave more importance to the main objective because the player couldn’t take shortcuts to the targets any more, he has to discover a safe path, that is the real relation to the contest Theme (Discovery).
The third mistake, less important than the others was to remove the gameplay video from the game’s page. The game’s entry allow contestants to put only 5 links. At fist I put a link to the game, to the source code, a link to our blog, a link to the a gameplay video and a link to the jam version of the game, but after I uploaded the timelapse video to youtube I had to remove one of the links and the gameplay video seemed to be the best choice because I had a link to it inside our blog. That was a mistake because new players watched the gameplay video to see what they have to do in the game, it was some kind of tutorial, without it players felt disoriented.
I made a short postmortem at Ludum Dare’s blog, follow the link if you want to read it.
That’s all, thanks for reading.
UPDATE: added game position and updated link to Ludum Dare 19 results in order.
