Another Ludum Dare season has come to an end and the show’s over! However, we still have our results to look at! How did our game, Vast Trivia Of The Void, perform this Ludum Dare? 🐳
Game jam results are always interesting to analyse. Should we be worried if we went down on stats? Do the ratings show actual improvement? What can we learn from the results we get at the end of the jam?
Before we do that though, we want to thank every single one of you! Whether you played our game, submitted questions for our trivia, or were one of the jammers that helped keep the Ludum Dare experience running, you’re amazing! Thank you for making this a great experience for us all! 👏
Now then, let’s see what happened this time around! 👇
Not bad at all! We got over 100 ratings on all the categories, which means that the results should accurately portray the average jammer’s opinion towards our game. In previous jams, we have made a Google Sheet with all the results we’ve got across Ludum Dare, so let’s add in this jam and compare how we stack up!
Our highlights this time around were Graphics and Audio, and the Overall is pretty fantastic! The Theme rank was admittedly a complete disaster, making it the first time we’ve landed ourselves a sub-1000 rank. But to be honest, of all the categories, that’s the one we tend to concern ourselves the least about. The most important thing for us is to have a game done at the end of the jam, even if the theme’s interpretation is a bit of a stretch!
But the important question is, how do the ratings themselves stack up against our previous entries? Did the lower ranks mean that we didn’t do as well as on previous jams?
Turns out that Vast Trivia Of The Void actually scored the highest rating of all our previous Ludum Dare games in four categories: Overall, Fun, Audio and Mood! Basically, when it comes to design, programming, music and sound, our team knocked it out of the park.
For a more fair comparison, in our sheet we’ve added a new average that weighs only Fun, Graphics and Audio. We can associate these with the tangible skills of the team: Programming, Art and well, Audio. With that average being of 4.36, Vast Trivia seems to be our best constructed game for a Ludum Dare to date!
This is why it’s important to always take into consideration not only the ranking, but also the ratings! If we only look at the ranks we’ve got, it would seem that our performance was not as good as previous games. However, when we look at the game’s ratings in context, the improvement becomes clearer and measurable.
The lower ranks don’t mean a game performed worse, but rather that there were many more high quality games this time around!
Nowadays, a lot more games that are created during Ludum Dare make it to commercial releases in the post-jam, regardless of the ranks and ratings they had during the event. Did you know that both Dorfomantik and Friday Night Funkin’ started as Ludum Dare entries? And look at the massive following they have nowadays!
If you’re proud of the game you have and want to continue working on it, please do! Take the feedback from the comments you’ve got, and push your game even further! 💪
All things considered, we had a great time seeing what you and the community have made this time around! Genuinely good stuff left and right! Seeing all of these inspiring submissions and community is always a treat!
Finally, we’d love to stay in contact! Some of you have already dropped by our Discord server to say hello, but everyone is welcome! But if Discord is not your thing, we have our Twitter profile as well! We’re really eager to show you more we’ve got in the plans for this year!
Thanks a lot for reading! Here’s to GMTK Game Jam this June, and towards the next Ludum Dare in October! ✨
