Ludum Dare 15: Results

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: September 16th, 2009

Daring!

The 15th Ludum Dare "48 hour solo game development competition” has ended. The theme this time around was “Caverns,” and there were over 143 (i.e., 144) games submitted — all of which you can find here. (With screen shots!)

The top honors this time went to ChevyRay‘s Beacon (shown above) and ’ Thorson’s Site">YMM’s Broken Cave Robot, which are both excellent. But there are many other gems! I advise scrolling through the voting results and trying everything.

Ludum Dare 16 will begin in December. Prepare thyself!

  • http://b-mcc.com// BMcC

    Dock’s entry in particular makes me smile. :)

  • raigan

    I hope this deluge of posts doesn’t prevent people from seeing the Bit Trip Void post.. it went from front-page to buried in a couple hours!

  • Tim James

    I noticed a couple of the games say they are using rendering techniques that may not work with some video cards. Is this a Game Maker 7 warning? Each game seems to have an odd hitch or pause in the display every couple of seconds. Haven’t dug into this yet but if this is a known issue I’d appreciate a quick point in the right direction.

  • Jay

    While the visuals for Beacon were impressive, especially for 48 hours, I don’t see why this game is considered so great. It’s basically an on-rails platformer. Not a fan.

  • Paul Eres

    it’s telling that the contest was dominated by people who came out of the game maker community and the tigsource community :D

  • ssid

    Something about the presentation and ambiance of that game was… scary.

  • RoboStephen

    Over 143 entries? That sounds like a GROSS exaggeration.

    …get it? See, because it…ah, never mind.

  • Chris.R

    Beacon was very well done. He did a great job making me love/hate the beacon. I have two gripes:

    1. It doesn’t save progress when you quit (as far as I can tell).

    2. The later levels (that I saw) went past my threshold for “make a stupid mistake and have to redo a bunch of stuff you’ve done before”. Checkpoints would be nice if you want to make big, convoluted screens. I can deal with punishing difficulty in bite sized pieces (IE When Pigs Fly by Anna Anthropy).

  • foo

    Paul: Telling in what way? That the ones using Game Maker didn’t have to start from scratch, and thus effectively had more time for gameplay and polish than many other entrants?

    By that I don’t mean that Game Maker entries are “less worth” than the from scratch ones; it’s still an amazing accomplishment to create a full game in 48 hours. It’s just something to keep in mind that not all of the entrants started from the same base.

  • IndieJoJo

    @Chris: Agreed. Appreciation quickly gave way to frustration. I play a lot of indies at work, most of the time I’m looking for a quick, fun diversion and this got incredibly aggravating in the final couple of levels.

    Ending was fucking great, though.

  • ChevyRay

    Just so you guys do know, I’ve released a post-compo version of Beacon as well, which deals with several of the too-frustrating parts near the end, and also has a save-game feature. You can get it from my website:

    http://properundead.com/2009/03/games.html

    Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time within the 48 hours to attend to those issues, but I’m still glad the game was so well-recieved :)

  • http://properundead.com/games/ ChevyRay

    Hmm… my post seems to have been disappeared. Maybe because I left a link in it.

    Anyways, for any (many) folks who find the compo-version of Beacon to be too frustrating (I only have so much time to refine the gameplay), you can download the lastest version from my website, which has several difficulty fixes as well as an included auto-save feature.

    @foo: Telling that Game Maker is an awesome game-development tool. Every other contestant could have used Game Maker as well, or even prepared a core game engine ahead of time (since that’s not against the rules) which could have been even more powerful and easy to use than Game Maker. So the folks who did use it didn’t have any more of a leg-up than any of the other participants.

    :) Game Maker <3

  • foo

    @ChevyRay: Game Maker is Windows only, and costs money. Your other point is valid, but many entrants didn’t do this, either by choice (some just like it that way) or for other reasons.

    Again, my point wasn’t to belittle your efforts, or that of any others who used Game Maker for their entry. It was meant more as a defense against Paul Eres, who implied that non-TIG Ludum Dare entrants lack talent. This is simply not true at all.

  • O

    LD is about the experience and maybe learning something. Despite the voting system it’s not really a competition. If anyone is seriously wondering about “advantages” or anything like that is missing the point.

    I’ve felt that the competitiveness of some of the first-time participants in the last couple of LDs has detracted from the experience somewhat. Seeing that some people have been voting a bunch of 1s on some of the best entries (presumably because they feel threatened by that entry in some category) is frustrating.

    There’s nothing that can be done about that directly of course, but I hope the trend of emphasising the spirit of LD increases as the number of participants does too. Like the keynote, that was great.

  • http://properundead.com/games/ ChevyRay

    Yeah, the best part of the whole thing was just being able to push myself to accomplish something in such a short time period. I was extremely excited and felt rewarded at what I’d accomplished before I even submitted it, because I’d never done such a thing before.

    A little competition is healthy, but too much definitely just ruins things.

    @foo: if you know Paul Eres, you’ll know very well that he wasn’t actually implying that at all. Game Maker is actually free too, and only costs a small amount of money for folks who want a couple of the advanced features. It would be folly to try to cry lack-of-talent when you look through there and see all these games with destructible terrain, procedurally-generated dungeons and levels, and 3D games with some pretty beautiful graphics and effects.

    I would (and will) definitely take part in every Ludum Dare, though, voting system or none. It was a wicked experience!

  • Pyabo

    Props to Broken Cave Robot! Still working on my map. :|

  • IndieJoJo

    I want to see that map!

    I have a sneaking suspicion there’s no exit…

  • NoExitJackson

    Beacon was okay. All the others sucked. No discussion. SUCKED.

  • Zok

    shut up jerk just cause you didnt like it makes it not good so sucks you

  • Barf

    Shut up both of you or I’ll write a comment. (Darn it!)

  • hu

    I still lick marionettes for a living. It pays the bills, but I hate the splinters in my tongue. Still, at least I get wood.

  • Nemsin

    Was there an exit? Or did you get me excited for nothing?