Judging for Ludum Dare 27 officially ended at almost midnight last night. As such I figured it would be best to finally give my post-mortem, show my score and reveal my favourite games from this Ludum Dare all in one post!

If you haven’t done so, play my entry, 10 Second Paper Flight.

Results

	Coolness	71%
#563	Humor	2.22
#566	Audio	2.53
#694	Graphics	2.66
#851	Innovation	2.56
#896	Mood	2.26
#910	Theme	2.73
#966	Overall	2.59
#1036	Fun	2.24

So while it’s a shame that 10 Second Paper Flight didn’t get anywhere near the Top 100 in any category, I’m happy that all my efforts to rate and try out as many of the 2213 games got me a medal, seeing a huge amount of people getting 100% Coolness ratings made it quite a shock that even someone with 71% would get a medal, bronze or otherwise. While it’s a shame I didn’t get anywhere near the Top 100 in any category, I feel great about my results. I mean this was my first Ludum Dare and my first 48 hour solo games jam entry with a completed game, considering the fact that this was in ActionScript 3, which was pretty much new for me. Also being in the Top 1000 out of 1437 compo entries for all buy one of the categories definitely says something, these are definitely goals to work with.

Post Mortem

What went right

1. I learned fast: Aside from the two tutorials made by Newgrounds flash game dev and Ludum Dare Competitor, Schulles, I never did ActionScript 3 programming. I did basic ActionScript 2 at A-Levels and that was it, and until Ludum Dare, I never made an original game with it. I consider this a great achievement since I had less than a week to read up on it, using online tutorials and an Actionscript 3 code book as reference. Of course I wasn’t perfect, I had to use Schulles’ tutorial games as a basic reference and I got stuck at multiple points, but considering most of the gameplay was done in the first day, I think that’s definitely some effort I’m proud of.
2. I made people laugh: Humour isn’t something I’m not too good at, and is usually down to luck. When I made this game, I wasn’t really trying to make people laugh, the little additions I made were to add more of a surprise than laughter. But then I see that my game got #563 in humour, it kind of suprises me. I think more of the humour was down to watching other people play my game instead of just the gameplay itself. I watched a livestream of my game done by JellyCakes, and when I saw him try so hard to get a good flight in, and then suddenly his plane got struck by lightning, I was in histerics. There were a few people in the comments that pointed out that was what made it funny, so I guess it works.
3. Achievements Added (also known as “God Bless the Newgrounds API”): Regardless of what you think of Newgrounds, it’s API for implementing achievements and scoreboard is brilliant and works perfectly with Flixel. Thanks to the API’s functions and accessible data members, adding achievements into 10 Second Paper Flight was really easy.
4. Finally made a game for Ludum Dare! =D

What went wrong

1. Prepared to Code, Not to Art: Yeah, looking at some of the artwork, I definitely need to work on drawing pixel art. Also need to make an effort and get comfortable with music trackers so I can actually produce the music instead of the well made, but lazy autotracker.py.
2. So Simple, Yet Too Challenging: Pretty straightforward issue, my game was way too short and simple, yet I purposely made it too challenging, to the point that it broke realism. I like my game, but I know I should’ve made something more dynamic.

Overall

My Favourites

Compo

Jam

Please go to the Ludum Dare Website and try out a few more games on there. There’s 2213 games on their and this is only a pinch of salt out of the best games I could find!