With 125 games played, here’s my traditional list of great games that clearly don’t have enough ratings.

Investigator and the Case of the Red Herring

Awesome adventure/detective game about Investigator and his side-kick Trauma Llama solving a thrilling murder case full of mysteries and puns.

#16

Claustrophobic game that scares without having any literal monsters; my personal overall favourite of the jam.

Photographer

Innovative photo-game about PR, blood, posing heroes and management of your monster lair.

Katapillah

Beautiful music-driven exploration game about a space caterpillar drifting through the Peach-galaxy. No real goals, just you, music and peach pips.

The Loved Ones

Interesting narrative experiment that tells a story of a family with a lottery-scratching game mechanic.

Chekhov couldn’t predict that he’d be stabbed with a vase

OK, I guess I have to write a post-mortem for “Where Is Your Gun Now, Mr. Chekhov?”, since the guy certainly died (too many times already).

This LD, I was planning to participate solo as usual, but the theme caught me unprepared. Unconventional weapon? I haven’t done a game with guns or stabbing since 2013, so making an action game was quite a challenge for me – and I gloriously failed it. Another challenge was to make a ridiculously silly game, and that kinda worked out.

Anyway, after the theme was announced, I brainstormed for some time, coming up with several ideas, at some time seriously considering making a parody of 50 Shades of Grey. But neither me nor my wife had seen the movie or had the experience with, erhm, the unconventional stuff, so that idea was put on the shelf.

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Play “Where Is Your Gun Now, Mr. Chekhov?”

Now back to work.

Finally I have some time to write a post-mortem for our LD entry, Owls Ever After (we did it together with my wife Tanya). As usual, everything didn’t go as planned.

TL;DR: Instead of trying to make your game longer, spend more time on polishing it and making it more accessible; most people will not finish your game anyway and most likely will rate it based on the first couple of minutes. Also, music and sound effects is a must.

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Mandatory self-promotion post and off to sleep for a couple of hours. Please play our game, it’s cute and has owls.

Play Owls Ever After!

So, here’s a long-overdue post-mortem of my LD29 entry, And the Moment Is Gone. The idea behind the game was to combine themes from two separate jams that were held during the same time – Ludum Dare and Russian GamesJamGAMM – in one project. Given the themes (the second one was “Phobias”), the subject became apparent – I decided to make a game about social anxiety, evoking frustration and humiliation emotions from players.

It was an old idea of mine to make a game about a person who thinks over different scenarios of an important conversation in his head over and over, never actually starting that conversation; this was a good fit for the theme, so I’ve decided to make a game about a lonely boy on a subway (I like those very much), who desperately wants to meet a girl, but just haven’t got a clue how to talk to a stranger. Main inspirations for the mood became my all-time favourite Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and this comic. This is how it turned out:

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With everyone posting their top-5 lists of best games (that mostly look similar to each other), I ‘ve thought about composing a top-5 list of games that could use more user ratings.

Infantile Oceanic Feeling

This is one of those ambiguous audio/relaxing experiences, but it held me for at least 30 minutes trying to make a self-sustaining ecosystem. In my opinion, this is the most beautiful and underrated game in the jam.

Seven Souls

Seven Souls is the winner in Mood section for me. A very stylish and depressing game, with an interesting take on dialogue/puzzle mechanics.

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