So Ludum Dare 31 voting period finally comes to a close. How did Laundry Day do? Pretty darn well, actually:

First off, I might as well leak this “secret:” yes, the game is a satire of freemium and social games. It was designed like that from the beginning, from the mundane, boring activity of putting clothes into a dryer, to the comically juicy process of collecting coins and trinkets from the lint trap. This isn’t the first time we’ve posted a satire to Ludum Dare — Not a Clone was also a satire — but seeing that this time around, the game was deliberately uninteresting, this developer had very low expectations.

Not so, it turns out. A lot of people, both within and outside of Ludum Dare have found the game to be oddly addicting. Many commented how hilariously boring the game was, and still managed to find something fun about it. And a few people even managed to figure out what the game was satirizing about.

(That last comment is there because the user clearly figured out our nefarious plan to create a sequel. See, dreamlogician? I told you the volcano was an awfully obvious place to have an evil office!)

Anyways, I’ve got to give my thanks to all of you who played and voted for our game. We had a lot of fun this time, and hope to make more games in the future!

P.S. Our favorite comment may have to be this golden gem from Newgrounds:

For the longest time, we’ve had the following categories:

1. Overall
2. Innovation
3. Fun
4. Theme
5. Graphics
6. Audio
7. Humor
8. Mood

For LD31, I noticed that if we wanted to remove our game submission from a rating category, we had the option to disable it.  I didn’t see the point, myself, but I suppose if your game really wasn’t trying for one of the categories, there’s no harm in recusing yourself.

I would like to see another category added for future LD events:  Controls.  I think controls are a critical element to game design, since they are what makes a game interactive, and thus, a game.  Not having its own category is an oversight that should have been corrected a long time ago.

<3 this post if you would like to see a Controls rating category added to voting!

Seriously, what about to make in the “all games list” checkbox “hide entries which I voted”.

Seriously, this has become not a joke anymore. With damn shuffle I must view all entries within a day. BUT I CANT!

Seriously it getting annoying. I want to view as much entries as I can. But damn shuffle pulls down all my efforts on zero.

Seriously, admins. Can hear me anyone?

I’ve noticed that the major part of the rates for my game were done in first two days and then declined drastically. I only rated about 10 games in the first two days and got 50 rates back, but during the next week I rated more than 100 games and barely got 10 rates back. I suppose the situation for other games is the same – people rated some games from the beginning of the voting list and stopped after a day or two. That’s why I’m writing this post – to give you a reason to continue.

I didn’t stop rating games because I think it’s very useful for me, even if people don’t rate my game back. Here’s why:

New Games

I’m the game developer, but I don’t play games much by myself. I played lots of games before, but now I spend most of my spare time coding games, supporting players in my existing games, meeting with other developers offline, and spending some time with my family. So I actually play games for about an hour or two a month. That’s definitely not enough, but I’m not ready to commit my time to playing some large game while some decent small ones are hard to find.

And now I have hundreds of games made for Ludum Dare. They’re all pretty short, easy to start with, and easy to get new gameplay experience – because most of the developers tried to make them easy to understand in less than 30 seconds. So instead of playing just one game for an hour or two I play 5-10 different games per hour. I wouldn’t find such variety of game at any game portal, let alone Steam and other distribution platforms.

New Ideas

All Ludum Dare game are built around the same theme, so every developer tried to either make something completely new or implement some obvious idea in the unusual way. Yes, some games are very similar (I played at least 10 games about disarming bombs), but the implementation is always different. When you see some patter you start to focus on minor details, some cool features, sounds, or visual effects. All these little things bring you lots of new ideas for your own games.

After playing games like Spacecrap I think that the pixel-perfect art is not necessary to make the game feel real. Aereo made me think about drawing all my sketch art on paper first and use the scanned version in the game (instead of triangles and simple shapes drawn in Photoshop). The 10-second Murder made me think that adding some story with backstreet intrigues instead of fancy animations may make some of my games way better. And the Duellists gave me some absolutely new and amazing ideas about the asynchronous PVP fighting for our Facebook game.

New People

I usually try to check profiles of the people who made the game I like. Some of them have Twitter accounts, some don’t, but I try to find them using google or other sources. Being in touch with people who produce some good stuff is priceless – you can get tons of ideas from what they do. Most of the people who do something interesting are usually open for conversation, they follow you back, give you feedback when you ask, and actually try to help you to succeed with your games.

The community is one of the most important things for game developer. You won’t ever be in the trend if you don’t talk to people. That’s why I consider Ludum Dare a great opportunity to meet active people, check what kind of games they do in their spare time, and how they do it.

Let’s rate some games!

If you didn’t rate any new games in last few days – don’t waste your time! You have only 12 days left.  It may seem a reasonable wide time frame, but the amount of games you can rate is huge – 2213 games! If you don’t like the games appearing at the first page of voting – you can always use search to find some games.

The easiest way is to search games made with web technologies – they won’t require installation and will work in any modern OS and browser. For example: HTML5 games, JavaScript games, Flash games, Unity games. You can also use names of your favorite frameworks – there’ll be some games to rate, I’m sure.

Let’s go!

P.S. Don’t forget to check my own game – it’s HTML5 so you can try it in your browser, no installation required.

I took the results of the four preliminary rounds of voting and graphed them to see how popular certain themes are compared to the others. I ranked them by the sum of the pluses and minuses. The top twelve are in the Final Round.

 [click image to embiggen]

Looks like there are three themes that are obvious favorites over the others–End of the World, Construction and You are The Villain–with between 800 and 1000 plus votes (green) and around 500 minus votes (red). For the most part, pluses and minuses for themes stay between 500 and 800 of either kind of vote. The neutral votes (yellow) stay fairly flat, but you can see what appears to be climb on the left side of the neutral votes before it starts it’s up-and-down.  I believe what sets those three highest themes apart from the others is that they managed to get more people than average to select plus instead of neutral, as well as have less people vote negative. In other words, they’re more polarizing. P.S. I don’t know what I’m talking about, look at the pretty colors.

My official prediction is that the top vote getter End of the World is going to be the final round winner. The timeliness is perfect and probably what drove it’s numbers in the first round. We won’t get this chance again, whether the Mayans were right or not.

UPDATE: I added another pretty graph. Since each round had a different open/close time there is obviously a flux in the number of votes cast in each one. Also, some people actually refrained from selecting an option, even neutral, for some themes. This graph shows the percentages of total votes plus or minus based on the number of votes cast for that theme.