Wrapping up my first Ludum Dare

My game is submitted. You can play it here. My emotions are mixed right now: exhausted, excited, proud of what I’ve achieved (entering LD and getting a game…mostly… finished) and yet simultaneously disappointed in the end product. I can say for certain though, even in this burnt out state, that I’ll be doing this again. It has been great to be involved and has been an amazing learning experience. Congratulations to all of you that have finished and submitted a game, the quality of many of the entries that come out of this series of competitions is incredible.

I thought I’d go through some quick post-mortem thoughts now while they’re fresh in my mind as I’m not going to want to do it tomorrow (bank holiday Monday lie-in), so what went… wrong:

Lack of preparation: Can’t stress this enough, I’ve been busy with other work and have put off doing any base code, learning libraries or even considering the themes before entering. A large proportion of my time this weekend went into implementing basic functionality such as simple motion and navigation between nodes, managing objects and states, UI elements and other things that have little or nothing to do with the game mechanics and – most importantly – the fun.

Sketchy art style: Rather than using a minimalistic but functional art-style, I went for something more complex and in turn much more time consuming. I had to adapt the art-style to be something very-sketchy, black and white with spot colour because it was going to take far too much time to create what I wanted.

Lack of play testing: Because of the lack of prep and the time spent faffing around with drawing, I had very little time to play test and frankly it shows. My submission doesn’t play well, it’s only just holding together as a game.

For my next attempt I’ll try to be much more prepared and go for a more minimal approach to art, in order to give myself more play testing time. Of course, I was aware of all these errors going in (they’re common knowledge round these parts) but I wasn’t aware that I was making them – I thought my game was pretty simple – it isn’t until you fall into those traps that they really sink home at least for me. So what went right:

Adapting the art style: I was forced to adjust the art style to something more sketchy and embrace the lack of colour (read: lack of time to colour in the artwork) and, whilst there are areas of the visuals that are very scrappy, it was a valuable experience to teach me how to adapt.

My trusty sketchbook: As well as being a plain, old sketchbook it acts as a design document, a place to work out coding problems and a personal organiser all in one. The design notes and to-do lists buried in it are what kept me going throughout the weekend.

Going with what you know: I was tempted to try out HTML5 and JavaScript development as I’ve been doing a lot more work in them recently but because of the lack time to prepare I decided to fall back on Flash CS5 professional – not Flixel or FlashPunk (which I was also very tempted by but don’t know well) but plain old Flash. It isn’t ideal for games (far from it) and the game itself is not optimised but I know it very well now and as a result could get something up and running in it. If I’d have had to deal with programming/software issues as well as the art and lack of base code then nothing would’ve been finished.

So that’s my Ludum Dare in a nutshell. I’m glad I took part and submitted something even if I’m not very happy with it and I’ve learnt a lot of valuable lessons for next time. Good luck with your entry if you’ve submitted one, all the best.