Random Musings

LDJam 41: A Post Mortem

Luke Parker -

I have to say that this was certainly one of my better LDJams that I've done ever.

At first I originally went with the idea of something like a cross between DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and X-COM but from the outset I realised that the scope of doing something like that would be too large for 48 hours. With that I decided on an idea that I'd been mulling over for a few day prior, the single player, turn-based, battle royale game which as complicated as it might sound, was actually relatively simple to implement gameplay wise.

You can directly download the game here: https://lparkermg.itch.io/hug-me-while-the-world-collapses
Or
You can go through the LDJam site and drop a rating as well: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hug-me-while-the-world-collapses

So lets get on with the rest of this shall we?

What went right:

This time around a lot of things went right, more so than a lot of the other times.

  • Pacing: This time around I actually paced myself a bit better than I had done in previous jams, this included taking time out for lunch, dinner and breakfast along with getting a proper amount of sleep. This also helped with the fact I had a TODO list setup of things that needed doing each day.
  • Gameplay: This came together surprisingly easily, but that maybe because the turn-based mechanics would slot into most other genres.
  • Completion: This is probably the first time in a little while that I feel I've completed something to a relatively acceptable standard.

What went wrong:

Even though there were a few things that went right, things still did go wrong.

  • Bugs: This is probably the key thing that stopped me from getting all the polish done, this and my own stupidity on the first day when I was close to finishing the gameplay I hit a bug which took up a lot of time (like the rest of the daty kind of a lot of time.) and I had to push back the rest of the project so I could fix it.
  • Unfinished Polish: I generally wanted a but more polish and to tweak a few things visually to make it look better but I generally didn't get around to finishing really.

What could be improved:

Considering this was generally imo pretty successful I'd say there are still improvements to be made.

  • Scope: I feel I could generally improve on what I put into and out of the scope in my projects so I'm not removing things while working on the project.
  • Bugs: Being able to prevent the larger bugs from even happening would be great, at least in this case it would free up time for other things.
  • Polish: I know for a fact that I'm pretty bad at art things outside of gameplay programming, so I think in future if I could put aside more time to do polishing I feel that would be great.
  • Engine Diversity: This is generally something that I've been thinking on for a while, I currently stick with Unity and generally have done since I started game development. I kind of want to try out other engines such as Unreal and maybe some html5/js based ones next time.

Conclusion:

All in all, this jam actually went pretty well, considering what the theme was and the difficulty in coming up with viable ideas for it. Things certainly could have gone better and I have a bit more to think on as well.

I think next time I will either try a new engine or go for something like making a mobile game within LDJam. Though I also want to look at starting a series of games for this as well, but I'll think more on that over the next few weeks.