post ludum dare post

Well, I didn't quite finish whatever it was that I was working on for Ludum Dare 22. To tell the truth I had some trouble with my idea. A couple of specific things come to mind:

1) 48 hours to do the /entire/ game, from concept to ship, is a very tight schedule, so the idea itself needs to come to form and solidify *very* quickly. I think Notch had his "Harvest Moon" idea within the first hour or two, like right after he had a blank window up and running in his code.

2) It might have been easier to do a 2D game, even using Unity3D, simply because it's a lot faster to draw low-res sprites than it is to do even the simplest 3D modeling. At least, with my current level of skill with MAX, which may very well improve with more use over the next few months.

3) As they always say, it is best to start the competition fully prepared. Usually this is meant in terms of tools, but I found myself adapting my work tactics as I went along, taking some really long breaks to sleep, nap, walk the dog, etc, and had to make a run to the store at one point to get some energy drinks and snacks. I could have arranged beforehand to have all of these things taken care of for the compo and minimized my time away from the keyboard.

4) Did not pick up on the music thing until maybe halfway through. My collection is a little thinned out right now, as I'm switching off of DRM music and am in the process of deleting a lot of what I had before - the proverbial pulling of the needle out of the arm. I made up for this lack of music on my computer with some internet radio. That really helped, and is something I'll continue to use in my daily work, but only came into play maybe halfway through.


So, to sum up, this was a really great learning experience, even though I didn't even get close to where I wanted to have been by the end. Having to work within a 48 hour window forced me to figure out ways of working quicker, much of which is applicable outside the competition. Obviously, this will all come in handy for the next Ludum Dare, which I definitely plan on doing when it comes around in April.

And also, there's like 600+ games submitted, which I intend to play as much of as I can, even though I'm not able to rate any of them because I didn't submit a game of my own. I'll probably follow up with another post once I've gotten through those with my thoughts on the other entries, some of which, just from the titles/screenshots look very interesting indeed.