My first Ludum Dare was neither a success or a failure. I managed to “finish” the game enough to submit it in time, but it lacks so many of the things I drew up at the beginning of day one.

Things I learned:

– Plan how to use your time, just as you plan the game. I ended up cutting like crazy in the last two hours just to submit something that felt somewhat finished.

– Start with a pre-made engine. I spent hours in the beginning setting up my core classes that I could’ve really used at the end.

or

– Use pre-made art. I was more focussed on the code, but I still spent SOME time drawing that could’ve easily been replaced with some (far better) open license stuff.

– Decide before the theme is announced roughly what TYPE of game you want to make and think about it. I had planned out the whole game in the first hour, but I hadn’t really considered how long the code would take for the game from scratch. With more thought beforehand I could’ve planned out the code better and hit the ground running.

Title screen thrown together in the final moments of the compo

Tags: C++, opengl, postmortem, random, SDL