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So I made it. My first game jam, and I actually managed to finish a game in 48 hours. I had some pitfalls along the way, but overall it went way smoother than I expected.
“Weeeeeeee!”
What went right:
- An idea came rather rapidly
- I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted to make and how it should look like
- I got a working prototype running in around half an hour
- For it being the first time I had such a harsh deadline, there were hardly any time sinking problems
- Managed to get the game played on a stream and get some feedback from nice folks
- Actually ended up with a complete game, including story, intro, outro, credits and a good amount of levels
- Implemented an extra feature that I thought was cool: Recording and saving of your best-times, speedrun-style!
What wasn’t so great:
- I had no idea, nor time to make my own music. A friend made some, but I couldn’t include it. (It’s in the post-compo version though)
- Was using headphones that were quieter than usual thus making the game extremely loud by accident which took a while to set right
- Didn’t manage to include as many background details and polish the graphics up as much as I would have liked (LOVE details)
- Also couldn’t do a big round of testing so the game ended up pretty hard according to feedback. I fixed that in the post-compo version by adding more levels in the beginning that are easy and let the difficulty ramp up slowly and providing an alternate control scheme
Focus and working against the clock
To get this done I really had to crunch it. Making the graphics in addition to balancing the physics and then adding the boring to do bits (menus, text intro/outro etc) took a lot of dedication.
Fortunately I got motivated a lot by reminding myself that this is my first time doing a gamejam and finishing it means I will have a complete product that I can keep working on and improve upon. Another thing that motivated helped the motivation was…
Feedback and being able to show people what I made
This was also a major point in keeping me motivated. I never really saw strangers play one of my games, and the thought of that was exciting. I even managed to get the game played on two streams and seeing random people play the game, react to it and comment on it was an incredible experience.
I also met a lot of nice developers in the IRC and on the twitch streams and had a lot of fun talking about and sharing experiences.
What happened after the compo
The first thing I did was fixing up the things in the game I would have liked to improve before the time ran out: Added more levels, made the start easier etc. I also included some more art assets for the background to make the levels a bit more interesting. The drawings are usually what I pay a lot of attention to so it was a bit frustrating having to constrain myself like that. I uploaded the post-comp version and got positive feedback on that as well. All in all it felt like a huge success.
I will definitely try and do another jam, it was very fun and rewarding, and I learned a lot. About work flow, techniques, and I think I might even have improved my programming skills.
I wish everyone the best of luck with their future endeavors and hope to see you again on Ludum Dare soon.
