This time, Ludum Dare was quite different.
First of all, the game I made is this one, called CubeShift:
You play the blue box and have the objective of reaching the hole through all the moving and stationary obstacles. That’s all there is to it, in a nutshell at least. Some levels require thinking, some moves need to be timed extremely well, but the basic idea is pretty simple.
Unfortunately, I could only work on my game for 12 hours on Saturday, so I submitted early.
I was the 18th person overall to submit, and I think the 3rd one for the compo, but I could be wrong here. Lots of people found the game and played it already back then. I received tons of comments – not a single negative one among them, and that’s still the case now. Well, there were some ideas for improvement, mainly about making the game longer and perhaps a bit more difficult, which I could luckily both do on Sunday, opposed to what I had expected.
Multiple people suggested putting this out as a mobile game, and that’s what I’m going to do soon, I promise! With lots of additional levels and also more “baddies”, as someone said.
The contradiction of effort vs. success
Fact of the matter is, I haven’t played a single game yet (didn’t have the time! I plan to play lots and lots of your games later, there are so many great ones!), but still my vote count after just 1.5 days is already a multiple of the count I reached last time, after the whole three weeks, with playing other games and making blog posts and tweeting included. So many of you commented, too, and I got the greatest feedback I ever received.
The conclusion to be drawn is that simple = good. Sure, everybody heard something like that before, but could you say you took it seriously? Probably not. I didn’t, either… Yet, here’s the proof.
Remember, I spent 12 hours on the game. On my previous 5 entries, I worked about 34 hours on average (probably).
Post mortem, this was …
… a great Ludum Dare. Not just because of all the feedback, but also because of the new things I learned, like what I wrote above.
My time was very much limited, yet, the fun I had surely wasn’t. Developing a game for the web the first time ever felt really smooth, too.
Oh, and the music, I’m so happy with how that turned out!
You can of course play CubeShift as well, if you’d like