https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/cloud-game-early-build

Whew! What a ride! This was my first Ludum Dare, and I'd be lying if I said that it was easy. Here's how my weekend went:

Friday: 1. Created a concept for a lightbulb-robot puzzle-platformer, then scrapped it for a single-screen arcade concept, featuring a cute cloud and her garden. 2. Posted a witty gif of my progress, and went to bed.

Saturday: 1. Reveled in the Twitter-likes for my gif. Felt good inside. 2. Worked my butt off for one hour at a time, but took plenty of breaks. Took a walk to the market, spent time with my wife, sat on the deck. 3. Drank 3 energy drinks and polished gameplay and effects until 3 AM, when I realized that my sleepy-time code was causing more problems than it was solving. Lay in bed, wide awake, bugeyed and worried that I wasn't going to finish.

Sunday: 1. Woke up at 7, overtired and grumpy that I hadn't worked hard enough on Saturday. 2. Nailed down the rest of gameplay, planning to spend some time in the afternoon on UI, music and sound effects in the afternoon. 3. Frantically realized that Sunday is a family day for both my side of the family, as well as for my wife's family, and as a grown man, I can hardly just sit at the dinner table on my computer, ignoring the people closest to me. 4. Stressed. 5. Nearly threw in the towel. 6. Received a pep talk from my wife, and submitted what I had, even though I wasn't satisfied with the product at the time, and didn't even have a name for it. 7. Sunk into the depths of despair. 8. Got over it. Realized that I made a cool game, and was amazed that Stargust hadn't existed just days before. 9. Regained composure and took control of my life once more. The end.

So, let's analyze my performance.

Bad Choices I Made! 1. Spent too much time on Twitter. Maybe it's a gamedev thing, or just a social media addict thing, but I love gifs. I spent hours on Twitter during valuable hours on Saturday, checking out gifs from other devs, and enjoying the attention that my own gifs were getting. While I'm still glad that I had the chance to check out other Ludum Dare work and get acquainted with some really cool people, I do wish that I had kept my nose to the grindstone a little more during the early hours on Saturday. After all, I wasn't overtired during these hours, and a little less procrastination could have saved me a ton of stress on Sunday! 2. Too much caffeine on Saturday. I need caffeine. It's who I am. But a grown adult like me should know better than to pound three energy drinks after midnight. Seriously. That's just ... profoundly foolish. I could have slept much better on Saturday night if I had just closed my laptop at 11, and accepted the fact that Well-Rested Andrew will code much better in the morning than Miserable-Toxic-Green-Drink-Hangover Andrew. 3. Focused too much on my intro in the last hours. Making a nice, clean intro interface, along with animations or a game-over screen, can be a very time-consuming experience. I should have taken these last crunch hours and spent the time writing up my Ludum Dare page, prepping my game for upload, and/or coming up with a proper name for the game. Not many people checked out the game when it first launched, probably because I uploaded it as 'Cloud Game - Early Build'. I might as well have launched it as 'Cloud Game Please Don't Play This Game I Am Dissatisfied With It So Leave It Alone Okay'. It just wasn't appealing, and certainly didn't match the spirit of the game. In the end, I didn't finish my intro anyway, and it marred my otherwise polished game with a tacked-on, unfinished opening screen. In the future, if I'm lacking a proper intro at crunch time, I'll write up my controls and instructions, slap them in the game's Ludum Dare page, and let the user find the instructions that way. It's cleaner, easier, and much less time-consuming.

Good Choices I Made! 1. Opting to make simple arcade-style game. My original game concept was cool, but I knew immediately that I wouldn't have time to commit to its complex level structure, puzzle design and complicated physics. Dropping the complicated concept was a great idea, and saved me a ton of frustration. Stargust's simple structure allowed me to focus on gameplay, animations and the sort of things that matter most to me, instead of slaving away just to create a working physics system or passable level design. 2. Spent time with my wife and family. Even though these weren't technically 'productive' hours, the fact is that even though Ludum Dare is a competition, spending time with the people I love should still be a priority, even if I don't feel like making the time for it. 3. Submitted what I had finished, even though I didn't want to. Maybe it's part of being a creative person, but there's a tendency in me to view my art as a boolean. It's either true or false. Worth it, or not. In times of stress, the grey areas between ON and OFF can be hard to see, but that in-between space is there, objectively. Yes, my game launched without sound or a proper intro. And yes, it wasn't what I had hoped to submit. But I'm still glad I did. Stargust is a cute game, and one that I'm immensely glad to have made. It taught me a lot about what I can accomplish in a short period of time, and the game's activity on Twitter introduced me to a ton of other jammers who I'd never have otherwise connected with.

So, to summarize: Ludum Dare is great! I'll play again! But next time, I'll focus harder on dev during the early hours, treat myself a little better in the late hours, and avoid sweating the little details in the last minutes. We make games, after all! This should be fun, not an exercise in self-destruction. So, with that said, I hope you all enjoy Stargust in its unfinished form, and I'll be sure to make a big deal about it on Twitter when it's time to launch the final version! :D