Universal Powers is my first LD entry, for LD39.

If you'd be interested in checking it out, you can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/universal-powers

Even though I'm proud of what I made (and I probably should be), there's some problems with it... Both minor and major.

The Great

• The amount of content: In the time-span of 48h, I managed to get 66 situations working, drew about 35 unique sprites, thought of 80 somewhat witty buffer-screen texts, and even found time to get some neat little things going on the background.
• The "repeating"-buffer: Because the game in completely based on randomness, there'd be a chance you get the same situation three times in a row, so I added a "repeating"-buffer, which makes sure you get at least 33 unique situations before they can be used a second time. This also holds for the planets displayed.
• The fact I finished the game.

The Good

• The art: Even though the pixel-art is probably sub-par, it was my first real attempt at trying to pixel-art, and I thought it turned out really good. You can see four of the "planet"s I'm particularly proud ofdown below.
• The humor: I'll come back to this later.
• The sounds: Even though they weren't the highest quality, I quite liked how the sounds turned out and how it gave the game a bit of character.
• The polish: Though not perfect, I believe to think the game was quite polished.

The Bad

• The humor: The main problem with the humor is that it's focused on very niche groups of people. It's all over the place with the references (Isaac, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, League of Legends, memes, ...), and every situation basically has a reference in there that at least one group will understand. Though this isn't per se bad, it's not great either.
• The flow of the game: Even though it's meant to be a slow experience and the enjoyment should be from reading the absurd texts

The Terrible

• The balancing: Even though technically all the outcomes were fairly balanced, the game was made in such a way that it was impossible to balance properly. The problem lies with the arbitrariness of the choices made. They result mostly in absurd outcomes (they are both a blessing and a curse, really), which technically line up with the stats gained, but it's off-throwing more often than not.
• Artificial difficulty: Don't hate me for this, but because I feared people would go on playing this game forever and would think it's "too easy", I added a secret bit of artificial difficulty in there. All stats are automatically being drained constantly, with the formula taking care of it being:

(currentSituation^1.5f - 2 * currentSituation) / (65 + currentSituation * 1.75)

This isn't that big of a deal, but the fact this sets a rush behind the normally relaxed feeling of the game after situation 10, and the fact it's not clearly communicated to the player, this decision was the worst one in there. This also makes it virtually impossible to get past situation 20 consistently.

The Conclusion

Overall, I think the game turned out fairly well. I feel like I did good on all aspects I'd never think to do good on (art, music, humor), and failed on the only thing I really got going for me (game design)... which is interesting, to say the least. In the end it did turn out way better than anything I've made in the past, which feels kinda great, but is kinda sad at the same time.