Another Ludum Dare has come and gone and I have to say that my experience this time around was much different from that of previous compos. Miraculously, nothing seemed to break and I was able to get art and gameplay completely finished by the beginning of the second day. This was pretty amazing to me. Before I was coding right up to Submission Hour and the whole thing was very stressful for me. This time around, I found myself not only wasting time by browsing reddit but actually venturing out and trying to do music – something I have never tried before. Now, I’m not trying to say that I am better than anyone else here because of all my free time – looking at the submissions already I can see that you guys are way more talented than I could ever be. However, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that keeping your game simple can be one of the best things you can do in this compo. It gives you much more time to experiment with game development and saves you a few sleepless nights. I found it very helpful (in my case) to map out exactly what the game was, which was four main things. Winning, losing, combat, and puzzle solving. Once you have a set of base rules the coding goes a lot easier than making it up as you go along. Setting up an easy way to create levels can also be very helpful. The first thing I did was basic color recognition, so I could feed my game simple drawings and have it spit back fully rendered levels with sprite sheets and etc.

TL;DR: Have a plan, keep it simple, and automate what you can.

My submission is “Burgeon”, if anyone is curious. Good luck to everyone going for the Jam!