Hello guys! This my second Ludum Dare and my 4th game jam overall. I was (and am) really excited because unlike last time when I joined with friends, this time I participated along with my own students who I taught personally.

For LD40, I think we improved quite a bit comparing to last time, most notably we have a dedicated artist. Despite being his debut game jam he was the one who conjured the game's idea. I loved it immediately because not only is it immediately fun, it also have a subtle layer of philosophy underneath.

For the game's design. I think the lesson I had from last LD was very educative. This time I kept the player base (other Jammers) in mind throughout the process and designed the game based on it. There are 2 clear distinctions between LD jammers and a random player that I noted:

• LD Jammers are surprisingly careful to read. Maybe because we have to create tutorials and lore ourselves, we're also careful to read a game's story. Taking advantage of that we added some background story for the game and it seems everyone paid attention to it (excuses the non-native English). It make me really happy - phrasing all that stuff was not easy. I think while gameplay make a game, lore make the game realistic and extensible.
• LD Jammers won't spend a lot of time playing your game. This shouldn't come as a surprise at all: given the number of submitted games, surely anyone would want to spend their time wisely and play as many games as possible. The result of that is no one would spend a lot of time mastering tricky moves or exploring non-obvious secrets (they would but only if your game is really, really good). That's why we created a game where you literally cannot lose. Everyone can enjoy the full game to the end, and if they liked it, we made it obvious that they can try again for better contents.

The resulting game is satisfying for me personally, the game got quite positive feedback from both LD Jammers and our friends, much better than last time's (nowhere near Managoore's, but well).

But most importantly it shown I've learned a lot from last time.

It is not all roses though, there're a lot of things we could have improved, like how we were nowhere nearly as hardcore as last time (we actually slept 4 times in 3 days!) because half of us caught a cold before or during the jam.

The pixel art could be better, and at panic rush moment I had to scale some assets on the HUD and broke pixel scale. There was a @!#$%& sound bug on WebGL that took me 3 hours and still unfixable now, and we had to workaround by removing that particular sfx - we should've checked WebGL compatibility earlier. And we almost submitted a test version (immediate gameover!) and went to sleep, luckily a friend played the game at the time and notified me about it, just in time for the fix.

It was a wild ride, and it was really fun! Looking forward to next one!

(Cleaning up the room after use was not an easy task)

And of course, the mandatory shameless advertisement: Play my game! I always play others' game carefully and give constructive feedbacks, not just "Nice", "Great", "Ok" :smile: