Here’s a quickly written, crappy, and way too long (sorry..) post mortem for LD40, and some plans for the future.

The jam

Since LD30 I haven’t been feeling very motivated to work on any games. I started working on my codebase maybe a week before the jam, but I didn’t add or rewrite that much. It’s still pretty messy and badly optimized. I was also smart enough to not properly test my new level loading and editor scripts, which was pretty stupid of me.

I live in Sweden, so Ludum Dare always start at 3 am on Saturday. Past jams I’ve gone to bed really early on Friday to get up somewhere around 2:00 and 2:30 am, because I’ve really wanted to be awake when the theme is announced. This time I didn’t go to bed until around 1 am, and decided to sleep the whole night. I woke up at 9 am and checked the theme. I’d gotten the idea of making a golf game when seeing the theme “The more you have, the worse it is” during voting. I felt like traditional mini golf has been done so many times, and thought that I could do disc golf instead to make things a little bit more interesting. I don’t actually know how disc golf works, and I didn’t intend to research it. This is therefore only my take on how it plays. It’s not realistic either, but I think realism is a bit boring though and not very important to me. The player must feel like the game is predictable to some degree, but I think that can be achieved by consistency instead of realism.

The idea is that you walk around a world in a top down perspective, playing disc golf holes scattered across the world. By scoring well enough on certain holes, new areas of the world would unlock. The original idea was a lot bigger than what I soon realized was possible: I had intended there to be enemies and fighting to make the game more dynamic and add some action. I soon realized this was unrealistic to make in the time frame of the jam, so I had to scrap the idea. My first problem came while planning out how the game would play: the level script in my codebase didn’t support diagonal collisions – and I thought making a golf-style game that played on the idea of the ball, or in this case the disc, bouncing off walls would be pretty dull. The first thing I did during the jam was to add 45° diagonal collision support to the level script in my codebase. I have always thought of slopes and diagonals as something super tricky, but after drawing it out on paper I had a good idea of how it would work. It still probably took me an hour or two to code, but it was really worth it.

Coding the disc and the player went well and wasn’t that challenging. Adding the rest of the features didn’t take that much time each, but many small things accumulated to a lot of time spent. My biggest problem during the whole jam was making the disc bounce of edges in the right direction. I spent many hours trying to understand why the disc sometimes didn’t bounce the right way, but eventually I decided drawing this out on paper would be a good idea. I then realized what was wrong and was able to fix it very quickly. It still seems to be a little bit off, but it’s pretty consistent. I think I’m pretty good at planning and drawing out things when I don’t understand, but I can clearly get even better at doing it.

My concentration was really good during this jam if I compare to previous ones. Usually I get tired around lunch on Saturday, and things go pretty slow. This time Saturday just flew by, and I went to bed around 1 am pretty happy with what I had. I still felt behind schedule after spending a lot of time fixing the bouncing problem. Sunday started off nicely, and things were going pretty well. Around lunch I started feeling very exhausted and felt very far behind. The rest of the jam I struggled to keep myself focused. I drew a small world map for the final game in Tiled Editor, but when I was transferring the levels to the game I encountered a few new bugs I hadn’t seen before. Transferring the levels wasn’t fun work either, I just wanted to get my game “done”. The bugs could’ve been fixed pretty easily, but I decided to save what I could and submit early because I felt too tired to continue. I put a “tutorial” hole, my testing level and a start and win room into the game and submitted it.

I can’t say I’m too happy with what I submitted, but it was a fun LD. These 48 hours were as always really worth it.

Plans for the future

This was my 10th Ludum dare, but I can’t say I feel like I know what I’m doing. I’ve developed a bit of a routine for the 48h jam format, but I have such a long way to go. This applies to gamedev in general, not only jams. When I participated in my first Ludum Dare, LD31, I had just recently started learning programming. I used unity, and didn’t even know about public variables yet. Since then I’ve gone a long way. I’m self learning, and my programming knowledge is still very limited. I’m starting too feel like I kind of know what I’m doing and how to go about doing things though. I haven’t really put too much effort into really learning to code properly. I feel fairly secure with lua at this point, but I want to learn properly in the future. I’d also like to learn some other languages, especially lower level languages.

Since LD31 I’ve participated in many jams and worked on a couple of games outside jams. Although I worked on quite a few games outside jams, none of those projects ever made it online for others to play. I always say I might rework my jam games, and on a few occasions I started doing it, but I often lack the motivation. It’s not impossible that I will rework one or two in the future, but I think it’s pretty nice to move onto new projects after LD. Ludum dare always gives me a huge motivation boost, and I’d like to start using that boost more, instead of playing with my submission for a week or two and then throwing it on the death-pile with the rest of my games.

My next step in gamedev is extending my “attention span” for projects. By over scoping my projects I lose interest before I’ve gotten anywhere. Instead of trying to force myself to keep working on too big projects I now want to start to work on shorter and smaller project, and once I’m done with that I can consider working on something a little bit bigger, and a little bit more ambitious.

I’ve told myself countless times to do this kind of thing without too much success, but I intend to succeed this time by setting realistic limits and shorter deadlines deadline, without letting myself crunch too hard. I will have to force myself to sit down and work on projects, because no project is all fun. At the same time it’s really important that I don’t stress about getting stuff done. By working on smaller projects I hope to get more experience with the whole process of making games.

My current goals are: - Keep working on the codebase to have a nice environment to make games - Get a game or two finished and out there - Explore many small ideas and polish them until they feel like finished games - Always work on some game and/or other creative stuff, instead of working super hard every third month and then losing interest - Learn how to set realistic goals - Increase my gamedev "attention span"

We will see how far I can get until LD41. I hope to see you there!