What a week this has been. LD41 was my first-ever game jam, and my finished entry, Love Is A Battlefield, is my first published game under my "Altrix Studios" banner, and the first published game I didn't make at university. (My scene creators on Newgrounds don't count.)

First of all, a massive thank you to everyone who's reviewed Love Is A Battlefield and left such kind words. It's especially amazing to see people whose games I followed all jam long, coming over and leaving positive reviews on mine! Honestly, I was happy just to get it out the door on time in an almost-entirely-working state, so the feedback is just the icing on the cake for me.

So, what have I learnt from those 48 hours?

What Went Well

• First of all, I think I got a bit lucky with the theme. It was one of the ones that caught my attention back in the Theme Slaughter round, and I was glad to see it win. If it had been one of my less-preferred themes, I might have struggled more to get off the starting blocks.
• My warm-up really helped as well. As practice for Ludum Dare, I spent most of April working on a PICO-8 demake of one of my uni projects... that happened to be a shoot-em-up. Love Is A Battlefield was coded entirely from scratch, and ended up being far more complex, but that practice run meant I had a good idea of what I was doing.
• Speaking of PICO-8, it was definitely the right choice of engine for me. No compile times, no tabbing between different programs, graphical constraints that helped disguise my mediocre drawing skills, and code length limits that forced me to scope small. I'll almost certainly be using it for any future Ludum Dares I enter.

What Went Badly

• In hindsight, I actually caused problems for myself before the event had even begun, by staying up late on Friday and then sleeping in on Saturday morning. If I'd gone to bed normally, and gotten up normally, I could have had 2-3 hours of extra development time, which would have really helped with the next thing...
• Testing. I just did not test this game enough. On multiple occasions, I went ahead and hacked in hundreds of tokens' worth of code without testing any of it, and then when I finally ran the game, I found I'd made half-a-dozen typos or introduced some silly glitch. The boss battle in particular was so glitchy that I had to post an update fixing it, after I told myself I wouldn't do that. The fixes took me literally fifteen minutes. I would have found them if I'd bothered to test things properly.
• I made a minor slip-up as well when submitting the game - I forgot to put the controls! Thankfully, from playing a few other PICO-8 games, it seems I wasn't the only one... but still, it's not great to wake up in the morning, excited to read your game's reviews, and the very first one just says "I couldn't figure out the controls". Oops.

What Comes Next?

I'm already working on a "DX" version of the game, to be released after judging ends. It'll take into account all the feedback I've gotten so far, and will have more polish, more features, and fewer bugs. I'm also working a more relaxed puzzle game, based on another theme idea I saw during the Slaughter, so I might post about that too.

Again: thank you all. This has been a wonderful introduction to Ludum Dare, and I absolutely intend to have a go at the next one as well.

~F1