Ludum Dare 42 was my 4th time participating in the jam, and each time it is a totally new and different experience. My teammate @SpicyRhino and I made the game Gravity Well, an action puzzler in which you must guide your spaceship to the end of each level by placing black holes to effect your trajectory. Here is a quick audit of our creative process and a post-mortem of what we learned this time around.

The Pre

In previous Jams I have competed with teams of 3-4 people, but this was the first time with just 2 of us, both with limited schedules. This personnel and scheduling crisis meant we had to curb our enthusiasm and let our constraints make some choices for us. We spent the first hour of the jam brainstorming, the results of which can be seen below.

We started by performing a brain dump. No bad ideas. Fill the page, make the font smaller, repeat.

We then picked 3 that we liked the best and fleshed them out a bit.

Finally we did a quick analysis of the feasibility of the idea as well as answering the all important question "Where is the fun?"

In the end we picked the Gravity Well concept and started work.

The Post

I am very happy with our game, but there are several things that I would change. Our process was solid, but our limited experience held us back a bit. The GUI drag-and-drop controls were not quite functional and not being able to re-position things in the game-field was an issue. (All of which were fixed post-jam). Some play-testers had issues finding the reverse-thrust button, so I would like to make that more obvious in any future releases. It sucked not to have 100% original assets for the game, but I will be replacing those shortly.

Overall I am very proud of the game we made, and have lots of ideas on how to improve it and to make it fully featured. It has good potential as a mobile game and so I eventually want to get it to the app store. Of all the games that I have made, this one is the one I will most likely keep working on.

Link to the page for Gravity Well

I look forwards to hearing from you all at the next Jam!