Thanks to everyone who played and rated Screen Space Defender! I had a blast playing your games!

Ratings Breakdown

Postmortem

The theme of this jam was "Running out of space". Participants were given 72 hours to create a game from scratch that incorporated this theme. The concepts and mechanics I came up with were:

• An Arcade game where the player types incoming filenames to prevent them from being downloaded and having their hard drive run out of space
• An Action game where the player must eliminate enemies in a specified order to make the approaching spiked walls recede
• An Action game where colored boxes fall from the sky and must be destroyed by the player by matching their fist color to the box before being crushed
• A Puzzle game where the player must unscramble images and close panes to prevent their desktop from running out of space

I went with my fourth idea as I felt it was the most unique. I also thought it would be fun to create the simulated operating system in the game.

What Went Right

• The game was completed and submitted on time
• The presentation was polished and visually appealing
• The mechanics worked well and the audio selection complimented the gameplay nicely

What Went Wrong

• The difficulty scaling mechanic of having multiple versions of each puzzle with an increasing number of pieces made the game too hard and was removed
• The delay added between selecting the second puzzle piece and the swap occurring was too long and not well received
• Limited testing time resulted in some bugs making it into the release (patched post-release)

Conclusion

Another Ludum Dare in the books! This was my second game jam, and while it didn't go quite as smoothly as I had planned, it was a great learning experience that resulted in another playable title.

Time is always an issue. The 72 hour window is tight and really forces you to refine your scope. I had planned to add an online leaderboard, as well as additional animation, OS interaction, and puzzles, which didn't make the cut. This is something I hope to improve on in the next jam.

I'm happy to have made progress in the graphics department. As a programmer, art is not one of my stronger skills, although it is something I have been working on. Screen Space Defender rated higher than Deck of the Dead in Graphics and Mood so I consider that a win in itself.

I'd like to thank everyone for playing and rating Screen Space Defender. The feedback is greatly appreciated. I had a blast creating, playing, and rating games during this jam and I can't wait to do it all again for Ludum Dare 43 in November!

Play Screen Space Defender

Dave Brake Creations