How I spent my time

The first 2 hours were spent coming up with an idea. I had a few different ideas, including a tetris game where bricks expand after every turn (leaving you out of space), and an inventory management game where you need to fit items in a limited inventory. I thought all of these ideas are super original, but of course I later saw similar things implemented again and again in different LD games :) (to be honest, many of these implementations were much more original than what I would come up with).

Eventually, I brainstormed with my wife and came to the idea of going up the pyramid, trying to avoid creatures running around. Here’s the original design drawing:

I then started with drawing the main character. I’m not an artist, so this took me a long time, and the results weren’t very good. Here is my original pencil drawing:

I “scanned” the drawing (by taking a picture with my cell phone), then colored over it with gimp:

And then animated the character using aseprite:

Obviously it’s very amateurish (and the hands move all wrong!), but I think given what a noob I am at this kind of thing, in my opinion it came out rather nice.

However, this took a very long time. 6 hours after the start, I basically had the player and snake characters animated, and had them walking around in unity:

The next 4 hours, I coded the simple AI for the snake, and started playing around with trying to avoid the snakes:

Eventually, I spent most of Saturday trying to polish the AI to make the snakes fun to avoid in different room sizes. This was eventually what probably took most time in developing my game. I wrote an entire post about this process so I’ll keep it short here. I’ll just say that one thing I learned - while it seemed very tedious while I was doing it, this was eventually the most rewarding work. It was amazing watching people have fun playing my game after spending so much time making sure it’s actually fun.

Sunday was spent mostly on polishing, adding things that are not essential to gameplay, such as adding all the hieroglyphics and wall painting, the Horus character and the dialog at the start of the game, the end game, and a few of the animations.

Sunday night was then spent on making easy mode, which was surprisingly simple to do (since it didn’t contain any new elements, except for different snake AIs which was just a bunch of tweaks of already exposed variables in the AI script).

Monday morning was spent on drawing and programming the hawk character and making / balancing hard mode.

Results

If I understand correctly there were about 1300 games, so that puts me in the top 35% which I’m pretty happy about for my first attempt at Ludum Dare! Also, I’ve had a game breaking bug (that made the game unplayably slow for around a fourth of the players) which I discovered and fixed only around 40 hours after my submission, so I imagine it also affected my score.

One thing that surprised me is the relatively high “mood” rating. I’m not sure what mood actually means - I thought only sad or scary games get a good mood score. I guess what happens is that the sad/scary games get the top results and the others just get assigned to a random score and I got lucky :)

Alternatively, maybe people scored it high because of the “ancient egyptian drawings” theme I’ve made for my game.

My conclusions

• I need to work on my method for creating art assets for the game. This took very long for me and ended up eating a very large portion of my time. I think I could get at least twice as fast, allowing me to create many more animations and characters for my game.
• Gameplay programming is really fun, probably the most rewarding of all the work I’ve done in the jam! It’s awesome watching people playing my game and commenting about all the design decisions I’ve made.
• Watching streamers play the game was one of the most insightful things for me this jam. Next time I’m going to take at least one more day off from work to be able to watch and interacts with a few streams.

That's it. Had a lot of fun participating in Ludum Dare! Can't wait for the next one. Thank you to everyone who played my game! I'm still happy for more feedback so if you're feeling bored and have a spare 5 minutes, please play my game and let me know what you think.