Not long ago I wrote an answer to a post on Quora how to become more efficient making games in Unity and one of the key advice I decided to give was to participate in Ludum Dare. This applies to making games in any engine, and from scratch, it just happened to be a response to a Unity question this time.

I want to share the parts of what I find so powerful, useful, and fun with Ludum Dare in specific. This is aimed at the compo part of Ludum Dare but most points are valid for the Jam as well.

Time framing - You only have 48 hours to do everything so you can only spend so much time on each task.

Avoid Scope Creep - You won’t be able to let the scope creep where you spend a lot of time on details you didn’t have in mind to begin with - this lets you focus on making a complete game.

Multi-Disciplines - Since you have to do everything yourself you spend time on all elements that make up a game. This allows you to improve your skills in each area but you also learn what takes time and what it entails to create and implement mechanics, graphics, and sound.

Repetition - If you participate in multiple events over the year it lets you repeat this process of making a game over and over again. Implementing game states, game loops, and game logic helps you to cement the knowledge and figure out what works well and what does not.

Post-Mortems - When I have made a game in Ludum Dare, I write a post-mortem about the experience and go through what went well and what went wrong. I also read other post mortems (since there are 2–3000 other people making a game the same weekend) and you can learn a lot from that too.

Finish(!) something - It’s all too easy to prototype games and then dive into a project with great ambition which may take years to complete. You can easily lose yourself in such projects which both affects your motivation and your ability to follow through to a finished product.

Learn what takes time - By doing game jams you will find out that when you have what may feel like a “nearly complete game” and you estimate you are about 80% finished, you are more like 20% finished in reality. In the prototype you may have implemented the core mechanics, but transitioning between game states, resetting levels and objects, implementing the menu system, creating enough levels and figuring out good level progression (or story), implementing tutorials, doing play testing, and polishing the final product takes a lot more time than you may think.

I have participated in the 7 most recent Ludum Dares and when I got started I haven't been able to stop. It's just too much fun and too powerful of a tool to learn. My games so far have been:

LD42 - Parking Spaces

LD41 - Golf N' Grenades

Narrated "making of" Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_DmQ1kcYHM

LD40 - Robby & Coppy

Narrated "making of" timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXS9gZ671sY

LD39 - Robot Power

Narrated "making of" timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSCYn3dQX_4

LD38 - Planetary Remains

"Making of" Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc0YHI3KqMc

LD37 - Space Junk

"Making of" Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUAVqYFoueg

LD36 - Ancient Tech to Return

"Making of" Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VNQiAZPdvE

You can play these games and download the projects on my itch.io page: https://imphenzia.itch.io/

Hope you manage to find the time and motivation to participate in Ludum Dare 43. Take care everyone and make sure to practice your main tools a few days/weeks before the event begins :)