This was my second Ludum Dare (my first one was LD42 with the game Pyramidion), and both times I had a really awesome time with the jam!

This time was definitely more stressful for me, but also much more rewarding. I wanted to write a short post with my results and my conclusions from this jam.

Results

I'm super happy with the results this time! I got top 100 in 'fun', which is the most important category IMO (other than overall), and top 100 in 'innovation'. Also, a great improvement in overall score over my last LD - up by 0.3 points over the 3.525 I got for Pyramidion last time. The only score that took a big hit over last time is graphics. Last time, I got a score of around 3.5, and this time it's down to less than 3.

I think the main thing that worked for me last time is that I had a very clear "ancient egypt" theme which made my graphics very consistent, but it was also an artistic style that was kind of easy to draw in a way that looked pretty decent:

This time, I didn't have such a clear theme for my graphics, and the graphics ended up being pretty inconsistent, with more realistic textures used for the backgrounds, but more "cartoonish" style used for characters and items:

The other thing that worked for me last time is that the game was much simpler, so I was left with much more time for improving the graphics. This time around, I had only around ~0.5 day for drawing all the animations, and much more time was spent on designing levels and improving gameplay.

My conclusions

• This time, I really feel motivated to try and publish a post-jam version. Mainly as an exercise for myself to try and polish the game more, making it a bit more pleasant to look at, but also just because I have many more ideas for improving the mechanics and adding more levels and I want to try them out. I hope to publish a slightly improved version that's also playable on mobile before the next Ludum Dare.

• As for my last game, watching and interacting with streamers playing my game was the most insightful part of the experience. I strongly encourage anyone who hasn't done this to try going to some twitch channels and submitting your games. I learned so much from this experience about what worked and what didn't work in my game.

• I don't think I'll manage to become an artist by the next jam, but I want to study the more polished-looking games in this jam and try to understand how I can get a more aesthetically pleasing game next time. There were many games I played that used very simple "programmer art" but still looked great.

That’s all. I had a lot of fun and I can't wait for the next Ludum Dare. Thank you to everyone who played my game! Even though the jam is over, I'm still happy for more feedback, so if you're feeling bored and like solving puzzles, please play my game and let me know what you think.