Prospective here

My second ludum dare (and two of our teammates' first!) is complete! It was a huge success for us, and I'm really stoked our team turned out to work so well together.

Starting Out

We began coming up with ideas for all the theme finalists the day before the reveal. You can see those here. I was really looking forward to Limited Memory, Ridiculously Overpowered, and Side Effects based on what we'd come up with. While we had an okay idea for Your Life is Currency it was kindof on the bottom of the list (just above Change the Genre of a Classic Video Game, which is objectively the worst).

So when that theme got picked we all kindof sighed, but with my cat Taki as our muse we ended up ditching the death-harvesting-furnishing idea and developing the mechanics of what turned into Don't Die, Dumpstercat!.

What Went Right

• Having a starter cart ready to go we were able to jump right in and start working on making a game rather than an engine. By the end of the first day we had basic platforming and collision stuff done, as well as an almost complete game-loop (even if there weren't any enemies yet).
• We pivoted really fast into a working idea that would be small enough in scope for our skills and experience.
• We took advantage of PICO-8's new #include functionality and took the time to make sure everyone knew how to work git in a basic sense, which made version control a lot easier than last time.
• We had people who actually want to make art and music. This was huge for motivation as we could see the game getting better even when the coders were stuck on a problem.
• WE FINISHED! And not only a barebones game but one with multiple purchasable abilities and different enemy types. Yes, there's only one level, but feedback has indicated that the abilities add to the replayability of it, which affirms that we put our effort in the right place.

What Went Rightn't

• I failed to understand how the PICO-8 cart is laid out as far as art and music go. This led to some version control headaches until I figured out that placing a blank sprite on each sheet fixes the issue and makes everything simple to merge.
• We didn't build the game with new levels in mind right away. By the time I went back to try and implement this it was 6pm on Monday and I ran out of time.
• We didn't document as much as I wish we had. Photos, timelapse, streaming? All of these would have been fun but I guess we were too focused on the game to bother.
• We didn't end up with much time to playtest so balancing the game proved difficult. We as a team felt that the game was too difficult and wanted people who were quickly playing through to give it a rating a fair shot at completing it, so we tuned it to be a bit easier. But now we're getting feedback that the game is too easy. Game balance is really difficult, especially under a time constraint, so I don't feel too bad about this one, and I also feel that we were in the right to lean toward too easy rather than too difficult. More time would have done wonders for fine-tuning though.

In Conclusion

This Ludum Dare was a big success for us. Not only finishing something but making such a stride over the last one feels great, especially with new teammates, less coders, and a theme we weren't actually looking forward to.

We already have enough ratings to get ranked, and most of the comments have been positive:

Next Time

We're going to take some time between this jam and the next one to get familiar with Godot. Debating between gdscript and C#/C++ for scripting in it but I think we're ready to step out of the fantasy-console world and into something a little less restrictive.

For Now

Gonna spend the next 20 days playing and rating as many entries as I can. I've been blown away by some of the ones I've played thus far. Nice job to everyone who participated, and thanks for playing!