Well, this has definitely been one of the more unusual LDJams I've participated in. Usually, I either participate on-time, or I completely miss that LD is underway until it's already well done and gone. This time was different; I remembered LD was happening ~19 hours into the Jam, went "oh CRAP", and jumped straight into a new design-doc to work out what game I'd make this time. Settled initially just on "something with a robot where all your weapons, armor, etc use your personal battery & if you run out, it's game over", thinking it'd probably be a top-down wave-shooter in the vein of The Fallen, with the notable gimmick of being able to trade your maximum energy for artifacts that grant new powers and the likes.

That wound up changing to a side-scrolling dungeon-crawler of some kind, and my first 24 hours were mostly spent faffing about in other areas whilst slowly building a character-controller. Not a whole lot of motivation until towards the end of those 24 hours, which saw the starts of a procedural-weapon system. Unfortunately, being that I started late, I only had another ~24 hours to go, and still the motivational troubles persisted. Until the last ~8 hours or so (the final day), at which point I had a stroke of semi-genius on how to do a vaguely Metroidvania-style finite map, and spent the remainder of the day cramming to smooth out the pre-requisites for random map generation, followed by about two hours of massive stress trying to finish the map generator in time to submit.

Unfortunately, I didn't succeed; when the hour hit, the world-generator was suffering some catastrophic failures, and enemies didn't even exist yet. As Submission Hour rolled in to a close, I put up a barebones template page under the Unfinished category w/ a link to the as-of-the-time unfinished Gitlab & Itch.IO pages, and threw in the towel on submitting in time for an actual scored entry. Kept working on it, though, and here we are about a day later and ~75 hours of dev-time in, with a post-release post-mortem. A few hours after Submission Hour closed, I'd managed to fix the world-generator, and over the course of the next day, most of the remaining critical polish got put in - all three sizes of weapon are now available, enemies are present, you can win and lose the game, et cetera. So, while it's a day late, the game is done (for the time being) and now playable via Itch.IO, and the source is available at GitLab.

My lessons from this Ludum Dare are probably only a pair this time; one, check the bloody calendar to make sure LD isn't already half-over, and two, don't bloody procrastinate playing Breath of the Wild instead of making videogames. Gah. On that note, I'm going to go procrastinate playing Breath of the Wild whilst recovering from that mad development spree. If all goes according to plan, I'll be playing some of your games fairly soon, so if you happen to want feedback, I'd be glad to provide some if you'll leave a comment, though I dunno if my ratings will count, being that my game is Unfinished. Cheers, fellow jammers!