Hi after finishing the jam and updating a couple of fixes, we can now share out experience. So here is our postmortem.

If you want to know what I'm writting about, here is our game.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/they-ran-out-of-mana

What went right:

1 - Game design freeze before the jam.

When Pau and I decided to join the jam some months ago we agreed that doing a card game would be fun.

Cards everywhere!

A few weeks ago I came our with an abstract game mechanic. The idea was to put a theme on it based on the winning one. The initial design was more complex of what we ended up doing, but gave us a lot of focus and saved us valuable time. When the final round of themes was announced we imagined, for all of them, how could we add a twist to the card game. Some were easy some were not. Which leads us to...

2 - The wining theme: Life is your currency.

We were super happy with it. Necromancers are cool. Its my default class when playing games suchs as Wow, Guild Wars, Diablo, Hearthstone, etc and the theme was screaming Necromancers!!.

Also, mechanically it was one of the easier themes of the final round to adapt to our initial design. Our game concept didn’t have a resources/mana system so we this was not a breaking change.

Our initial plan was having free cards of different colors and the oportunity cost of playing all cards of only one color was our resource management mechanic. So It was easy to add a currency system based on life layer on top of it.

At the end we removed the color based system because of scope issues. The game was still fun thanks to the need to pay cards with life.

Necromancers don't like each other. Everybody knows that

3 - Team compatibility and scope.

Pau and I have been working on projects together since university. So we know how to organize work and what we are capable of doing. Our interests and skills are quite complementary. I like to think of crazy ideas, love game design and quickly prototype tons of unpolished features. Pau is super methodical and can spend a whole day polishing the smallest thing, he doesn't mind much about the design as long as it is fun and has good art skills.

After having worked on a couple of game jams with physics based gameplay we moved to something more deterministic and turn based. It was the right choice.

Being able to work on the same physical place was a big plus.

What went wrong

1 - We didn’t have an artist in the team. Luckily, Pau drawing skills are awesome, but his programming skills are even better and he lost a lot of coding time to work on art.

We did what we could

2 - First jam as dads.

Both Pau and I have children now. That’s why we skipped previous 10 ludum dares.

For this one we sealed dark pacts with our families. But anyway we spent half jam with the kids.

Also on sunday it was national elections day in our country and we had to go voting.

progress_1.gif The game looked like this on saturdat night.

3 - No sound = no glory

Because of the reasons above we had to reduce scope to the minimum.

Gameplay goes first. Art is fun. Sound lost the battle.

And it's a shame because sound makes games so much better.

4 - Re-learning Unity.

We spent too much time googling basic stuff. Why do my scriptable objects break? How does animation work? Our last game jam was ludum dare 33. Many things have changed. Even more things we have forgotten.

This is our final result

That would resume our jam experience. How about yours?