Finally, I have some free time to write a brief postmortem about my very first Ludum Dare game Big Fascinating Mutants.

Although I've been working as a game designer for years and have broad experience with crunches, I made a lot of silly mistakes. However, I'm happy with them as it's a valuable experience for my team and me. What kind of mistakes did I make?

Firstly, I suggested a redundantly big idea. We were planning from at the beginning to develop a colossal game for LD, e.g. we wanted to make: - 8 weapons; - 5 different enemies; - 1 boss fight; - 4 battle arenas with different level design; - 2 different player characters with unique abilities;

I was so excited at the start that I couldn't asses the volume of the work. Fortunately, our team managed to scale our ideas, but not very fast.

Secondly, I failed miserably with UI and UX. I have a lot of experience working on UI and UX alone as a game designer. However, this time I forgot to create a proper User Flow of the game which could have helped our programmer; as a result, our UX and UI awful.

Thirdly, the programmer had forgotten to make GIT for the project before the jam. Thus we lost a lot of precious time. We could have better spawner and AI, but we have what we have. Anyway, the programmer did his best and did a lot of work.

On the other hand, other game designers and I managed to make a lot of GD stuff, e.g. mutations design, level design (which we cut off) and balance table. Speaking about the table, it was beneficial when I had a hand in the game build for the first time. Unfortunately, it didn't help me make the game easier.

Although the problems we faced, I enjoyed the process and atmosphere of the jam. First of all, because the first two days of Ludum Dare 44 we spend at the creative space for indie game developers Indikator (RUSSIAN LANGUAGE) in Saint Petersburg. If you are in Saint Petersburg, you should visit this place. Additionally, I love seeing so many good games here on the web site. Hope, next time I'll be better.