Last week I entered the Ludum Dare game jam for the very first time. It was so much fun, but I also made quite some mistakes. And I love that! Here are some of the lessons I learned.

Any feedback is appriciated, so please check out my game.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/trash-planet-explorer

The wrong ratings

Knowing I didn't have any audio because I ran out of time, I wanted to disable rating for sound. But instead I accidentally opted out for graphics, which is probably the biggest selling point of the game. It's a silly mistake, but it really screws up my ratings at the moment.

Scope too big

Of course! We all have been there, haven't we? I think I don't have to explain this one.

No end game

When the game starts it is told that you have to reach the core to destroy the mainframe. Spoiler alert: there is no core and there is no mainframe to destroy. Next time I'll start with the end game condition and work my way back to the start of the game.

Unable to choose between procedural generated and hand crafted

When I first started I intended to make a procedural generated planet. The player would be free to explore, going either left or right. But somehow I ended up crafting the planet by hand in an attempt to better control the player experience. I feel procedural generated is definitely the way forward to a post-jam version of the game.

As a result only a portion of the planet is finished. When mrjoshuamclean streamed my game he actually got around the part that was finished, drifted endlessly into space and hit an out-of-bounds crash. I fixed that by adding invisible walls and a message that tells the player this is all there is for now. It's better to be honest about it than to allow player get lost.

Too hard

The main problem here is that some enemies start shooting even before they're visible in the player's view. The wiggle of the shooting direction contributes as well, since enemy behavior is even less predictable. I should have narrowed down the overall movement speed and ranges.

Dev tools still present

I like to have some dev tools available, like displaying player coordinates and being able to decrease or increase certain stats like shield. In the initial build some of the dev tools were still present. I patches them out pretty quickly, but I had to go all over my code to remove them manually. Right now I have a global DEV_MODE flag.

No playtesting

Next time I definitely should have some friends ready to playtest the game. I learned so much from people streaming my game on Twitch, but it was rather embarrassing seeing them struggle with design aspects I deemed to be helpful.

Game jams are all about learning. Making mistakes is good!