With Ludum Dare 44 winding down, it's time to reflect on how things went for me. Firstly, as always, a massive "Thank you!" to everyone who's played 15 Minutes to Live, and especially those who left comments and feedback. While I won't go into details here, my self-confidence has taken a battering recently, and I honestly needed the pick-me-up that LD44 provided.

So, as always: what went well with 15 Minutes to Live, what didn't, and where do I go from here?

What Went Well

• 15 Minutes to Live has, by far and away, the most content I've ever crammed into a Ludum Dare entry. The dialogue alone is larger than the entire code base of any of my previous entries. The playable area is about the combined size of The Gods Are Angry's four levels, but with much more variety and content. And of course...
• Music! Every Ludum Dare I've said, "This time it'll have music", and every Ludum Dare I ran out of time. But with the last hour or so I had left, I was able to get to grips with TIC-80's music tracker and compose a simple 16-second loop with a thumping heartbeat rhythm. It's short and repetitive, but it works... and it's there.
• I've been writing for much longer than I've been coding, and finally I was able to properly exercise my writing ability, without being constrained by the PICO-8's tiny screen size. I think 15 Minutes to Live has the best writing and dialogue of any of my published games so far.

What Went Badly

• I overscoped. There is so much more I wanted to include, but didn't or couldn't. I didn't even get to program Vance's walk cycle, he just glides around like he's already dead. That's not a stylistic choice, I literally just ran out of time before I could get round to it. The end result is a game with a 15-minute time limit and (going by most of the comments) 5 minutes of content.
• Collision detection, my eternal nemesis. When you press Z, the game draws a hitbox, and checks to see if any NPCs are inside it. The hitbox is obviously a bit wonky, and if you're directly beneath an NPC, it doesn't always find them. When there are three NPCs standing behind counters - and you have to speak to two of them to complete the game - this causes a bit of a problem. You can also apparently glitch through solid objects sometimes. I have no idea how that's possible. All I know is I'm really starting to miss Unity's collider system.
• As proud as I am of the dialogue, the actual storyline kinda falls apart if you stop to think about it. Why didn't anyone just lend Vance some time? Even just a week? Is everyone really so stingy and heartless in the year 20XX?

What Comes Next

For the first time, I'm coming out of Ludum Dare with something I feel I can really expand on. After the voting period ends, I intend to go back and develop an enhanced version: more interactivity, more buildings to explore, more detail in some of the buildings, more music tracks. I don't know whether I can expand the core concept out into a full-size, multi-hour game, but I might try my hand at it.

In other news, I'm currently (albeit veeeeeery slooooowly) working on a story-driven roguelike, developed in the same TIC-80 engine as 15 Minutes to Live, and which will hopefully be my first full-size, commercial project. You can find sporadic development updates on my Twitter page.

I wish everyone the best when the ratings come out next week!