Hey everyone,

I am Monish H. Vyas, an indie game developer from India. This was my second Ludum Dare and third overall participation in game jams and boy it gets better every time you participate. This time around however has been very different experience and taught me so many things. This competition I could witness the result of my tardiness right in front of me. I am sharing here my journey of 3 days during the competition.

I like to prepare a couple of days in advance for Ludum Dare as I have knowledge of possible themes. What I usually do is plan very little about all the themes so that when the theme is finalized I can already have some idea and it helps me start in the right direction. However for this time I only realized about LD one day prior to final theme voting. At this point I had given up and planned to not participate in the jam just like 2 other game jams I chickened out earlier.

On the first day of the Jam I woke up 5 hours after the theme was finalized (Theme was announced 6:30 AM). Ya I woke up at 11:30 on the first day of the game jam. In my mind I already gave up and was starting to think about what I could have made have I participated in. So after 3-4 hours of mindless scrolling and napping I happened to have an idea of what I could make. I decided to make a text adventure (I made one in an earlier jam), but this time I decided to have choices rather than user guessing what action to take. So I decided to take part in the jam (Half-heatedly) and thus began my awful journey of Ludum Dare 46.

I played a game "Kyle is famous" and I absolutely loved that game and decided to make something inspired(*cough copied) from it. So I quickly made some simple UI that was completely different from the game I played.

I added some nice UI transitions and sketched some idea that would work with the current theme. At the end of day one I had complete functioning menu with animations. On the second day I wrote the scripts to navigate through stories based on user interactions and planned to have multiple endings which can be explored making different choices. All this time the most important part was missing and that was the story itself. Towards the end of the second day I realized that I may need to change some programming and mechanics based on the story and thus the aspects of the game seemed complete started to feel unfinished. And everything started to fall apart.

On day 3 I woke up knowing I only need story and a few adjustments to complete the game. Boy was I wrong. After adding a few dialogues of the game I started feeling the game is not that interesting and felt like clicking buttons here and there and so I decided to take a break for an hour to start with a fresh mind. That break worked in all the wrong way as I was having second thoughts about the game and having new ideas to develop the game. In all these I took the worst decision and that was to scrap everything I did and start on a new idea from scratch.

And so I started working on the assets. The initial idea was to keep the game as simple as possible. So I started drawing a black hole and some simple spaceships. And the idea was to keep the black-hole alive by feeding it the spaceships and avoiding meteors (Some accurate astrophysics right there). In few minutes the idea changed to feeding a human and avoiding bad food. Time was the luxury I couldn't afford, so I went with the later idea and thus born Gannet (Very accurately named by my friend). After all the artwork I wrote a couple of scripts and the game was looking good already. I planned to have a background and some popup effects for later and if time allowed.

After playing and changing some variables for difficulty settings I compromised with what I had and went for dinner break. After the break I tested it some more and decided to add a dimension of difficulty by increasing the "items to avoid", but that went wrong somehow and wasn't working intended. This was before 4-5 hours were left for the deadline. I felt everything falling apart once again and I started giving up again from the jam. But I tried to push it till the end and I am glad I could finish at least a working product. Even though it has a few bugs and feels duct taped, it still functions as a game and I am happy with it. And glad that I submitted it.

During these 3 days the most important thing I learned is the importance of planning. Have I given enough thought and spent more time with pen and paper rather than starting to work mindlessly on the first idea I had I could have made a better game, a game that looks finished and has that juice. So even if I couldn't make a decent game I learned a lot and that's why I shared this experience with you guys as well. I hope you all had better experience and result than I had Best of luck to all.

If you would like to give it a shot, here's my game Keep Gannet Alive.

https://monishvyas.itch.io/keep-gannet-alive

Thank you all for bearing this long postmortem.