This jam went a lot smoother than in April I think. I'm tempted to do a slightly more detailed retrospective on how the April and October LD Jams went for me at some point but I think the main things I learnt were:

It's really useful to have a lot of time to actually play your game.

April's attempt suffered a lot I think because we spent so long trying to get everything as close to mechanically functional as possible, I didn't actually spend a great deal of time playing the game to get a feel for what a good level would look like.

This time enough of the game was in place to have a play around with level ideas really early on, and having a design that allowed for a bit more modularity really helped. Seeing a lot of early ideas not quite working lead me on to ideas for a few of the components used in Age of Amperes.

Preparation is important

I didn't really use the practice weekend in April - I had a quick look around for some JavaScript libraries I might be able to use but didn't really settle on one enough to focus in on and properly learn. From a code perspective I wasn't really confident enough in the way JavaScript handles things like classes and inheritance to take advantage of some time saving language features I'd have been able to use more naturally in C++ or C#.

This time though I'd started playing around with PixelBox in advance and threw together a few basic prototypes to get my head around how it works (a Frogger clone and a simple collect the coins platformer). I'd also crucially found a physics library that was more geared towards game physics than proper physics simulations - it's not really the "proper" way of doing things but doing a lot of directly setting velocities rather than using forces makes much more sense to me for game coding.

Overall I've found my second LD Jam has gone a lot smoother and I'm far happier with the game we've made this time round!

Plays and ratings much appreciated :smile: - Age of Amperes