Since I like doing game blogs and postmortems, I just wanted to share the postmortem of my entry for Ludum Dare 48, Sky Plummet! I found Ludum Dare 48 to be one of my better Game Jam experiences, since I took what I learned from previous jams and applied them here. However, there are still some things that I know I can be better at, especially when competing in the Compo entries this time.

So what better time than the present to go over these thoughts!

What went well?

1. scope creep I banish, ye!: This was something I am REALLY proud of, since there was not a lot of cut content in this game. While there were some cool ideas I had, I realized early that it is better to focus on what works and what needs extra polishing.

2. Animations: I was really proud of this one particular animaion where after the player presses the space bar, they do a small jump and the platform below them dissapears. I used a combination of Unity animations and scripting to get it just right and I am really happy that part of the game was able to be made into a reality in such a short time frame. 3. Getting a Minimum Viable Product in 0.5 days: This surprised me a lot since in other game jams, I was able to not get the entire game done the night of the jam going live. This game me 1.5 days of getting the art and polish into the game, which paired off a lot.

Bonus: The player art: I love how it looks! I wasn't sure if I wanted to do a robot drill, or even something like this at all, but looking at the sprite work for it, which I cranked out in 6 hrs, I am really happy with how crisp it looked! Especially coming from a programmer haha!

What could have gone better?

1. The music: I was a bit concerned about making music for my game since that is something I never dabbled into in all of my game projects and that fear struck in me on the last day. While I did get some nice tunes for a few seconds, most of the music can get a bit irritating at times. I guess it's either the inexperience of making my own music or I'm secretly tone deaf. Maybe both?

2. A little lacking: Even though I am happy on the end product in the end, after hearing some friend feedback, I did wish I implemented one more gimmick into the game, since it is a little bare bones, admittingly. Nevertheless, that is always a to do item for the future!

3. The art direction: The art of the game is not exactly something home to write to (besides the player sprite imo), and part of it is because I wasn't exactly sure what to do! I ended up just thinking about that one theory where if you dig straight down into the Earth, you'd plop out on the opposite side, so that is why the themes are sky, caves and lava. There could be more imagination in them admittingly, and maybe it might even be time to look into some external help on art or just spend more time concepting.

What can we do in the near future

1. Clean up the code! I always say this in every game jam post mortem I ddo, but it's the honest truth haha. I really am a programmer deep down and writing clean scripts makes me really happy. While this project is not spaghetti code by any means, I do want to at least put in some comments and clean up any repeating code so that on future revisits, it will be easier to understand what is going on.
2. Implement those lost features! One feature I removed due to not really seeing how it would work is a mechanic where you can bounce off of specific ores in order to navigate a specific chain of danger blocks. I wasn't sure if that would mesh with the current game design, so I omitted it, but I do feel like it has some nice potential. Another idea one of my friends shot to me was making a progression system in the game to where every run matters (like a rouge like). While not ALL games have to have this, I think this has merit because I can definitely see this game being like that to a small extent. More ores, moves, maybe even powerups?

Closing

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am really proud of what I cranked out this game jam, even if some things are a bit simplistic. If you want to check out this game yourself, come visit it on the Ludum Dare page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/sky-plummet-my-compo-ludum-dare-48-entry!