felt like posting some kind of post to close my ld49 journey so I can not think about ludum dare anymore until eventually deciding to jump in ld50 out of random spontaneous whimsy again lmao.

Since this is my first jam and actually any kind of attempt at game development, I think it's kind of a "win-some, lose-some" situation.

Oh boy I don't know anything about coding but through multiple helpful tutorials, I think I did alright in making something that you can move, clip into to interact and technically lose at. But it's very... bare bones. So I guess this jam was more about a jumpstart in coding/programming and getting familiar with Godot as an engine.

Now the downside: I realize, and this is something I do a lot apparently, is I think I was too passive. I signed up 1 week before the 49th Ludum Dare and tried to follow the gdquest beginner video but it definitely wasn't enough to change me from "no experience consumer" to "marginally experienced basic starter dev" in the span of a week.

So then what happened was, the theme dropped and the first few hours was just kinda fun doodling of the ideas and stuff but eventually I started to get into the coding but my mistake was waiting for the tutorials to tell me what to do.

But I also think it's kinda unavoidable. It's more like, I'd like to have the critical thinking for what I need to absorb but also, I have no metric to figure out what's important so everything felt important and that meant: really slow pace. Which kinda eats away at the jam lmao

I guess it was necessary however as nearing the final hours of jam I realized "Hey I should make a game!" And it was the cheesiest, barely qualifying effort but it was made with the applied experience of about 69(nice) hours in the final 3 hours of rushing to pump out a low quality, but finishedish, game.

Going forward, I'm adding game development practice into my routine because I doubt I'll ever get any better if I only just last minute learn through jams only. Not sure if I'm disciplined enough to keep at it but it's a post mortem not a life crisis lmao.

With that, I say thank you to all who played and left feedback on my first attempt at making a game. I genuinely didn't expect to hit 20 at all. After the obligatory submission post, I basically just wanted to bury my entry lmao and THEN I learned there was an unfinished category! Too late for that now, but hopefully in the future if I am able to participate again, I won't have to worry about that category anymore. Cheers!