With the jam winding to a close, it's once again time to look back at how things went for me this time round. What went well for me, what didn't go so well, and what have I learned for next time?

First of all, though, I would once again like to say a massive thank you to everyone who's played and rated The Flower of Marasca so far. If you haven't done so yet, give it a try.

What Went Well

• Once again, I refused to play it safe and experimented with a genre I'd never done before, in this case, Metroidvania. By most accounts, I did a good job, so I'm proud of myself.
• The Flower of Marasca is probably my nicest-looking Ludum Dare entry, and possibly my nicest-looking game, period. It takes the dingy aesthetic of The Gods Are Angry, and adds in smooth tile-based animations and fancy particle effects. I'm continuing to get better and better at animation, and at making my game worlds feel alive.
• I didn't overscope! I managed to cram in a fair amount of content, challenges, and gameplay mechanics, as well as plenty of juice, and only one or two optional extras had to be cut for time. This is my first Compo entry since LD45 and it's good to be back in the groove.

What Went Badly

• Bugs. While The Flower of Marasca was nowhere near as buggy as BreakEven was (not that that's a high bar to clear), it was still very buggy in its initial release, requiring two separate patches to iron out the worst of them. Five years of Ludum Dare and I'm still putting out broken releases. Not good.
• The game's design isn't exactly the clearest. Several reviewers noted that they got stuck, either because they used up all their powers and got softlocked, or because they couldn't work out how to proceed. The former was intentional - you need to ration out your powers - but in hindsight, that's not good game design, especially since you have to restart the game from scratch if you don't realise that. I had an idea to solve the latter, by adding prompts that would appear when you got close to something, but it was a "stretch goal" and I ran out of time to include it.
• I spent too long on Day 1 messing around with an advanced camera system that moved depending on which way you were facing, to show you more of what was in front of/above/below you. I couldn't get it to work and had to get rid of it rather than continue to waste time on it. Had I just stuck with a simple camera system, I might have had enough time to implement those prompts.

What Comes Next

I fully intend to give The Flower of Marasca a post-jam update to polish and improve it as much as possible, and I'll see if I can get that out before the rating period ends. A lot of the time, I say I'll do that and then forget to, so let's see if I can hold myself to it.

After that, I'll be focusing on Prism Indigo, my first professional, full-scale release, which I "rebelled" to work on during LD49. My targeted release date is May 20th, with free versions being available on Newgrounds and the TIC-80 website, and a paid downloadable version on itch.io. In the meantime, you can play the demo here.

Finally, I'd like to say good luck to everyone who entered!