It was the December of 2014, and a Unicode snowman almost won the theme vote. A friend of mine who has been around since Ludum Dare 25 was showing me a game they created for Ludum Dare 31. At the time I had been wanting to get into game development for a while. I've downloaded Unity and followed some tutorials, so I had a grasp on what I was doing. My friend introduced me to Ludum Dare, and I gave it a go.

Ludum Dare 32

The theme was An Unconventional Weapon. After spending the first day on an idea that I eventually dropped, I came up with a better idea. My weapon shall be planets! With my incredibly limited knowledge of unity, I made an endless survival game about throwing planets into asteroids to prevent asteroids from crashing into the sun. I wrote the music in LittleBigPlanet 2's Midi Sequencer, and all the graphics were just default spheres with some poorly made unity materials.

Having never completed a game before this, the deadline was incredibly exciting! Before this point I had never made a title screen before, and I know it sounds goofy to say it, but after adding a title screen, it felt like a complete game. I still have incredibly fond memories of showing this game to all my friends, and them all competing for the high score. In the end, I scored 41st in innovation for the compo, and I was hooked.

Ludum Dare 33

I'll keep these short and sweet. Reflecting on my previous Ludum Dare, I was going to need a lot of extra time programming to fix things, so I spent exactly 20 minutes on the art for the entire game. You can imagine how well that turned out.

To avoid giving the main character a walk animation, he has Heely's so he can just slide around. HA!

Ludum Dare 34

At this point, I have moved on from LittleBigPlanet 2's sequencer, and upgraded to LMMS. In hindsight, I should've done that before the jam started. The music I wrote for LD 34 is bar none the worst sound you could ever experience.

This uninspiring endless runner about being a ninja pair of pants was a disaster, and the comments seemed to reflect it. Despite that, one comment really stood out:

The joy of reading their first sentence left a huge impact on me. My game sucked, sure, but it was enjoyable in its own stupid absurd way.

Ludum Dare 35 through 37

This was when I seriously started reflecting on the feedback I was given from the previous games, though it took a little longer to really understand the notes on difficulty. Looking back, it feels like I was trying to beat the players, which is stupid. My Ludum Dare 35 game even says "I didn't really expect anyone to get this far" in the victory screen, just to show how bad that mindset had become.

Ludum Dare 36 wasn't judged due to website maintenance, but I wrote some real good music that jam, and I always wished I could've got a score for that just to see how much I had improved.

Ludum Dare 37 was the first game I made that got a better score than my first Ludum Dare. 34th in Theme, and 39th in innovation. For "One Room", I made a game about running around a pillar in the center of the room, and behind the shadow the pillar casts, a new procedurally generated room is created. Despite the game doing great in innovation, it had the least memorable main character of any game I have ever made.

Looking back, I was making too many endless games, and nowadays I'm simply not a fan of the genre.

Ludum Dare 38 through 42

The current website has arrived! At this point I've decided "I know all there is to know. Now I can screw around and make whatever I come up with". A bold statement. It definitely is the time where I became more ambitious with my LD games. I was no longer getting comments about the games being impossibly difficult, I was now getting comments about the game being impossibly confusing. All around, these games were creative, yet terribly explained. An era where my ideas far exceeded my execution, resulting in some real big messes. In one of the games, as an effort to prevent it from being confusing, there's a "Things you should know before playing" option on the title screen, leading to a stupid-sized wall of text. Great work, buddy.

So I was starting to understand that my games needed better direction and tutorials, but I wasn't quite figuring out how to do it. On a related note, this is where I started finding my art style. I played around with it a lot in these games, and I really enjoyed cute characters with no outlines.

Oh- and LD41's "Combine Two Incompatible Genres" is still the best theme I've participated in. Every game that jam was unique and amazing!

Ludum Dare 43 through 45

Okay, yeah. I have really found my art style.

These are games that I really look back on fondly. I think the game I made for Ludum Dare 43 was my first "Good game". It was actually fun! I made a game where you play as Mary, who had a little lamb, and you throw your lamb at enemies to kill them, Steal their money, and buy more lambs. Its like absurd Pikmin, and has a synth-heavy rendition of Mary Had A Little Lamb playing the whole time, and ah! It's this kind of absurdism that I fell in love with.

What about a game where you mine for money and spend it all on a bunch of ladders? Sure! Why not? I also learned a lot about mixing audio, and found some more cool synths. My music was starting to get better, and I wanted to show off.

This was also my first game to include a speedrun timer at the end, and wow let me tell you it's the best idea I've had yet. Not only do people enjoy winning games, people enjoy bragging about how fast they beat the game. Why would I ever want to make another endless game ever again? Every time someone posts a screenshot of their speedrun time, I want to give them a hug.

My first top ten in graphics was my LD45 game, "Ultra Quest". I spent a lot of time on the music as well, trying to incorporate a leitmotif. This game is about going on an adventure, nonsensically killing everything in your path, becoming king, and slaying a dragon. At the end of level one, you start a forest fire, and the fire is visible on the map used for selecting levels. After level two, the fire on the map is bigger. It's one of my favorite visual gags.

Ludum Dare 46

Overconfidence? What's that? Okay yeah so this was the first Ludum Dare I ever submitted where I don't think the game was complete. If Ludum Dare 34 was my first failure, then this was my second. I created a super edgy gardening simulator with turn based combat, dialogue, cutscenes, a unique crafting system, and a final boss. All within 48 hours. And none of it was polished. It didn't even follow the theme! I think maybe two or three people actually beat the game, due to the insane amount of softlocks. That said, I learned my limits.

It's definitely one of the game's that I don't tend to replay. I usually avoid showing this game to any new friends, ha!

Ludum Dare 47

Second place in Innovation. This game hits different. Ribbon was the game I created for the theme "Stuck in a loop".

It's my first top 3 score, and in innovation, no less! If Ludum Dare 46 was a complete flop, then Ludum Dare 47 was a complete 180. I had a lot to reflect on from LD46, and I wanted to show that I learned my lesson. The music slaps, the artwork slaps, no softlocks, (it's not unreasonably edgy), and I paced myself. I had plans for more content, but scrapped it so I could polish the main mechanic. The steering mechanic was incredibly buggy until the last hour. It's a lot of math that, looking back, I have honestly no idea how I made work. The end result however, is a game that didn't have a single negative comment, except for wanting more content.

Ludum Dare 48

So how do you follow that up? Well, before Ludum Dare 48, I participated in Discord jam! Outside of game development, I was playing around with the concept of Arbitrary Code Execution in Super Mario Bros. 3, and thought it would be fun to make a game about lining up bytes in the game's memory and "Executing" them.

Still being in the mood to make a game about memory manipulation, I had an idea for a game where data will get cleared if it's not written to within 3 seconds. For instance, if you are running on a flat floor for 3 seconds, your Y position hasn't been changed, so you snap vertically to a Y position of zero. I called it RAMnesia.

Something I wanted to focus on was making the music very long. This is a puzzle platformer, and if a player is stuck, you want to avoid repetitive music. It wasn't high-energy, but it was more than a 3 minute loop, and I was proud of it. That being said, the game didn't follow the theme at all, so uh- whoops!

Between this and the next Ludum Dare, I once again participated in Discord Jam, this time coming in first place overall!

Ludum Dare 49

I parodied Donkey Kong! I really struggled to come up with an idea during this jam, so it doesn't quite fit the theme, but I enjoyed the concept of dodging barrels while building the scaffolding to reach him yourself. And oh yeah, the music goes hard. It's one of my best original songs, and halfway through I incorporated a NES audio chip emulator and added the iconic donkey kong loop as another instrument. (as well as some 8 bit noise channel for some "snares")

Ludum Dare 50

My second time scoring second place, this time in Humor. Also 4th overall! At this point I have taken the absurdism of my games to a new height. It's a game about managing a blockbuster video store, but you also need to murder dinosaurs and netflix employees by shooting lasers at them so you can harvest their bones and use them as scaffolding to prevent your video store from sinking into the ground.

I picked up a bunch of 80s synths, and wrote the most bangin' music for this one. I had over twenty comments compliment my music, and it's no surprise it was the best I had ever done in the Audio category. I mean, it slaps.

Then I participated in Discord Jam again, but whatever.

Ludum Dare 51

With this being my most recent game, I have lots to say.

Once more, 4th Overall!

Reflecting on the success of Ribbon, I wanted to try my hand at another 3D game. Despite having very little experience making them, this game really came together and significantly faster than I expected. I had way too much time for polishing this one, and I used every minute I had to fill this game to the brim with details. Looking at my previous games, I had yet to score a top ten in audio, despite how great I perceive my own music to be. I asked around for some tips, and was suggested to add voice acting. Now, VA is great and all, but why not take it a step further? That's right, baby! I added an acapella track to my Ludum Dare game!

Recording all the layers for the acapella track was the most awkward I've ever felt. It felt cringy and bad, and I was nervously shaking the entire time, wondering if I could've been spending this time to make a better song, ha! Somehow it really came together though! Don't get me wrong, it's a disaster full of flat notes and awkward nervousness, but wow I had fun! And I finally met my goal of Top Ten in Audio!

I also wanted to go all out on accessibility. My previous game, which scored 4th Overall, didn't even have a volume slider, so this game has one for the music and one for the VA. I have a colorblind friendly mode, and you can enable/disable subtitles for the VA. It also came in 4th, so I must be doing something right.

I was joking with some friends that I'll have to do acapella every single jam now, and in 20 more jams I'll be some sort of acapella master. I probably won't do that, but it's fun to think about.

Closing Thoughts

Oh snap, 20 down. I haven't missed one yet, and I sure don't plan on missing any in the future. It's honestly pretty great looking at the old games compared to where I am now. Especially how much I have grown as an artist and composer. I mean, you can see the screenshots, and with how bad my music was in the first few jams, perhaps it's a good thing I can't share that here, ha! I've certainly done a lot better than I could've ever hoped for, and I'm only planning on getting even better.

Onward to the next 20. It's gonna be a wild ride.

☃