Ahh, the dreaded postmortem writeup.

I’ve been putting this off as earlier this week I became sick and further destroyed my sleep schedule.
Regardless, I feel like this Ludum Dare was particularly fruitful. Using tools that I am familiar with and have had experience with made a huge difference this time about. As an example, during my last Ludum Dare I attempted to use Twine without having had any prior experience with it. When attempting to do specific things I found that the editor did other things that made what I wanted difficult. A lot of effort was not being used correctly as I attempted to combat the editor that I was unfamiliar with.

During this Ludum Dare I decided to simply build everything myself. Using jQuery as my lib and some functions I’d written previously for other projects made this project flow smoothly. While the end product did not seem to be particularly fascinating I’m rejuvenated and excited that I was able to make a complete game and get it entered within the time limit! I consider that significant progress since the last Ludum Dare.

I was also happy with the amount of focus I had on my project this time around. As soon as Ludum Dare started I was prepared. As soon as the theme was out I wrote upon five to seven pieces of paper every single idea that I had in regards to the game I was going. I started with a game that was going to be about the connections between machines and the users that used them and moved to the connection we have with objects around us. From that I thought of mirrors, objects that have long had various interpretations involving fear and a subtle curiousity of the unknown.

Initially I’d intended the mirror to have a monster coming through that the player needed to stop, but with my current amount of skill and the hours ticking by I decided to make something more Twine-like where the player will be presented with options to choose from. As for the mirror speaking to the player and informing them that everything they do is wrong… well, that was tied into an awkward understanding of the inner debate that goes on in the minds of some people. Being scared to talk or confide in others, a social anxiety if you will, I’ve had experiences where I realize I’ve been debating with myself for hours about something. Talking to myself and effectively denying everything I want, tearing it down, and tearing myself down. I wanted this game to be something like that. A game about the connected worlds inside the mind. The interconnected ideas that stray and degrade the rest of a person’s happiness. The things we all need to let go of but can’t.

It ended up being kind of weird and hardly polished. It ended up not really going anywhere with any obvious goal. But I’m happy. I made a complete game in 48 hours for the first time. I made ‘graphics’ that ‘moved’.

I’m really looking forward to the next Ludum Dare. Next time I want to use HTML5 Canvas or WebGL to produce my graphics. In the meantime, I’m going to be practicing and fiddling about with those and I think I want to play with Hexels a bit as well. I want to practice producing assets and whatnot for my games. It’s the only way I can get better, after all.

So I look forward to seeing you all next time and I hope you all stay well till then.