As I mentioned before, my entry in the 48 hour comp was “Dreamshift“.

THINGS I LIKED:

• It was my first time making a side scrolling platformer in Unity.  There was a bit of a learning curve, but overall I think it was successful.  I got the important parts down (moving and jumping), and when I realized a 2D box collider would ‘catch’ on the edge of tiles sometimes, I was able to fix it by switching him to a box collider for the top part and a circle collider for his feet.  I also learned more about how 2D physics works in Unity, which should be helpful for future projects.
• The special effects were pretty simple, but still took me some time to get right.  In the end, the parallax background and various dark effects that occur as your stress level rises was worth the extra effort.
• As always, I was pleased with how the music came out.  But besides that, this has some of the best sound effect work I’ve done in a Ludum Dare game.  All of the SFX I made myself, from the simple yawn/pain recordings, to the jump and switch sound effects, to the creepy shade noises.  (I’ve done that on my previous LD entries as well, but I really like how these came out.)
• I’ve never really done sprite animations before, and while I’m sure there were easier ways to do it in Unity than the way I did it, it still worked in the end.

THINGS THAT NEEDED IMPROVEMENT:

• There was some kind of bug with the sprites, and I don’t know what caused it.  I was certain everything was lined up perfectly with them, but at some point they started pulling part of the neighboring sprites on the sheets on the edges, causing weird black lines to appear.  I was never able to sort out what caused it, and for some reason it was EXREMELY present in the webplayer version, which is why I decided not to include it in the submission (it looks terrible, trust me).
• I really wanted more than 2 levels.  I actually completed an hour and a half before time ran out, but I didn’t want to risk breaking something so close to the end, so I decided not to make any more levels.  On reflection, I probably should have done at least one more.
• The title screen is very lacking.  I threw it together pretty quickly and probably should have spent more time on it.
• I would’ve liked to include more interactive elements in the levels.  Pretty much all of it is figuring out whether to flip switches in the real world or in the dream world.  More ways to interact between the two worlds would have led to better level variety.

I’ve always felt that LD is supposed to be a learning experience after all, not just a showcase of talent, and I definitely learned a lot doing this.  I hope everyone else has as well.

P.S.  No, I don’t know what the hero of the game is supposed to be.  A cat?  A rabbit?  I’m not an artist; I honestly just drew until something looked right.