This post was originally posted on my Tumblr.

The 29th installment of Ludum Dare ended over a week ago now, but I’d like to write a post now, reflecting on how the weekend went.

The game I made, SUPER ROBO GARDEN ADVENTURE, can be found here.

It’s a top-down action game, with pixel-tastic graphics. To start: here’s a broad outline of things that went well and things that didn’t go quite so well.

GOOD STUFF:

– I made something almost finished, by myself, in forty-eight hours.

– The thing I made looked pretty decent, IMO

– I managed my time pretty well, all things considered.

– I wrote my first proper game in Haxe / HaxeFlixel.

– I learnt a whole lot about lots of different things.

– The most important good thing that happened over the weekend, however, was the Skype Call I was part of. More on that in a sec.

– I had an absolute blast!

NOT – SO – GOOD STUFF

– The game I made had no clear direction because I sat around scratching my head with no viable ideas.

– The game is mechanically weak. I totally made up all the mechanics in the last few hours.

– The game doesn’t have any music, because I’m a lousy musician and I’m not comfortable with any music software.

– The game is buggy. Obvious stuff that should have been fixed easily was left too late, and stuff was forgotten in the final rush.

– The game hasn’t got any tutorialization – this isn’t so important, but it makes it harder for people.

– The game’s controls are sluggish and animation is slow to change because of unoptimized code.

The best part of the whole weekend was the Skype conversation I was a part of. Folmer Kelly, a gamedude I admire a lot, tweeted out his Skype name inviting people to be a part of theme discussion. I quickly responded and added Folmer, just because I could, and joined a group of people who I think all assumed that I knew some other person. The chat quickly evolved into a place to share ideas, get feedback and show WIP. This was really useful, because it inspired me to keep going (I guess because I wanted to prove myself) and produce something good. The chat, post-LD, has evolved into a general developer chat, which is really cool, and I’ve met a bunch of really cool and talented people.

My goal for the next Ludum Dare is to produce something more thematically and stylistically interesting; I want to innovate a little more. I trapped myself into going for one specific genre this LD, and I think that was because I was unconfident about my programming ability.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the next one!