We’ve finally had the time to sit down and write up our post mortem for our LD28 Jam entry so here goes!

Our entry was “Only one light”, a short little prequel short to our upcoming mobile game, Drift Bloom, in which a spirited little flame gets only one chance to restore light to a colourless world. In just 4 levels, it’s your task to light all the matches swiftly before the snow puts your flame out.

The Tools

• To make the game, we used Unity 3D with the new 2D features.
• We used Photoshop CC and Paint Tool SAI for all of the art.
• Finally, all the music was made by Thortrillion Tomsborg.

What went right?

1. Planning – We were able to plan out our idea within the first 3 hours of knowing the theme and caught up with a bit of sleep before beginning work on the game itself. We were able to get the planning pretty streamlined and planned it far faster than our previous jams (I think this was mainly because we had 48 hours and not a week).
2. Scaling down the game – When we started planning the game, we had loads of ideas and the game sounded a bit too ambitious, but we were able to scale down the game and understand the games scope. We realised then that our game would be achievable and completed in the time frame, whilst allowing time to polish the game prior to uploading the final version.
3. Getting enough sleep – We made sure that throughout the entire jam, we had enough sleep to make sure we could get this game completed. Without 8 hours of sleep each night, I don’t think “Only one light” would have been a good game at all. 
4. Assets and art – We wanted to make sure that all of the art and assets used in the game would be well polished and look good, so we decided in the initial planning stage to have as few assets as possible and focus on the look and style of the game rather than adding more and more assets.

What went wrong?

1. Unity 2D features – It was our first time working with Unity 4.3 2D features, and we figured out that we should have had some prior experimentation with it before the Jam. We were so used to other 2D frameworks in Unity 3D that it took some time adjusting to the new features.
2. Jumping mechanic – Just prior to submitting our game to the Ludum Dare entries, we noticed a severe problem with the jumping mechanic whereby the jumping was erratic (This was because of the new Unity 2D physics and Delta time). This took a good 3 hours to figure out the problem, almost deleting all of our code to find the issue, but even when we submitted it, the jumping still felt a bit awkward from time to time.
3. Sound effects – It’s one thing that bugs us to this day and it’s also what we’ve received a lot of feedback on as well but we just ran out of time and couldn’t add any sound effects to the jumping and the burning of the flames. 
4. Better level design – It was our first time making a platformer and with no time to test the game, there were some flaws with our level design, especially with matches being too far away and quite challenging.

Conclusion

We’ve had some brilliant feedback from our entry and it’s been wonderful to experience a Ludum Dare for the first time. We know that next time we will definitely make sure to refine our game and test it out before we submit it. However, our planning was really effective and we will continue our planning strategies in the future and we look forward to making more Ludum Dare games 😀