Argh, this is my 6th Ludum, and the first one I’ve failed at. What do I class as failiure? Simple: not releasing a game within 48 hours.

Its like 2 days later, and here I am weeping into my soft squidgy programmer hands looking back at what went on.

But enough of my ;_;, lets start off on a brighter note:

THE POSITIVES

• http://mkv25.net/ludum/ld28/preview/ – I managed to upload -something-
• I made a reasonable stab at the artwork and animations. Paint Shop Pro helped me out as usually with basic pixel editing and painting.
• I got walking, interactions, and an ingame menu working, these were neat features, and could have been strung together to make quite a nice game.
• The music is kind of neat, I played around in Otomata to make a few sequences
• Audacity was simple to use, and I was able to cut, fade, and loop my music track with relative ease

THE NEGATIVES

• Lack of a clear idea – this is the first Ludum I haven’t felt 100% confident in an idea from the get go. My ideas spiraled into a multi-biome exploration of the concept of “One moment in time” from monkeys with sticks, lighting striking, apples falling, and so on. Its a bit of a lame excuse to pin this on… maybe excuse isn’t the word… I think its a damn clear reason that without conviction in my own idea, I didn’t have the drive to actually make it work. What was it I wanted? I wasn’t really sure.
• Going for a long walk on a Sunday. Yep. That eat up most the day. Its December as well, pretty cold here, I was tired when I got home. Why did I do that? Maybe if I had a better idea I would have stayed home and coded.
• Building a game engine from scratch, again. I actually quite enjoy this part of the challenge – not being too prescriptive with framework before I begin, and really crafting something unique for the challenge… but in this case I had no structure to drop content and ideas into, and feature creep kept on creeping along… requiring me to implement more and more basic features that I might have got if I’d used an existing framework, like HaxePunk on my LD26 Minamalism project. In fact, there were a lot of similarities between the two (side scrolling, interactive stories), and it might have been healthy to strip that project back and build up from there.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. Have a little look if you’re interested, maybe you’ll get a sense for what it could have been.

I’m glad I got this off my chest. <3 I can move on now…

~Markavian