This was my first Ludum Dare, and it was fantastic! Stressful, but fantastic. At points my partner wanted to quit and at points my brain was fried, but we pulled through. And we made a game! If you haven’t already, check out “Run, Bun, Run!” I appreciate any ratings and/or comments immensely! So now it’s time to break down what happened.

Positives:

• We got out a game; a full game, with menus and everything.
• We made a great choice less than a day in to scrap our original idea and start over; it was way too hard to do, and super intensive in both code and art.
• We’re getting tons of positive comments (and feedback)! All of the comments (we got a lot, around twenty-five or thirty) we’ve received have been positive, praising the art and music. Some also offered some great feedback, which I will be aggregating here and reviewing before the next Ludum Dare.

Stuff to improve on:

• Make sure everyone on your teams knows all of the rules beforehand. About a day into the compo, I found out that some of my artists work was edited versions of copyrighted images, as she didn’t know that that was not acceptable. She then had to redo all of those sprites, which almost prompted her to quit. This all could have been avoided with proper precautions.
• Too many menus! We had a ton of menu screens (nine!). Too many. Keep it simple. Have only the essential menus, and try to keep a standard navigating method between them.
• Keep your game fair. The enemy spawning behavior I wrote wouldn’t prevent the enemies from spawning close to where you spawn, which often led to you dying rather quickly, which becomes frustrating. I ran out of time to fix it, when I could have just wrote that prevention in the first time. I could also have added a marker to tell you where a wolf was approaching from. We tried to do that with growling sounds that only played when near a wolf, but that game no indication about where the wolf was.
• Try not to shoehorn the theme into the game, if possible. Build the game around the theme, and try to do something innovative, which we failed at.
• Don’t settle for “close enough”. One of our menu screens listed a requirement that wasn’t actually required, but we decided that no one would really care, so we never changed it, which I would greatly have liked to.