I think I shall go with the time honored separation of Good Stuff and Bad Stuff.

Good Stuff:

• Choosing to do the Jam (solo): I wasn’t feeling particularly well this weekend, and doing the Dare, with its ridiculous and demanding pace, probably would have killed me. Doing the Jam was great because it allowed me to slow down a bit, meaning I could put a little more effort into my art and music.
• The Tiled map editor: Tiled is incredible – it works so well that it seems like it can read my mind at times. If you’re still editing maps with MS Paint, or God forbid using a home brewed map editor (like I was at one point), please do yourself a favor and check out tiled. It will save you so much time.
• Writing music: I’ve really honed my ability to write music quickly – I busted out the main theme in 2.5 hours and I think it rocks, and I even had time to write two other themes too! This is all thanks to One Hour Compos, which, over the last year, helped me get better at writing music faster than anything else I can possibly think of.
• HaxeFlixel: It gets the job done and it gets out of the way. Back in the day I used to have a lot of people complaining about clumsy controls and awkward interactions – all that’s gone now. This is wonderful because it means I can focus on the important stuff
• Clever concept: I loved the theme, and came up with 2 brilliant ideas almost instantly. I really loved the idea I eventually stuck with, though I felt like it had a LOT more potential than what I managed to get in-game.
• Art: I think this is certainly a step up from LD26.

Bad Stuff:

• I failed to get a beta tester… again: Actually not 100% true – my beta tester just happened to live in Sweden (I’m on the west coast of the USA), so our interactions were unfortunately super brief. Near the end of the jam he shot a ton of brilliant ideas at me, and I wish I had more time to implement them. But then again, isn’t that how all Ludum Dare game work?
• Forces outside of my control: I was feeling less than spectacular pretty much the entire Ludum Dare, and I had a lot of other crap happening during the first day (I had to move from 1 apartment to another). Can’t do anything about stuff like this, of course, but I’ll always wonder how much better the game could have been if this wasn’t the case.
• I didn’t really know HaxeFlixel: Know your libraries. Know your libraries. Know your libraries. I had used HaxeFlixel for maybe 5 total hours before LD27, and it definitely showed. Especially at the beginning, I was running into dumb bugs that were taking MUCH longer to resolve than they should have been. By the end I was starting to gain more proficiency, but with more expertise with my library I could have done a LOT more.
• No polish: I had a lot of great ideas for polish that failed to make it into the game – particle effects, gradual darkening of the background as the world was coming to an end, etc. I pretty much failed to get any of them in game. This is because…
• Poor planning: The first two days I spent programming a lot of features. Then when I finally designed some levels, I didn’t use them. Like, I had this whole complicated setup of lasers that required some raycasting and stuff, but I never ended up using them. So dumb! So I’ve learned a valuable lesson to apply next time: Build levels as you build features. Whenever I do this, I have a nice and playable game by the end (LD24 and LD19 come to mind). Whenever I don’t, either my game is too short (like this one) or too buggy and hard (like LD26 and LD23).
• Humor: I feel like my game had 2 or 3 genuinely funny bits, but honestly my LD24 entry was much funnier. Seems like the funniest bits came when two (or more) characters were talking with each other, so I’ll have to remember to make excuses to do that in the future. I came up with most of the funny stuff when I was taking a break from the code, so I should remember to do that more often, too.
• Art: I’ve practiced doing background tiles a fair bit since the last Dare, but I’ve never really practiced doing 1) sprite animations, 2) animations of any kind, 3) dialog pictures, or 4) detailed backgrounds of any sort. So when I had to do any of those during the Jam, I procrastinated, or took forever, and so some of my art looks great, and some of it doesn’t look good at all. This should teach me to practice ALL things equally, not just one thing!

Things I’ve learned:

• Build levels throughout Ludum Dare, not just on the last day. This is seriously the most important thing. It’s important so that I can…
• Stop being such a misanthropist and ask people to test my game! I’m positive that this would have helped more than anything else. I need to idle on the Ludum Dare IRC more And of course, I need to also…
• Know my libraries.

If you read through that, I’m massively impressed! If you just read the bold stuff, well, that’s pretty good too. Play my game and let me know if there was anything I missed, and I’ll hit you back with a review.