Hunted is my entry for this LD – and last august I started making games, so it’s also some kind of gamedev-anniversary game.
(Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=15985)

I want to write about 2 things, 1st about what’s special about this choice of game and how my skills changed over these 2 years.

1st points
So, playing it you could say it’s a usual horror game and according to the comments with good sound design and graphics, but the player being a bit lost.
Once you know that I’m so easily scared that I’m sometimes even scared of some dungeons in Skyrim, it becomes special – I wasn’t able to play it.

So, how do you make a game without really playing it?
– by making it entirely out of the design-perspective

Gladly I know the design of a good horror game and I know my engine (Blender Game Engine) pretty well, so the basics weren’t that hard. A flashlight, so the sight is reduced, some unknown enemies and fitting sound.
Also, I took very much education in game-design over the year, so I knew pretty fast, what is good and what is bad and until the end of the first day everything went perfect. But then I had to think about the actual Level-Design and AI. The player shouldn’t know, where and when the enemies are coming from. But I don’t know it either, so that was the point I couldn’t play for longer than 1min.
For the LevelDesign I decided to do a world that’s abstract, but still telling some kind of story. Now I think while playing you don’t get it, but just look at this picture, so you can understand the world: http://puu.sh/4d33k.png
As you can see, there’s a “forest”, a “city” (upper right), a field(upper left) and a “cave”(bottom left). It’s very likely, that the player will go to the city first, then the forest or field and then the cave, so you can find the “winbutton” at the “cave”-area.
A good idea, but I didn’t think about how long you really have to search. And it seems like far too long.

2nd point:

1 year actually isn’t that much time, but you still can do a lot during it.until start of summer, I spend lots of time in school and didn’t do very much for games. But since start of august it became much more relaxed and I can finally focus on making games again. Over the summer holidays. I also learned a lot and got tons of motivation from 2 visits at the “Games-Academy Berlin”. A great Games-school, where I would love to go after school, but it’s far to expensive, even with scholarship. Since I can’t really go there I’m working much more on my skills to join a real game-studio someday. And according to the comments “Hunted” is my best game so far and I take this as encouragement.

Keep it up and never forget: You can do anything if you work hard enough!