So I’ve always had a bad run with personal projects, I get halfway through one and then decide I can do it better and restart it. I also have prototypes for games everywhere that never went anywhere.

So to stop that, I did Ludum Dare 27! It was great fun.

Here are some of the things I learned during:

• I’m rubbish at music and that is fine with me, I spent 2 hours trying to compose some music and completely failed. I ended up using Autotracker.py which I would highly recommend to anyone that is tone deaf like me.
• I’m rubbish at art, I found something that works, minimalism(i know) but it feels a lot more like a polished game than it would have if I put ugly pixel art everywhere. I’m not saying everyone should use minimalism, if you want to be good at art you can only get better by trying!
• I am not happy with my personal libraries, my number one priority until the next LD is to come up with a new 2D engine most likely in SFML.NET and a standalone editor!
• I created a level editor in game which just made everything hard to manage and it was hard to create a symmetrical levels,  another thing on the list to do is to create a generic level editor that I can port to any format I like.
• I can get a game working a LOT faster than I thought, Not just 48 hours but I only spent about 7 hours on all the major features of the game and then spent the rest polishing(except for the last minute random level generation).
• The Ludum Dare community is full of very nice and helpful people! I will definitely be doing it again in the future.

Here is my entry if you want to check it out.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26147