Good morning Ludum Darers (at least if you live in central europe 😉 ),

as I announced last night I want to have a look at the things that went right/wrong during my first Ludum Dare (yep it’s my first and i finished my game! Yeah!)

Let’s start positive and look at the things, that went right:

I was well prepared

I’ve read some Posts about people struggling against their Tools because they were inexperienced with them or they didn’t test if they are all working correctly. As I think it is always a good idea to learn new technologies/tools/libraries I think LD isn’t the best place for it. You are under heavy pressure of completing your game and most of the time there isn’t that much time to put much effort into getting your tools running/learning new things from scratch.

Besides from the technically preparation my fridge was full and I had enough chocolate to survive the weekend without having to leave my dorm.

My game idea was (luckily) small enough to be made in 48/72h OR it was flexible enough to shrink it into something playable 

I must admit the game i submitted isn’t the game I had in mind half way through the first day of LD. There were plans to involve more natural effect that the villagers have to struggle with (changing seasons, wild animals). Luckily with the implementation of the starving mechanic the game went from a pure simulation to a game that made a lot of fun (as you could lose it). So, yesterday evening, I decided to throw those missing things out of my concept and put a point system in place. So you will get points for creating tools (that cost the villagers time that they cant use for collecting food) and for the pure survival (every 10 seconds you’ll get 1 point).

I finished it! ^^ 

I have enough half baked (potatoes) projects that never reached a playable state during the last years, so I am really proud to have a fully working little game. Next to having a finished game, I had a lot of fun during the creation AND I learnt a lot.

Now for the bad sides of my LD Weekend

My code is a mess!

If you look at the sourcecode of my game you’ll easily distinguish between code I wrote before LD Weekend and code created during the weekend. It isn’t well structured, good commented or even well thought through. So it ended in a ocean of straight forward written code without thinking it all through really good.

That leads me to… I didn’t plan properly

Basically in everyday single person projects I have 3 main phases

1. Collecting Ideas
2. Modelling Classes and interactions between them
3. Programming

Unfortunately I left out the second, but really important phase, so that my code ended mostly in a bad condition.

The idea was to big to be made in a weekend

Even if in the “positive list” there is “i finished it”, I only could finish the game through cutting some gameplay elements out of the game yesterday. So basically, yeah i finished it, but also cut about 25% of the gameplay that I originally had in mind.

TL;DR

Concluding I can say I had looooots of fun during my first LD and learnt a lot. It was nice to see streams of other participants or even some people appearing on my own stream from time to time.

HERE is my entry Mimisi (Minimalistic minimalism simulation). Have fun with it, have a look at the source code, take what you need, improve it if you want to… do whatever you want with my game as long as you have fun doing it.