This was my first jam, and it was awesome!  I had a lot of fun.

What went right:

As far as complexity, I decided to aim really low on this one since it was my first time.  I had a playable game up and running within a few hours, which let me relax and spend my time adding things and tweaking gameplay.  I didn’t want to run myself into the ground and be burnt out this morning, so I took lots of breaks and got a fairly decent amount of sleep.  Next time I will probably go for something a little more ambitious, but I hit my main goal, which was to just finish something.

The gameplay ended up being pretty close to what I wanted.  So did the music and sound effects (if I may abuse those words).  The idea was to make a game that was way too easy, and then make it really hard not by increasing the difficulty of the game itself, but by annoying and distracting the player.  If you can block out all the visual/audio noise and adapt to the controls repeatedly reversing, you could play forever.  (Just for fun I made the time counter go up to 100 hours, but I can’t stand it for more than about a minute and a half.)

What went wrong:

The biggest issue I had was balancing the development with family needs.  My wife and I have two elementary school kids, so it was a lot to juggle.  I also lost some time due to some web hosting issues that I should have sorted out in advance (a DNS issue, and forgot to add the MIME type for Unity 3D files).  I figured that something like that would happen at some point, so I left myself a lot of buffer time.  I also had planned on swapping out the cubes with some kind of graphics, but I ended up needing more time for gameplay coding than I had though.  In fact, this game has absolutely no imported art assets of any kind.  It’s all built on Unity’s stock cubes and UI elements.

Conclusion:

Overall I’d call it a success.  The main goal was to finish something and have fun, and I did both of those.  Can’t wait for LD 32!