I did it! Last week I was finally able to finish a game for Ludum Dare. I’m really happy, it was my major goal this time. I have participated previously but couldn’t finish for different reasons. The first time, my project was too ambitious. Next time, I had other urgent things to do. This time, I decided to go for something very very simple. I decided to write something between Space Invaders and Galaxian, where you actually played the aliens. This was part of the “you are the enemy” theme. I really loved the theme, by the way.

What went right:

• I finished! That’s the best thing!
• I made something simple.
• I started using very simple graphics and decided to improve them later only if there was time.
• I could come up with a design pretty quickly, this allowed me to spend more time on coding and creating graphics.
• I created a simple plan and was able to follow it on time.

What went wrong

• Game mechanics and controls. The controls didn’t fit quite right with the game. The game mechanics could have been improved.
• No sound I didn’t have time for it.
• Final game had some bugs, because I tweaked the controls at the last minute.
• I had bugs with other browsers that I didn’t detect until the last minute.
• Sunday was significantly less productive than Saturday and Friday night. I was really tired and took a lot of breaks. Probably because I had a lot of work the previous week. I will try to take a rest before the compo next time.
• I’m not an expert with the tools I used (Dart + HTML5). That slowed me down with the code. And the engine I wrote is still very immature.

What I learned

• Playing and rating games is equally or even more fun than writing the game. I love to see such explosion of creativity!
• The community rocks! Thanks for everything.