I’ve held off on writing this because I was waiting for reviews and issues to come in so I’d have something to post-mortemise about.

I have been sat here most of the afternoon playing and rating games, whilst reading the ratings on my own game in case things were broken.

Actually, nothing is broken apart from Audio – which is the usual story with HTML5 games even in these days (sadface), so I uploaded a fix that on platforms where it wasn’t going to work, that audio could at least be disabled (it was only generated fuzzy noise anyway).

Lesson learned there, TEST ALL THE BROWSERS

What else have I learned? Well, I actually finished my entire game by the end of Saturday, by doing the following things

• Using an engine so I didn’t even once have to worry about collision, pixels, rendering, etc
• Focusing on the game, rather than art or sounds
• Keeping my features to the bare minimum and making sure there was an end-to-end experience in place

Following that, I spent a few hours when I was tired

• Making some art
• Generating some sounds
• Playing and noting the things that annoyed me
• Getting other people to play it and noting things that annoyed them

The next day was solely spent just making the game fun to play

Yes indeed, after spending about 8 hours building the game, I then spent about 8 hours in the following loop

1. Play the game
2. Note down what wasn’t fun
3. Think of a way to fix the problem raised by #2
4. Implement the fix for the problem raised by #2
5. Goto 1

It seems to have paid off, as the reviews being written are favourable indeed, my favourite being

“Easily gets into my top 3 of LD25! Keep it up!”

I am strongly encouraged by this as a note of the things I have learned at past Ludum Dares and now cannot wait until the next one where I might try to be a bit more ambitious but still try to “finish the game by the end of day #1” as that really seems to be the best way forward.