I finished, but I’m not happy with it. Lets call it a failed experiment.

To better illuminate this, lets rewind a bit.

My first Ludum Dare was LD19. I went in with a framework I barely knew and a set of balls made of pure steel. As someone who had spent a lot of time in the game dev world, I knew the thing I needed to succeed was a microscopic scope, so I did just that. I started with the very core of the game and worked outward. It all went very well. By sunday morning I was effectively done and had over 10 hours to polish and add features. The game shipped with all kinds of neat stat tracking features and generally felt very complete. It even had menus!

LD20 was more of the same. With a LD under my belt I went in with more confidence, but the same approach. The result was a similarly well polished Shmup with leaderboards and bosses. I focused on the elements that my LD19 entry failed at (mostly the sloppy controls) and again walked away very satisfied.

LD21 got a bit more ambitious. I went with an idea I initially wasn’t sure how to code. Google came to the rescue and End Of Line; my best rated/personal favorite game came to life.

LD22 was missed due to a job interview (I still tried, but couldn’t get power on the flight which was during the middle of the compo

For LD23 I went for the jam. Knowing I had an extra day, I went fancy on a rotation mechanic that ended up being a complete nightmare to code. It went OK.

Totally missed LD24.

Which brings us to now: LD25. On previous LDs I’ve always been more or less feature complete at the halfway mark, so the second half is adding features and polish. I wanted to see this time if I could start with a much more complex idea to start with. Instead of taking the “start small, work up” approach, I wanted to try the “Start big, trim to size” angle.

The compo started at 6pm friday here. By 1am I was pretty sure I’d cocked up.

I had, at this point, coded the core idea. I had a spaceship that you could equip modules to, with energy/armor/shield systems. But I was beginning to realize how complex this was going to become. There were a lot more interactions going on that I’d originally anticipated, and it was looking to be a mess of code. However, Saturday was a long block of time, so I soldiered on.

I hammer through Saturday and before I know it it’s 3am and I’m still a LONG ways from even having victory conditions. At this point I know things have gone sour. It turns out slashing scope is a lot harder than adding to it. When your core gameplay relies on all these little features, you realize that cutting them gimps the gameplay rapidly. You’re left trying to pull weeds from a desert; there’s just nothing to remove.

Sunday. 7am. Alarm going off.

There’s a loud voice in my head screaming “turn off the alarm, go back to sleep, you’re not going to finish”. That voice is beautiful. It’s music.

But no. If I quit now I’d have wasted all this work. I begin to quietly wonder how many “5 hour energy” drinks is too many. According to the bottle: 2. Now you know.

I had one goal at this point: Finish. Any feature that hadn’t been at least partially implemented and wasn’t gameplay critical was cut. This sadly ended up really murdering the “fun” since the enemy spawn patterns and waves ended up getting gimped pretty hard. However, 2 minutes before the deadline, I’m literally hammering out the last bugs in the fitting window.

So here we are. It’s done.

However, the game itself isn’t important. It never is. LD isn’t about winning, it’s not about making the best game of them all, or even making a good one. It’s about learning; and I just got a fantastic lesson on scope. I picked up the idea knowing it would be a wonderful test of just what the limit is for a 48h compo; now I’m pretty sure I know. LD26 is right around the corner, then I’ll get to take a remedial course and see how much I’ve really learned.

tl;dr version: Start small, build up. Never the reverse!