Link to entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=3407

As I said in my submission, Mine Escape was my first attempt at a game and my first entry into Ludum Dare. I feel like I learned a lot in a short amount of time and I’ll definitely be back for the next one.

Mine Escape was “finished” in that it’s a self-contained playable game with an opening, levels and an ending. Due to running out of time I wasn’t able to put in many of the levels and different traps to fill them but the underlying “trap” system is in place so it would be fairly easy to add more. I’ll expand on that below.

What worked:

• The graphics –  I’m a programmer, not an artist, and all of my art is usually programmer art of the worst kind. I can barely draw a circle freehand. By using tools like Photoshop I tried to draw with shapes and lines where possible instead of freehand sprite art. I learned that when working solo it’s easier for me to apply filters and approximate a ‘pixel’ look than to try and draw it “legit”.
• The coding – Mine Escape is the last of a long series of failed projects and unfinished tutorials, I’ve never been able to see something through long enough to do anything more complex than draw a static sprite. Basic elements of game dev like scene management and platformer physics were things i’ve never been able to get my head around before, but they’re working in Mine Escape.
• The controls – I’m keen to get started making Xbox XNA games and so I wanted to do the controls properly instead of  hacking them in. The title screen detects if you press a keyboard key or gamepad control and responds accordingly. The mouse cursor is not drawn if you’re using gamepad input and you can play with any controller index (1-4) regardless of how many are plugged in.

What didn’t work:

• My timekeeping – In retrospect, I didn’t make  the best use of my time during the 48 hours. I surprised myself by creating art+sound assets I didn’t hate and so spent a lot of time producing more. You can see this in my first video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4qASBnUXpo) where most of the assets from 18 hours in made it to the final game.
• The game length – Games like Mine Escape live and die by their levels, and on that count this was a failure. Most of my time went into the “overhead”, the engine + mechanics and I just ran out of time to implement more stuff to do.  I was going to have more dangers such as acid drips and electrified floors which would eventually start being arranged so that you had to rely on the BUDDI rather than just swinging the torch about to see what’s ahead.

What I learned:

• If my game needs lots of levels to be playable, I should spend more time crafting them and getting their mechanics working. If the intro screen’s art is amazing but there’s only 1 level then it’s the length people will comment on. Speaking personally I’d rather play 20 levels with  placeholder art than 2 levels of finished sprites before game over.
• Game making is FUN. When I first started out I quickly realised it’s also a lot of hard work, but once you push past that it’s a rewarding hobby. I’m glad I proved to myself that I can do this, even if I’ve only scraped the surface.

What’s next?

Entering LD48 was a ton of fun and I’ll be here to take part in the next one, too. Now that the compo is over I’m wondering what to do next. I feel like my thought process has been changed from “what am I able to do?” to “what do I WANT to do?”. There’s a strong possibility I’ll add some more levels, fix some bugs and take Mine Escape for playtesting. If it turns out there’s a fun and engaging game idea in there I may clean it up to fit the Microsoft App Hub guidelines and publish it on the Xbox Live Indie Games section.

Entry link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=3407