OK, here’s my story of the LD48 compo this year.

First, it was my 2nd LD48 so I quite knew what I could expect. The main restriction for me always is that I have a family that keeps me quite busy at the weekends. But this weekend my wife was invited twice to go out, so my actual time was:
Friday 3am-5am
Saturday: 12am-1pm, 8pm-12pm
Sunday: 8pm-12pm
Sum: 11 hours.

But that’s fine for me. I’m bad at polishing things. I’m quick at prototyping.

What went right:

• The idea. Really, I sat there for 2 hours thinking of a game I could do in ~10 hours and I was close to give up. then came the idea with “explore the fridge”.
• Music, Sound. I’m bad at anything about sounds. I have no idea how to make music and how to make sfx. So for the sfx I just did some “chip chip” and “squeek” sounds using my voice. That gave me the idea, that I do have 5 hours left in my MS SongSmith free trial version. I wrote a few lines in the IDE, launched it and just “sang” as it came to my mind. It was bad. But it was so bad, that it started to be good, again. I kept the first trial w/o any improvements. Had I tried to improve it, I think it would have failed horribly

What went wrong

• MS Paint. Really, usually I use CorelDraw for graphics, but I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if the idea just works at all. I wanted to redraw the gfx with Corel later, but got no time. The gfx suck totally, but at least the game is fully playable.
• Sleep. I was so excited on Friday, that I woke up too early. I was dead tired on Saturday and close to be sick on Sunday.
• Communication. Really. I was so busy and had just too little time to chat and look what others did, that I have the feeling I missed a good piece of the compo. Might have been because I had so little time, too.
• Sleep. I’m still tired.
• Highscores. Next time I should try to find time to implement a simple online high score table. That might add long time fun to the game, since no one cares how much you can score if you can’t compete with others. Maybe.
• Sleep. I slept too little and feel like I can’t remember what I wanted to do the very second ago

Tools I used

• GLBasic. I’m the author of that language. I hope not to get a pimp hat for that 😉
• MS Paint. Next time I’d better use CorelDraw, because the results are worth it.
• AC3D. For the fridge door I used AC3D, which is a very nice modeller for low poly objects.
• Audacity. For the wav sfx recording I used Audacity with the “save selection as wav” option. Was very quick.
• Microsoft Songsmith. Really, they all post YouTube videos about “Enter Sandman” with MS Songsmith, and they suck. But if you use it in the way they designed it for, the results are quite funny. Don’t expect anything serious. It’s a toy that will produce a joke. I should have saved the file as WAV and convert to MP3, later. That way the Linux version had had music.
• Nettalk. It’s a slim, free IRC program. I can’t program w/o IRC, I’m afraid of being alone 😉

Final thoughts
The game was thought as a joke. I didn’t like the theme a lot, because all my “exploration” ideas were too big to realize in that little time. The feedback so far is overwhelming. Thank you so much. I really thought it’d fail miserably, thus I chose “cheese” in the game’s name. I’m happy that it doesn’t stink in the end.