This was my first LD, and I had a great time! : ) Thanks to everyone organizing this, being in #ludumdare, and just working hard to churn out awesome games. THANK YOU!

There’s definitely something to be said for reflecting on the good and the bad, though. Let’s start with…

The Bad:

1. It took forever to come up with a platformer engine in pygame. I didn’t really have one till 2 pm on Saturday, and I spent forever wrestling with collision detection and never actually got it to work correctly. In the future, I would love to start with an engine that is much closer to my finished product that straight-up pygame.
2. I started with this lofty idea for a story, and viewed the game as a storytelling medium, relying on level-design and storytelling to make the game fun. Whoops, I have NO experience with either of those things and couldn’t really pull it off. Also the story stank.
3. As a result, my game is a very generic platformer, short, and… not actually very fun at all. Next time, I plan to think about gameplay first, and what ‘innovative’ things I can do in that department, and story, atmosphere, etc. second.
4. Again on the story front, I actually totally changed the story and concept to be less pretentious sometime really late Sunday night, which is part of the reason the story seems like an afterthough. :/ It was.
5. My plan was to finish on Saturday night and work on homework on Sunday, but that didn’t happen.

The Good:

1. I FINISHED! I’m extremely proud of myself for this. I usually have a short attention span and trouble finishing stuff, but I did this time. : )
2. This was the third game I worked on, and the first individually – for that, I feel very happy with what I came up with.
3. I was about to give up Saturday afternoon due to my problems implementing a platformer – but DIDN’T. I just threw out the bits of collision detection which weren’t working, which turns out I must not have needed that badly, because the game mechanics work alright without them.
4. The graphics are very atmospheric and cute and actually didn’t take too long to come up with. : ) I’m very happy to have struck a happy “simple, but effective” medium here.
5. I made music! I know nothing about music, and had never made any before, and granted I mostly just jiggled knobs in audiotool, but I feel very proud of myself for attempting and making something that fits the atmosphere even vaguely.
6. A few hours before the competition ended, I got a great idea to actually make the gameplay unique and fun! There’s no way I could have done it in 48 hours having started where I started, but I plan to work on it over winter break.
7. I got sleep, I showered, I didn’t totally wear myself out. I’m especially happy I just slept in as late as I wanted on Sunday, since that was much-needed rest for Finals week.

Conclusions

I had a great time at this LD, and I’ll continue working on my game, and hopefully participate in future mini-LDs and full LDs. : D Thank you everyone!