So the Friday night that LD started, I texted my husband to let him know I was headed home from work, and he tells me he’s busy with Ludum Dare so would I please take care of dinner? Which baffles me because I thought he was way too busy to do Ludum Dare this time around, but what do I know, right? Well, his enthusiasm was contagious, I guess, because half an hour later I was busy coming up with ideas for what game I could make with my extremely limited game-making skills.

From the beginning I wanted to approach the theme by defining “10 seconds” as something other than a time limit. I also knew that whatever I came up with, it’d have to be something I could implement in RPG Maker because I know absolutely nothing about programming. It wasn’t until the next evening that I really got started, but by that point I had a pretty solid idea and was fairly sure I could pull it off before the jam deadline.

• I finished a game! Really, this trumps everything else. I made a game almost entirely from scratch, it works, and it’s winnable. For a first game ever, that’s about all you can ask for, right?
• I stuck to something I could do. My initial idea involved all sorts of dishes to eat and different endings depending on which ten second helpings the player chooses. It didn’t take long to realize that was way too complicated, both for the time limit and my skill, so I settled on a figure-out-the-right-order puzzle instead. From there out it came together pretty easily, except for a little hiccup at the last minute when I was figuring out how to get my sprites uploaded, but that’s for a different list!
• I’m really happy with the music. It’s a Thanksgiving themed game, so I created a little melody based off of a traditional Thanksgiving hymn, and then near the end when I decided I had time for winning an losing sound effects, I played off that with church-organ-sounding “Amen” chords in major and minor keys. Apparently people find the losing music hilarious, which I never would have expected, but I’m really glad it turned out that way!
• Spriting isn’t as hard as I thought. Once I got started, making all those little food sprites was really pretty easy. Of course I pretty much ignored perspective and shading and anything that makes sprites good, but the fact that you can tell what the food is supposed to be – sometimes even without reading the description first! – makes me very happy. I was dreading doing an animated character sprite, and I joked to my husband that maybe instead of a little pilgrim guy I’d cheat and draw just a hat, which he thought was awesome. The hat bouncing around when you move is now my favorite thing.

• Tiny things. Honestly, I don’t have much for this list. I had to learn how to make an RPG Maker game not look exactly like a stock RPG Maker game, but I bravely delved into code I didn’t know anything about and figured that out. I could make better title and ending screens with more time, but I’m not displeased with what I have. I had some trouble importing my sprites and get the transparencies working correctly, but I stayed up too late and eventually got it right.
• Managing to post something people could actually play. The biggest trouble I had was not in making the game, but in getting it posted with all the relevant bits at a reasonable filesize. I originally compressed the game data without the RTP, which it turns out you need if you don’t have RPG Maker installed. So then I compressed it with the RTP, which made a 6MB file into a 297MB file, which was clearly less than ideal. So then after a good deal of digging around and error messages I managed to include just those parts of the RTP that I needed to make the game run and get a new file uploaded. Then even later I figured out how to upload a .zip that contained all the needed stuff so people could bypass the extractor. All of which was a pain but taught me there’s a lot more to putting a game out there past just making the game!

Overall, I’m really glad I decided to jump in and give this a try. Not only did I get a game done that I’m pleased with, but so many of you nice people played it and left encouraging feedback! I was really quite taken aback by how many people left comments saying they liked my stupid little game and how good it was for a first-timer. So thank you! You have convinced me to keep working at it, to improve and expand this one and to do Ludum Dare again in the future!