Ludum dare is always a great time, although I reach a certain point where I feel some frustration about submitting an unfinished product. But the main responsible for this, is obviously me.

Fuga: a game about space, chemical elements, and music.

For this edition, it was like someone had asked me to make a selection of the biggest mistakes a jammer can do.

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Never validate an idea before breakfast

I woke up at 05:30(GMT+2) and I started to think about the theme. I quickly came with an idea of exchanges between planets (a lot of us had the same kind of idea). It sounded cool, I drew some sketches for the GUI, I already had some melody in mind, and I had some ideas about some cool GFX I could have experimented.

I went back to sleep, and I started to work immediately after a short breakfast, without rethinking the project at a high scale for the whole day.
At the end of this first day, I had my “engine” and some graphics, here I asked myself a question: “what exactly is my game ?”

I just realized that my game was barely one. I completely forgot to check if actions made by the players were fun, if the goal proposed was motivating. I freaked out a bit, and found some safety solutions, which implied to cut some of the mechanics I had already worked on and to reform the code structure. And here comes the second point.

Time == code == bugs == loss of Time

Those changes, which should have brought some more life into the game, they also brought some errors (modifying a weak code can be dangerous). In addition, due to distraction and exhaustion, I also create some stupid bugs. I had the feeling I spent my whole day correcting stupid things.

This was not really cheering me up, furthermore I was loosing a lot of valuable time. As a direct consequence, I had to make some cuts – you usually make cuts during a LD – but here I sacrificed important things, such as clarity, coherence and fun.

(Re)Doing everything from scratch

To start from nothing is interesting in term of creativity. I don’t feel limited by the already existing code,  I think I’m more creative in those circumstances. So it’s quite positive.

But redoing everything each time, this is really absurd, boring and time consuming, especially when talking about GUI elements. The problem is I don’t know If I will ever find the courage to make those damn Buttons and DialoguesBoxes in a nice reusable way. In conclusion redoing everything is a serious loss of time when you have only 48 hours.

A nice LD afterall

Even with all this dark forces playing against me, I still managed to have a fun and nice week end. My game, even if not what I had in mind, is unique and playable. I’ve spent some nice moments staring at my code and solving some problems I never encountered before. And now, I’m playing some fantastic games and meeting kind people.

For all of these reasons, it’s ok for me to not make a great Ludum Dare game.

tl;dr

Thought of a game idea, but not of a complete gameplay.
Had to make late changes which creates bugs and errors.
Run out of time because I use it poorly.
I had fun making this game and I spent a nice week end 😀

Tags: LD30, post-mortem