Hi everyone! I wanted to share my experience participating in the recent Ludum Dare game jam.

What Went Right

Normally I don't spend as much time on a level editor and instead hack together levels with the built in unity editor, however this time I made a fleshed out robust level editor inside of Unity.I was able to design this tool to quickly assemble levels by adding electronic components and making connections between them wherever I wanted. Despite being a programmer by trade, the 3D models turned out surprisingly well, which is a great achievement for me.

What Went Wrong

On the flip side, I ran into trouble with the circuit board mesh. I wanted it to have nice rounded corners, but when I created a mesh in Blender and imported it to Unity, the corners were inconsistent depending if the level was much wider or longer and would very between map sizes.

To fix this, I decided to create a circuit board mesh generator that would adjust the mesh based on the map size and desired corner size. I had some experience with generating meshes in the past, but this task took way more time than I anticipated. It was a clear case of the sunk cost fallacy, as I consistently felt like I was 20 minutes away from finishing, but it ended up consuming hours. I should have bailed earlier and just accepted the circuit board corners being a little iffy.

Conclusion Despite the challenges, participating in the Ludum Dare game jam was a valuable experience. As usual taught me a little bit more about time management and being careful about the tasks I take on, especially under tight deadlines. I look forward to applying these lessons in the next game jam!

Anyways I know a lot of you like playing HTML 5 games so I made sure to build it to play in the browser:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/electron-odyssey