What went well:

• Decided to go with Game Maker Studio 1.4 instead of 2 because of two reasons:
  • I never used 2 for more than a few minutes and I think LD is not the best time to try and study something completely new.
  • It doesn’t have HTML5 export and I really wanted my game to be as accessible as possible.
• I threw away stuff that wasn’t a ‘must’ for me. This probably saved me since I almost didn’t make it on time.
• Made the graphics simple yet effective. Most of the animations are done by code, the others are 2/3 frames. So yeah, no animations basically.
• Theme usage. I really liked the idea of making a game about making a game, and LD people are the perfect audience for that.
• Game length. The fact that the game is short and there’s no punishment for death made it more accessible to people to play until the end.
• Most important: didn’t completely freak out. Tried to stay as chill as possible. Obviously it didn’t work that well close to submission hour when I had to cut my leg off as a sacrifice for satan.

What went not-as-good:

• I made the entire audio in the last two hours or so. I’m pretty happy with the “music” but the sound effects were pretty bad and lacking. (Most of them were made with my mouth or with junk in my room that I threw on the table). Also the volumes are really not balanced.
• Totally forgot to animate the player. Somewhere along the way I thought I could get away with it by having the dev say “If you’re not going to behave you won’t get any animations!” or something like that, but I totally forgot about that too.
• “Beta” testing. I really should have sent friends demos since the platforming part is WAYYY too hard for most people. For me it was really easy and my brother also managed to finish it quite easily, so I thought it was fine. Boy was I wrong…
  

  View post on imgur.com

  (See? It’s easy!!!!!! Well for me at least)

• Having more debug shortcuts. Well, the game has different parts, and I didn’t break it to enough parts and didn’t make it easy enough to switch between parts. This led me to play the same parts over and over again, which is partly good due to testing, but mostly boring and making me want to kill myself.
• People expect to jump with space and not with up or W. I should’ve learned that lesson from the previous LD. Next time I’ll remember.
• I misspelled “procedurally”. And no, I did not misspell “mnoster”. That was on purpose.

More stuff that I want to say:

• So far I got lots of reviews and votes which is really encouraging. So I gotta thank you all for that.
• I got frontpaged on Newgrounds (again!) which blows my mind.
• I’m taking this whole experience as practice in making games, but also marketing the game. This LD made me open a Twitter (yeah yeah I live under a rock), but the thing that proved most effective is posting gifs here. So sorry-not-sorry for the spam.

Thanks for reading!