Well, it's finally finished.
My second complete game, A Relatively Small World.
This was my first LD, and my second game jam (the first jam I ever did was in Blender, and we had a week, and I still made a terrible game).
I'm super proud of what I've made, and I hope you like it to. And now, the process I used to make the game.

Preparation

Cleaned out my workspace, ate pizza, set up an iTunes playlist and watched The Andy Griffith Show to slow down my mind. That's pretty much it.

Day 1

What's better than a belly full of pizza, and 18-hour orchestral game remix playlist, a room with no distractions, and a game to make?
Well, it's not drawing a blank on the theme, I can tell you that.
I had come up with vague ideas for the other themes in the Final Round, but I didn't think that 'A Small World' would ever become the theme.
Shows how much I know.
To get inspiration, I googled 'A Small World' and came up with Disney, Disney, Disney, and Disney.
So, no help.
Then I remembered The Little Prince, with its little planets and big characters.
I knew I had my concept, and threw together an ugly scientist in paint.net:
From here I had until 10:00 PM if I wanted to get a good night's sleep, so I cranked out some more graphics and the core gameplay (yay, trigonometry!), and hit the sack.

Day 2

It must have been fatigue telling me my graphics were good. When I got up in the morning I saw the futility of my efforts and quickly came up with a new art style. This was way better and I redrew the rest of the art to match. Any further art I drew as I came up with the ideas.
Also the sound effects were recorded as I went along, and I recorded the first version of the soundtrack with a terrible pick. Now for the glitches...
First, the aliens would not attack the cities. This was due to an annoying quirk about Game Maker where the image angle's 0 degrees points up, while the sine function's 0 degrees points right. In addition to this, as the y moves up on the screen, the value goes down (WHAT?). It took me a while to figure that out and fix it, but it still took a huge chunk out of my development time. The second trig bug came when I went to put Gort in. When he appears, he takes the image angle of the city and increases it by 10, then figures out its location on the planet from that (for more explanation, stay tuned for the code explanation post). But I had Gort appearing all over the place, off the planet, on the wrong side of the planet, in the middle of the planet, in the right spot but upside down (but only when the angle was over 90), but never appearing in the same spot twice. Eventually I got it figured out and fixed him, and from there it went pretty smooth. I took some breaks, played games, ate, and got to bed at 9:00, leaving me the rest of Sunday to finish the game.

Day 3

Okay, maybe not all of Sunday. I went to church in the morning, and didn't get back until 1:00, so I had 5 hours to finish. I rewrote most of the text in the game and created the last mission, and spent an inordinate amount of time on the fade out at the end. Once that was done, I left my brother and sister to playtest it while I re-recorded the soundtrack (I found a better pick). When I came back, they had discovered a game breaking bug that had me working until 30 minutes to the deadline.
But I got it done, and I did it in 48 hours.

What Did I Learn?

Don't ever assume the theme, don't ever assume that you can do it without difficulty, and don't ever assume in general. A Ludum Dare schedule is incredibly fluid (at least for the way I work), but if you get stuck on one thing for too long it could ruin your whole game. For me, it was Gort. I should have scrapped him and come up with a better mission.
But I just love The Day The Earth Stood Still...

Future Plans

I think this game would go good with a sandbox mode, a longer, more dynamic soundtrack, and more pugs. But all in all, I'm really proud of what I've done.
Play it here and rate!
A Relatively Small World