Sorry for any error in this post but English is not my first language. I'm trying to express and share my experience as best as I could. If you'd like to read the original version, please visit my blog (Chinese)

Part 1 is here

DAY 2, 4/23/2017

I opened my eyes after a dozen times of alarm rings. It was 10:00 A.M. 5 hours of sleeping recovered my energy, and there was another hard working day ahead.

Building the world

As I finished the core gameplay part last night, I started building the world as first priority.

Considering my poorly trained 3D modelling skill, I gave up the thought of building the world with Blender, and chose Qubicle Voxel Editor, a voxel art editor which I bought months ago but never installed on Steam, for modelling the furnitures and characters of my game. I know some skills of drawing pixel arts, I can handle it, and voxel art fits perfectly for indie games. Perfect choice!

The game scene is based on my apartment in real life. For a nice and clean game scene, I removed the kitchen and toilet. Modelling, exporting, refining textures, placing in the scene...the game scene looked better and better as furnitures were created one by one. Looking at what I had built, a huge satisfacation embraced me. I just realized this is why I threw myself into making games, and the best interpretion, for me, of the theme A Small World.

I got more and more skilled in modelling voxel items. I started to making the treasures (socks, cat toys, smartphones..) and the super star: Doggie. 'These are just like moasic masks in porn videos.' My fiancee laughed at me. I still love my works.

I planned to make Blender for IK animations for Doggie, but I had no time to learn how to do it anymore. At last I abandoned Doggie's limbs, and made her a slime-like creature jumping around.

It was over mid-night already. It tooks me 5 hours for modelling, and 2 more hours for animation. I also coded something during the art works for rest, including adding hideouts in my voxel apartment.

I hadn't designed the level. My game had no UI or instructions by then, and was not tested. I knew I had to work the whole night to meet the deadline.

Vomit and race against time

I'm not sure if I ate something poisonous, or it was all because of stress. I started to vomit and trapped in the toilet. After eating six pills, I asked for a day off with my company's team leader.

In the darkness, my lamp and the LED screen was like beacons on the night sea. I kept working on the final parts of my game in non-stop. I wanted to record a Meow from my dearest Doggie, but she refused to make a single sound no matter how I teased her. This little btch must understood my language. Desperately, I mocked and recorded the *Meow myself, when I found my throat hurt so much to barely say a word.

Glimmer broke throught the curtains, and I finally came to the ending part. I'm not really satisfied with my work so far: the connection between jump animation and cat movement was not very smooth; the UI was ugly; the sight detection of human was rather inaccurate; the collsions behaved awfully sometimes; and I should have chosen a better way controlling the camera... But It was 7:00 A.M in the morning - 2 hours before deadline. Not only it was too tired to make any large adjustments, but the time also not allowed. I had to give up many designes. Even the human's model (which I forgot to do it totally) is a capsule.

The clock kept ticking. I felt myself was crawling in mud, with a tank behind me, rolling to me slowly. Sometimes I just made a litter bug-fix or adjustment, and twenty minutes aleady passed.

In 8:59 A.M. I submitted all my works.

Last Hour!

I went for packing my game in WebGL, making people easier for playing. But when the package came out I was quite frustrated: the scene was poorly rendered. The environment light was so dim that players can barely see the details. My best guess was the light map was poorly set. So I went back to the editor, adjusted parameters, and packed the game again and again like crazy. Luckily, I got the intended result.

The rendering job took me about half an hour, and there was only 30 minutes left. I prayed for my network being good, and submitted my entry.

My should hurt, eyes heavy. But I made a game in 48 hours! FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Lessons

Ludum Dare exposes my short barrel board: I'm lack of knowledge in so many techniques, and I overestimated my capability. Before this, I was always lazy, not trying to know every aspect of a certain techique, skill or practice. Such bad attitude almost made my Compo challenge failed.

Ludum Dare makes me learnt and improved as well. I realized that,

Never underestimate your limits. Always with a heart of eagerness and fearlessness. You never know what awaits you. All you can do is to advance, even if you can't see through the mist.

And there are some more of my thoughts:

• Do not try to make a commercial game, which is unrealistic. Ludum Dare wants what is nice and small.
• Knowing my effectiveness. Try to make a rough schedule before start, and arrange time and energy properly.
• It is so difficult if trying to learn everything in Ludum Dare, which I should've learnt in normal days.
• Do whatever I'm capable of. I'm not trying to make a science study here.
• In emergency some code can be ugly. But try to refactor the code often (I did it after finishing each module). It will save life when something goes wrong.

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If you've read all the way down here, please accept my sincere appreciation and biggest thanks! English is not my first language, so there might be errors in the article. And here is my game; I do hope you can try it out and leave me some comments and thoughts!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/this-world-of-mine