My submission for this Ludum Dare is named Make Me Beautiful. I have to thank Jupiter Hadley for the name.

This was not the first time I participated, but it has been a long time since I posted a playable build. This time I was happy with the result opposed to the last few times I never had a good enough result to share.

This build of Make Me Beautiful for Windows can be found at Itch.io.

https://smallgaming.itch.io/make-me-beautiful

What I should repeate nex time

I had enough knowledge of the used tools. The newest tool I used for this jam was Pyxel Edit. It is a great drawing tool for 2d graphics. I been using Pyxel Edit for the last few months on a lost most daily basis. Knowing the shortcuts and the functionality Pyxelf Edit has to offer increased the productivity. So redoing sprites took less time then when I was using Gimp. This resulted in short iteration loops.

I been using Unit since 2013. Learning to work with unit the way I want to work as a software engineer took many hours of prototyping. Wormhunter in April of 2014 for Ludum Dare was the turning point for rethinking how I must use Unity. MonoBehaviour does not offer a good structure to work as a software developer. My personal preferences is to add only 1 script on a prefab. In April of 2014 I started with thinking about a solid structure on top of Monobehaviour that satisfies my preferences. That structure has saddled now and I am happy how I work within Unity.

The scope of the project was just right. Often I just set the scope too big for Ludum Dare. This time I thought of a function I could reuse. The code for the creation of different elements of a planet was reused 5 times. The code is so modular I could easly plug in a new animation or element to create. Make Me Beautiful only has three (overall) types of states for the player: Idle, Moving and Creating. There were only 3 game states: start, game, result. There were any NPC to implement either. This to saved me a lot of time.

Balance between work and rest. I never had so much off time. I slept on the 1st day from 14:00 till 18:00 and on the 2nd day I went to a party during the day. I did had my laptop with me and I did some work. It was not nearly the amount of work I could have done when I would have stayed at home (and not eat cake, NEVER!).

Knowing what my limitations are. I can not make music and I am not the good pixelartist. During Ludum Dare I will not try to improve those skills either, outside Ludum Dare sure why not if I have the mindset for it. So I just except my limitations and make something with what I know and works for me.

What I can improve on

I did not have a complete vision of what Make Me Beautiful was. Until the end of day 1 I had no clear vision of the complete game loop. That's also one of the reason I could sleep during that day. Starting without a complete vision is risky because of the chance to procrastinate to solve the problems that needs to be solved. Procrastination can lead to the biggest failure: not having a playable submission at the end of 3 day. Still not having the complete vision was a little chain reaction of things to improve on.

The implementation of the game loop was done on 3th day. That was way to late to think or make changes to the submission.

There was no option to let other people test play Make Me Beautiful during the 2nd and 3th day. Getting feedback on your art is easy via social media, but feedback on the game itself is harder. Still having honest feedback early on will help to give focus on what could be improved if there is time to iterate on it.

My bad chair and sitting position resulted in some painful joints. It was just a bad tripe filled with pain at the end of last day. I sat through the pain because I did not have to work the next day. It is not something I would recommend to do.

Thank you for reading and have a great day!