Hi folks! It's time to do this post-mortem thing. Give Me Life is a really simple 2D game on which you have different small levels, each one with a limited number of movements you can do, and you have to try to create as much life as possible in order to reach the next level.

I've been so excited, because this is the second Ludum Dare I've done and the first I've been alone, so I was expecting a worse result. But I finished the game and its playable so I'm really surprised.

Well, I want to keep this short so let's start:

Good things

• 2D or 3D?: I had so much different ideas for this game jam, and a lot of them were 3D games, but finally I decided to make this way because I wanted something really simple, and 2D, although there were other ideas I liked more. And I think that was a good decision. I have some basic skills on game art, but I'm not an artist and for sure I didn't want to make the art for a 3 days project. I tried on my first GGJ and it was fun but traumatic, so I wanted to use free assets this time, and I think it's easier for 2D games. And that leads to the next point.

• Game Assets: A few days before the game jam I was looking on OpenGameArt.org, and I found a lot of great assets, if you don't know this web you should visit it. I specially liked the ones from Kenney, that you can find also in Kenney's web. Kenney has a huge amount of packs you can use for your games with a really cool style. So I decided to focus on ideas matching that style, and which I could do with one or more of the packs. That was great because once I had the final idea it took me 5 minutes to find matching art, so I could focus on design and programming.

• Godot: For this game jam I decided to try Godot Engine. It is an open source 2D and 3D game engine with a lot of cool features. You can use C++ or its own scripting language, GDScript. I normally use C++ but this time I used GDScript, just because I wanted to learn something new, and I can say that GDScript it's really easy to learn. There is a lot of documentation and examples on the Godot site. Godot it's a really good option if you want to make a pixel perfect game for example, because it's easy to configure.

Bad things

• Godot: Yes. Godot was a bad thing too. I really like the engine but I had a couple of troubles with it. It's not as mature as other engines like Unity or Unreal, so it has some annoying errors, and the community is not as big, so sometimes it's hard to find a solution for your problem. Being more specific, I don't like the debugger, and for me it's really annoying not been able to see in runtime the hierarchy of the scene, as you can in Unity. I also had problems to find shaders documentation, and the moment you need to export your game can be a little pain, more so if you want to export it to HTML5.

• Design: This is the first game I've designed, I worked a lot on the idea but I know it's not the best. I redesigned a couple of things after seeing two friends playing, but I would have liked to work more on balancing the levels.

In conclusion, this was a really fun game jam to me. Using the Kenney assets was very liberating. This allowed me to focus on the design, something important to me because I'm really bad at it, and I wanted to practice. I've learnt a lot using Godot, and despite the problems I had I'm thinking on using it for my future projects, because it has so much potencial.

And that's it. I think I'm not fogetting anything.

If you want to play the game you can do it here