First, a thank you. There’s a big part of me that feels I don’t quite deserve even this much; I probably relaxed a lot more than I should’ve, and in the end felt I didn’t contribute enough overall to the event, but it means a lot to place as high as I did regardless of my activity. I often tell myself I don’t care if I ever get noticed for my games, I have more fun making them than I do reading the comments… but that’s a lie. I loved reading everyone’s feedback and took all of it to heart (yeah, all of it) and for my very first Ludum Dare I can’t believe how well I scored. Truth is I feel pretty guilty about that, I got swept up in other work and life and honestly kept telling myself to play more LD games, but it just didn’t happen. I’m happy with what I got and hope everyone who got to play Miskro enjoyed it. I still hope to play quite a few more that I downloaded before voting ended. Hopefully next LD I’ll be a little more on the ball.

Second, this jam.  Easily the weirdest experience I’ve ever had. Everything went way too smoothly, everything came out way better than I expected, I slept a good amount each night and came out the other end with something presentable. I’m still not sure how. Miskro started with an idea based on growing and shrinking, but that idea was centered on a shooter, where you have a beam and would use it to make objects grow and shrink to solve puzzles. I started playing off that, somewhere in there I had the idea to turn the gun on yourself and shrink and grow to explore a rat map, and during all this (because it’s a jam) I’m already prototyping. I had a test map mocked up already and implementing the grow/shrink powers was simple, then jumping in that, pressing a button, and watching the world perspective change around you was the feeling I immediately felt I was going for. Something kind of magical about it, akin to Alice in Wonderland.

From then my process is horribly unorganized. I work on art, design, and code almost all at the same time as ideas come up. I decided I wanted the first power on a cliff in the first island, so I started morphing terrain to create that cliff. I wanted foliage so I modeled grass and trees. At one point I decide the player needs more feedback for drowning so I spend an hour tweaking an underwater shader to give that information. I just hop from moment to moment, coming up with it as I go, and building what’s needed as it comes up. It’s not a super concise or efficient process. When I felt I had built enough moments for it to be called a complete game, I came up with an ending and stuck it at the end of the most logical path I assumed a player would take. This being somewhere around the 30-hour mark, I started polishing, adding fail states, making sure puzzles couldn’t be broken (they still can be), tweaking my art direction and within the final few hours I decide I want a better win state than just reaching the end. This birthed the medal collecting and eventually, the god character, who I figured was necessary as a teaching tool and a bit of charm. His systems and the dialogue widget were simple, but it left little room for testing cramming that in towards the 48-hour mark, and I was packaged and uploading before running any more tests.

I’m used to Global Game Jam and others where you don’t have a lot of extra time to get projects ready to upload and I think towards the end I may have panicked a bit. I left quite a few bugs in, but now that judging is over, I’d love to go back and iron them out. Miskro isn’t a very complex game, but adjusting physics volumes in real time will almost always cause unforeseen issues. Kill volumes for growing in small spaces exist but don’t seem to work. They did at one point I think? I didn’t feel like it was necessary to test much further and now they don’t. The house crumbles when you’re at any size but it’s only supposed to when you’re giant. It’s little things like that. I’m incredibly humbled, proud, and thankful that it got as far as it did, but it could definitely use some more time. This was a rewarding experience for learning what having a community for your little projects is and means. I’ve never reached out to a streamer before, I’ve never had my game let’s-played, and all that happened within weeks of wrapping up. This is almost too cool for words, and I guess that’s what I want to get out there with this post. Ludum Dare feels pretty special right now. I have nothing but thanks to say for that.

Final note, I’ve been asked a few times; Miskro was my poor attempt at combing the Greek words for ‘small’ (micro) and ‘island’ (nisi). Hastily translated gibberish has been my go-to for most game jams, it tends to help the game stand out when googling too. :upside_down: