This was my first Ludum Dare, but далеко not my first jam overall. And, strangely enough, this one turned out to be one of the easiest.

Usually I participate with a team and friends, but this time I worked solo (yes, using assets - thank god for Sketchfab), and I expected it to be harder. But in the end, I finished the game about 16 hours before the deadline. And I even slept relatively нормально - about 6 hours per day. Honestly, I thought I wouldn’t make it, but everything turned out pretty smooth. And I’m actually happy with the result. The game turned out cool.

For comparison: once I participated in a two-week jam and slept a total of about 50–60 hours over the whole period. That was really hard.

Actually, I noticed this amazing little rat a long time ago and wanted to do something with it, but the idea came together during the jam. Rats are associated with mazes for me, and I also wanted to experiment with unusual controls and with deception - and voilà: Rat Signal.

Of course, there are always some problems. The main one, especially in Unreal Engine, is the build size. No matter how you optimize, getting below ~500 MB is almost impossible. Well, I mean, you can - if you convert everything to 128×128 textures and that’s it.

On top of that, it tends to increase audio file sizes several times. To reduce everything, you need to compress things in a very specific way, but that’s definitely not something you want to deal with during a 3-day jam.

And yeah - this time I probably broke all the rules of OOP 😄 I tried to encapsulate almost all the logic in one place so I wouldn’t get confused.

And surprisingly - it worked. About 70% of the logic fits on this one screen.

So yeah, that’s my experience. Not the most stressful jam in my life - and maybe that’s why it’s one of the most enjoyable ones. And if you want to make games for fun, feel free to reach out, we can come up with something

Well, you spend a little time, go through this game. Thank you