Hello everyone! This is my postmortem of the 34th Ludum Dare. I didn’t write the name of the game in the title, because it’s too long

So I was ready to create a game last weekend, and complete my 7th or 8th Ludum Dare (I can’t quite remember). I did have some appointments during the days, but thought that I could join and compete anyway. I wasn’t wrong, but wasn’t completely right either. I had my high school prom on Saturday, and I knew I was going to skip 8 or so hours from development, so I woke up early (because LD starts at 3 am in Hungary) to see the theme and start programming. I joined the IRC, waited for the theme announcement, and when I saw what the theme(s) was(were), I was quite happy, because I thought it was a good theme to work with. But I just couldn’t figure out a concept in like 5 hours, and I had to leave my computer because of the preparations of the prom. I was in town, when I finally got my idea, so after I went home, I worked straight for about 5 hours until I had to leave again. I had a great time at Saturday night, but I had to go to sleep, because I was awake for about 22 hours. When I started working on Sunday, everything was kind of in place in my head. I thought I might even finish for the Compo instead of the Jam. My game concept was that there’s a constantly growing tree, and you have to climb it. I didn’t quite have the concept for what you exactly have to do on the tree, I was thinking about something, but in the end it turned out to be something completely different. I spent the whole Sunday to do the tree generating and lighting for the game, tweaking it to almost perfection. Then I realized I can’t finish for the compo, so I went to sleep and started working on Monday again. When I started working, I figured out that I can’t do anything with climbing the tree, but I didn’t want to start a new game, because the tree was so beautiful . So I started experimenting with some destruction, because I was kind of bored. And then it occured to me: The branches’ fall looked so good, I new I had to make a tree chopping game. So I did it. I removed the climbing part, making it so the player only climbs the trunk, made a cutting animation, fixed some bugs that occured when you cut a branch, added explosions, some sense to gameplay, powerup, music, sound, some artwork and I was done. I finished 4 hours before deadline.

What went good:

• I had a simple idea I knew I could do in 3 days
• Making the music was very fluent, I finished in an hour with it
• The tree looked just like I imagined it
• libGDX behaved very nicely compared to my LDs before

What went wrong:

• Time: Don’t do an LD if you have a prom at the weekend, two music contributions and a highway code test next week, because you’ll be tired AF during the whole week
• My new computer I worked on didn’t have Photoshop and FL Studio installed, so I had to work with PDN and LMMS
• Couldn’t figure out why, but I was not able to import my code into a new GDX project that had android and HTML5 support

In the end, I learned some lessons during the weekend, had a lot of fun, and last, but not least I finished a game! Check it out, leave a vote and a comment, and I’ll check out and vote for your game too

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=20731