I was half-way through writing a monster post here, but decided to retry with a nice tidy summation of my thoughts while creating Roto this compo:

• First time finishing a compo entry. So, so, so much harder than a jam (for me), but oh my so much more rewarding.
• Being a solo dev who can touch on art, music, sound, level design, and game mechanics while tying it all together with a cohesive theme in 48 hours makes you a god in my eyes. You’re amazing.
• Music is really, really hard. I thought I could ‘wing’ it, and I really could not. BeepBox helped, but I have neither the talent nor the training to do anything useful in that arena.
• Practice a little bit of everything if you want to solo these.
• Scope remains one of the most important things. I found what helped me was to set in stone two separate lists: must-haves and nice-to-haves. If you don’t finish must-haves you don’t have a game to submit. Once that list is done then start pulling out your favorites from the nice-to-haves.
• Polish belongs on the must-haves list.
• You don’t have to be an amazing visual artist to make your game have some visual appeal. Simple tricks like drop shadows and squash and stretch animation do wonders. I like how the aesthetic of my game turned out, and I load zero external graphical assets (other than a font file. So I guess that’s actually 1).
• Progression in your level design is important. Ramp the player up, introduce new concepts in an appetizing way and THEN hit them over the head with it.
• It helps immensely to watch someone play who hasn’t spent the past two days playing the same levels over and over.

A huge congrats to everyone that finished, and a hearty round of applause for everyone who even tried. This is hard, but so worth it! See you again in April.