...win Ludum Dare, I said.

I was only joking about the "win" part, but I still set Ludum Dare for holiday homework. I think I might do this every year, I've had a blast!

Anyway, I would be a pretty horrible teacher if I asked my students to do something I wasn't prepared to do myself, so I geared up and got more game made in 3 days than I normally ever get done in a month. In fact, this is the only game I've ever really finished. Ever.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/the-torches-are-burning-low

My jamming went pretty smoothly, although everything took about twice as long as planned. Also, I had an epic fight with Unity's lighting model to get hundreds of realtime lights working together and dimmable at runtime.

I thought I would talk a little about how I got so much maze done in the time. I'm sure there are plenty of level creators out there, but for the jam I wrote a really quick and dirty Unity editor script that post-processes a texture to produce a level object built from prefabs.

The script is frankly embarrassing, but it got the job done. And I got to do my level design in GIMP.

And just in case you were wondering: the game is winnable.

So far, I have found at least one game made by one of my students. It's pretty awesome. Whether students or not, I know a lot of games here were made by people new to game design.

When you give feedback, please remember: * Be kind * Give practical, constructive feedback