Eldritchual was my first game jam entry, and writing a brief post-mortem will be a great opportunity to smooth out the process for future jams. (That's my hope at least.) Hop over here to rate, play, and check out the source code, and after you have a chance to play and review Eldritchual, hop back here and see a few of the lessons learned.

What Went Right?

• The mechanics and interactions remained simple. One of the driving design notes on the whiteboard next to me was "Simple." It was a reminder to keep the scope small enough to complete and clear enough to be both accessible and approachable.
• It's complete. I kept saying that "I just won't post if it's not done." I pushed myself to have a complete game, and then I still needed a nudge to post it. Being able to stay on task and check off every one of the features that I decided that I needed to be in the game was a fantastic positive for me. There was a list of "like to have" items on my feature list, but
• I posted the game. This was surprisingly challenging to post to the Compo. I almost backed out at the last moment, but just posting the game was another positive for me. I needed a push.
• Tried things I've never done. Unity scriptable objects for the lesson topics in the tutorial, mouse click and drag interactions in Unity, Music in Bosca Ceoil, and of course all of the things that come with the process; hosting a game, participating in a 48-hour game event, and pulled everything together before the deadline.
• Clearing my mind before the event. I started thinking about the themes as they went through voting and I listened to the positive and negative feedback about them. Ultimately, I needed as much time as possible to clear my thoughts and position myself to tackle the challenge.
• Subtle 2D lighting. I really enjoy the subtle light flickering effects from all of the objects. There are a few things I would have like to have tried with it. In the end, I think the small amount of light and motion helps keep the game screen alive.

What Went Wrong?

• Slow start. The majority of the game balance and timing seemed to work, but getting the player interacting with meaningful choices had a 36-second delay, even if you know what you are doing. Difficulty settings and an event system would have addressed this.
• Tutorial was too long. At first, it was going to be a tutorial. With scriptable objects, I was able to create more content relatively quickly, and I had initially intended to display some "under the hood" information there as well. The tutorial quickly turned into a game manual, which would be fine, but was not represented that way, and the game lacked an introduction as a result. The "Tutorial" should have been rebranded on the menu screens as a "Manual" before the conclusion.
• No version control. Not only was there no version control, but somehow the main game object had all of its balance values cleared and I didn't have a complete list of them. I was also not prepared to host my source code once I decided to post the game. As a result, there was a needless delay in posting the source code.
• Coding became bulky and sloppy. Too many features were stacking onto the game objects, and later on, some methods would have cleaned up the code and been easier to maintain. For instance: each method that toggles the display of a menu or UI canvas manually sets the canvas to true or false. As I added more menus and screens, this temporary code kept drawing my attention back with strange canvas interactions. More methods and classes would ultimately have been worth more and would have been able to be used for more features than my inline-procedural hacks.
• Music quality was low. Had I been prepared, I would have just played and recorded a music track. I thought it would be cleaner to use a tool like Bosca Coeil, but I think I could have had higher quality if I was just ready to perform and record.
• Eating and sleeping. I didn't eat or sleep like humans usually do. That was somewhat to be expected, but with a little bit of preplanning, this could have been avoided.

What Will I Do Next Time?

• GitHub. I've uploaded the source code to a GitHub Eldritchual Repo after the event concluded. This is significantly easier to work with and trivial to share the source code. In addition, I've been able to create a development branch to make some small changes to the code that can be reincorporated into the master after I finish the features and balance that I really wanted to include in the game. Until then, the original LD version can still be seen in the master. I was worried that the time crunch of the jam, and Unity, and my limited exposure to Git would be a hindrance. In reality, it would have likely saved me time, and in retrospect, I had enough time to get it started. In addition, I could have used the GitHub project features instead of my trusty whiteboard for my feature based development. Just incorporating the tools available on GitHub, I hope to have a much cleaner and more organized project.
• Have my instruments and recording equipment ready the night before. I could have and should have had better options for music available.
• Vacation day on Monday. A 48-hour event takes a lot out of a person. I should have taken the day off on Monday. This may not seem like a lot, but having a chance to relax, spend time reviewing some games, and spend time with family after ignoring them for two days would be a better way for me to handle it.
• Get to the good stuff. Get the player playing as soon as they launch the game. You have less than 30 seconds to get to the hook without the player feeling the hindrance of that delay. I'm going to aim for a player-driven ramp up that allows a player to ramp up at their own pace.
• Gimp brush dynamics. I noticed that there were a few brush dynamics that I would have like to have tweaked a little bit. More options for cleaner lines, more options for smoother brushes. I want to have the brush dynamics ready for a variety of styles since I don't know what I will need to create.

So, those were some of the lessons that I've walked away with. I hope there is some insight that can help you, even if it is from a first-timer. What do you think? I'd love to hear what you think I've missed or how you tackled these issues in the comments. Thanks for reading!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificium-2

Can you break into the Vault and steal the Golden Mullet? Come and find out!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/absalom

Game-play example...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQJ-HWYpZE

Geta Game Jam 6 will be occuring between January 5 and January 8!

• Challenge yourself to make a game in three days
• Work either individually or in a team
• Share your progress with our wonderful Discord community
• Participate in theme voting and influence the final chosen theme

Interested? Come and join!

Leave a link to your game and I'll play it and give you feedback! I can't play Windows games unfortunately, only browser and mac games.

I would also really appreciate feedback on my game, Ethical Smoothies Co., a game about running a smoothie factory: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ethical-smoothies-co

🔧 Fixes :

• Press "F" to toggle fullscreen on / off
• Tutorial will only play once per launch now
• New game icon

📝 Quick recap on what will change in a future version :

• More levels with different grid sizes
• More tiles with new mechanics
• The timer will change to a move counter
• Losing will not restart the whole room
• Mouse controls will be totally reworked
• Cloud feedbacks for the blocks when they move (and more feedbacks in general)

🍻 Our friendly team

• 🎧 Alexandre Meunier : Development, music, sound design, voices
• 🎨 Emilie Defernez (Frigolite) : Character designer, animator, main beer supplier
• 🖌️ Quentin Cloos : Graphic designer, commnunity manager and GIF master

Thanks everyone for your interest and feedbacks !

📲 Download and rate here :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrificial-inc

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/rift-plugger

In our game you play as a hero who defend village from demons. Demons come from dimensional rifts and to save your friends you need to plug them. But how to plug the rifts? Maybe you will use one of this villagers? It is up to you what you will sacrifice to do it.

P.S. This is first LD for most of our team. And we really enjoyed to develop the game for this event. That was really fun!

I just got to 600 views in the last month in itch.io. Half of them are from Alain's sacrifice, my LD entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/alains-sacrifice

-Try to evade all defences and take your ship to the Core.

-Play our game on: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lastcrifices

See you space cowboys...

It's a peon scout simulator. You know from those in RTS games, early game. Just now you are not the commander, but the expandable one...

Aaaand now you can play it on Mac and also without downloading in WebGL!

Oh, how I love Unity when releasing on multiple platforms!

>> Play PeonCraft! <<

I still working at some missing animations and sprites. You can find me working via twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/skigfx Welcome.

Play and rate my game!

What was right

• Management. I’ve spent two days just working on my game. I’ve had enough sleep, food, fresh air and even managed to rest and finish the last few mission in Red Dead Redemption 2!
• DevStream. I streamed the whole process on twitch. It was a little bit scary and I haven’t stream with audio and camera for five or six years. But now I’ll try to do it more often.
• “Okay, that’s good enough” - I told this to myself several times during the development. And it REALLY helped to keep things simple and just move forward wthi stuff. You can spend 10-20-40 hours working on “perfect” soundtrack, or you can stop after 1.5 hours and say “That’s ok, I can live with it”. And just move to the next feature. Amazing.
• I made everything. Sounds, music, VFX, UI, Start and end game screen, tutorial, testing, achievements, analytics… That’s my most complete indie game at the moment and I’m happy :-)
• The game is completely realtime and 3D. That is a huge step from my usual “2D turn-based prototypes with text as a placeholder for everything”.
• Replayability. I can’t say that making the game round length so short (60 seconds) was a completely good decision, but because of this, many players can try to play this game two, three or even five times in a row. I was thinking about two tries per player, but I saw 5+ on streams, with full ten minutes of gameplay. That’s really cool!

What was wrong

• Balancing and difficulty. Noone managed to save all the 10 cubes (I think it’s still possible and the main menu tells you it’s not, but still…). It’s way too hard and chaotic. The short game session makes every mistake fatal.
• Playtesting. There was none. And when I saw the first streams with people trying to play my game, I was laughing and facepalming at the same time. It was terrible. They were completely overwhelmed with UI and stuff to do and dying cubes and then the time is already up and everyone is dead. And I thought it is so simple! Some cubes with health and needs, four rooms and just 60 seconds to save them all. But your first playthrough is taking you 30-40 seconds to just get around, click some stuff and it’s already too late to win.
• UI. OMG. Again, I first saw this on the stream. And it hit me. I tried to make everything SIMPLE. I made icons in photoshop and progress bars for each parameter - so you can watch it with ease! How wrong I was… The game starts. You have 4 sectors with 2-3 cubes in each. 10 cubes in total. Each cube has three params with three possible state + health bar. That’s 30 params to estimate at first seconds of the game. Each sector also has three parameters - oxygen, heat and power. They can be turned on and off by three interactive objects. And you can open the doors between sectors and move cubes. And there is also fuel progress bar and time to evacuation timer.

• So… it’s 30 icons, 23 progress bars and 26 interactive objects (which you can HIGHLIGHT with TAB, yay!). It’s easy, right? No. I think I could make a few simpler levels with smaller capsules and less cubes to watch for. And the current game level should be the Last ExtraHardcore YouCantSurvive Boss stage.

• Exhaustion. That was really unexpected, but after 25 work hours at the weekend I was really exhausted. And that completely ruined my work week. You just can’t think clear. Now I understand how important the rest is.And I’ll try to take a day\week off after the next LD :-)

It was very inspiring and entertaining LD. I hope you can find some time to play and rate my game ;-)

I had a lot of problems with my game breaking after the first level, but only on other people’s computers. Either way I’m finally confident that it’s fixed, so you can check out my newly working game, ‘More Sacrifices!’ here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/more-sacrifices

In a world of limited resources, there can be no infinite growth. Will you promote innovation to the detriment of some or promote equality at the expense of progress? Use the elements to develop your different territories and forge your society in a limited time. Sacrifices must be made and decisions come back to you...

You can play here and rate there

Please play my game and rate it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/maze

So, I finally updated this game and now you won't have to wait for the level to generate everytime you pick a good sacrifice ! The game is also now playable directly in your browser !

You can check it at this url :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/im-bored-so-lets-make-some-sacrifices

Hey everyone! For this Ludum Dare we made a game in 72 hours, called "Ursa". The game is about a little cosmic cub, learning about the secrets of the universe with the help of his mom. Growing wiser and older, he'll eventually have to take care of his mother. We received a lot of great reactions, but the game still is far from perfect. We have carefully listened to all of your helpful feedback and decided that we will continue working on the game to fix every little bug and polish every detail! We will improve the story, levels, mechanics and art to try and give you the best experience possible! We will try to post a devlog on itch.io every now and then to keep you guys informed about our progress. We hope you are as excited as we are!

Here is the link to the devlog on itch.io: https://maksymdev.itch.io/ursa/devlog/59457/we-will-make-a-post-jam-version-of-ursa

And here is the link to the jam version of the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ursa

For LD's we try to do as much of the sound effects on the day as possible. This jam as well as doing the music @shaunjmr also did some of the effect recordings, turning it into more of a professional affair than previous jams where we would use a hand recorder.

Sacrilicious required effects for the volcano, boars, chickens, screams etc so for the object effects we recorded tin trays being hit, boxes thumped, gas cookers lighting, etc. For voices and creature noises we used human voices (even the chicken).

Below are some of the outtakes that didn't make the cut and some that did. Some were not used due to not sounding quite right (at one point I sounded like scoobi doo) and other reasons like the pizza turning up while recording.

https://soundcloud.com/carl-hughes-409527001/sacrilicious-ld43-game-audio-outakes

If you would like to hear the results in the final game you can play and rate at :

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrilicious

It's almost been a week since the jam finished and I only just set up the theming for the Itch page for my entry: The I in Team (the title made more sense with earlier ideas for the game...)

It's a simple puzzle game where you can swap between two characters that need to work together to navigate a dungeon and escape... but only one of them will escape!

Give it a try and don't forget to rate it. Let me know if you make it out :)

I fixed the intro bug on the linux version of my game. You can play it Here