A day later, I'm sitting here amazed: I finally finished my first Ludum Dare and my first completed game jam that I've ever participated in! A lot of work was done over these 3 days I slept only 9 hours, and I haven't felt this happy and energized in a long time.

There were so many ideas! Of course, not everything made it to the end time just wasn't enough, and I was disappointed when I realized the game wouldn't have all the animations I planned to add. Like many artists, looking at my art to-do list, I thought: "This won't take long." But when I started working, my perfectionism showed itself in full force. I was trying to make the project as beautiful as possible, and considering it was my first project, I was terrified of messing it up.

The art and sounds took about two days, then another half day for revisions. It was a long but interesting journey. Big thanks to my coder for his contribution he did fantastic work, spending a lot of time on it. It's a shame we couldn't find a musician, so I had to figure out Sonic Pi myself to compose music in 8-bit style. I didn't do it perfectly, but I gave it my best shot.

If you've read this far thank you for your attention! With your permission, I'd like to invite you to test our game and leave your feedback. Your opinion means a lot to us!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/wavelatro

Thanks to everyone who voted and supported us! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/wavelatro

This was my first jam, and I had no idea how fun yet brutal it would be. 72 hours of development, only 9 hours of sleep in total... wow... But the most interesting part happened closer to the end.

With just a few hours left before the deadline, the game was critically missing sound. My old hobby suddenly became a lifesaver.

The thing is, I don’t compose music in the traditional sense. I program it in Sonic Pi (there are browser-based alternatives too). It’s an application/tool where you can write music using commands. It sounds like torture, but once you get into it, it’s actually quite simple plus there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube, a couple of lines of code, a bit of logic, and you already have a melody playing. I’ve been tinkering with it for a long time, creating 8-16 bit tracks from time to time, just for myself, for fun.

The funniest part is that I also made the sound effects in Sonic Pi. So literally the entire audio part of the project was created in this app, where I usually just relax and experiment with pixel beats. In the end, what I considered a useless hobby saved the entire audio component of the jam during the final hours before submission.