Super excited for my fourth LD and 3rd time entering the compo!

This was my fourth LD, and my 3rd time doing the compo. Overall I think things went well, though there definitely were issues (forgetting how Unity does assets...).

What went well:
I ended up primarily putting together pieces of what I've learned from other LDs and coding I've done between jams for this game and building off of them. As a result, I didn't need to spend too much time learning how to use completely new features in Unity and had a playable after only about 10 hours of work. This allowed me to have much more time to polish up the UI and balance the game. I ended up attempting to implement some of the ideas I'd gotten from reading some game dev articles about creating difficult decisions for the player and building a framework for the player to build a story on. I think that overall I succeeded at that, though (as with any game made over a weekend) more balancing would undoubtedly be beneficial.

What could have gone better:
I am slightly disappointed that I didn't really get to learn a major new system this time (Though since I also had other events happening this weekend and eating into my LD time, maybe it was a good thing). Specifically, I would have liked to try to get sound working for my game; I think it would have added a lot. If I do continue working on the game (and I hope to) sound will likely be one of the first things I try to implement. As far as specific errors I had trouble with, the biggest one was Unity's way of doing assets. If you want to read from text files, you need to specifically add them into your built project after the fact; they don't get included when Unity builds the project. There also were a couple instances where reversing the order in which I called some functions fixed a bug and I definitely don't know how. Other than that, it was mostly just general bug fixes.

Takeaway:
If you can, adding sound makes everything better. Other than that, getting a couple people other than yourself to try playing the game is immensely helpful. Not only do they find bugs you may not have found because you already "know" how to play the game, but it can also help show you what may not be clear to a player just starting the game.

If you want to give my game a shot here's a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$18756

Well, this will be my fifth consecutive LD and the second time I'll be working with a team! Going to be working with the same couple folks I worked with last summer, though hopefully things will be a bit smoother since we aren't learning Unity on the fly this time (though we'll be using JME instead this time).

Looking forward to another Ludum Dare and I'll be competing in the compo again this time. I recently learned a lot more about Unity during another game jam I participated in and hope to use and expand on that here!

Engine: Unity
Graphics: paint.net, Gimp
Sounds: bfxr

This has been a LD of firsts for me even after only 24 hours in. I finally started using Unity's GUI system properly (and it's awesome). I also decided to create my own font and it turned out surprisingly decent. However, I also wasted nearly 3 hours trying to get text to be centered. However, overall, I like where I'm at with this text-based adventure card game hybrid and I think I'm on track to have a something really cool by this time tomorrow!

Hoarding Havoc has been finished! A unique blend of text-based adventure and inventory management, Hoarding Havoc is a blast to play.

Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/$54421