As someone who just completed his first LD48 compo I’ve got a lot of thoughts going through my head right now. I’ve been looking at the last two days that just flew by and though I was tired, frustrated, and kept forgetting to feed myself, I think it’s one of the best experiences of my (short) adult life.
I created the game “Food Court Hell,” a top down shooter with multiple enemies, powerups and game modes. For having only 48 hours to create a game, I’m quite proud of myself for what I did. Though it may not be the best work of art in the compo, it’s going to hold a special place in my heart as the first game I coded completely by myself. There are a lot of things that went well with the competition and a lot of things that didn’t, but the important thing is that I finished and now have a good prototype for a new project.
And a consistent reminder of how much I need to improve my art skills
Check below the cut for the challenges I ran into and how my LD48 experience went!
What went well:
The Idea: Right away when the theme was announced I had a bunch of ideas running around and fighting each other in my head. I didn’t jump into coding until I was absolutely sure I had a decent idea. I found out just how important outlining can be later on in the jam and I feel it provided a good foundation for a decent rest of the competition. After taking my idea, cutting it down as much as I could and getting input from my roommate, I started coding.
Gameplay: The gameplay is definitely the biggest portion of this game as I spent almost all my time working on the code. I put countless hours into tweaking mechanics, fixing bugs and balancing it all out. I feel in the end the game had a decent balance on normal mode despite the powerups of the game dropping more frequently in the end than I had originally planned. I now have a decent idea of how to continue this game thanks to the amount of work I put into the code.
Beta Testing: I’m definitely not bragging for this, but I’m lucky to have a somewhat decent following on tumblr that I can go to and I actively used that medium to reach out and ask for help with testing. Thankfully, the people following me were kind enough to check the game out and give their feedback as well as help spread the word of me needing beta testers. One of my demos had gotten quite a few reblogs (for a game demo) and though many bugs had surfaced, almost all people testing the game told me they thought the gameplay was fun, just lacking in how long you could play before the enemies would be too easy. I think without tumblr I wouldn’t have found the bugs I did or expanded the gameplay like I did
What went not as well:
Graphics: The main area that FCH is lacking in is definitely graphics. During the competition I somehow made the bad excuse to myself that I wouldn’t need to focus on graphics as much and thought gameplay alone would be good enough. However, after the compo had ended I realized how flawed that line of thought was. Gameplay alone will not save a game, as a true game is a good balance of all three forms of basic media.In the end I ended up with a game that takes place in a food court and the only way you’d know that is if you read the description. If I could go back and do it again I’d start out with making programmer art from the beginning so come competition end I’d at least have some backgrounds, a helpful UI and less use of text.
Sound: The other most noticeable feature that FCH is missing is the lack of any indication that you’re being hurt or that something related to your stats happened. The easiest way to fix this would be to add a sound or a basic animation that showed you lost health. Once again, I spent too much time programming and didn’t think to give myself time to add sounds.
Biology: Even when my brain isn’t on LD48, I tend to have a nasty habit of forgetting to feed myself. Normally this isn’t as big of an issue but when my brain is working overtime and I’m trying to solve problems I definitely need some fuel before things start to go downhill. Both nights in the compo, I was about to go to bed before realizing “I forgot to feed myself.” I did manage to get a few breaks in there, but overall I was terrible at taking care of my body and I paid for it this morning when I woke up with stomach pain (thankfully it went away since I started writing this).
What I learned:
Start smaller: The biggest thing that blocks me in life is that I tend to overshoot when coming up with ideas and I tend to lose motivation when I realize my idea is too big to create by myself in the amount of time I’d like it done. LD48 Taught me that I don’t need to come up with a big idea, and even if a big idea comes naturally I should try to cut it down and be realistic. I can always add cool features later but in the beginning I need to focus on what exactly needs to be done to get a prototype finished. Even though my idea was simple and I got most of the features I wanted in the game in there, I still could have cut back and had a better overall product.
Sleep is important: When I was younger I learned to program through MMORPG server emulation* and would stay up as long as I could creating content for the players on my server. I was young and better at dealing with lack of sleep. As an adult, I can’t stay up too late before I begin making stupid mistakes, spend hours trying to fix a bug that could be fixed by deleting a single character, and getting frustrated with the application. During LD48 I learned how important a good night’s sleep would be and how I didn’t need to overwork myself to create a decent game.
How to take criticism: A big thing for me this compo was to learn to take criticism better. I generally am okay at it normally but this contest pushed that and taught me that even though I consider my game a part of me, we don’t share it’s flaws. Beta testers aren’t there to tell you how awesome you are or how great the game is, they’re there to tell you what’s going wrong. Though my gut reaction when faced with criticism is to be offended, I learned to successfully separate myself with my work and look at it from an objective standpoint.
About myself: I found out during this compo a lot of things about how I think, how I work and a few quirks of mine. I found out that yes, I can make a game in 48 hours and actually only needed 5 hours to make a half decent prototype which is something that’s going to help me in my future game creation endeavors. I learned that yes, I am a good enough programmer to create my own games, though I have a lot to learn before I can even consider myself good at it. Most importantly, I relearned about my love for game creation, which is something I had long forgotten.
In the end, I have a prototype for a game that may be lacking in art and sound, but will still be a special creation of mine. I’m definitely going to be participating in more game jams in the future as the entire experience was extremely fun to me and actually reignited my passion for programming. Over the past few years I’ve started many projects and finished none because I lost sight of what I enjoyed doing and how to get my ideas out there. LD48 challenged and pushed me to quiet that little voice in my head that says “I’m not good enough” and just enjoy the development process. The coolest thing of all is to know that I participated in a huge event where thousands of people have come together to manifest their ideas and share their creations.
I look forward to the next event and over the next few hours I’m also going to be writing some tips and a post mortem for the HTML5 Game engine I’ve been working on, LynxJS. I’d like to thank the Ludum Dare community for all the fun I had the past few days and for reigniting my passion for game development. Keep creating awesome games and get those ideas out there!
-Cosrnos
*PS: I worked on server emulation years ago and while I now realize how private servers are (mostly) unethical, it was an important learning experience for me and an important part of my past. Just thought I’d mention that.
