Just took the plunge and signed up! I've been wanting to try participating in a Ludum Dare for a while now, but always decided against it due to concerns that I just wouldn't be able to find enough time to actually finish something. That may still be an issue, but I've decided to give it a shot and see how it goes. Really excited to see if I can rise to the challenge of completing and submitting a playable game over the course of a weekend!

Planned tools:

• ReactJS
• Inkscape / GIMP / Blender

Ludum Dare #42 progress update, day 1: Got my project set up with some very (very) minimal functionality. It doesn't look like much yet, but is at least heading in the direction of something that could arguably be called a game:

I have a rough idea where I'd like to go with it for the "running out of space" theme, though I'm not sure how much of my idea I'll have time to actually implement. So, I'm planning to try to work on it in an iterative way, starting out with the absolute minimum and then adding features and complexity if time allows.

Tomorrow's agenda will be to implement all of the core gameplay functionality, getting as far with it as I can, and then reserving Sunday for polishing and visuals.

Hi everyone! So Ludum Dare #42 was my first game jam ever, and I decided to write up a detailed postmortem dev blog post about how it went! Topics include such things as:

• How I decided to participate (despite thinking it was impossible due to lack of time)
• The development process (including progress screenshots from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3)
• Analysis of feedback received, and a look at the final scores
• What went really well, what went sort of okay, and what could've gone better
• What I'm planning to make next!

Overall though, I had a blast participating and can't wait to join the next one. Congrats to everyone else who finished and submitted a game as well!

Really excited to join again! I've been having a great time voting on the themes, and even took a stab at suggesting a few back when submissions were being taken. (Surprisingly, one of them -- "Transform your surroundings" -- showed up in round 3!)

Ludum Dare #42 this past August was my first game jam ever, and shortly afterward I wrote up a detailed postmortem dev blog post about how it went, and some lessons learned. One of the biggest items in the "things to do differently next time" section was to use an actual game engine. I had used ReactJS for my last Ludum Dare submission -- which worked reasonably well for UI stuff, but not so much for animations / sounds / general polish. And I've been using SpriteKit pretty heavily for an iPhone game I'm making, but it's not very well-suited for a game jam where ideally you'd want something that could be played directly in the browser.

So after some research and recommendations, I decided to give Godot Engine a try this time around. I've started reading the docs and playing around with it a little these last few days, and so far, I'm really loving it. But I'm also completely new to it, so part of the challenge for this Ludum Dare will be to see if I can learn an entirely new engine, and make a game with it, in the span of less than a week. It'll be interesting to see how this goes or if I'm completely biting off more than I can chew.

Normally I gravitate toward RPG mechanics and progression systems in my projects, but since I'll be going solo on a single-weekend jam using an unfamiliar engine, it'll be all the more important to keep it as simple as possible. Currently I'm thinking of aiming for something my daughters (ages 4 and 7) would be able to play and enjoy... Their latest obsessions include unicorns and slime, so I might see if I can work some of those in too depending on the final chosen theme!

Now that the ratings have been revealed for Ludum Dare #43, I've written up a detailed postmortem dev blog post about how it all went! It includes the exciting story of how I came to make a game full of unicorns and rainbows for the theme "sacrifices must be made," along with other topics such as:

• How I split up the development process into "phases" to maximize chances of finishing
• Analysis of the feedback received, and a look at the final scores
• A comparison with my previous ratings from Ludum Dare #42
• What went really well, what went sort of okay, and what could’ve gone better
• Plans for what's next!

This was my second Ludum Dare, and once again I had a blast participating. Congrats to everyone else who finished and submitted a game, and I'm already looking forward to the next one!

So admittedly, my entry for Ludum Dare #42 was pretty mediocre - it ranked 988th overall, had no sounds or animations, and the overall gameplay had some design and balancing problems. But it was a milestone for me in being the first "finished" game I had ever put out there for other people to play. I went on to do a few other game jams, and decided that rather than tackling a huge ambitious project for my first "real" game (I had my sights set on building a full RPG), I should try to fully finish and release a smaller game in order to better learn the ropes of doing it. That smaller game is now available on the iPhone App Store, and you may recognize it as a continuation of my game from Ludum Dare #42:

Granted, the overall theme is really the only similarity between the two -- Pretty much everything else ended up completely different from the original, all the way from the title ("Evil Forest Battle" vs. "Bitey Trees") to the gameplay mechanics (clicking with half-baked Tetris block patterns vs. "bubble shooter" style aiming) to the level designs (square grid vs. hex grid) to the technology used (React vs. SpriteKit). The remade version did end up taking a fair bit longer than I'd originally expected, but it was really fun and satisfying to see this little project through to release on the App store.

Anyway, here is the App Store link for anyone interested -- any feedback would be most appreciated! And I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who did a more polished continuation (or outright remake) of one of their Ludum Dare submissions, especially for release on mobile? Would love to hear about it in the comments!