This is the first time that I’ve participated in Ludum Dare, and the first time I’ve designed a game for a game jam. The game involves having to move a group of blobs around so that they fit into a particular pattern. We haven’t come up with a title yet but here’s the soundtrack.

The soundtrack is designed to be played with the segments shuffled around as the game goes, and such that the game can crossfade between tracks when changing level sets. To that end, everything’s in the same key and at 80BPM or a multiple thereof.

Tags: LD35, music, puzzle game, soundtrack

After the theme was posted I came up with an idea for a silly pun interpretation of it, and a fully-formed game popped into my head. But I'm having some serious motivation problems and can't bring myself to actually write any code or make any sprites. Maybe I'll just add this to the ever-growing pile of game ideas I have, except that I don't think the game itself is valuable as anything but a joke on the theme.

Maybe that's the problem.

My team and I didn't post anything here while we were working on our game because we didn't have a lot to say. But I just posted a preliminary build of Bricktris (which isn't our final jam submission - bamboy is still working on some finishing touches with physics and UI) and it's coming along very nicely.

Anyway, this isn't my first jam or even my first Ludum Dare (my prior entry was before teams were really supported on the site, or at least the team leader didn't know how to set them up) but it's still always good to keep a few things in mind:

• Scope needs to be pulled back
• Don't be wedded to a particular design idea if it doesn't work (because it probably won't)
• Be flexible
• Be willing to go outside of your element
• Be patient, and listen to your teammates

I had gone into this expecting to only do music but I also ended up doing some of the code (much to my wrists' displeasure) and some ad-hoc game design, beyond having been the one to suggest the combination of Pong and Tetris (even though the game turned out to be more Breakout than Pong).

Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this, especially making the soundtrack but mostly just having fun making games, and that's what all this is about, right?