Got togheter almost all the graphics and game mechanics. Sadly it slipped my mind that to submit as compo all the assets must be done during the jam, so I'll go with the classic one this year.

The game is titled "10 Seconds Ambush". It will be played in rounds of 10 seconds during which difficulty keeps escalating to a bullet-hell madness and then reset when the timer hits zero. Pretty straight forward but I'm having lots of fun.

This is probably going to be my last solo jam in a while: I start missing the sense of discovery of working with new people.

Wow, that's it.
Game mechanics are pretty simple, so I've gone all-in on polishing and made two little intro and ending scenes featuring Your Horse.
This time I even dared to record guitar and bass for the soundtrack myself.

I'm struggling a bit to get the resolution right for embedding on LD, but you can play it on itch.io!
Thanks for reading me, I hope you have fun with my game!

Well, this is my first postmortem, but seems like a great habit to have, so here we are!
Wish me luck!

Theme and first hours
The theme here in Italy is announced at Friday midnight, so I brainstormed for 1/2 hours before going to bed.
I started by writing down on Milanote whatever came to mind, then I got a list of the main game genres from Wikipedia and tried to apply the theme to any of them.
I ended up with quite a lot of stuff, and came back on first day (late) morning to trim my list and elaborate on the ideas that did pick my interest.

First day

After a little trim, this is what I had by the start of the first day:

Chosing an idea
Here is a list of some concepts worth mentioning and the reasons that led me to discard them:
1. Teleport
Understanding some past events through environmental storytelling while being teleported around every 10 secs
-> Out of skillset and resource budget
2. "change world layer"
Sidescroller platformer with objects on multiple layers that are switched between every 10 secs
-> Was meant to work something like Hue, so I discarded it for the lack of originality. Thinking of it now it could have led to totally different puzzles through the 10 secs limitation, who knows...
3. Vision
Being able to see every 10 secs
-> Couldn't really think of a fun way to wait in front of a black screen for 10 secs, but I came across some great entries that used this approach
4. State swap
Swap character or team every 10 secs
-> This actually seemed like a lot of fun, but I wanted to keep it singleplayer and not having to write a decent AI in a rush. I'll probably try to extend more on this one concept.

I'm pretty happy with what I made, but I can't help but think many ideas I discarded could have led to a more interesting gameplay. Probably not as polished though.

First prototypes
At the beginning I thought to make the arena harder to navigate using physics based zero-g controls, and the main character had to be an astronaut wearing a jetpack.
After making a first prototype it was too frustrating to move around and avoid stuff, so I decided to stick with simpler, snappier controls and increase bullets number, speed and pattern variety instead.

Graphics and concept
While scouting the Web for assets and graphic ideas I came across these cool trees and knight asset packs that ended un in the final game. I then started making the arena and implementing the leaf particles when trees get hit (Yeah, I'm one of those bad guys that waste a lot of time on trivial stuff before they even have a playable demo).

Having a knight in a forest I thought the attackers would be druids, mages or something on this line, so I made some generic magic bullet shader and a flash of light of the same colour to announce the shot.

This is what it looked like by the end of the first day:

Second day

On day two I took it a little slower: the previous day I realized I couldn't submit the game as a compo because I used third party graphics, so I had one more day to finish.

Core mechanics and level editor
I abandoned the idea of having bullet spawners inside the arena because I couldn't think of a coherent look for them. It just seemed cooler to have some unseen foe hidden in the forest.

So I worked on the bullet variants and the spawning system (Before I only had a fixed source bound to an object) and did set up two splines that define the possible spawn points.

Then I wrote a draft of the level editing system. It uses Unity ScriptableObjects to store lists of bullet types associated with the seconds to wait before launch. Spawn position is a randomized point on the previously mentioned splines.

Music
To take a break from development I programmed a drum loop in Ableton Live and recorded guitar and bass for the soundtrack. The final version is pretty much unchanged except for a little editing and mastering done the next day.

Third day

On day three the core game was finished, more or less.

The Horse part
I found a vector graphics horse I didn't notice before in one of the asset packs I was using, and I wanted to turn it into an NPC, so I made a the little dialogue system you can see in the game.
The plan was to make both the horse an in-game character and the knight present in the dialogue, so that they could answer each other and react to the dialogue in the world, but I had to cut this for the lack of time.
Anyway I had time to make two little intro and ending scenes.

Health system and general polishing
I dedicated some time to animating the character and making win and death screens. Then I decided to add a few lives to make the game less frustrating and made a new HUD to match the style of the dialogue panels. I also made sure hit feedback was as clear as possible (Flash on character sprite, camera shake, sound fx).

Bullets graphics update
I wasn't satisfied with the graphics of the bullets (Variants were just different sized color swapped versions) and with the intro gag the game had took a humoristic turn enough to think of some new bullets to reinforce that aspect.
The first idea was to throw completely random stuff, then I kept it fruit-only for consistency.

At this point it made no sense to keep the flashy light before launch, and it got replaced by a more cartoonish speech bubble. Actually I wanted them to preview the type of bullet, but hadn't that much time and they would have probably been too small to give any significant help, so I kept the danger sign.

Level design and jam end
My last jam hours have been spent making levels and testing them, until I got ten working levels and was happy and tired enough to call it a day and upload.

Some features that didn't make it into the final game:
Speech bubble bullet preview, banana boomerang trajectory, dialogue featuring both characters, in-game Horse NPC.

And here is the final version that you can play on my itch.io:

You might argue that blue bullets had better contrast with the environment, and I would agree with you, but having bullets of multiple solid colors in the scene (to differentiate between types) didn't look that great.

Conclusion

Ludum Dare is a great place to try new stuff, see cool ideas and get constructive feedback, and once again it has been a great pleasure to be part of this amazing community.

Thank you for making it this far in this long post, I hope this was useful to you in some way.
Take care and I hope to see you again in a few months for LD52!

I wish there was a query based filter for themes, as I noticed 70% of those I discard meet at least one of these criteria: - Longer than 20 characters - Contains "always", "never", "all", "vs", "is key", "is the limit", "AI" - Has been the theme of an older edition - Not starting with capital letter (Not a strict rule, but usually true in my experience)

I'm proud to present you Unwanted Postman, a game where you undergo a training to become a mail spammer, armed with your Mail O' Matic 2000!
I'm also happy, really tired and grateful for this great event I get to share with all of you!
Now go get some sleep, you need it dude.

Unwanted Postman has now an updated version with online leaderbord on itch.io!
It's the best time to check it out!