I created a small gouvernement style game for the compo. After only 11 Ratings, 6 comments and playing about 10 games from other people I learned a few things I´d like to share.

If someone wants to see my mistakes after reading this he can find my game here: ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/politics-rome

1. Gradually expand your games content. Throwing your player into the cold water makes sense for some games, but someone playing Ludum Dare Games does not want to invest more then 10 minutes in playing your game. So you should expect them to start your game and learn it´s mechanics through trail and error.

2. Make it easy. While it can be fun to die (see Dark Souls), when playing Ludum Dare Games you want a quick fulfilling experience. It can be fun to fight with the game to win even the first few levels, when trying out games other people made I do not want to only value the first quater of the first level.

3. Gameplay > Content/Story. 48 hours is not long. And as most people will only play your game for a few minutes, don´t bother with adding a 200k word long story. I first tried to set up a system for easily adding content to the game by using Ink (a scripting language for interactive fiction). This worked very well, but it was very time consuming. And while it would totally make sense to do this if you want to tell an extensive story, it costs time which spending on improving the gameplay would make the game more fun for other players.

4. 1 Mechanic. The most fun games are the ones that focus on one mechanic and not on an complex net of different actions.

5. Make it simple. Me making my game was a constant struggle between implementing a feature which I wouldn´t need right now, but which could come in handy in the future and polishing the core mechanic. For example my game contains two stat trying to mimic your support from the people. These are called agreement and support. Both are calculated from the difference between the way the player act with the opinion ever citizen has. While this makes sense to some degree and if I had implemented the ability to talk to every person individually, the way I implemented it was total overkill, as in the end i used on Integer variable that rises if the player does something good and falls if he does something bad.

Finishing of I want to say that I learned so much from this jam and I hope to participate in the future.

Not my favorite theme but something I can work with. Also I just woke up. My alarm clock did not do it´s job properly

I created an engine for point and click adventures. From scratch. Now I have 6 hours left for writing a story and drawing sprites. It´s gonna be close. Even after I cut 90% of the possible content from the first draft.