I've always wanted to take part in game jams but never quite found the... I don't know, bravery? I tend to take forever when doing anything game dev related, I always overdo the scope of the project, and perfectionism usually strangles them to death long before completion. Creating something enjoyable in a matter of days always seemed daunting. This has also lead to a terribly demotivating lack of actually progressing and creating things in general, but no more I say!

I'll finally be taking part this time around. I intend to take things relatively casually, no 48 hour straight crunching and hoping to create something incredible, I just want to make something simple and actually release it for once. If I can accomplish that much I'll consider this a success.

Really looking forward to both my own attempt and seeing the amazing stuff people somehow manage to crank out during these jams.

I intended to take it a bit easy from the start, I actually only planned on getting the...well, plan, done tonight, but even after I went ahead and started mocking up the most fundamental mechanics up I still feel miles behind! All I have so far is an almost certainly over-scoped plan and this :

I have the basis for character movement and an extendable system for triggering interactions with objects going (the red box just shows the "interaction" area), but that's about it. In some ways I think it's an okay start, most of the potential gameplay is just different extensions of this basic system, but boy is there a lot left to do. I think the biggest hurdle is that I still don't know what I'm doing as far as the visual style of the game, and the aesthetics are going to be pretty important to the feel of it.

Hopefully I can figure that out tomorrow, along with getting most of the gameplay elements in place. For now I'm going to force myself to stop before I drop my casual approach, do a 48 hour binge and hate myself. 😅

I'm still taking this pretty casually, and I started the day off by starting a new project and porting what I had (which wasn't much, for better or worse) over to a fully 2D project, so I'm still not particularly far along. Initially I was going with a "2D in 3D space" approach, which I personally am fond of and more familiar with, but it was definitely going to cause too many problems later on.

I think going the full 2D route will make my life a lot easier if I actually reach the point of level creation, the tilemap system in Unity should make that much easier than trying to fiddle my way into functional 3D levels. Mind you I have very little idea how to make functional 2D levels either, but it seems more practical in the time constraints and it will certainly be a learning experience.

So my game is still extremely limited functionally, and it's... not the prettiest yet. I do hope to vastly improve on my 20 minutes of aimless pixel doodles, but hey, it actually looks vaguely game like now!

It's my fault for cutting it down to the very last minutes, but something about finishing "just in time" and then getting :

Hasn't even gone down any in the last 15 minutes.

My ISP fails me on a regular basis, but this just takes the cake.

I was writing a more conventional postmortem, but it was getting far too long to expect anybody to read (This is the short version, somehow). I may eventually make use of the >40GB of video I recorded to give a proper view of the process, but for now a simple reflection on what I took away from Ludum Dare 48 as my first game jam experience will suffice.

For the LD48 Compo I created Prospector Paranoia, a game about a naïve miner spelunking deep into infamously cursed caves hoping to score big on the ore nobody else would go for. Along the way it quickly becomes apparent why those rumors spread, and the miner quickly goes even deeper... into madness! (I'm making it sound way better than it actually is)

Before looking at how it went, I do think it's important to establish what my goal was in participating.

The Goal

I spent years watching Ludum Dare from the outside, always saying I should take part without ever actually committing. LD48 was the one where I finally dove in, largely because I had been in a horrible creative slump for entirely too long, and what better way to solve that than creating an entire game from nothing in 48 hours?

The key here is that I really didn't want to fail. For the sake of my own motivation it was critical that I actually submit something, and this means suppressing all of my worst game dev habits. My inner perfectionist couldn't strangle the game to death like it usually does, and my grand ambitions couldn't over-scope the game in such a time constraint. This was all the more important as I'm also quite slow when doing game dev (I have the attention span of a chipmunk), so keeping it realistic was a must.

With all of that in mind, I decided to take the jam relatively "casually". I felt I had to maintain a "it's just a weekend project" feel. I still wanted to make something decent, of course, but it couldn't be something precious to me or my usual habits would kick in, and I can't even finish normal projects when that happens. (It always happens.)

The Positives

-- Obviously I ended up meeting that most crucial goal of actually submitting a game to the Compo. The game itself is even generally playable, if a bit lacking in substance. Still, as far as I'm concerned I did accomplish what I set out to do.

-- I feel like I learned more in 2 days than I normally do in 2 months. As someone who often falls into the 'tutorial trap' and then promptly forgets that lazily acquired knowledge (again, chipmunk brain), this was great for me. The pressure of the deadline and the need to apply what you learn to a real situation immediately after felt like I was actually progressing myself. This applied to everything from learning to use 2D lighting to figuring out how to create sound effects out of napkins and gravel.

-- I very quickly and undeniably learned where I need improvement as a developer. For example, I tend to get lost in details and refinement of specific parts far too early and linger until my project inevitably dies, long before it ever resembles a complete game. This jam made it overwhelmingly apparent that those habits made me very inexperienced at actually putting the individual pieces of a game together. Something as simple as switching levels caused a lot of problems due to how the game was made.

-- The game isn't even completely terrible! There was so much more I wanted to accomplish with it, in pretty much every regard, but it still isn't really a "bad" experience to play, just a little uninspiring. It even has potential to be kind of fun if I were to implement all the original ideas. I realize "eh, it's okay" isn't a particularly loft goal, but all things considered I think it's something to be positive about.

-- The Ludum Dare community is fantastic. Everybody who's commented has been very supportive of the things the game does okay at, and very constructive about the things it does not. I imagine it's because everyone here understands the development process and the limitations better than most people, but either way it's just been overwhelmingly pleasant taking part in the community.

The Not-So-Positives

-- I immediately overdid the scope, well before writing a single line of code. The problem was that I focused in too much on my theme idea and then built up the idea for the gameplay to deliver it. Instead of having a simple core mechanic that could be expanded, I ended up with a large and complex set of mechanics that had to be cut back, much to the detriment of the final game. I even partially noted this before beginning, but despite it being a core goal not to bite off too much I still tried to go for too much, especially given my casual approach to the jam.

-- I got too wrapped up in details. It was inevitable that I would over focus a detail at some point, and the biggest example is a shader effect to make the hallucinations disappear. They could have just faded out of existence, but I wanted to make them dissolve. The effect itself was working pretty quickly, but due to a trivially small issue that I didn't know how to diagnose I couldn't automate the effect properly, and I wasted hours trying to fix it.

I stopped working on Saturday night specifically because I was so annoyed by this, and I had almost demotivated myself out of the jam entirely because of it. I ended up solving it within minutes the next morning, which seems to be how these things usually go.

-- Time management. Between overdoing the scope and my lack of focus (chipmunk brain) this was inevitable, but it got really bad. Just four hours before submission my "game" was nothing more than a loose collection of individual systems. I had just barely gotten some animation in, but there was no win/lose state, the sound effects didn't even exist yet, and I didn't even start creating levels until an hour before I submitted the game. It was pure, stress-inducing chaos. (And then my internet crapped out on me and I risked not even getting in my submission!)

Conclusion

All said and done, I created a relatively uninspiring game, but one that I still think I can be proud of for putting together in a single weekend (while still sleeping and eating normally). I knew I had countless shortcomings as a game developer, in fact I've never even publicly released a game before this one because of them (another big reason I wanted to take part), but I definitely made some progress in that regard over this past weekend and I am quite pleased about that.

I'm glad I finally took that step to take part in Ludum Dare, and I am absolutely on board to do it again next time.

Prospector Paranoia - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/prospector-paranoia