Excited for my first time joining Ludum Dare. I'm going to be developing using Unity. Have zero experience developing games. Good luck everyone! :)

Took me a long time to think of an idea I wasn't completely unhappy with. I eventually thought of an idea for a sort of platforming game set in ancient Egypt. You are exploring a pyramid and the goal is to reach the top, so with every floor the available space becomes smaller.

After basic design of the game, I started with making sprites, trying to make them match the ancient Egypt theme. However, as I have no experience at all in making assets for games, this took me forever... finally, 6 hours since start time, I have one walk animation for the player, and one for an enemy (a snake):

Been spending most of the time since last update writing up the code that controls the snake. Apparently it's really hard to code up an enemy that's fun to play against - being both difficult enough to be a challenge, but not feel unfair. Still don't feel too good about the gameplay, and I had very little progress today, but it's a good thing I'm doing the jam and not the compo :)

Here's current gameplay animation:

Going to sleep for today. Finally have a name for my game (Pyramidion) and a title screen. The game is playable end to end but needs tons of tuning and polish.

For tomorrow: * Add music / sound. * Add in-game instructions screen. * Add a few missing animations and tons of decorative graphics. * Make easy difficulty mode, and hard difficulty mode that unlocks after you beat the game on normal. * Tune the enemy behavior to make the game more fun.

Stretch goals: * Add some dialog / story to the game. * Add another enemy type exclusive to hard difficulty.

Good luck everyone!

Finally submitted my entry! Please play and rate my game. I know it's not as good as the amazing things most people here do, but it's the first game I've ever made, so I'd really appreciate some feedback.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/$101307

Recently when I saw jtn191 playing my game on twitch, I noticed that on his setup my game played very differently than it does on my machine - player character moving very slowly, causing the game to be much more difficult than it's supposed to be. I suspect it's something to do with the webGL build. Has anyone had a similar experience with WebGL? Is that why so many games only give a downloadable binary version and not a web version?

Anyway, here are the top 3 of the 13 games I rated so far:

Viral (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/viral): really neat concept (having to delete files on your computer to stop a virus) and great implementation, and the interface felt great.

Park and Match (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/park-match): a very stressing valet simulator :) I had fun with it and thought it conveyed the theme really well.

Flood (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/flood): one of the more polished games I've played. Especially liked the bow shooting mechanic.

Gonna rate more games now. Would appreciate it if people want to try my game out as well! (please try the binary version if webGL version seems too difficult, and tell me if you see a big difference):

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pyramidion

I found a bug in my code that made the game unplayable for some people. Just in case anyone made the same stupid bug as me:

* never multiply velocities by Time.deltaTime!!! *

velocities are not supposed to be multiplied by time. Silly me. I "inherited" this bug from a bug in a popular Unity textbook (Unity in Action). I'll submit an errata to it shortly.

Anyway... I hope I fixed the bug, but I'd be really happy if a few people try it and report if it's playable for them. I'm really worried I ruined something instead of fixing it and I'm going on a trip tomorrow morning and will not be able to fix anything until next week.

Unfortunately, I don't have any way to actually reproduce the bug on my machine, so I'd really appreciate if anyone reading this can try playing the game and tell me:

1) whether they saw the timing issue - basically if you see you can move around quickly enough, and jump over the snakes, then it probably works fine
2) whether you tried the webgl or binary version

I'd really appreciate you also rating the game while you're at it, but the main thing I'm looking for is making sure the bug is gone :)

Thank you for the help!

Game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pyramidion

Hey!

Stuck on a business trip with only my company laptop. I can not run any downloaded binaries on the laptop so can only play webGL games.

Please post your games in the comments so I can play, rate and review them!

If you feel like also playing my game, I'd be of course very happy if you do, but don't feel any obligation :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pyramidion

So many amazing games this jam! I am sure there are many awesome games I haven't played, since I mainly played random games offered to me by the site's algorithm. Wanted to share the games I liked most from the ones I played this jam:

Jam games

Writespace

@larkinia, @lenaschimmel, @flauschzelle, @blinry
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/writespace
Amazing and very innovative puzzle game. Probably the most original game I've played this jam. It starts with a really cool idea and follows through with excellent puzzle design.

Unfamiliar

@mister-kweh, @sbx5, @carystringfield, @laurim, @kovakomes
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/unfamiliar
Winner of "only Ludum Dare game that actually made me cry". Visual novel about Alzheimer. Very pretty, excellent music, good story and very emotional.

California Jane

@jlooz, @bobo-oh, @zguerrero, @kinsei, @fivenamefivesocks
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/california-jane
One of the most polished-feeling game I've played this jam. Turn based puzzle game.

Runnink out of Space

@wan, @aurel300
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/runnink-out-of-space
Cool word puzzle game. To be fair I didn't complete this one because it became too difficult for me, but I did spend almost an hour banging my head against it.

Snakescape

@krasse, @hadi-danial, @aguakev, @cloudcraft
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/hissterics
You can see I have a thing for puzzle games :) This was not as polished as some of the other ones, but I really liked the mechanics behind this game and the puzzle design.

The Hero's Incredible Chronicles

@gaming-night
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/the-heros-incredible-chronicles
Very short, not much of a game to it, but really liked the experience in this one :)

Compo games

Evolution

@noa-calice
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/evolution
Not much of a game, but a very moody, emotional experience. Amazing that this was done by a single person in 48 hours!

Personal space

@ursagames
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/personal-space-1
Fun adventure game about social anxiety.

There are probably tons of other games I really liked and are missing from here. There are actually even some games I rated higher (or the same) as some of the games above but are not mentioned here, so don't feel bad if I played your game and it's not here :) Really, many of the entries I played were so good, it was really inspiring to see what people can come up with in such a short time.

Anyway, good luck everyone! One more week until the results...

I'd be super happy if anyone else wants to try my game and write a comment on the page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pyramidion (although please try the ones above first, they are all much better than mine :slight_smile: )

For my game, I’ve had three different difficulty modes, with the hardest difficulty mode locked until the player beats the game on normal difficulty. I wanted to share my thoughts on how well that went, and also in general share some decisions I’ve made about the difficulty progression in my game and how well they were received by the players (at least according to the streamers I’ve watched).

Please note: obviously, this post contains "spoilers" for my game. If you have some free time, you can try playing my game without spoiling it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pyramidion

Including an easy mode for the game

This was my first Ludum Dare, but before starting, I’ve read some advice saying most players have very little patience for the game, so I should make sure not to make the game too difficult so that a very casual gamer can get through it. At the middle of the second day of the jam, I had the game completely playable and finished balancing the game for normal difficulty mode. I then let my wife, who’s not a gamer, try to play through it. I saw that she couldn’t even get past the first level. I realized the game might be too difficult for casual gamers, and made the easy version.

The guidelines I had for the easy version: 1. Minimal randomness. Enemies should be predictable and easily avoidable. This lead to the two types of snakes - walking snakes and jumping snakes. The walking snakes never jump, and almost always chase the player. The jumping snakes always chase the player, and jump when they get close to the player. This is in contrast to normal difficulty snakes who jump/walk randomly. 2. My wife (non gamer) should be able to complete the game within a few minutes.

Walking snake:

Jumping snake:

What went well with easy mode

• Easy mode ended up serving as a great tutorial for normal mode! I saw many cases where streamers were stumped with normal mode (usually because they didn’t realize they need to go under the snakes when they jump), changed to easy, and after finishing easy it was very easy for them to go through normal.

• Many more streamers got to the end of the game thanks to easy mode. As predicted, many streamers (and I assume other players as well) didn’t have the patience to go through the game at normal difficulty. However, easy difficulty allowed them to get to the end game and have a much more positive experience with the game.

What didn’t go well with easy mode

• Many streamers (and I assume players as well) only finished the game on easy mode and complained the game is too easy (as I said above, easy mode was supposed to be easy enough so that even a non-gamer can get through it). I'm not sure what could be done about this, except maybe give a message at the end of easy mode reminding the player that normal mode is much more challenging.

Difficulty progression for normal mode

For normal mode, I had one main guideline for my design: * Enemies should have random elements, but be predictable enough to avoid. My basic rule was that I should balance the game so that I could consistently beat normal mode with only losing up to one life. If I’m losing more than that even though I know the correct “strategy” to go through the game, it means the enemies are too random.

I made three main mechanisms to support the guideline above: * I made the snake give a little hiss and wait a moment before jumping, to allow enough time for the player to adjust their movement to go under the snakes while they jump. * I made the snakes significantly slower when they “random walk” (they are faster when they’re chasing the player). The slower random walk allowed the player to cancel their jump if a snake changes direction as they try to jump over them. * I made the snakes “communicate with each other”, so the snakes actively try to avoid a situation where the player could not avoid one snake without bumping into the other.

However, I found out that I can’t put more than a single snake in the smaller higher levels of the pyramid without making the game too difficult. This meant that only the 2nd level of the pyramid had more than a single snake, making it the hardest level on medium difficulty.

Normal mode snake:

What went well with normal mode

• Many streamers felt the design was fair, and commented that the snakes are challenging but predictable enough so they feel it’s their fault when they die.
• Good learning curve - I saw many streamers getting better as they played through the game (as I said above, especially for the ones that tried easy before going into normal)
• Having the most difficult level be the 2nd level (and then levels 3-5 being much easier) actually made the game much less frustrating because after players finally figured out how to go through the 2nd level, they usually passed levels 3 to 5 without dying and were able to complete the game. If I’ve made level 5 much harder, I’m afraid many people would be really frustrated with dying after going through the entire pyramid.

What didn't go well with normal mode

• Many streamers/players did complain the game was unfair and that they do not feel the deaths of the player was their fault, complaining the snakes move too randomly and are unpredictable
• Some players could not figure out that you can go below the snakes when they jump (almost everyone figured this out in easy mode, which is why easy mode made normal mode so much easier).
• Many players complained that the hitboxes were too aggressive. Next time I’ll definitely look into making the hitboxes a bit more forgiving.
• Some players complained that the last level in the game was the easiest level, making the difficulty progression a bit weird for normal mode. I still tend to think it’s a good thing to have the most difficult level early, but I’m not sure. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Including a hard mode for the game

I made the hard mode at the last minute - basically spent the last 3 hours before the deadline to draw the bird sprite, program the bird enemy, and balance the hard difficulty mode. Because of that hard mode is not too well balanced, and might be significantly easier than normal mode.

Bird enemy:

What went well with hard mode

• Hard mode was not just “more of the same”. It actually included a new enemy (the bird) which looked different and had a completely different behavior. I think this made players (judging by streamers reactions) feel actually rewarded for completing normal difficulty, as they got significant new content for the game.
• The fact that hard mode was easier than normal mode was probably not good for difficulty progression of the game, but was kind of nice for streaming, because it usually took a long time for streamers to be able to get to hard mode, and I assume at that point they had much less patience to go through the game many times, so it was nice that they were usually able to complete it within the first few attempts.
• The last level of hard mode was very easy, but looked kind of crazy (with both the snake and the bird jumping around inside a very small space), and made a lot of streamers laugh. I think it was a good ending for the game (to the select few who actually got that far).

What didn’t go well with hard mode

• I spent quite a while designing an additional enemy character that was exclusive to hard mode. The fact that it was locked until finishing normal mode, means most players never got to see this enemy, which was kind of frustrating for me. I still think it was worth it (see my point above about rewarding players who got this far), but it was kind of frustrating, especially when watching the first few streams and realizing how few people actually get far enough in the game to see hard mode.
• As I said, hard mode was probably not hard enough, but surprisingly I didn’t hear anyone complain about this one :) Probably by the time people get to the end of hard mode, they are pretty happy the game is done and don’t want it to be any harder.

TL;DR

Had a lot of fun spicing up the game with different difficulty modes and seeing how people progress through them. I think locking up the hardest difficulty was a good decision as it allowed people to feel rewarded for completing the game. A lot of people complained about the game being too difficult (mainly people who only played through normal mode and did not try easy mode), but also a lot of people complained about the game being too easy (mostly those who finished the game on easy but then never progressed to normal).

Would be interested to hear your thoughts about difficulty, in general in Ludum Dare games, or in my game specifically. If you want to try out my game, please do so (and I'd appreciate any comments or feedback) at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/pyramidion

One last shoutout

Thank you to all the streamers who allowed me to watch them play my game! This has been invaluable for my learning experience. Special thanks to the following streamers: @bigbosserndog, @ursagames, @outstar, @saoi-games, @firesplash-entertainment, @wertle, @rebecca-kremer, @tigerj, @jtn191, @messinabrothers, @mike-inprinciple. I tried to include as many as I could find, but if you're not included and you streamed my game it's probably because I couldn't find your Ludum Dare user. In any case thank you everyone who is out there playing and streaming games, you guys are awesome!!

How I spent my time

The first 2 hours were spent coming up with an idea. I had a few different ideas, including a tetris game where bricks expand after every turn (leaving you out of space), and an inventory management game where you need to fit items in a limited inventory. I thought all of these ideas are super original, but of course I later saw similar things implemented again and again in different LD games :) (to be honest, many of these implementations were much more original than what I would come up with).

Eventually, I brainstormed with my wife and came to the idea of going up the pyramid, trying to avoid creatures running around. Here’s the original design drawing:

I then started with drawing the main character. I’m not an artist, so this took me a long time, and the results weren’t very good. Here is my original pencil drawing:

I “scanned” the drawing (by taking a picture with my cell phone), then colored over it with gimp:

And then animated the character using aseprite:

Obviously it’s very amateurish (and the hands move all wrong!), but I think given what a noob I am at this kind of thing, in my opinion it came out rather nice.

However, this took a very long time. 6 hours after the start, I basically had the player and snake characters animated, and had them walking around in unity:

The next 4 hours, I coded the simple AI for the snake, and started playing around with trying to avoid the snakes:

Eventually, I spent most of Saturday trying to polish the AI to make the snakes fun to avoid in different room sizes. This was eventually what probably took most time in developing my game. I wrote an entire post about this process so I’ll keep it short here. I’ll just say that one thing I learned - while it seemed very tedious while I was doing it, this was eventually the most rewarding work. It was amazing watching people have fun playing my game after spending so much time making sure it’s actually fun.

Sunday was spent mostly on polishing, adding things that are not essential to gameplay, such as adding all the hieroglyphics and wall painting, the Horus character and the dialog at the start of the game, the end game, and a few of the animations.

Sunday night was then spent on making easy mode, which was surprisingly simple to do (since it didn’t contain any new elements, except for different snake AIs which was just a bunch of tweaks of already exposed variables in the AI script).

Monday morning was spent on drawing and programming the hawk character and making / balancing hard mode.

Results

If I understand correctly there were about 1300 games, so that puts me in the top 35% which I’m pretty happy about for my first attempt at Ludum Dare! Also, I’ve had a game breaking bug (that made the game unplayably slow for around a fourth of the players) which I discovered and fixed only around 40 hours after my submission, so I imagine it also affected my score.

One thing that surprised me is the relatively high “mood” rating. I’m not sure what mood actually means - I thought only sad or scary games get a good mood score. I guess what happens is that the sad/scary games get the top results and the others just get assigned to a random score and I got lucky :)

Alternatively, maybe people scored it high because of the “ancient egyptian drawings” theme I’ve made for my game.

My conclusions

• I need to work on my method for creating art assets for the game. This took very long for me and ended up eating a very large portion of my time. I think I could get at least twice as fast, allowing me to create many more animations and characters for my game.
• Gameplay programming is really fun, probably the most rewarding of all the work I’ve done in the jam! It’s awesome watching people playing my game and commenting about all the design decisions I’ve made.
• Watching streamers play the game was one of the most insightful things for me this jam. Next time I’m going to take at least one more day off from work to be able to watch and interacts with a few streams.

That's it. Had a lot of fun participating in Ludum Dare! Can't wait for the next one. Thank you to everyone who played my game! I'm still happy for more feedback so if you're feeling bored and have a spare 5 minutes, please play my game and let me know what you think.

I'm in for my second Ludum Dare.

In the previous jam I entered with Pyramidion (see post-mortem).

I'm going to be using Unity again for this jam, and for asset creation I'll use Procreate on iPad, Gimp and Aseprite. I'll probably opt-out of audio for this jam as well (I have no idea how to create music and I didn't learn anything about that since my last jam).

Good luck everyone :)

I'm a bit nervous because the idea I have so far is a puzzle game. It's very different from what I did before so it's very hard for me to assess whether it will be a fun puzzle game or not. So, what I decided is, that unlike last time, where I started by coming up with the art style and story for the game, this time I'll start with a very basic prototype that contains no story and the most basic art, and start iterating on that to make sure the gameplay is fun.

This is what my prototype looks like at this point:

Now I'll try to design a few levels to see if this is a fun idea or not. If it seems fun, I'll start implementing a version that looks more decent tomorrow morning. If it's not, I'll have to start from scratch 😲

I think I'm done with contents for the game. It came out really short (only 8 levels, many of them introductory and super easy), but I must start working on some art and polish tomorrow.

This was a very interesting experience for me so far. Play-testing a puzzle game is so different from play-testing an action game! In any case, I still have tons of work to do, so I'm really glad I'm doing the jam and not the compo.

Here's a current screenshot from the first level of the game. Hopefully the game will look completely different by end of day tomorrow:

Good luck everyone!

Wow, this is going to be really tight...

I got a lot of progress today, but I still have quite a lot I wanted to do:

1) Come up with name for game 2) Title screen 3) Fix up dialog script 4) Fix a few sprites that still don't look very good 5) Improve look & feel of game in general (right now color scheme is horrible!) 6) Improve character switching mechanic (right now it is a bit annoying) 7) Add music and sound effects

Better go to sleep now if I want to have some energy left for tomorrow.

I really envy the guys that have already submitted their game :)

Good luck everyone!

Wow, close call this time - I submitted the game at exactly 6:59 :)

I'm sure it still has bugs. I finished everything at the last minute this time and didn't have time to playtest enough :( I also didn't have time to make a proper start screen and I only got around 50% of the content I planned.

In any case, I'm really glad to have it in! If anyone's interested, my game is at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/labrats

I will be free to start rating games in ~an hour. Can't wait to see what other people have made!

This time, because my idea for the jam was a puzzle game, I had very little intuition for whether it would be fun. I was terrified that I'd end up working on the idea for a long time only to find out it's impossible to make challenging / fun levels with the mechanic. So, I decided I'd try to make up some levels as quickly as possible so I could scrap the idea quickly if it doesn't seem fun.

I started by drawing some schematics for levels on my ipad. Here's an example of a schematic I drew, trying to come up with a somewhat challenging level given the simple mechanic:

It gave me some confidence to draw some levels, but it was still very hard for me to get the feel of how it would actually feel like to play these levels. Maybe the concept that seems challenging on paper will be too simple once you could actually play around with moving characters? So, my next idea, to avoid wasting a lot of time on coding, was to build a paper prototype. I cut little pieces of papers for the characters, keys, and locks, and played around with them. Here's the same level built from paper:

It was helpful in giving me some intuition, but eventually playing with pieces of paper became very cumbersome. So, I made the most scary decision - I will try to make an actual working game as fast as possible before the first day (Friday) ends, so on Saturday morning I could decide if I want to keep the idea or scrap it for a new one. Here is the prototype I had before I went to sleep on Friday (it's the same level as above):

Eventually prototyping was an amazing experience, and really made me feel how powerful it is that you could basically build a working game mechanic with unity starting from an idea in less than 3 hours. I later spent Saturday designing all the levels and story/dialog for the game, and then Sunday-Monday on polishing to make it feel more like a real game (or at least like a better thought out prototype). Here's the same level using the final code and assets in my LD submission:

I'd be really happy if anyone wants to try out the game, and would appreciate any feedback. Please check it out at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/labrats It's available on web, windows, mac and linux.

Hey!

I only have my company laptop today, so I can't run any downloaded binaries and can only play web games.

Please post your games in the comments so I can play, rate and review them!

If you feel like also playing my game, I’d be of course very happy if you do, but don’t feel any obligation :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/labrats

Deleted

Please note: this post contains some light “spoilers” for my game. If you have some free time, you can try playing my game without spoiling it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/labrats

Last Ludum Dare, I decided to include several difficulty modes in my game. I wrote a detailed post about the experience. In short, the decision to include an easy mode came about after I had my wife play-test my game and realized it might be too difficult for many players. The decision to include a hard mode was there because I wanted the players to feel rewarded for finishing the game and the put on a challenge that would attract players to try several times until they manage to beat the normal difficulty.

This time, I did not have anyone to play-test the game. Also, since I really like narrative-driven games, I wanted my game to be longer this time, to have some time to develop a story, so I wanted instead of having different difficulty modes, to have the difficulty progress through-out the game.

Since the game I designed this time was a puzzle game with very simple mechanics, I was actually afraid it would be too easy. I really tried to create levels that would pose a bit of a challenge, but after finishing the game I still suspected people would breeze through the entire thing in a few minutes. So, after publishing it, I dreadfully waited to see some streamers play through it, and made a record of exactly how much time it took them to solve each level.

How much time does it take to "solve" each level in my game.

Here are the stats I collected from 22 streamers:

To summarize the data:

• Level 1: Takes around a minute. It is completely trivial to solve, but it takes a while to navigate the maze.
• Level 2: Takes around a minute. It is small and completely trivial, but there is some dialog and story which takes most of the time.
• Level 3: This one had a pretty high variance, with some streamers taking around a minute, and some taking more than 5 minutes. The average was around 2.8 minutes. Most players thought the progression to this level was good, but some complained that it was too complicated as a follow up to the previous trivial levels.
• Level 4: This was the most surprising one for me. I wrote this level as a pure "story level" - it was supposed to show the story of how the rats manage to escape the maze, and to be a gentle introduction to the "sacrifice" mechanic. Apparently, I've made this level much more confusing then I thought. The variance is really high - one streamer finished this level in less than a minute, and two took more than 7 minutes. The average was 4.1 minutes for this level. I'm pretty sure this level would benefit from a few more hints given in the dialog, at least to clarify what the objective is. Especially in the context of a jam, I'm afraid I probably lost many players at this level because they assumed there's no solution and the level is buggy.
• Level 5: This was supposed to be the first actual challenge after the sacrifice mechanic was introduced, but I wanted it to be a pretty light challenge, and in this I was pretty successful. Playtime was around 2 minutes on average, with very few outliers.
• Level 6: Was supposed to be a bit trickier than the previous one. I think it is a bit trickier, but it is actually solved on average faster than level 5 - around 1.6 minutes. Watching streamers, I think it's mainly because levels 4 and 5 did a good job in teaching the players how the mechanics work, so I'm pretty happy with level 6 being easier.
• Level 7: This was the most difficult level I designed for my game. As I said, I was afraid my game would be too easy, and really tried hard to make a level that would not be trivial, but that could be solved by reasoning and logical thinking, and not by random tinkering. I think in that aspect I was successful - the level is apparently pretty difficult (it took on average 9 minutes for streamers, with the longest being 20 minutes, and the shortest being 4.7 minutes). Watching streamers solve the levels, all of them eventually did it by reasoning through the level and the mechanic. However, most felt the spike in difficulty between level 6 and 7 was too high. I should probably have included another level or two in-between to get the players more used to the mechanic before introducing this challenge.
• Level 8: I wanted to finish the game on a dramatic note, so wanted more of a fast paced level. The level is also a "trick" where most of the items in the level are actually not needed, and you eventually finish the level mostly with the power of sacrifice. I wanted this to reinforce the story - you need to sacrifice everyone in order to escape. I think given those goals I was successful - the level is much easier and takes around 1.7 minutes to solve. The response to this was mixed - some players liked the dramatic end and enjoyed the trick of the last level, while some were disappointed by how simple the solution was and wanted more of a challenge like level 7.

Conclusions

• Obviously, the game would benefit from more levels. However, I was really stressed for time this jam, so I have no idea how I could find the time to build more levels. I guess the only way is to either team up instead of working individually, or just be more efficient in the rest of my work.

• Given the time limitations, I'm actually pretty proud of what I accomplished. I managed to make a game that's pretty challenging. Difficulty progression is not perfect but it's not too bad. I also managed to integrate a little bit of a story into the game.

• I started with a working prototype, using placeholder graphics and coding a very quick version of the game, so I already had the first level working on Friday night, and I had all 8 levels working by Saturday night. This worked great and allowed me to spend the last 1.5 days focusing on polishing the game. Here is how the prototype I had on Friday night looked:

and here's the same level in the final build of the game:

• I should have implemented progress saving. It should have been trivial to implement, and would have prevented many players from dropping off my game. I even had two streamers who accidentally quit the game in the middle and had to give up because there was no progress saving.

• Lesson learned from level 4 - I should be extra careful to make sure that the objective is always clear to the player. It's not fun to try to solve a puzzle if you don't know what your objective is. The level was apparently pretty challenging even when knowing that the objective is to escape the outer walls (I know this because many streamers still took some time to solve the level even after I've told them the objective), but at least then the players know what they're working towards.

• I did not implement a level selection. I'm not sure if I should have - I sometimes feel a level selection screen really reduces the feeling that the player should work towards the challenge of completing the levels. I know for games that have a level selection I tend to be a bit too eager to skip levels, eventually missing out on the accomplishment of working through the challenge.

Would be interested to hear your thoughts about difficulty, in general in Ludum Dare games, or in my game specifically. If you want to try out my game, please do so (and I’d appreciate any comments or feedback) at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/labrats

One last shout-out

Thank you to all the streamers who allowed me to watch them play my game! This has been invaluable for my learning experience. Here are the links to the twitch channels of all these streamers:

https://www.twitch.tv/muzzz29 https://www.twitch.tv/mikeinprinciple https://www.twitch.tv/erebuswolf https://www.twitch.tv/crefossus https://www.twitch.tv/morgstream https://www.twitch.tv/kindreddev https://www.twitch.tv/messinabrothers https://www.twitch.tv/anniehascoffee https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames https://www.twitch.tv/stovoy https://www.twitch.tv/mrjoshuamclean https://www.twitch.tv/yourbr0ther https://www.twitch.tv/syrapt0r https://www.twitch.tv/aggressivecombustion https://www.twitch.tv/bentglasstube https://www.twitch.tv/mknooihuisen https://www.twitch.tv/beanborg https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames https://www.twitch.tv/firesplashtv https://www.twitch.tv/casualgamesnu https://www.twitch.tv/miziziziz https://www.twitch.tv/tigerj