Quite a bit of progress made today. Not bad for missing the first 12 hours. I MIGHT have set my reminder to Friday 13 instead of Friday 6. Ah well, seems to go alright anyway.

A first sneak peek at the project temporarily titled Plant School

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is feature-complete. A few code touches left and one feature left to implement to make it usable. Got a stretch goal, but tomorrow I'll focus mainly on aesthetics, music and adding content.

State of the game as of now

Looks a bit better now, though I still got a fair bit of tinkering to do. Code is pretty much feature-complete, but we still need better sprites and some music.

And a name. Plant School just doesn't work for me... Gotta have a think about that one. But for now, another coffee!

Plant School just didn't sound right. This is a much better name!

This is my second run through Ludum Dare and I certainly took several lessons with me from last time.

Firstly, this time I aimed for Compo. I held no vision of actually managing to get there, but last time I felt too relaxed with "it's just Jam" and that affected the final product a lot.

Secondly, I aimed MUCH lower this time in scope. Instead of an overly ambitious project, I had a single, simple mechanic in mind and built on that.

Thirdly, there's no such thing as perfection. Don't spend too much time getting everything perfect, it will take your whole life and longer to do that, there will always be something you think is wrong with your own work.

Fourthly, relax. Don't procrastinate, but also don't stress about it. It's about having fun and enjoying game development, if you stress about the submission you'll miss the main goal of this entire event.

And with that, I released what I think is a game. It has rules, it has interactions. Might barely fit into the category, but here we are, it's submitted for your approval.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/plant-school (Yes, I forgot to rename it before hitting Publish the first time)