Are our dreams still alive?
Hey there fellow developers, just wanted to get a few things off my chest, so here it goes.
This post is mainly a personal introspective on my first jam game - Dream Rock (it is short, simple, maybe even thought provoking and hopefully inspiring).
If you are interested in the game, I invite you to take a peak - it is only a few minutes of content, but hopefully will be worth the trouble. Here is a link to it: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/dream-rock
For anyone brave enough to engage in the upcoming text - keep in mind it is primarily meant to push myself to analyse my work more effectively. If you have any questions or would benefit from some clarification, you are welcome to ask.
Prelude
As you might have noticed, it is a tiny project. Part of that is due to starting a day late with 0 preparation (no scripts, plans or overall game structure designs). Another part is simply inexperience, which resulted in a few mistakes that I would hope to avoid in the future.
Big mistakes
A lot of time was spent on some mechanics that ended up irrelevant, invisible, overlapping with better ones, or simply scrapped. Hopefully I gained some valuable experience on how to spot when a mechanic is going nowhere before investing significant amount of time in it.
Invisible mechanics tie into the next mistake - lack of clarity. To keep true to my username, I avoided showing numbers to the player, keeping them under the hood and instead relying on visual indications. This was alright, but the mistake was lack of clear indication/explanation of how the game state is influenced (passively and interactively). This was at least somewhat addressed by adding clearer explanations on itch page. Far from ideal solution, but at least it made the game more approachable.
On the topic of things that were somewhat patched in the itch page, another big mistake was neglecting the narrative. At some point during development, I realized that there will not be enough time to add and polish enough features and mechanics to make the game interesting enough, so decided to focus on the narrative - as soon as the main mechanics and a few other things were finished... Well, that ended up with me trying to get everything else out of the way before really focusing on it, and thus only having a couple of last hours for writing.
Conclusions
Overall, I am glad to have pushed myself to participate, and am quite satisfied with the result - learned some priceless lessons, and am happy with the comments received. These were just the things I needed to help me get over the hurdles I was stuck on with my long-term projects. So, to answer the question posed in the title of this post - yes, thanks to Ludum Dare, my dreams are still alive.
