Though I competed in last year’s Global Game jame, this was my first Ludum Dare, and therefore my first solo attempt at making something complete in a short span of time. As such, I learned quite a few lessons, including:

-Sleep is for the weak. If you’re going to nap, set at least ten alarms. If you only set one alarm, your body may manage to turn it off before your mind realizes that it should be coding.

-Appropriate breaks from creating the game are things like going to the bathroom, getting some food, or going for a walk. Happy hour and beer pong are much less appropriate, since they inhibit your ability to code for quite a large chunk of time.

-Keep things simple. You can’t remake Zelda in 48 hours. Your design doc shouldn’t outline a billion assets and fifty individually scripted events, even if you can fit it all on one piece of paper.

-Don’t get down on yourself. You can’t let yourself be your own worst enemy, you’ve got to keep being your own best friend. When you’re solo in the trenches, you’ve got no one to tell you everything’s going to work out and be okay, so remember to tell it to yourself.

-Code efficiently, and don’t worry about making your code efficient. In a time-limited event such as this, programmer-time is infinitely more important than program time. Unless, of course, you have a giant memory leak that seeks to consume the internet. Then we have a problem that can only be solved by Hollywood hackers.

I’m sure there are more smaller lessons that I learned that aren’t on the list, but those are my big ones. Glad I participated, and see you all next time!

Most jams I’ve done before, my biggest problem has been letting it go too long before getting to a first playable version. I tend to over-scope things, and let my designs get out of hand, and then it quickly becomes more than I can handle in the time frame.

This time, however, I decided to focus on a tight core loop that I could get up and running as fast as possible. I wound up going with a weird niche genre (Invest-Express) that I always find entertaining, and always wanted to try doing my own thing with. It also is currently allowing me to use absolutely minimal assets (Text-only) to test out my mechanics and the core loop, which has been great.

I feel like I’m “cheating” a little by using an existing engine, however on the other hand I’ve never used JavaScript in my life, so I feel like it’s evening out a bit.

I’ve got the first playable version of Core up and running at http://robgiusti.com/core/, with more to come (like, maybe actual UI…)!