Hello, allow me to tell you a story of our adventure of creating game for LD48 called Greedy Miner. If you didn't play our game, we defintly welcome your opinion here, there is HTML5 version and Win64 version. Only problem is in HTML5 version where main sound loop is bugged and we can't figure out why :/

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/greedy-miner

For me, it was pure luck that I stumbled upon LD48. Every year I wanted to participate and every year I've missed it, until now. I was happy about it and started preparing, but I didn't wanna do that alone, I don't really know why, it just must be a social experience for me. Luckily (yes again..) I have a colegue/friend who was willing to do it with me, but we agreed that we WON'T under any circumstances tryhard it.

The day before starting (for us it was starting on Saturday 3 a.m.) we got together and talked about our vision for some minigame we could do just the two of us. We both agreed that 2D pixel art is the only possible way for us and that it's going to be written in Unity3D engine as it is the only engine we both know. We decided that 9 a.m. is quite resonable hour for a weekend and went to relax before it (Somehow we knew its going to be an exhausing weekend).

We met up on discord (yeah.. corona and some living distance) on time (that was new) and started brainstorming what our game might be acording to the chosen theme. We expected to brainstorm for an hour at least, but weirdly we finished in mere 15 minutes and we both knew almost exactly, how the game should be played out. Of course our imagination started being a wild creature, spewing an idea after an idea what more we might incorporate into our game, but we managed to control ourself and chose only the necessary mechanics for the game to be playable with a backlog for "If we finish early". I am really glad that we were in sync with ideas, I can't even begin to imagine what it would be if we couldn't agree on it.

My friend went to draw some basic tiles/character for our world and I started doing some programming on our world infinity generator. It wasn't that hard to create a simple generator that would suffice our needs, what was a hard problem was how not to waste PC resources (I don't know if it was necessary, but I felt like if I let the generator populate too much, it might be a disaster), I managed to clear tiles with some simple math, but it wouldn't be classic programming if it wouldn't bring another issues, like... clearing everything in 1 frame is even worse than having the world populated or what the should I use for thread-safe C# collections... Well again... I somehow managed (it's a programmers work, to manage a problem, isnt it).

Then my friend sent me first art and I was really stunned, even though he said "I don't know much" he did a pretty good job and it fit our narative really well. For the character art... well for me it will always be the Elvis Presley who's dancing around a mine (that is how I see it, can't help myself), but I still loved it. We worked hard until 9 p.m. and we managed to create our generator, populate it, implement our core gameplay mechanis (which was defending your cart and mining) and we were happy with the result. What was missing the most was music. Of course neither of us had any experience with it, but because my friend did the art, we decided that it is fair that I would do the music stuff. Hell of a assignment it was.. I wanted to sleep, but my curiosity just didn't allow it..

On Sunday, we started a bit late, 10 a.m. if I remember correctly and yeah, the music wasn't done anyway.. So I continued to test some notes in BoscaCeoil, but it was just hit and pray for a nice result. Even we didn't have the music yet, we though we were quite ahead of schedule and decided to implement some more mechanics (Turret cart for example). We aimed for Sunday night finish, because both of us had to go to work. So sunday was in the name of new mechanics and balancing.

On Monday, we were totally KO, but we decided... we must go on, we were so excited about the game, we loved it. Friend added 2 more enemy types and we started balancing again. We didn't know, what a nightmare balancing is! The game was either unplayable or too easy. Next time, we will try machinima and hopefuly, it will be easier then playing the game thousand times as we did. In the end, build for Win and HTML5 went relatively smoothly and no real disaster happened through whole event.

Aftermath We are glad we participated, we learned new ways, we learned new things and most importnantly we learned our limits (hopefuly only temporary limits) and we want to do this again. We expected to take a break (two or three months) and maybe try another Game Jam. What we didn't expect was how easily we fell in love with our little game and how much we desire to expand it into full product. It would probably calmed down over one or two weeks, but another thing we didn't expect was your reaction and reaction of our friends and friends of our friends, which was absolutly AMAZING!!! So the break is still on plan, but not that big. We will take one or two weeks break and try to selfreflect and then we will start planing our next actions to bring our vision to steam and other platforms.

Thank all of you for your support, feedback and your time and I hope you've all enjoyed LD48 so far. I know we did.