Hey all!

This was my second game jam with my team (who's been doing jams long before me) and to say I was nervous going into LD59 is an understatment. Long before LD59 was announced my LD58 crew had had long since decided we were going to take the jump and build a 3D game.

If you've worked a job and felt like you've reached the highest rung (that you can reach at least) and just start decorating it -- that was my feeling on the last day of LD58. We made an awesome game and really capitalized on our title but creatively it felt stuck and restricted in 2d space.

Shaders were kinda mid, graphics tweaks hit a ceiling and overall it felt like 80% of the effort went into 20% of the polish. I don't want to complain, a lot of you seemed to really enjoy the gameplay and connect with the characters (woof), but it felt like something was missing.

For those of you who've had a chance to try out both our games I hope you can see the dramatic difference between the two titles. Instead of each developer focusing in on one given task, we all took a swarm at various bugs, issues and found ways to collectively improve everything. When we had started I wrote a simple orbiting implementation but the way one of my fellow team members implemented it absolutely blew my naieve implementation out of the water.

All of it came together beautifully (though with little time to spare), thankfully we got it building cross-platform and conveniently all of us develop the game on different platforms. So when you do something that breaks on Linux you'll get an earful and fix it instead of waiting for end-of-jam technical difficulties trying to monkey patch things.

TL;DR I'm done with the 2D thing. 3D is badass, we did awesome and I'm so happy for and proud of my team. We came out with something that I'm really proud about with an amazing blend of artistic and programmatic talent.

To more awesome games with the talented team I'm lucky to be a part of :)

For anyone curious here were our game from last year, I hope you can see the improvement and PLEASE share where we need to improve for next time around (speculation welcome)

2D LD58 game (This rocks!): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/this-rocks 3D LD59 game (Almost empty): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/almost-empty