This was the first ludum dare I participated in and it was a blast! I learned a lot but if I can boil down my experience into one core point for all of you to take with you it would be this:

Go the extra mile!

I spent a lot of time on my game fine tuning and playtesting it and even sent it around a bit to let others try it while I was making it in order to see how the game felt for other people. Their results were similar to my own, but my sample size clearly wasn't big enough. I released my game with four hours to spare because Ludum Dare 39 is the 4th gamejam I've done in a row in the past couple weeks and I just wanted to step away from it all for a bit and catch my breath. But I've already done so much and put in the time and effort so why didn't I go that extra mile?! If I had I might have been able to adapt my game to a lot of common issues and feedback I received. There seem to be two that are the most reoccurring.

A) The batteries despawn too fast.

B) The cursor is hard to see.

I fixed both of these issues in less than a minute and I can only imagine how much more I could have done had I fully utilized my extra hours. It's over for those of us in the competition(atleast for #39) but if you are in the jam and aren't finishing strong, please take my advice and don't stop until the clock ticks 0! Best of luck to everyone!

If you are interested in trying my game it is available here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/dorgus-needs-power

Thank you!

Hey everybody! We're drawing closer to the end of the playing and rating period and I think it is important for everybody to ask themselves a valuable question.

What now?

Some of us have already moved on to new jams, got back to our regular lives, or continued a previous longer term project. All of which involve taking the experience of this jam to grow in some way. There is one other section of us though. Those of us who take what we've made, absorb the good and bad criticism we've received, and move on to make a better experience with the restraints of time and theme no longer on us. I'm sure there are a few people already making plans on how to take their game to a greater level!

I'm the sole creator of the comp entry Dorgus Needs Power (please play it if you haven't)

My goal is to take everything I've learned from this and a few other jams I was recently in to polish my game, fix reported issues, and make a full game. I have a background as an artist so my first goal in all of this is to redo the look of the game now that I'm not hurried to make something playable rather than something pretty and playable.

This was the original sprite for the main player character in my game:

Definitely did the job for the jam but it won't suffice for a more complete project!

If you are an artist than take the time to really work on this and have several revisions. Show alternate versions to friends and don't be afraid to take your time. If you are by no means an artist, make a friend / contract one. I will likely look at my newest draft of my main character multiple times and change things that I see fit to alter many times in the process of making the game, but that is one of the freedoms of taking a jam game to the next level or just starting a larger scale project!

I'll leave on an image of my newly revised version of the player and will link my LD39 entry again because the more feedback the better! Next time, I'm going to break down some game feel fixing!

**Quick note neither image shows two arms because that is a separate image

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/dorgus-needs-power

AHHHH less than 3 days left! Vote for games and give some genuine feedback! Save the people with less than 20 votes!

ok ok. Now that we've settled that, hello my name is Will! I made the competition entry Dorgus Needs Power and this is a series of blog posts I'm making leading up to the end of judging period. If you haven't tried the game, I highly reccomend you do to help understand the content of these posts! My last post discussed how I've begun to evolve the art of my LD entry and in it I mention that I'm likely to change it even further. That is exactly what I've done!

What a cute boy! This time around his head, head, torso, arms, and legs are all separate assets that are going to programmatically puppeteered to add more life on top of some actual animations. Enough of all this though, this post is about growing in terms of game feel!

Since the comp ended I've been toying with the physics and movement to make the game feel better all around. The gun still retains it's hard knockback but I felt as if the horizontal push of the gun was far weaker than the vertical and lead to a singular strategy that was incredibly vertically based. I've also changed the jump to have variable jump height based on how long you hold the jump for. It's hard to convey but I'm including a gif to help illustrate the movement

This is all still very WIP but I love sharing the snapshots of how this project grows. Sadly, this ldjam is coming to a close and I won't be posting any further blogs here

BUT!!!!!!!!

If you are still interested in seeing the growth of Dorgus or my work then you can find me on twitter here

...and if you read this without playing for some reason here is Dorgus Needs Power

Thank you very much for reading and I look forward to the end results and rating as many games as I can last minute!!!