It's been fun doing my first Ludam Dare and solo project. I've learned a lot from this weekend and it's been very rewarding.

What started as a joke about Tamagachi with plants will soon be a little of that and what you would expect with Idle game in the present. Just trying to finalize more idle interactions. Looking forward to hearing what people think.

-Patrick

I know it's early, but I only had the weekend. I'm pretty happy with how this little idle game turned out. I'm looking forward to seeing what people think of it. Enjoy and relax.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/cool-plants-chill-beats

Hi there everyone,

I hope you all had a great Ludam Dare like myself. This is my 10th game jam, but first Ludam Dare and first "solo" jam. I'll get to the quotes later.

I found out about this Ludam Dare the Friday night after it had officially begun. When I saw the theme of "Keep it Alive", I made a joke about making a tamagachi style game, but with a plant instead. I thought about it and went to my asset packs in Unreal and realized I hate a house plant assets pack and a house asset pack. All I needed was a watering can, which my friend offered to make. I then began on my "solo" venture. I didn't make everything from scratch. I was using asset packs and a few assets from a friend, but that was ok. If I didn't have these things, I probably wouldn't have participated. Instead I decided to approach something I've never done and came out the other side feeling really good about this little game. I love seeing the work of the compo jam and seeing those people shine, but it was also good not feeling the pressure of the normal jam and just making a game.

I got the basics up and running pretty quickly, but the biggest challenge I needed to tack was, "How do I have it so this game plays even when it's turned off?" There was a lot of data to handle to save and load properly and keeping track of time passed when the game turned off and adjust things accordingly. Luckily the internet is a great resource and I was able to find little bits here and there of information that I was able to piece together to figure it out. Now that I figured it out all was great! Well no, there were a lot of bugs. While I believe I was structuring gameplay object correctly, I was having a really hard time saving them and loading them correctly. This took up many hours of debugging and I'm glad I did it. I've learned so much more about saving/loading than I ever would have otherwise. This right here is the main reason I love game jams. It gives opportunities to push yourself to learn something new and I sure did here.

So the main systems were done, but I didn't have a lot of idle/interaction systems. I only had 48 hours to really work on this so there wasn't a lot of time. I figured out some basic fun interactions, but I really wish I could have fleshed this out more.

Also building UI is hard. Luckily I had a main menu asset that I could modify to get that all handled, but all the UI for the game needed to be figured out as I was building it. Luckily I built some pretty crude buttons early on to get everything working in a prototype, but UX and UI is a lot of work to really make it smooth. I wish I could have focused here more to flesh out the experience, but I got enough there I think was decently approachable. Not getting a more robust interactive UI did kill the one thing I wish I could have done for the jam, and that was unlocks. Idle games are all about progression, but doing progression right means needing to message it properly. I might have been able to do this, but I didn't plan ahead enough for it, so I took the alternative route and gated things by price.

In the end I have a weird little game I'm proud of that I never thought I would have built. I've gotten great feedback from so many of you and I'm glad so many enjoyed it. I hope this little post mortem was insightful and I look forward to doing more Ludam Dares in the future.