It was my second ld, this time I decided to make game in a small team (me and my gf). It was fun experience, looking forward to see other games. So, we released a game, I understood that my code is garbage, that's all for today.

I thought it would be finished 9 hours ago, but I was still fixing critical bugs until now. Guys, this little creature needs your support, so please play our game and leave a rating!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/signal-mage

I’ve finished polishing the game, and now it’s time to reflect on the jam. The first is that people doing Compo are absolute monsters. We worked as a team of two, me and the artist and we didn’t even come close to the result those guys manage to achieve in just 48 hours.

This was only my second jam, and my artist’s first, so I ended up coming away with a few rules for making games during next jams:

1. No more than 3 game screens, and ideally just 1.

2. Less is better, as long as it’s high quality. Better to make less, but make it good, than to make more and do it worse.

We ended up with way too much art for one person to handle in such a short time, and because of that, the overall quality of the game dropped a lot.

1. A simple but fun mechanic is better than a complex mechanic you never manage to finish. And it's really hard, I didn't thought that working on minimalism game design is such hard work. You need to make game interesting with 2 or 3 mechanics.

And we wrapped up the project just half an hour before LD ended. I honestly don't know what would be, if we had picked something more complicated. You really have to be realistic about your limits.

1. You need to leave time for a tutorial.

I noticed that in a lot of jam games, it’s really hard to understand what’s going on because there’s no tutorial in the game itself. Tutorial work absolutely needs time reserved for it near the end of the jam.

And please, give our game a try! I’ve just uploaded the final patch, and we’re only 7 ratings away from making it into the rankings. We really want to make it in this time.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/signal-mage

Hi guys, I just wanted to share a little poster that our artist made for this project.

It’s my second LD, but this has become something of a tradition. We're making small, funny posters for our games and keeping them at home as a piece of history.