You're a busy person! You're trying out lots of games, rating them and providing good feedback. So I will be as concise as I can be for this postmortem.

What is Carter's Crates?

You play as a warehouse worker named Carter who has the duty of sorting different colored crates and sending them down chutes of the matching color. You do this by picking up stacks of crates and moving them around the play area. You must keep the boxes from stacking up to the ceiling. For the theme "Running Out of Space", the idea is that as more and more crates come in, you have less space to organize them and it becomes more difficult to maneuver around the warehouse.

What went well?

• Finished on time. The core gameplay was programmed a bit after the first 24 hours, which gave me the rest of the compo to create sprites, animations, and sounds. I also had time to give the game some extra details like camera shakes, a global scoreboard, a box reticle, and a warning indicator when boxes were stacked too high. For future Ludum Dares, I'd like to keep scoping out my games for the core functionality to be done in the first 24 hours, and everything extra for the other 24 hours.
• People think the game's design was good and put together well. This is the general consensus I have gleamed from the feedback I have received. The core idea behind the game seems easy for people to understand. There has also not been any bug reports. Sweet!

What went wrong?

• The game might be too challenging. I err on the side of making difficult games over easy games because I like them more. But this is not the first time that I have received feedback that one of my LD entries is too difficult. I think I easily fall into the trap where a game dev thinks their game's difficulty is fine but any other person playing finds it too hard. I should keep this in mind for the next LD.
• The controls are frustrating. This comes as a surprise for me, but many players have mentioned that the controls are tricky and hard to get used to. I tried to minimize the number of buttons needed to play, and I added a sort of reticle to indicate to players where they were picking up and dropping off boxes, but clearly more work was needed.
• You can get stuck between two stacks of boxes. This is just a consequence of the game's rules, but I should have designed around it. If you get stuck, either you wait until you lose, or you restart the game. Not a good experience for the player.

There's more valuable feedback that players have given me in the game's page, but these are the bigger bullet points. Thanks for reading! If you'd like to try out the game, you can click the link below.

Play Carter's Crates here!