Okay so after completing my 10th Ludum Dare I'm just going to start by saying that based on my feedback so far and how much I enjoy my game, this is for sure the best game I have made for Ludum Dare so far, or maybe even best game I've ever made in general! My art style has definitely improved, and I have found myself adding in a lot more subtle effects to make the game feel better and more satisfying to play. Balancing the look and the gameplay of my games has always been a point where I struggled, either focusing a lot on the graphics then realizing later that the gameplay was kinda bad (like my games for LD40 and LD38), or sometimes focusing too much on the gameplay where I could have used a bit of that time to significantly improve the graphics or overall design (Like my LD39 game). This time around I found that I did a much better job at balancing all aspects of the games design, leaving no area feeling like it needed improvement.

Deciding on an idea

I feel like one thing that definitely helped me be successful with balancing my game out was that I didn't have to spend too much time on thinking of an idea, leaving lots of time for everything else. I came up with the idea for a shrinking skill-set because you needed space to pick up items rather fast although I did consider switching it a few times and didn't even start working on that part of the game until about 20-24 hours in. Once I thought of this idea, I realized I could use this with some game mechanics (the ability set) which had been floating around in my head for a week or so before the jam.

Process and timeline of how things went

It took me about 20-30 mins total to decide on my idea and I was ready to start on my basic character art rather fast. With this done, I was able to finish my basic stand, jump, and running animations and have my character running and jumping around by around the 4th hour. By around 4:00am, 10 hours after the start, I had my full ability set working, although some temporary animations were used, and I even had the most basic enemy in the game too. Having this solid start done and feeling very confident that my gameplay was feeling good, I was able to go to sleep and then in the morning start working on more art and creating more enemies and implementing my theme idea into the game. By the second night, I had all my game mechanics working, all 3 enemy types fully created, and one basic testing level. Also, my main graphics style and level decorations were mostly done. I woke up late on the last day leaving me only 7 hours to work. In this time I crammed in a LOT of work! Here was my to-do list for the last day: - Create a quick 7-part tutorial teaching each mechanic of the game, and at least 5 levels (only had one done at this point) - Do all the music and sound effects for my game - Create a main menu to select either start game or tutorial - Add a LOT of particles and effects to the game including, blood when hit, yellow sparks when get key or box, floating particles in the background that even interact with the player when he walks by, small black particles that appear whenever either a door activated or de-activated or when the player lands on the ground after a jump, improve the particle effects in the upward wind zone ability, a small spinning spiral above head when enemy is stunned, a subtle vignette over the game to make it feel darker and so the gradient background would feel less plain (aside from the floating particles in front of it), small plants and or rocks that would randomly appear in different places in the background, with varying looks and transparencies, glowing orbs that move to the player when you pick up a box to make it not look like it just disappeared.

To even my own surprise, I was able to do all this within the 7 hours I had left and was very satisfied with my final outcome.

What I think I did well

• Interesting graphics, mechanics, and game feel which in my opinion and based on the comments is super satisfying and enjoyable to play.
• Unique idea and mechanic/level design. I took a puzzle platformer and gave it really fun abilities and ways to take those away forcing players to adapt their play style.
• Good time management. I was able to complete everything I wanted, even with sleeping in on Sunday and having a couple hours less than expected.

What I wish I did better

• A few "bugs" that I could have spend a couple minutes each to work on, not anything that was terrible or ruined the game in any way, just some inconveniences like not having cool-downs reset on death, but even that wasn't too bad because the longest one is 6 seconds so you would only wait a couple seconds at most.
• Condensed the tutorial more. I split it up to 7 different sections which individually did a good job of teaching the mechanic so the player would understand before moving on, however for those who went slowly through it, it might have taken a bit too long, like maybe 4-ish minutes. I had a couple streamers play my game and by the time they got done the tutorial, they only did 1 or 2 levels on stream before they felt they should move on to the next game so they weren't able to experience the full game in the 5 minutes they usually try to limit a game to.
• Focused a bit more on the flow of the levels. Based on the feedback I received, people loved the level design and thought it was really good, however there was one thing I wanted to eliminate from the levels, wait time. In a couple of the levels, I had areas where you would need the wind zone ability to either kill an enemy or get up somewhere, but then would also need it again right after, like to either get out of where you killed the enemy, or get up to a second area, but would need to wait another 5 seconds to use the wind. While this was probably not noticeable and didn't effect most players who would just play through the game once, after playing my game for the entire weekend as I tested, some of these moments became frustrating to me, and afterward, I found some ideas to eliminate this wait time which did not require previous setup (all situations of the wait times in my game could be avoided by planning ahead and setting up a bubble somewhere before the ability was disabled by grabbing a key or box).
• One last thing would maybe be a slight bit more explanation of the different ways the bubbles could be used, most times people would simply figure it out themselves that they could jump off it, but a better explanation of that would help with my slow tutorial issue. (The explanation I gave in the tutorial gave a simple graphic of the character jumping on a bubble but I should have put that to words to make it more clear)

Well now that all that's done, here's a link if you want to give it a try!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/aeromancer