The Ludum Dare 45 was my first time participating in a game jam. It was a great experience and gave a short time frame to work on a new project. Over the last two years I've been working part-time on my "first" game. I'm getting close to finishing my current game but haven't had the opportunity to work on anything outside of that project. I have made a few small "games" but none of them were worth releasing to the public.

It was Friday evening, I was sitting in a hotel for weekend meetings, and I see that a few of my 'online friends' are working on the game jam. I think to myself "hey, I have nothing else to do the next few evenings... I can get something together in that time”. I thought about what I could do with my laptop and what the resources I had available at the time. It was a last minute decision to join the jam. I decided on a simple hangman-style word game that incorporates music from a band, Dt Surgeon, that I've been working with.

I only have experience working with 3D projects so I started making assets in Blender, imported them to Unity, and started to layout the game. I wanted to explore what could be done with Unity's Animator so I focused on that and wrote two really simple scripts to run the game. I then needed music and decided to make an audio management system that could loop individual parts of a song (i.e. drums, guitar, bass, etc.) so I can build a full song as the player progresses through the word puzzles.

Over the weekend I managed to get the game working and at the airport on Monday afternoon I got the audio into the game. Later that day I returned home with a few hours to submit the game. I had time to build the game for Windows and web, setup my jam page and itch.io, and made some art for the pages. When everything was ready I uploaded the game and submitted it to the LD45. It was a great experience finishing and releasing a game in that short of time. I ended up calling the game nothingEVERYTHING.

This is my first publicly released game and this jam gave me experience in the releasing process. The LD45 community has also been great to join and it is enjoyable to see what the other game creators have made. The response to my jam game has been better than expected and I have received some good feedback on how I can make the game better. I plan to take my game concept and apply it to another project I recently started. I think that the LD45 was great for my growth as a game developer and I encourage you to either do a solo jam or join a team if you haven't done a game jam before. The experience is great and will help your development as a game developer, artist, musician, programmer, storyteller, etc...

I'm looking forward to the Ludum Dare 46!

You can check out my LD45 game here: nothingEVERYTHING