First of all, the game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/respect

Usually I work with a team. I have friends and acquaintance with interest in making games but lacking the programming/development skills to do them alone. This time I knew that I did not have the full weekend, both days had something going on, so I didn't want to be the bottleneck for a team and went for it alone.

All I knew beforehand is that due to the extra-limited time, I had to do something short. I also had decided that I wanted to try something with asynchronous multiplayer, like an auto-battler. This ended up being a leaderboard and player ghost-data in a some sort of racing game.

The time ended up being more of an issue than I thought. I originally planned to join the compo but I was way behind, so I ended up extending my time to the jam. This time issue seems to be an everpresent issue for me in the jams. The scope balloons if I can manage the time off or have a team, which means that I always end up scrounging the game together at the final hour. Biggest fallback from this, is that I rarely have the time to play test the game, especially design-wise, and this time was no different. I'm not happy with the map, and the wall-collision is very unfriendly and sometimes a bit confusing.

The roll mechanic ended up being more polarizing than I thought. I rarely build games with a system that rewards mechanical ability directly, but for racing I felt it was almost needed. The comments do seem to appreciate the learning curve, but the fail state is probably a bit too harsh. Something that would have been fine tuned if I had the time to test more.

Another thing I'm not happy with, but realized too late was the scoring system. Due to the signal theme, I needed some randomization for the runs that you actually had to use it every single time. Total randomness would invalidate most of the ghost data, so I ended up creating handful of "levels" and just putting the player in one, preferring the ones where they could improve the most. However, since the scoring is a black box, and the "levels" are slightly hidden, I think that leaderboard can seem demoralizing. Even the best runs generate around a thousand points and the leaderboard scores are way above that. You cannot really know if you just need to play more, or if your run was somehow insufficient. Since game jam games receive very short attention, a different scoring system would probably have been better.

Overall, I'm still happy with what I managed to create. I do still hope that before the rating phase is over, someone manages to take the top spot from me :P