Hello all! I've seen a lot of these retrospectives since I began doing Ludum Dare, so I've finally decided try my hand at writing one while waiting for results to come out. Hope you enjoy!

What went well

• Premise: I wanted to come up with an original take on the theme, and I think I may have succeeded - I have yet to see any other entries that use "going deep" in the context of throwing a pass. Additionally, I think a lot of commenters found the basic premise of a football player who runs off the end of the field and keeps going far more amusing than it has any right to be.
• Flexible scope: The game was composed of several independent biomes that the player runs through, so if I had run out of time at any point I could have just ended the game there, or if I'd had extra time it would have been easy to keep adding more biomes and fun Easter eggs.
• Music: I think my music quality has been gradually improving each time I enter Ludum Dare, and this time I am fairly happy with it. The orchestration is still very simple, but it has an appropriate feel and doesn't get too repetitive (in my personal opinion). As one commenter suggested, varying the orchestration depending on the biome would have been a really cool addition, and might be something I try to incorporate in future game jams.
• The Boat: The part where the football player reaches the ocean, climbs into a boat, and starts frantically paddling was personally my favorite moment of the game.

What went poorly

• Difficulty: I typically end up making my games too hard, and this one was not an exception. I tried to err on the side of overly forgiving hitboxes, based on the reasoning that it's more fun for the player to survive because of a bad hitbox than to die because of one. However, the lack of any checkpoints (a planned feature that was cut due to time constraints) also meant that few players were able to beat the game. This was made worse by the difficulty of the first two biomes (the football field and the city streets), so in practice some players never even made it to all of the biomes.
• Art: This game concept required a lot of graphics because of the sheer number of biomes and obstacle types. As a result, the quality was far from consistent. While I was pretty happy with a couple specific images (e.g. the football players, the penguins, one of the cacti types), others like the houses and trees were pretty lackluster.
• Water Effects: I tried out a new approach for the river and ocean effects, using multiple image layers moving relative to each other. However, in practice this honestly looked pretty terrible. For next time I will definitely be looking into other techniques.

Conclusion

Overall, I think a lot of players found the idea of Touchdown very entertaining, and I had a lot of fun making it. There is definitely room for improvement, especially with respect to graphics, but I am generally happy with how it turned out. Thanks to everyone who played and left comments, and anyone who hasn't can try it out here. If you have any other feedback or advice please leave a comment, I'd love to hear it!