Hey everyone! This was once again an incredible Ludum Dare, I'm playing a lot of great games and discovering cool indie devs, I love it.

I did a little stream yersterday were I sumed up my experience during this jam, and I thought that some people here might be interested too, so here it is in text version!

Context

This is not my first Ludum Dare, but this is my first compo. I did all the other in the jam category and worked as programmer with talented artists and sometimes sound designer. Now that I have a bit more experience in gamedev (I even released my first commercial game a few months ago!) I felt like I could try this crazy thing that is compo. I streamed almost all my work during the jam.

Overall

• It's hard not to have too much expectations. Since it's the first time I do compo, I thought that the change of context would let me go into the event with not much expectations. I said to myself that finishing anything would already be really great. But during the jam, it was really hard to not to compare what I was doing to previous jams where I got good results. That did gave me energy and pushed me to do the best I could, but I think I will need to work on that if I want to do more "chill" jams someday. I feel writing my expectations before the event can help a bit, but if you have other tips I would gladly hear them.
• I'm even prouder than previous events. Even if that's really not my best game, the fact that I did everything on my own makes me really proud. It's easy for me to dismiss the quality of my work and think the success I get is due to other people work. I still love to work with other people and will continue to do so, but if you are like me, doing some things alone from time to time might be good for self confidence.

Time Management

• Scheduled time slots helped a lot. I started the event by preparing a rough calendar for the 2 days, and I managed to follow it approximately. The most important things were: Art was schedule for day 1 early afternoon, Sound + music for day 2 early afternoon, and I wanted to have a playable prototype mid day 2 so that the end of the day could be spend on finishing touches, polish, and tackling playtest feedbacks. On 3 days jam, I usually keep a whole day for that, but it was hard to find more time for it on a compo.

• Cutting the day with a bloc of asset creations felt great. After big lunch breaks and a nice walk, instead of coming back to what I was doing before, I dedicated 2 hours to do art (day 2) or sounds (day 2). I think this was a good call, since both are domains where I need a lot of energy, and that gave me time to cool down on programming issues or questions I was facing.
• Getting fresh air is really helpful. I know, everyone says it, but omg this is so real. Every time I got outside to walk, I came back with solutions or nice ideas for my game.

Code

• Trash code is good, but not everywhere. I feel like after several jams as a programmer, I know the approximate quality level of code I like to work with on such event. But this time, the core of the game was on character movement, and my doggo.cs script felt heavy to work on the second day. I think that instead of trying to find the "overall best" code quality level, I should have put a bit more effort on crucial parts of my code and rushed the rest.

Art

• A fixed and small color palette is a must. I always feel like 8 colors won't be enough, but it always is and helps so much with consistency. Even if you draw terribly bad, if you use a nice color palette I'm sure your art will look pleasing. I took mine from lospec.com.
• Drawing without line art has a lot of advantages. It's fast, it's easier to animate, and most of all, it works well with rescaling. During prototyping, I often rescale a lot of things, and if I work with visuals that have line art, it create inconsistent line sizes and I find that very visually unpleasing.

Music and sounds

• This was not as hard as expected. I absolutely never made audio before, be it sounds or music. I was a bit scared, but the solutions I chose worked quite well. For the sound, I recorded my voice, which took a bit of time but sounds fun in game, and for the music, I used beepbox and just clicked everywhere. I believe having minimal knowledge in music theory might have helped, because I felt very very unsure of what I was doing and had to thrash my first attempt because it didn't feel right.

Playtests

• Playtests are a life saver for priorization As always, I did playtests but thought I already knew what was wrong with my game. And as always, they were way more useful than what I anticipated. Not only did they show me things I didn't see or didn't want to see, they helped me a lot to make a prioritized todo list for the end of the jam. If you can do playtest during jams, do them. If you can't, find a way, it's so great.

Stream

• Streaming during a big jam gives a nice "community" feeling. Several other devs that were doing Ludum Dare came to chat and that was very motivating.
• A stream is a very good rubber duck. Talking continuously helps a lot to not get stuck on programming problems.
• Streaming is really tiring I wanted to do the whole jam on stream, but decided to do a small time off saturday evening. I thing this was a great idea, since being always live is really taxing (and yup, doing compo is taxing enough on its own).

Well Being

• I am less tired than after a 3 days jam. I don't really know if it's mostly due to the fact that 2 days is less than 3 days, or because working with other people is more tiring, or because I'm getting better at knowing my limits and sleeping well during jams.

Thanks for reading up until there! I would love to hear from you if you have some similar though, disagree with stuff or have tips on how to handle some of those issues better.

Also play my game maybe if you wish too! link here 🐕‍🦺✨👻