So first of all... wow.

This is obviously the best I've ever done in Ludum Dare, and probably the best I ever will. Ludum Dare has been an amazing opportunity to grow as a designer and developer, and to catalyze that growth with feedback and exposure to other great games. Thanks to everyone in the community who makes this jam great and keeps me coming back every event!

Now for the postmortem. What went well, and what went poorly?

---

The good parts

Concept

Innovation has historically been one of my lower scores --- enough so that my postmortems for the last three events (52/53, 51) have all said "next time, I should focus on innovation."

One of the first existing games that came to mind for "Limited Space" was Rush Hour (and the million physical and digital copycats). Turning this into a word game seemed like an interesting spin on the theme, and being selective about the particular words can tell a compelling "story"... such as having to break through an impossible wall that is literally the word "impossible."

Making a playable game early

I had a "playable" version 5-6 hours into the jam:

It didn't look nice, and had some bugs, but it meant I could test a couple levels.

This is usually a good idea for any game jam game, but it's extremely important for puzzle games. If the mechanics in your head don't translate to interesting puzzles, or the design space is very limited, you want to know a few hours into the jam, rather than on the last day after you have finished your art and music and realize you have a very pretty (but not very fun) game. My LD42 game as an example.

In this case, after making the level in the gif, I decided there was an interesting game there. A version of that level ended up in the final game!

Playtesting

Another benefit of frontloading the gameplay portions is that you can collect feedback during the jam!

I'm lucky to have a number of hobby game development friends who are often willing to playtest. Particularly for puzzle games, you are the worst possible playtester. That "easy" or "obvious" puzzle might actually be extremely difficult for someone who didn't make it. And make sure you watch people play, in person or over screenshare --- it helps to see exactly what the player tried, where there attention was, and what you can do to make things easier (or very, very rarely, harder).

For Hope Falters, this usually meant removing "red herrings" --- actions that looked like they could be part of the solution, but were actually not. Such as adding blocks to make it clear that you needed to interact with a particular subset of letters.

This is ambiguous how you're supposed to interact with the words, since you could need any letter in "light"!

While this one helps eliminate red herrings by making it clear you should probably be paying attention to the first two letters.

Music and audio

For some baffling reason I decided to write it in 7/4 time, but people seemed to like it!

Low hanging fruit for extra audio "juice" --- add a slightly different version of the music you switch between contextually. For Hope Falters, I had a "sad" version that played when you didn't have the word "hope" in play, which was identical to the original track but shifted down one octave and with a low-pass filter in Audacity. This makes it sound like it's coming from underwater or something.

I did a similar thing for my LD53 game Holding Out (link) for the music; while you're "on hold" it plays with a high-pass filter, making it sound like it's coming out of a phone speaker rather than being next to your ear.

Could be better

Visual direction

While I'm not unhappy with the final look of the game, the graphics definitely aren't a selling point like some of my previous entries. Then again, I was focusing on gameplay and level design for this event, so I was okay making that compromise.

I borrowed a page from the Claustrowordia playbook here: keep the "word" part fairly simple, and have a character to the side to add some interest. Of course, my game still looks worse, but not everyone can be a superhuman juicemaster like @antti-haavikko.

Scope

I probably could have squeezed a few more levels in there! There were really only three difficult puzzles that made full use of the mechanics, after some introductory ones.

That said, limited scope is generally a good idea for level-based games. You'd rather leave the player wanting more than let them get bored halfway through without seeing that really killer final level.

Fan art

I didn't have a lot of time during play and rate this event, so unfortunately didn't get around to making fan art for the games I played like I have the past few LDs. But it's been awesome to see other people making fan art and other user-generated content and compilations this jam! Especially everyone who took the time to make a custom level for my game:

• @100th-coin
• @frogman
• @jdeedubs
• @alchemic

Conclusion

Thanks again everyone who makes this community what it is! Even without scores and ratings, it's awesome to have an opportunity like this a couple times a year to make something you're proud of and share it with the world.

Cheers, and see you for Ludum Dare 55!