So I apparently got into the Top 100 with Laser Grid? I just discovered it today, as I was honestly pretty checked out for this jam. So perhaps you can imagine my surprise when I discovered this.

The context

Laser Grid is probably the game I poured the least effort in, mostly due to my increasingly chaotic schedule this month. My uni semester was starting, I had two different events to plan out, and overall, I was just stressed. My internet even went out mid-jam, to complicate things further.

At first, during the planning phase, I considered making a concept-heavy, emotionally-driven game. Even though my friends also wanted to participate, this time I wanted to go alone. The stress was taking a toll... so what better to do than to transform my suffering into art?

Slowly though, I realized that my best shot at this was trying out something simple. I had this image on my head of a fast-paced puzzle game, something that I could chew on to distract me from my problems. With a cyber-pixel theme, I could work on both the art and the music myself, as well. Everything aligned itself for me to eventually decide to go for Compo.

The process

The game was finished in less than a day. I iterated on the design a bit, but didn't deviate much from the original premise. Surprised with the lack of fucked up bugs, I was then able to focus on polishing everything up, extracting the juice out of every cranny I could.

With programming, at least for me, it's not the implementation that's hard - it's the bugs that come after. Finding them, fixing them, ughh! Due to this game's simplicity, though, there weren't many holes for which these nasty little critters could claim a home. When you reduce your scope, everything becomes simpler.

So okay. The only thing left to do was the music. I use an online tool, Jummbox, that's somewhat easier to work with, at least for a composition noob like myself. But then, my ISP decided to just give up on me - so I had to focus on something else. With this 'extra time', I went down the priority list and settled on making an intro sequence.

Nice. I watched some old DVDs with my sister, then went to bed.

The next day, the last day, I focused solely on audio - music and sound effects. That night of rest was critical for my creative juices to get a kick - had I tried on the previous day, I would've probably kept banging my head on the wall to get it right, wasting precious, precious time.

This was the result: https://tinyurl.com/ymndtx9r

With the extra time, I dedicated myself to developing a simple dynamic track system to advance the song at key times when the player reached certain waves. With this, the project was over. For the first time, I didn't even have to rely on last-minute patches or stuff to get everything running properly.

The next day, I wasn't even thinking of Ludum Dare anymore - I was too busy stressing over asking my boyfriend if he wanted to go official. A story that's perhaps a bit too personal for this site, haha.

So what did I learn?

My word of advice, honestly? Keep it simple, and keep it short. Don't think of this as making a normal game, but instead as a jam game. Introduce your concept in a concise manner, polish it up, and make it unique. Personally, when I'm going through the entries, I'm looking for that 'Oh, neat!' feeling of being surprised and impressed at the same time.

Another thing is to be wary of making it too difficult... people unfortunately don't have as much patience, there are other games to play! My idea for Laser Grid, from the outset, was for it to be action-focused - though that created difficulty problems that were tricky to solve. When in doubt, err on the side of 'too easy', at least for jam games.