This LudumDare marks my 6th time participating and my third consecutive Jam entry. As usual, the weekends have been a rollercoaster of emotions, but in the end, I managed to create Runic Summoner, which I am quite proud of. Let's break down how the weekend went and what I learned for the future.

• Pre-Event week:

Throughout the week before the event, I made sure to deal with every real-life responsibility I could. I ensured we had all the snacks at home, completed all the housework, and made sure nobody from work (or the family) could bother me. These all helped to make the weekend a much smoother experience than usual.

• Friday:

Right after work, I decided to install every software I would need. I really wanted to make something 3D this time as well, so I installed Qubicle Voxel editor to create models and tried it out a bit. Then I set up OBS and my new microphone for the stream. After that, I got bored and instead of creating the Unity project and testing some model imports, etc., I went and played Valheim until like midnight… Yeah, good start, I know.

• Saturday:

Surprisingly, right after reading the theme, I thought of an idea that was neither overcomplicated nor impossible to manage in two days. After some quick planning and setting up the stream, I opened Qubicle and realized I had no idea how it works. After a quick Google search, I swapped over to MagicalVoxel, which works the same way but somehow clicked way better for my brain. I spent the rest of the day focusing on coding the main game loop, doing my best to ignore how dumb everything looked with just different-colored cubes and spheres. My plan was to finish everything I needed to play the game, and then I could spend the second day on polishing and art.

Remember how I said the idea was doable in two days? So yeah, at the end of the day, I threw away about 40% of the planned content. Pretty good time estimate considering how it usually goes…

• Sunday:

Sunday started pretty alright. I was motivated to do some art and put them into the game. Unfortunately, soon after, this motivation dropped hard when I realized how much work needed to be done and also how annoying it is to draw everything by hand and import it into Unity. I was close to packing up and calling it a weekend at this point, but my wonderful partner helped me get through the worst of it. Soon after the first few arts were finished, I regained my motivation and spent the second part of the day on a mad sprint to fix all the bugs, create menus, and convince Unity to let me export the project on the web.

Things that I feel like I did well:

• Effective Breaks and Rest: I took way more time off to take a few 30-minute naps instead of suffering through the day tired. They always gave me some extra push for the next feature, the next bugfix, the next model.
• Building the Main Game Loop with Boxes and Spheres: It was way better than spending half the day drawing 6 extra enemies I had no time to implement in the end.
• Cutting Content: I think the game actually got better from not having 3 extra enemy types and mid-game upgrade options. It left more time to polish up and fix bugs.
• Actually Ended Up Learning a Lot: About how textures and emission maps work in Unity. My workflow to use them, on the other hand…

Things that didn’t go as well

• Not Having a Tested Workflow: To create models and import them into Unity was a major mistake. I think at least a few hours were spent figuring out how MagicalVoxel works, and copying .png files, opening them manually, finding that one pixel that I want to have emission, recoloring it to white so it can have any light effect, then coloring the rest to black… Every time it took forever and was single-handedly responsible for having the same projectile animation on every character.
• Playtesting: I Ended Up Not Having Enough Time to do a lot of playtesting or even release a working version to ask some friends to try it out. This led to inconsistent pacing, sudden difficulty spikes, and a UI that created a lot of confusion for the players.
• Streaming and Social Media: I spent almost the entire event live on Twitch, but I think it was hurting more than helping. Glancing over to the chat to see I have 0 viewers did affect my mood a lot during the weekend. I also didn’t have time to create posts on the LudumDare site during the event. The whole social media aspect feels like it takes an entire extra person.
• I Also Ended Up Being Cooped Up Inside: I believe going for a quick walk on Sunday would have saved a lot of time spent on worrying.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the weekend turned out. I learned a lot and found some extra motivation to keep working on games outside of jams. Would like to thank everyone who ended up playing Runic Summoner and hope to see you all again for the 56th LudumDare.