LD57 was my first game jam and it was quite cool! I first heard about this about decade ago, or even further back than that. Recently I saw a friend making games here which made me want to do it again, but I didn't feel I had the required skills to do so. That changed however, when about a year ago another friend showed me a site to make music with, which was the last thing preventing me from doing a game jam, as I didn't want to do one if there were to be no music in the game. I wasn't in the zone to do one in October last year though, so I did this one as my first. It was just me so I decided to do the compo format, so note that when I say "jam" here, I mean the compo part of the overall game jam. I knew it'd be harder to do the compo format, but I'd rather do the one that requires you to be a single person if I were to do it as a single person!

Info and Pre-Jam:

Tools I Used:

Before anything, I knew what tools I'd use for the game jam.
For Programming/Coding/etc. I'd use Godot 4.3. I didn't use 4.4 as I've never used it before, just in case there was something that changed that confused me and took a while to figure out that it's different to 4.3.
For Music I'd use Beepbox, it's quite easy to use and I hadn't used any of the enhanced versions much so I kept to the base one.
For Sound Effects I mainly made the noises with my mouth and applied effects to them via DaVinci Resolve (which was new to me but I did it as I had time and it made them better), but I did use scrunching up a medicine bag too. I also had to use Audacity to convert some files from .wav to .ogg because they wouldn't work for some reason (maybe due to short length? I still don't know).
For Art/Graphics I used Paint.net, it's quite easy to use and I've used it for ages. I use the laptop touchpad to draw on it because I don't have a drawing tablet or anything and using the mouse for it is awkward to me.

Theme Voting and Reveal:

For the theme voting, I knew that I wanted to use Camer the Dragon in some way (Camer rhyming with Hammer for those wondering), because I think being able to play as a dragon with 2 legs, arms, and wings in a game is really cool and that there aren't enough that do that! With that in mind, some themes were easier to envision how to make a game around than others. The theme that was ultimately picked was depths, which worked out decently as a dragon UFO game was something I was thinking about making in the lead-up to the event. I had a few different possibilities in my head on how to make a dragon UFO game, with the depths of space being close enough to the theme such that I didn't feel like I was just completely ignoring it.

Making the Game:

Here I will split days in terms of when I went to bed, so even though it says 3 days this was still over a 48 hour period.

Day 1:

Day 1 was when I got the fundamentals of the game down and I made some very basic placeholder images for the player and obstacles. I didn't want to overscope the project, so I decided to make a basic obstacle avoidance game in an arcade style. I thought briefly about having a win condition, but that'd require a lot more balancing without it being too boring or impossible, so I kept with the infinite arcade-style. I decided to use circular hitboxes, as rotation would not cause any extra trouble and could be used to make the game look nicer, such as having the UFO rotate a bit when moving and having the asteroids rotate around as they move.
Some limitations were that I don't know how to make a clear path, although I could've probably added a shooting mechanic in a decently short time which was a good bit of feedback I got from some people, I thought of a cool way to do it afterwards when I was reading the feedback. I worked about 5 hours on day 1.

Day 2:

Day 2 was when I finished the gameplay and started the work on the graphics. The game was pretty much done decently early into the day, after around 2 hours. The graphics take me a long time because I'm very particular about them in terms of pixel placement which means it takes me a while to do. I also had to go get a covid jab on this day because I get too ill easily so I have to have those sometimes. I got the player character, background, and asteroids drawn on this day. I worked about 10 hours on day 2.

Day 3:

The first half of day 3 I couldn't really do anything because of jab side-effects (much better than the real thing though, I got it in 2022 it's not nice, every time I coughed I was honking like a goose for a week! Alongside stuff like temporary lessening of taste). After I decently recovered, I resumed the graphics work and it probably took me 14-ish hours in all. I'm not lying when I say I'm very particular about pixel placement, because of the way I draw, any rotation (such as on the opening title screen) and I basically redraw the entire thing, or at least comb over the entire thing adding and removing pixels. I decided to make the ending screen a bit funny with the UFO tow service because we cannot have Camer the Dragon dying (too sad!) so I made it something funny like that with the doodle.
I then made a song over the course of about an hour and took another half hour or so to make the sound effects, I learnt some funny audio filters in DaVinci Resolve for this. After making the sounds I had to add those to the game which took a short bit, but not too long. I then made the images for the icon, this is a pain to do because I use GIMP which is only on my old laptop (I can't be bothered to get it on my newer one). I had to get the old laptop, transfer the images to it, make the icon on it, then send the icon back to the main laptop. Fortunately making the icon worked the first time, so it was decently quick. Because the icon has a lot of sizes and such, I was not as particular on the pixels since this was about 4 hours from the deadline too.
I finished the build of the game about 3 hours before the deadline, but my custom font would not work on web (it'd just show as black rectangles) and I still have no idea why. Godot 4.3 is weird with fade-in/out music during scene transitions on web anyway though so after roughly 2 hours of trying to get the web text to work, I had to settle for just the download version. As I was trying to go so fast during the web testing, I accidentally deleted my other game off itch! Fortunately I still had the files on the computer, so I fixed that easily after I'd submitted for Ludum Dare. I worked about 10 hours on day 3.

Overall I worked about 24-25 hours over the 48 hour period, meaning I was a lot more focussed on this than I usually am, which was good. I'm glad to have completed it because I wanna make cool dragon games and show people them, because I find them really cool and awesome, that's my goal!

Post-Jam:

Feedback:

After the submission of the games, the feedback period began. There were some really good ideas for expanding on the idea, which I will likely implement into the game post-jam as an updated version (although the LD57 version would still be available), there was also no feedback I found unreasonable or unjust which was good and nice to see. There were a decent amount of comments liking the dragon character which was awesome! I also got to play quite a few cool games myself when doing the ratings and I can definitely see how this game jam creates popular games.

Rating Reveal:

Before the reveal I didn't particularly mind what I got for a variety of reasons, with about 20 ratings there's a lot of variation on who may rate your game and their average rating given. I also found the feedback quite valuable and the experience of making the game in a short time, planning time effectively, and getting to play a lot of cool games was good enough for me.
The only thing that I was really wanting out of the ratings was for the graphics to be the best rated out of my categories (or near to it) as that's what I spent the majority of the time on. The graphics did indeed get rated the highest and I was glad about that.

The Future:

I'll probably make a video with roughly the contents of this post, as videos are good to have for these and I want to make some different types of videos.
I'll also likely do another Ludum Dare in the future, maybe the jam format depending on if other people I know are doing it and want to work on it with me. I'll try to get a cool playable dragon character in there somehow though, as I have to help make more games with those in, showing how cool they are!