Hi everyone, thanks for you comments, support and votes!
(for those who didn’t tried it so far, give it a try here)

Maybe it’s too late for a post mortem but I’ll do it anyway. LD #31 was my third participation at the main event in a row. I started preparing quite early (about two days ahead). Why? Because I had time. I was lucky that I had Friday and Thursday afternoon some free time. So I looked up all the themes that made it to the finale round of voting and I started collecting ideas. I almost had at least one idea per theme. I had a fantastic idea about an adventure game which somhow included all 20 themes of the last round. But there was this one the only one were I had no idea what I should do.

So time was slowly ticking to LD’s start line and I was very excited. I didn’t bother that I had this one theme I wasn’t prepared for. Why should I? I did everything you should do for LD’s preperation. Write down some ideas about the possible themes (check), download and install updates/versions of your software (check), have someone for you food supply (check), read and watch some tutorials to improve you knowledge about some useful features for your game (check) and finaly be in a good mood (check). And then waiting was over and the theme was announced. I was shocked! My mood fall from the Mount Everest right into the Mariana Trench. Why? Well, do you remember that I had only one theme with no ideas? Yes this theme was picked by the majority as LD #31 theme. (Entire Game on One Screen)

After the first shock I started collecting ideas. An hour later I had two directions I could go. Behind door #1 was a tycoonish game (like “Game Dev Tycoon”). Behind door #2 was a MOBA game (like “LOL” and “Dota 2”). So which way should I go? Isn’t it obvious? I choose door #2. Why? Maybe because I like to do new things or maybe because it’s the more challenging one (Why should I go the easy way? 😉 ). I knew making a MOBA game in 48 hours is a bit too much so I decided to make only a MOBA (battle arena game) with no multiplayer component at all.

So after an hour of collecting ideas and planning I jumped right into programming. I started slowly but after a couple of hours I was picking up speed. And then about five hours into LD something happend that I totaly wasn’t prepared for. My hard drive died. Not the OS hard drive but my hard drive with all my programming savings and git version control saves. So instead of programming, working on artwork or sound I had to fix my computer. The hard drive was quite new. I used it only for about a year. So for the next hours I check and replaced cabels and all the other possibilities for a malfunctioned hard drive I could think of. At the end of day one I stoped checking my computer and started programming my game all over again. So an entire day was consumed without almost any progress. 😥

On the second day everything went smoothly. But I had to realize that I lost so much time that I couldn’t participate in the compo. Therefore I entered the jam. In retrospective I would’ve probably switched to the jam anyway (even without my  problems). Oh! I wonder what I could’ve achieve with an additional day. Well, we’ll never know.

Now let’s talk about the good:
– I’m pleased with my skills of working with the tools. Yes, there is room for improvements (isn’t there always room for improvements?) but I pretty much knew what I needed to know for my game.- I learned my lesson! Always prepare for the unthinkable.

The bad:
– Early on, I made some bad design choices that resulted in a not intuitiv readable code. And this was the reason for a couple of bugs that costs me a lot of time to fix.
– In retrospective this project was a bit too ambitious for a 48 hour timeframe and without any preperation upfront. I mean that I didn’t thought about all the things and mechanics such a game requires. And this resulted in bad design choices.

The ugly:
– If you read the introduction you already know the ugly. Oh and for all that are intrested, at the end of day 2 my hard drive thought I had enough rest I can do my job again.

For all those out there who are thinking I had no fun at all, I can assure you that I had my funny moments too. So for me it was a typical not so typical ludum dare.

For those who still want to try my game, you can find my entry here.