I participated in Ludum Dare 31, and it was totally awesome! Now that the dust has settled and I\u2019ve had time to clear my mind a bit, it\u2019s time to look into the process of the actual Ludum Dare, and\u2026 Evaluate!<\/p>\n
There are quite a few good and bad things to talk about, but the most important thing to mention is probably the on-site event. A few dudes from my university (Play their games here<\/a> and there<\/a>!) and I decided to share a location during the event. One of the dudes had some connections so he was able to provide a university space for us to work at during the event. It was really cool! You still end up working non-stop for 48 hours, but it\u2019s cool to be able to take a breather every once in a while and chat up with other devs. It\u2019s especially nice to see other people\u2019s games develop over the weekend. If you get the chance to join an on-site event, I totally recommend it. Also, having a coffee machine within 20 metres is absolutely amazing.<\/p>\n Now, let\u2019s talk about a bad thing: locality. In short, when I woke up saturday morning and the compo had already started I was still 2+ hours away from university. This meant working and planning a bit while travelling. This is not a very bad thing but it was still irritating and distracting. So next time I should make sure I wake up at the right place, at the right time.<\/p>\n One thing I\u2019m really happy with is how I managed to complete the compo with exclusively my own resources. And with my own resources I mean my own art & graphics, my own idea, and my own utility library. This is ofcourse mandatory if you want to participate in the compo, but it is still a new experience for me. It was very cool to see functions from my utils library pop up all over the place, and I could really notice I was coding faster than before. Downside was (again) that my utils library had a few bugs and hiccups here and there. This includes a *very* very very grrrr stupid bug which caused 2+ hours of frustrating debugging near the end of the compo. But anyway, this means my game has a very distinct style, both in visuals and code.<\/p>\n Something I have mixed feelings about is my game idea and the gameplay of it. On one hand the idea was very applicable. It integrated nicely with the themes, was perfectly within scope of 2 days work, and had enough possibilities for extending in case I would have time left. On the other hand, it was a quite rubbish \u201cgame\u201d idea. The actual gameplay was barely there, and if you\u2019re not *really* curious you probably won\u2019t finish it. Since in the end the entire compo is about making a **game** this is a crucial point for me to focus on next time.<\/p>\n Now lastly, the compo had two nice side effects. First, I made a timelapse:<\/p>\n