So, I really ran out of time with this one, but at the same time I think it went really well.

What went wrong:

Like every time, I didn’t have a completely free weekend for ludum dare. Some things I had to attend to took up a lot of my time, and I also spent most of sunday doing stuff with friends. I also restarted with a new idea on saturday evening and really only worked saturday and sunday evening.

Because of the time limit, I wasn’t able to include proper enemy spawning, failstates or menus, so my entry ended up more like a broken prototype than an actual game. There really is no good gameplay except the movement system, I hacked in enemy spawning in the last minute and the game doesn’t have any proper balancing.

It is also missing any polish at all, I was hoping to add more animations and player feedback to it so it would feel better, and again wasn’t able to add sound.

What went right:

Except that my entry isn’t really a game, quite a lot. After realizing that my first idea would be too big for me, I settled on an easy and fairly fun idea pretty quickly. Work from there on was fast and smooth, I’m especially happy about how fast I got the art together. Normally art is really complicated for me and takes ages to make anything good looking, but I feel like I really improved since the last LD and was able to produce half-decent sprites.

Engine and coding wise everything went really nicely, since I know HaxeFlixel quite well by now and didn’t have to constantly look up stuff in the documentation.

What really stuck out to me this ludum dare was the fact that I didn’t stress myself about it and I was okay with doing other things with friends for about 4 hours. Instead of constantly thinking about it, I relaxed and had fun for pretty much the first time in a ludum dare.

And since that really is the spirit of the game jam, this for me was the most successful ludum dare so far.

Now I’m looking forward to playing the other entries and, further into the future, for the next LD where I can hopefully relax from the very start and really have fun!