For my first Ludum Dare, I made Save Your Planet!  I enjoyed making this far more than I thought I would.  Since everyone seems to be doing post-mortems, I figured I shall do the same.

What went right

• LÖVE is great!  Lua is…alright, but LÖVE is great.  I don’t think I would have gotten this done without LÖVE.
• The music too far less time to make than I thought it would.  I normally get super anal (ha!) when I sit down with my bass/guitar and record stuff.  Time constraints are handy, it seems.
• sfxr + Audacity allowed me to make the audio with a quickness.  I think I only spent 20 minutes at most on sounds.  The audio could have been better, though.
• Even though the theme wasn’t my favorite thing in the world, I was able to think of something to make and come up with a plan within my first hour.

What went wrong

• I didn’t think I was going to finish at all (I’ve never actually finished a game before), so I didn’t put more effort into it.  What can I say?  Arrested Development won’t watch itself.  This filled me with regret when I had 12 hours left and something that could actually be submitted.  I only worked on this for 20 of the 48 hours.
• Art is hard.  I’m just not very good at it (yet?).  I didn’t spend enough time working on my art skills before the start of the Ludum Dare.  Not only is the art less than optimal, it’s a bit inconsistent.
• The start of Ludum Dare fell on the same night as a Cake concert!  And I don’t have a smart phone, so I didn’t even know the theme until I got home 3 hours later.
• I didn’t get a chance to add everything I wanted; e.g., power ups, more enemies, a tutorial that isn’t just a screenshot with text on it, and an actual victory screen & music.  The lame victory screen I added is just the game over screen, except instead of “Game Over”, it says “Victory!”.  Weak sauce.
• I had a nice plan as to how I’d organize all my code.  That plan fell apart during the last 6 hours, and my code got really ugly.  I guess that’s to be expected.
• I really wish I remembered to think of a better name than “Save Your Planet!”.

I’m definitely will be doing LD #24, and encouraging others to do the same.  Have you played my game yet?  You should.