As soon as the theme was announced I grabbed a pen and notepad and started mapping out ideas.

I decided the keyboard world idea was the most original and also simple enough to create in the available time, so I slept on the idea and began fleshing it out the next morning.

Some mechanics evolved or were cut but the idea remained mostly intact. I decided to focus purely on programming the core mechanics to being with, so by the middle of day 2 I had a playable prototype but the characters were still grey capsules. I spent the second half of day 2 designing, modelling and animating the game's characters and objects.

I made myself a to-do list for day 3, prioritising the elements that were most lacking.

When I woke up on the morning of day 3 my game still had no sound whatsoever, so I set about creating sound effects using household objects (and recording puppy barking noises with my own voice...), once the sound effects were in place I grabbed my acoustic guitar and recorded an arrangement of the theme tune, which I had hummed into my phone the night before.

I was able to get through most of my to-do list but as the deadline was approaching I decided to abandon the ideas of difficulty settings or multiple levels, and just make sure what I had was as polished and balanced as possible.

I was anxious about not having the tutorial done so I got that made probably earlier than I should have. I found myself remaking the tutorial pages as I updated the game's mechanics and controls, which in hindsight was wasted time. Once I realised how long the tutorial was I added in the page numbers, just so a player wouldn't be put off by clicking through seemingly endless pages.

I uploaded my game a few hours before the deadline. After playtesting it in my browser I realised I'd made a huge error by choosing the Alt key as one of the controls (it kept bringing up a menu in the browser and shifting the whole game on the screen, distracting to say the least). So I hurriedly reprogrammed the controls, updated the key sprite and reuploaded.

With a couple of hours to spare I was totally burnt out but satisfied with what I had created.

I think a deciding factor in how things played out was my choice of a relatively simple idea. I think it has the potential for added features and greater variety, but I was able to execute on the core idea due to its simplicity.

A couple of things I think I could have done better:

Firstly, brushing up on my knowledge of the softwares I was using before the event started. I wasted quite a bit of time looking up how to do things that I knew before but had simply forgotten. I should have anticipated what type of methods I was going to use and practiced ahead of time.

Secondly, I started with great planning and work rate but as the event progressed my focus started to drift. There were times when I sat there spacing out, weighing up in my head what to do next and wasting valuable time. Burnout was partly to blame for sure, but I could have done a better job of small-scale time management.

Overall, it was a great experience. Honestly I never would have thought it possible to create something like this on my own in such a short time frame.

So thanks Ludum Dare for the inspiration to push myself to the limits and find out what I was capable of!

Here is a full timelapse of my LD38:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVGMHO0HJ4A

Play the final product here!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$15179