This is technically my third Ludum Dare, though during the second one I got (literally) the worst case of food poisoning in my life and never completed it. I had the great priviledge of working alongside several other very talented, inspired folks this run and I look forward to working with them again soon!

We'd be honored if you would give our game a try here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/atlantis And Leave a Comment in our Itch.io board.

What Went Right:

I spent the entire week before the Jam rebuilding all my tools, updating my libraries, getting re-familiarized with the pipeline, and getting my work-space all set up for 72 Hours of insanity. This translated into a very high starting efficiency. I spent the entire first day building a robust back-end of the game that would support all the features our designer wanted. It also meant when it came time to compile the code, even with 1 hour scheduled to get the builds running on WebGL and Windows, it compiled and ran flawlessly on the first go with only a single minor shader error.

The acquisition of the Hamilton Soundtrack greatly improved my own mood throughout the jam. 11/10, do recommend.

Every single team member got better at their craft by a magnitude. I've always described high intensity jams like Ludum Dare to be a kind of Crucible and I was not proven wrong.

Most of All: What we made, looks, feels, and plays like a halfway decent game. I'm very happy with what we ended up with... I see all it's flaws, but I'm super happy with what we accomplished.

What Went Wrong:

The damnable Ocean. I spent hours creating this really awesome looking ocean only to have to scrap it at the last minute due to incompatibility issues with WebGL. We have thoughts on how to make a new ocean that will look even better if we move forward... but it still bums me out.

Saturday: The wheels went off the Team for about 12 Hours. Half the team was "Deep in the Flow", and the other half had no idea what was going on. This was a group failure and created a lot of tension. I think we lost a lot of man hours during this time and it's something during our own group post-mortem we've agreed we need to be better about. We ended up taking a huge break to have several small discussions and while I think we walked away as a much better team, it certainly impacted our productivity. Alas, an improvement that will bear fruit in future runs but not this one.

Integration: As the only active programmer, almost all the meshing of Code, Art, Music, and Design at some point fell through my bottleneck. Once Monday hit I ended up putting a total feature freeze on the game and spent the remaining time, from 1am to 8pm (We scheduled 1 hour to get our builds running) getting the basic features done. This meant a whole host of features ended up on the cutting room floor in varying states of completion. I compiled a full list here if you are interested: https://itch.io/t/76217/cut-content-design

Pathfinding: I've done it so many times but for some reason this go-around a solid, perfect implementation has not panned out. I want to go in and do some major overhauls after the jam. For now I have to accept that it has a few quirks because they always occur in favor of the player.

Hit me up on Twitter @OccultSoftworks or post your feedback on our Itch.io board or LDJAM Page. We havn't yet decided if we are gonna finish the game, and would love to hear folks thoughts.

I look forward to playing everyone's games tomorrow!