Quick analysis of my entry, Nucleu: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/nucleu

The Good:

• I finally managed to complete a game in under 24 hours! I just missed it the last time I tried to do it, but this time I made it in 23 hours 58 minutes, with just 2 minutes left.
• The procedural music came out good, and the quick script I wrote to handle all of the tracks worked as intended. There are still little things I'd probably tweak, but that'd just be fussing with it really.
• I think I nailed the particle effects. The electrons sparkle just enough to get your attention, the nebulous background does a gradual change in color, and the effect on the end screen also felt convincing. The electron trails also came out perfect. Any success with graphics is a victory in my book, since I find it's usually my weakest area.
• As an artistic piece, it flowed very well; it definitely came out as the most artsy of my LD entries.

The Bad:

• That bug I missed initially that made the game unbeatable in some cases. I started noticing people couldn't figure out if there was an ending, and then upon replaying I was able to spot an easy-to-trigger bug (it doesn't trigger if you do everything flawlessly, which I was doing in testing without realizing it). It was literally just a 2 where I should have put a 1; easy to fix, but I wish I had caught it sooner.
• The controls seemed to be slightly confusing, and by that I mean it was easy for people to forget that you can right click as well. There are three ways I could have fixed this. First method, I could have made it so that the player automatically moves towards the mouse, and left clicking fires the electrons instead. Second method, I could have added some kind of visual effect when you right click without electrons, just to let the player know that it's supposed to do something that you can't do yet (which would prompt them to try it later). Third method, I could have had the electrons transfer just by touching the other atoms, instead of firing them (this actually makes more sense chemically, I would think).
• To reduce confusion, I should have had the small atoms disappear when you moved on to stage 3 of the game (since they were no longer necessary for the win condition). If there was time, I was also going to add a third atom size that required 4 electrons (it was in the atom scripting already to support this), but didn't end up adding it.
• The atoms themselves probably deserved to look a little better than just a circle. At least a little shading might have helped.