Also looks like I'm running behind schedule...

As someone who's done this a few times before and made all of these mistakes, some things to keep in mind:

1. Don't stay up for 48 hours straight constantly working in an attempt to squeeze out the most time. After a few hours you will lose steam; this is a great opportunity to take a few minutes to eat, make a blog post, discuss with your team (if you have one), etc. You will keep thinking and solving problems in the background and usually the main factor of solving those problems is giving yourself enough time, not working constantly.
2. Remember to stay hydrated! Always have a mostly full glass of water available. If you run low, go refill it; the trip will give you a brief break and may give you space to help solve a problem.
3. Start polishing now. If you're doing the Compo, you're already basically out of time for adding new features. For every hour you spend adding a feature, know that at least 2-3 will be spent polishing and bug fixing.
4. Scope down throughout the jam. Every 12 hours evaluate (with your team) where you are and if you'll need to cut anything. If you wanted to have 3 levels but don't have 1 done yet, maybe just make 1 level. Wanted two main systems that play off each other but aren't completely finished with the first one, maybe cut the second system and just make the one you have really good.
5. Enjoy the experience! This is supposed to be fun. If you find yourself stressing out about the deadline or a bug you can't squash, take a breath and remember that in the long run, Ludum Dare doesn't really matter, and that's kinda the point. It's ok to fail! It's ok to not know how to do something perfectly your first try!

Our NES game is starting to look like a video game.

BLOOD IS FUEL (for plants)

I caved in and decided to go with a farming game, my original idea was a bit too complicated and I didn't really want to stretch the theme so I opted to go with something a little more simple

Basically you kill the infected and harvest their blood, and then use the blood to water your plants and then harvest them

Finished the first version of my game! Yay :-)

This Sunday I already have a lot of other stuff to do, so I wanted to try to finish it in 24 hours.

The game is quite simple, but it has everything that I wanted: Gameplay, graphics, music, menu and game over screen, a decent challenge, and you can even try for a high score!

Play Harvest Tataki - whac-a-mole!

Let me know if you think it is too easy or too hard, or if you have any other suggestions - I might change the balance a bit before the compo deadline.

Our first Ludum Dare :)

I got really far my first night, this morning I don't feel that motivated. I don't know why. Maybe my game idea sucks. I don't know. I'm going to take a break and come back in a couple hours and see how I feel about it then.

Here is a screenshot of how far it is now.

Anyone have any suggestions on helping with motivation?

harvesting with a gun because why not

More in my twitter — https://twitter.com/Skigfx

Just a little cairn signifying my progress on this dreary Saturday morning in the Pacific Northwest.

Our graphics guy getting feisty over here

@hartvichio @sprotex @osel13 @sipfindel

A little sneak peak :)

Well it's Ludum Dare 52 so it seems there's only one option for me: My game will feature a standard deck of playing cards.

My usual process which seems to work pretty well for me for both creativity and life balance is to read the theme announcement, think about things actively a little bit, and then have a normal evening watching some TV with my spouse while my creative brain turns over ideas, thinking about things as I fall asleep, and sitting down in the morning to start actually manipulating objects and see if I like what my brain has been turning over.

For which the answer this morning, as it often seems to be, is no. I've been chewing over a solitaire card game which takes a pretty literal interpretation of Harvest, using cards in a multipurpose way to represent soil, cards, and actions, and . . . so far it's both overly fussy and not gelling into anything interesting.

So now I'm casting the net back open and my brain keeps coming back to how Keith Baker added a crops-and-seasons theme to the traditional card game Casino with Illimat, and some of the other stuff that interests me, and I might have something in that vague direction that I can get behind. If this pans out the only thing I owe to Illimat is the theming, so I'm comfortable with that.

Or maybe this also won't pan out and I'll be on to another idea, or back to the first one but better. That's happened before.

This earlier schedule may push me into Jam rather than Compo; I'm not sure I'll be able to get everything I want done by 3pm tomorrow, but so it goes.

Making a game for my toddler using a ridiculously heavy process... with acold, taking care of a toddler... and I only found out about LD52 about 5 minutes before it started. I LOVE repeating this process, though. It's getting so much faster. I've never completed this much game design in under 10 hours.

I've spent all day learning the basics of 2D Isometric art and how tilemaps work. Never used either before so these are totally new skills. That's why I love Ludum Dare!