This is going to be my third take on Ludum Dare.
Both previous attempts were… less than soaring success. But they were extremely helpful to me in identifying flaws in my programming skills!
On my first attempt, I gnawed at a bit too big. Spent too much time thinking up the concept of a game, with interesting mechanics, only to find myself rushing to get at least something functional done couple a few hours before the time ends. Mercilessly ripping out bits of the game that I just didn’t have time to fully implement (even thought, they costed me some time to get to a point where they were) and half an hour before the time ended I ended up with a pale shadow of a puzzle game I wanted to produce. But hey! It was functional. Not too fun to play, but still something that could be played! And then came the real problem: I had NO IDEA how to publish it! My guess was to upload it to the website (which is not…) and I rushed there… only to find the new site down and a note to submit the games to an old site, which I didn’t have an account on, and the registration process bugged at me… and this was final straw. Albeit technically complete, my first LD game was unpublished…
Approaching my second LD I considered what went wrong last time (too big scope, and too little time to publish) and so I set a target for myself not to overdesign the game and get it ready a couple of hours before the deadline, so I have some contingency. So instead of thinking up some playable mechanics from scratch, I took an existing board game mechanic and adopted it to the theme… And pretty fast I ended up with a concept of the game. One of the visual concepts didn’t work (the game was about making a “map” by putting “cards” next to each other so their borders match. And I wanted to use normal map to give this “map” some 3D sexiness, but… I forgot to ask cards to update their tangents after UVs were updated and this resulted in normal maps not working the way I wanted… and I had to ditch them form the final game and go for flat textures.) but overall the game development went smoother and I in fact had the game ready a couple hours before the deadline… and I realized that I still had no idea how to publish the game.
Thankfully I found a manual on the site and it listed Google Drive as a valid way of publishing a game, so I did put out some links with the game and source code archive… so my second LD was a success? Well… not really. I was totally unprepared to the way how judging would work, so I… didn’t put too much effort into playing games from other people, and as an obvious result my own game didn’t get too much attention, finishing with a grand total of 0 ratings. :smile:
So to sum it all up, things to go, to avoid the landmines I hit:
1) Be prepared. You should at least know the full process you need to follow during the jam. Making a game is only part of it. You also need to publish the game and the source code. And you should check all the preparations for it (i.e. that you have accounts on all the relevant services, and repositories set up) before you start programming. Your brain might be a toast when you finish, so don’t leave to much work to do after the game is done.
2) Don’t overcomplicate your game. 48 hours is a short timeframe. I haven’t done this myself yet, but based on watching some Stream recordings, it is a good idea to start small and add features after you already have something playable.
3) When the timer expired, your work is not over yet! Just like with commercial games development, Writing and publishing a game is not enough for it to be noticed. You have to market and advertise it. And in LD this is done by playing other people games and giving ratings out. The more you play – the more people will notice and paly your game.
And I know… It may look terribly ironic for me writing advice here, when better half of my problems could’ve been avoided by me reading some advice before getting into it (so most of people who actually need my advice are not going to read it anyway)… but… Oh, well!
