Before LD47 wraps up for good, I just wanted to do a quick post-mortem of our (@baldurs and my) game, Into the Mousehole (which you can play in a browser here -> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/into-the-mousehole).

What went well?

• Our time management was fairly good. By choosing to keep the gameplay, art, music, sound effects, etc, to a limited complexity, it allowed us to actually complete the game to a standard we were happy with, while still leaving us time to work on other commitments.
• Us avoiding a traditional health system meant that players could have more time to get into the flow of the game and understand the controls early on with minimal punishment for mistakes, which I feel makes it more enjoyable! Once you get into that flow it's also hugely satisfying to chain a couple dashes into some rats, along with a few slams, to regain all your dashes.
• I might be biased (as the primary artist), but I'd say the art turned out quite well (especially the title screen animation, but you'll have to play to see it)! It was my first time trying to work in a (mostly) monochromatic style, and while I think I could have done the colouring a bit better, I'm still really happy with how all everything turned out! Especially this one frame from the rat animation which looks absurd until seen in motion: (Also oooh rats without the colour filter)
• Baldurs did a fantastic job with the music and really helped tie everything together! Unfortunately I don't know his process for it, but he really managed to enhance the energy of the gameplay.

What could have been better?

• Buuuut, as you would expect, time is still finite and we didn't have the time to finish everything we wanted. For example, there's no in-game sound or music mutes, which means people have to rely on their browser's ability to mute sound, so not terrible. However, we also didn't have time to implement high scores, which means people have to manually track their own scores. Neither of these are absolute showstoppers, but they still would have really added to the experience.
  • We would have added them, but to respect the sanctity of the deadline, we chose to leave any changes to the game until at least after the voting has concluded.
• I also did cheat a little bit with the 1-bit style. I tried my best to stick to it, but sometimes sprites turned out... odd, or I just needed to use a second colour to better convey the form. Like with the cat diving sprites:
• There not quite enough "levels". We opted to use a room picker for level generation, and while the system works great, there's not quite enough variety to ensure someone won't get bored, or obviously notice it, in the middle of a round. It can work in the favour of the game to allow people to keep guessing while ensuring some familiarity, but increased gameplay depth was a common point of feedback and I completely understand where everyone is coming from.
• And as you'd expect, there's a few bugs. You can get stuck between spikes if you get unlucky, and breakable blocks can get you stuck if you're already on the ground. While these are certainly fixable, as above, we wanted to keep the game in it's original jam state until voting was over.

So for next time, and in the future?

• I should be less strict with the art=style limitations. While limits breed creativity, I definitely pushed my limits on this one and found them. I would probably like to go back to the sprite to give all of them a secondary, "background" colour to allow for greater depth.
• Perhaps doing a QoL post-jam patch to fix urgent bugs and address more necessary changes, but as the game was mostly functional, we found that wasn't quite necessary this time around.

And in the future, I'd love to come back to this game to perhaps add more content, flesh it out, fix the bugs and sprites, and whatever else comes to mind. Though for now, I'm still super happy with how this turned out! Huge thank you to Baldurs for organising this, and being the main developer in terms of the code and content, and getting us across the finish line. This wouldn't have been possible without him! I cannot understate how much of a leader he was during this, and how much of a role he had in development!

Anyway, you've read this far, why not go play the game too? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/into-the-mousehole

Edit: Also forgot to mention that we took a inspiration from Downwell (at least, Baldurs did, I mostly looked at the Steam screenshots after Baldurs told me about it). So similarities, like the 1-bit art style, falling down a pit, etc, are to be expected, though some of them more came up in hindsight, rather than by trying to pull from Downwell.