This was the second Ludum Dare that I participated in with tolja, and this community just keeps amazing me. Everyone's submissions are so much fun and bursting with creativity, and the comments are so positive and encouraging too. So huge thanks to everyone who made this happen!!
I have no formal training in programming myself, and I've been learning coding as a hobby with the wonderful, incredible Pico-8. We've used it in our jam entries primarily because of the familiarity, but I think it's also brilliant for a jam game because it contains all the tools you need for a game (including HTML exports and gamepad support), and the restrictions basically force you to focus on the core idea.
Because of the time difference here in Northern Europe, we learn of the theme in the early morning hours on Saturday, so we practically have just one full day to work on our submission before giving up on the wonderful game jam life and returning to the daily grind. Our entry for LD56 ended up being a mash up of different ideas, and it taught us that it's much better to decide on an idea very early on and just go with it so that there's time for fine tuning and polishing. This time around, our entry, Bubbles is much more consistent.
After we submitted the game, the static bugs and the ugly programmer-art-clouds still bugged me, so I made a few quick edits (but the game page still has the original submission):
It amazes me how even such small cosmetic changes can have a big impact on the feel of the game, so it does seem that polishing really is time well spent.
P.s. If you made your entry using Pico-8, please mention it in a comment - we would love to check it out!
