Last month I participated in another Ludum dare. I wasn’t to happy when the theme was announced. Them theme was “The more you have, the worse it is”. A broad theme, but I wanted to make something unique.
After getting some sleep and thinking about different ideas, I came up with a very vague idea about planting seeds and either the plants or the seeds would be poisonous. As I said, the idea was very vague at the beginning, and I started working on something without a good plan. At first I had the idea of the seeds being represented by particles like a gas cloud. I scrapped that idea, but the problem was I kep the idea about seeds being particles. I don’t know why I didn’t change that, but I ended up spending several hours implementing a system for detecting and destroying individual particles as they collided with the player. This system ended up very buggy, as expected, and I had to spend a lot of time just messing around with colliders to make things work the way I wanted (they still don’t btw). By that time, I had a clear goal at least, even though it was one that I no longer liked. I ended up building a game without any increase in difficulty over time but at least I had something playable to submit at the end. I ended up submitting it for the jam instead of the compo as planned, but still I made something.
Since I wasn’t happy about my game, I wasn’t eager to get it rated either, so I didn’t do much to draw attention.
What went well?
- I managed to submit a game.
- The idea was somewhat unique.
Where did I fail?
- The game was even worse then my first submission.
- Spent way to much time on things that the game didn’t need.
- Didn’t have a clear goal. Changes are fine, but not knowing what I even want to make is terrible.
- I could actually ahve done something with the idea I had, but the implementation was horrible.
- 2D animations lol
- I recorded sound effects and made a music theme. The music felt out of place.
- When I was done. The game still didn’t have a clear goal, except to survive as long as possible without increasing difficulty.
- I didn’t get to use my ugly death animation 🙂
- A lot of other minor things.
So, to sum it up, I ended up making a bad prototype that I haven’t looked at since. For my last game, I knew there were room for improvements and I actually went back after the jam ended to implement some of them. This game, I just want to forget. If I ever want to do something similar, I’ll do it from scratch.