Ludum Dare postmortem

Ah yeah, so it’s been a while since LD48. I should probably wrap things up.

What went right

  • Well, I made a “finished” game in 48 hours. Had a title screen, gameplay and a way to win. It just wasn’t very good.
  • My secondary goal was to familiarise myself with Unity3D. While I’d hardly call myself an expert I feel like the pressure of having to complete something in the two days really helped me make the effort to learn some stuff. Without that I’d have most likely just dicked around reading a few tutorials and not actually making anything.
  • I’m really happy with how the lighting and camera effects turned out. If the actual game had lived up to the promise of that initial flythrough of the level I’d have had something pretty good on my hands, I think.

What went not-so-right

  • I didn’t know the toolset at all. Not having a clue how anything in Unity worked was a pretty major handicap - I spent most of Saturday just getting the camera to behave, which wasn’t exactly optimal use of my time.
  • Losing all the level data when my PC crashed on the Sunday night wasn’t exactly fun. I really, really wanted to quit right there. Note to self : check out what source control systems play nice with Unity and bloody well use one next time!
  • I realised about halfway through Sunday that I really don’t know a damn thing about game AI, so not having the time to do anything about it I opted for just making the enemies do the classic dumb charge at the player. Think I need to do a wee bit of reading up on the subject, then when the next LD rolls around make sure my project is pretty AI heavy just to force myself to put some of it into practice.

Anything else?

Well, it’s taken me the best part of 3 weeks to write this up. Not so good. If I’m gonna make a go of this indie gaming thing I’ll need to do a much better job of publicising my stuff, so I should really make a bit more of an effort to keep this place active. Even if nobody’s reading right now, it’s good to get the writing practice in.

So with that in mind, I’m going to try and maintain a regular update schedule. Nothing too strenuous at first. I’m thinking of setting myself an absolute minimum of one development-related blog post a week and one tweet/FB/G+ update per day. I should probably try and maintain a semi-regular schedule of posting to Screenshot Saturday too, if only to get me out of bed at the weekend :)

Hopefully, having a regular update schedule to meet will help give me that little bit extra incentive to get stuff done, if only to have something to write about.