Two post-mortems in as many weeks? What is this madness, you may ask.

I’d made the decision to follow up Project Zero One’s completion with my first-ever attempt at the Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making jam-challenge. Thing.

This is tri-annual that’s been steadily gaining notice from the indie game development world, with participants like Terry Cavanaugh (The Letter V Six Times), Markus Persson (Minecraft), and Increpare (too many to list).

It’s a peer-judged competition where the entrants are given 48 hours to come up with a game from scratch. We’re allowed to use our own libraries so long as they don’t contain and game content and are made available to all prior to the event start.

Once all the entries are in, we take the next 2 (or in this case due to holidays 3) weeks to play and evaluate each other’s games:

There’s a secondary non-judged relaxed “jam” format that gives entrants an extra hour to develop and enter. I stuck with the compo.

Both levels are constrained not only by time, but also by theme. The theme is decided by community voting, and isn’t revealed until the start of the event. As expected, the server was overwhelmed at the start and I had to find out by Twitter, so thank goodness for tweets, eh?

Ludum Dare Competition 19′s theme was “Discovery”.

For this post-mortem I’m going to deviate slightly from the previous formula due to the special constraints that surround the Ludum Dare competition.

What Went Right

Focused and Disciplined Application of Positive Thinking

I believed from the get-go that I could do it. In the run up to competition there is a traditional amount of nay-saying and belly-aching over the effect of the community-chosen theme.

It got so bad that I had to bow out of the IRC channel a day early to avoid getting sucked into the miasma of doldrums that it was quickly becoming. Instead I took the day to play games and not think about the event.

Once it started I had fully cleared my schedule and had no excuse for not working on the game. I had a focus in the form of a theme and a limit of time. To me it was a very straightforward exercise that tested my discipline.

I Kept It Simple

I brain-stormed for about 3 hours, then sat down and hashed out a concept and tiered design document in about 45 minutes. I pledged not to deviate from that document until the listed features were in the game and working to my satisfaction, a policy I employed on Gravitos and Above and Below.

I ended up cutting a large swath of tier 2 features, but as they had all been deemed non-essential in the pre-production phase the loss was unnoticable to anyone but myself. More importantly, by the end of production I had a game that demonstrated a working game loop with potential for expansion, which is pretty much my modus operandi regarding release.

Sleep

I got a full seven hours the first night, keeping to my usual pattern. This paid off huge when I went the second day with only an hour’s rest. I also took my normal 2-hour siesta and 15-minute naps throughout, keeping me fresh and focused right up to the home stretch.

I Did It Standing Up

This image has been circulating for some time, and it’s referenced in the video:

Standing has completely eliminated the lower back and hip problems I was developing during Project Zero One’s cycle. I wear shoes while standing, and move around quite a lot, so I’m not killing my knees and heels.

It’s also a lot easier to burst into dance and air guitar, and sometimes I pretend I’m the Geddy Lee of game development and rock out the keyboard while screaming the lyrics to “Working Man“.

Standing during Ludum Dare was a bit of a push, as the periods were longer than normal, but along with the sleep it helped me stay focus and alert.

What Went Wrong

Not Using Pre-Existing Personal Libraries

I was still in a mindset of not wanting to give anything away, and this was kind of stupid in retrospect. Okay, not kind of stupid: totally short-sighted and idiotic.

At the end of Ludum Dare all of the code we create needs to be made public anyways, so worrying about releasing it prior to the competition was dumb. I should have put all my builders, lighters, audio handlers, score handlers, and movement handlers online for all. Then I would have spent that much less time rewriting them during the competition time.

On the plus side, I can say that I did write everything from scratch, and in some ways the new base code I came up with more efficient than the stuff I would have used. Either way, it’s out in public and now anyone can use it. If you develop games using Unity3D or C#, take a look at my package and tell me how terrible I am. If you’re betting I say that to all the girls, that’s a bet you’d lose: I’m not insecure about my package at all.

Building Framework Instead of Story and Character

I’m so guilty of this on my first projects that I should be executed without trial.

I think a lot of starting developers who are more code-oriented suffer from this syndrome, too. We build engines but forget the gasoline and chassis. I am well-aware of this weakness and I know that a day will come very soon where I’m no longer just writing programs to make the games work and can focus more on adding charm and quirk.

Because, in the end, it’s charm and quirk that turn technology demos into interactive and enjoyable experiences, right Steve?

Zero Pre-production Until Compo Start

I didn’t even really think about the potential themes until the competition started. I know that people were tearing their hair out over them, but I was playing it as cool as I could.

I’m one of those guys that used to shoot pool for money, but instead of using my own cue I’d just grab one from the public racks and go.

While this might work for pool (to a limited degree) in game design the more planning a developer can throw at a project the better. I thought I had something to prove to myself and I proved it by completing the game, but it would have been that much better if I’d prepared at least some basic outlines and concepts for the potential themes in the last rounds of voting.

Check out the Dark Acre Ludum Dare page for the process and a “live” blog; that information will all be rolled into this post when the next LD comes around.

You can play the game that this competition and I produced below by clicking the image. Time permitting I’ll come back and visit this gem, polishing and cutting it further until it’s something of “official” Dark Acre quality, but for now I’m going to let it stand as a testament to the work I accomplished that cold weekend in Decemeber 2010.