Ludum Dare 12 is the first of this event that I have participated in, and I must say I had a lot of fun making my game for it. I learned a few things about game development in the process, many more to do with the actual process rather than technical details, but some there too.

What Went Right

• Planning - Once I found out the theme, I took a large portion of Friday night to plan out the concept for my game. It took a little while, but once I decided on an infinite procedurally generated tower platformer, the technical gears started turning, and I quickly formed a lot of the ideas for the implementation.
• Time Management - After I planned out my game, I found that I didn’t have any trouble keeping up with my goals in time. Those goals that I had imagined were realistic and doable. In fact, I ended up releasing my final version about 5 hours before the deadline.
• Implementation - On the programming side, I mostly used techniques that I was familiar with, never branching out into the particularly difficult or unknown in ways that would cost me large amounts of valuable time and effort. As for media creation, while it is not exactly a strong point, I used some clever methods and helpful tools to create it, so it was not heavily time consuming, and Tower Infinite ended up with quality better than the usual programmer art (I hope!).

What Went Wrong

• Deficiency of External Playtesting - It was unfortunate that I failed to get enough feedback from players other than myself. I knew exactly how the game worked, but such is not the case for all. While this did not lead to terribly awful problems, I could have handled it better and probably submitted a slightly better game.

Conclusion

Overall, I think things went fairly smoothly with very few exceptions, which is particularly nice for me, this being my first Ludum Dare. I definitely enjoyed it, and I hope to do it again if I have the time for it.

Tags: LD12 - The Tower, postmortem

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