The title pretty much speaks for itself. I sat and sadly watched the timer kick over the last few seconds, and felt sad that I had not completed my entry. It’s not even close to finished.

Perhaps joining in on a 48 hour game making competition was a little too much for someone who has never made a game before? I like a challenge, and thought a little too highly of myself, it seems.

The one thing I will note is that I refuse to say I failed. In fact, the truth quite the opposite. During the past 48 hours, I have created more of a game than I have since I was eight and decided that making games is how I wanted to spend my life. I have a game sitting in front of me just begging to be continued, and that’s something.

So, as is popular to do, what went wrong?

• Familiarity with my tools. It had been a long time since I had used Construct, and a lot of the basics I’d forgotten. I should have spent the time before the competition getting re-acquainted.
• Stuck on logic. A lot of my time was spent bashing my head against a wall when I was stuck on an idea. It took me way too long to work out how to make my enemy detect whether I was within a certain distance of them in order for them to shoot at me.
• Lack of preparation. My decision to take part in Ludum Dare was a very last minute one, spurred on by a huge motivation injection from the Freeplay Independent Games Festival the weekend prior. Given more time to prepare, I would have had a more clear weekend, and also other things like supplies, and a sleep schedule  that would have been helpful also.

As I said, I may not have finished what I set out to do, but now I at least have something which I can expand upon in my own time. It was a great experience to try! Hopefully come Ludum Dare 19, I will be a little more prepared.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 12:24 am and is filed under LD #18 - Enemies as Weapons - 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.