http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8347

Here are some thought on my first Ludum Dare:

The Good

• Timing – never really felt that I was running out of time, or that I’m going to finish too soon. I felt I was about ready when there was 2 hours or so left.
• Learning – I was familiar with the tools already, but I have never made a card game before, and I tried out a couple of new techniques, which taught me a few valuable lessons
• I was really inspired by the community – the progress reports, IRC and live feeds (Notch seems to have some mad programming skillz/routine)
• File size - Web versions .unity3d file ended up just over 1MB, which is nice (Windows standalone is over 7MB zipped)

The Bad

• Sounds. Not very good with them, and spend very little time on them, but at least I have them
• Screen resolution isn’t very ideal (though shouldn’t be a problem on Windows standalone version)
• The game rules are a bit obscure, I’m afraid too many players will lose intrest before ‘getting’ the game

The Ugly

• Code – not enough routine or planning so ended up doing many things poorly or inconsistently
• Poorly optimized, realized at the last minute that I have a ridiculous amount of draw calls and did some hasty optimizations to bring them down from ~250 to around 35, which is kind of ok, but I know I can do better
• Graphics – I’m really not an artist, and as a result most of the graphics suck, though I am pleased with couple of the characters
• The info screen is a bit messy, I have no idea if it’s of any help to anyone

Conclusions

• A little bit of planning goes a long way
• I was pretty close to the sweet spot between trying to do too much/difficult/new things and doing too easy/familiar. Maybe I should’ve tried something a bit more ambitious, but just slightly so
• Maybe next time I pay a little more attention to accessibility and try to stay away from obscure/unfamiliar/abstract game mechanics
• I liked the end result, and will make another iteration of the game soon with better graphics and improved gameplay
• That was fun! Will definitely participate again!

Solitaire of Solitude development screenshot

I’d appreciate it a lot if you could give my game a try and give me some feedback about it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2011 at 1:48 am and is filed under LD #22. 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.