Here’s a brief lessons learned from my 48 hour compo entry for LD 24:

• Seriously, really plan backwards from the deadline (even if to the nearest hour). And build in a couple hours of “oh yeah, that too” time. My goal was to be done and submitted by 7pm, and I pressed the submit button at 8:57pm
• If you believe in your idea, stick with it. I found the LD 24 theme to be quite intimidating in terms of doing something original. I came up with a great idea and immediately wanted to discard it. I slept on the idea and decided it was worth the effort. As a result, I am very happy with my entry, and have something fairly original and fun (in my opinion)
• Automation will save you a lot of time. A put some common code snippets into Hoekey, and I would estimate it saved me 2 hours over the weekend. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+D is way easier than finding, copying, and pasting a snippet of code dozens of times (mind you, I am using Game Maker, so things like the fairly lengthy draw_sprite_ext() will kill your time like crazy)
• Scope is never as small as you think it is (related to the first point above)
• Planning is worth it. I stayed up late Saturday roughing out ideas for my story and level  structure on paper. The next day, this brief (~1 hour or so) of planning paid off big time

Timelapse and Notepad:

• I’ve finished my desktop timelapse video. It’s on youtube right over here. (note as of 12:45am August 28 it’s still uploading…)
• I also have my notebook pages up for viewing over here.

I’ve played and rated some cool games so far, and I look forward to doing some more!

Cheers,

Richard

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 10:04 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.