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Postmortem: The Cards Never Lie
The Cards Never Lie was Li’l's first game project ever and my first Jam, second LD.
What went right:
We were able to incorporate most of our basic ideas (using the phone, having visitors). Li’l composed all the music in about 48 hours, somehow. (There are 7 original tracks plus a few variant tracks.)
Three days is A LOT longer than two days, and in our case the difference between a mess and an entry. By the 48-hour compo deadline the game was technically submittable, but the extra hours on Monday made a huge difference.
What went wrong:
Mysteries are hard. 
I wanted to compromise between game play features and storyline so the game wouldn’t be too kinetic. I tried to find a good middle-ground, but it still feels light on both ends.
We had a lot of ideas during the brainstorm phase we weren’t able to implement. We talked about timed events and day/night scenarios, and I wanted to have a mini-game where you could guess if a person was lying based on their facial expressions/tics. L’il came up with all this elaborate tarot card stuff that I didn’t even get close to squeezing in. AND I FORGOT TO INCLUDE A GOAT. I have no idea where I would have put one, probably in the park eating delicious trash.
What we’d do different:
Should have bribed/charmed/stolen an artist, for sure.
The future:
I’d like to continue working on this. There are a lot of features I still want to try and I feel like the basic story has legs and could be expanded into 3 to 5 interlinked mysteries.
Tags: needs more goat, postmortem
Adding a storyline, or narrative to your entry will absolutely wreck the amount of effort you can devote to the nuts and bolts of a Ludum Dare entry. There’s no shame in feeling that you came up light on both ends due to the split attention. It happens.