This was my first entry into the Ludum Dare 48 hour compo. It was a blast and I learned a lot.

My LD22 Entry.

What went right:

1. Warmup – I put down Skyrim for a bit and spent the week prior re-familiarizing myself with Blender and Unity. I made a warmup game. I don’t think i could have made as much progress on my official entry had I not taken this step. So I actually made two games this week, which is darn impressive if you knew my track record.
2. Unity – A love working with Unity. I lack the experience and speed to effectively write an engine of my own in so short a time. Unity allowed me to experiment and prototype quickly, and my entry came out not looking too terrible. highly recommend!
3. Planetary texture generation tools – Google search to the rescue! These saved me a bunch of time.

What went wrong:

1. Overthinking – I spent 6 hours thinking of what to do the first night. What I should have done, was just open up Unity and start experimenting. The game I ended up making came purely out of experimenting in Unity, and had I just sat down and started earlier, I would have had 6 more hours!
2. Overtweaking- spent too much time tweaking some visuals that could have better been spent adding more valuable content, like improving the solar system generation code.
3. Undersleeping – I didn’t sleep enough, and was definitely feeling it in the final hours. Coding was slower, and i lost track of what I was trying to do.

All in all, I’m satisfied with the progress I made, and the amount of experience I’ve gained. I’m more motivated than ever to continue practicing game development, and working towards making this a true profession.

I tried to sleep, but tossed and turned for an hour before getting fed up with it. So I decided to start working a bit. 8 hours later and here’s what I have. It is a space exploration game so far.

Here are links to the skybox and planet texture gen tools I used:

Planet texture generator: http://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/world/

Space skybox generator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/spacescape/

Now for a nap!

I might only have about 40 hours free, but I am gonna give it a shot!

Here’s my warmup game, the theme suggestion was “Friendship”:
(Windows) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52817242/SoManyFriends.zip