Hello there. My name is Arhan Bakan. I’m a senior CS student at Hacettepe University, Turkey. This is the postmortem of my first entry in Ludum Dare competition. I had a lot of fun in the competition, so it definitely won’t be the last one for me.

The Good Stuff

• Before I started working on my entry, I was confident that it was impossible for me to finish a game in 48 hours. “Just gonna try the Jam if I fail the Competition.”, I kept saying to myself. In the end, however, I finished the game with one hour left on the clock. Sure, there are some places where I can say “I wish…”, but I feel like it’s a fun game overall and I managed to learn a lot from the process.
• Base game concept (a shrinking maze) came to my mind within the first few hours, and it turned out to be a simple and effective idea. Also, I set my goals for 48 hours pretty accurately.
• Sleeping. Lots of sleeping. 13 hours out of 48 were basically spent sleeping. I don’t understand how people manage to stay up all day and night to work on a game, but I just can’t do it. It’s way better to sleep well and think with a clear mind. Eating habits based on fruits and vegetables also work like a miracle when all you do is sit on your butt and code all day long.
• Learning from other people’s mistakes. I read some tips on how to survive a game jam before the weekend. And it all helped a lot. Reading good advice is always helpful.

The Bad Stuff

• Should’ve known the engine better. I worked on Unity3D. It’s the only game engine I’m familiar with, however, I’m not familiar with it enough. I spent nearly 3 hours on the character controller and after the dust settled, it was only a few lines of code. This competition made me a lot more experienced with the engine, but I still have a lot to work on.
• Lack of music. I couldn’t find a fitting content generator for music, and I was not prepared to compose music on my own. Next time, I hope this won’t be an issue as I’ll come back having finished my homework.
• Lack of interesting gameplay. For most of the users (and friends) who played it , the game has a good concept, decent graphics but not enough gameplay to keep the user interested enough to finish it. It’s also a bit tough for most of them, and this takes away from the fun, too. Most of this problem was due to time constraints, so I’ll try to do better next time.

Thanks for reading through my postmortem. I’ll definitely be back for the next Ludum Dare if I have time for it. It was a great experience.

If you’re interested, be my guest, play and rate my game if you can.

PLAY —–>          WORLD GONE WRONG          <—– PLAY

Here is my entry. This was my first ever game jam and it’s been a great experience. I’m really looking forward to play other participants’ games and also looking to get constructive comments about my game aswell.

It’s a maze game where the puzzles shrink from inside to the outside. A few things I’m not pleased about the game is the lack of music and the lack of any indication of tiles that are about to fall down soon. I’ll try to work on these issues next, but if I can’t progress further I’ll just call it a day.

Here is my previous post. Continuing from there…

This was a disappointing evening coding session. Nothing went well. I managed to do so little, which are in-game powerups. Simple powerups such as teleporting, running faster and shooting blocks out of your way. They’re unlimited for now, making the first level too easy, but I’ll get back to that topic later when I’m finished with graphics and sound.

Yes, next up is graphics and sound. I’m too inexperienced on these topics but we’ll see what I can come up with.

GAME LINK

Here is my previous progress. A little more is added up such as a full level, a menu (sort of) and some pop-ups. There are four exits in this level, each of them on the corners of the screen. Next up is utilities for the player, after that it’s graphics, sound and I’m finalizing with more levels, game balance and bug fixes.

Right now I’ve had some dinner and I’m going to take a walk outside to get some fresh air.

Here was my first post this morning, explaining what I was aiming for.

Right now, I’ve done very little but I remain optimistic. Movement is done, field of vision is done and shrinking is partially done, although it lacks random elements to make it more fun. I’ve not yet created a maze level but working on it right now. Next up are tools the player can use, more levels and the other stuff.

You can see the game for yourself here. All the graphics are placeholder art, ofc. But I don’t expect a lot from my graphics skills

After getting up four hours after the theme was announced, now I have an idea and I’ll try to craft something decent out of it.

You are a federation employee whose job is to track and destroy little planets that our federation does not like. In a regular day like others, you travel to the core of a mazy planet you’re going to destroy with your digger and plant your planet devouring bomb. In an unfortunate turn of events, your digger is not able to start up, so you have to work your way up to the planet surface to send a signal to your mothership before the planet gets devoured completely.

You begin in a maze. The maze shrinks from inside every second. You need to work your way outside to find the end of the level. You can’t see the whole level and obviously going in a dead end might have serious consequences. Luckily you still have some tools with you that can be useful in dire situations.

While this tiny world gets tinier every second, can you make your way out of it?

I really hope to be able to finish the game in time. See you on the next update!

Hello there. First time entrant over here.

I’m in and I’m going to use:

Unity for development

Gimp and Paint for graphics (programmer art ^_^)

sfxr, wolfram tunes for sound and music

Thinking about entering the Jam competition, but I might even try compo if things go well in the first 48 hours. To all other entrants, good luck, have fun.