For my first Ludum Dare, I made Save Your Planet!  I enjoyed making this far more than I thought I would.  Since everyone seems to be doing post-mortems, I figured I shall do the same.

What went right

• LÖVE is great!  Lua is…alright, but LÖVE is great.  I don’t think I would have gotten this done without LÖVE.
• The music too far less time to make than I thought it would.  I normally get super anal (ha!) when I sit down with my bass/guitar and record stuff.  Time constraints are handy, it seems.
• sfxr + Audacity allowed me to make the audio with a quickness.  I think I only spent 20 minutes at most on sounds.  The audio could have been better, though.
• Even though the theme wasn’t my favorite thing in the world, I was able to think of something to make and come up with a plan within my first hour.

What went wrong

• I didn’t think I was going to finish at all (I’ve never actually finished a game before), so I didn’t put more effort into it.  What can I say?  Arrested Development won’t watch itself.  This filled me with regret when I had 12 hours left and something that could actually be submitted.  I only worked on this for 20 of the 48 hours.
• Art is hard.  I’m just not very good at it (yet?).  I didn’t spend enough time working on my art skills before the start of the Ludum Dare.  Not only is the art less than optimal, it’s a bit inconsistent.
• The start of Ludum Dare fell on the same night as a Cake concert!  And I don’t have a smart phone, so I didn’t even know the theme until I got home 3 hours later.
• I didn’t get a chance to add everything I wanted; e.g., power ups, more enemies, a tutorial that isn’t just a screenshot with text on it, and an actual victory screen & music.  The lame victory screen I added is just the game over screen, except instead of “Game Over”, it says “Victory!”.  Weak sauce.
• I had a nice plan as to how I’d organize all my code.  That plan fell apart during the last 6 hours, and my code got really ugly.  I guess that’s to be expected.
• I really wish I remembered to think of a better name than “Save Your Planet!”.

I’m definitely will be doing LD #24, and encouraging others to do the same.  Have you played my game yet?  You should.

I can’t believe I not only survived, but I actually have something to show:

I nearly ran out of time, so it’s a little rough.  I never got to think of a better name than Save Your Planet!  I wouldn’t have been able to do this without the power of LOVE.

I’ve settled on using LÖVE for my first Ludum Dare.  Also, I’ll be using Pinta instead of GIMP for my graphics.  Since I don’t want to break the rules, I probably will be using a state manager and a simple entity manager of my own creation.  The plan is to have something playable by the end of the first day and spend the second day making it awesome.  I don’t know how well my plan will work.

This will be my first jam.  Hopefully, it won’t end in complete failure.

Code: I’m leaning towards using LÖVE with Geany.  I still might say “screw it” and use C++ & SFML with Codeblocks.

Graphics: Gimp!

Sound: sfxr, probably.

Music: Probably Ardour & Hydrogen