Hi everyone

That LD24 was my first LD, and also my first attempt at making a game. It didn’t go that bad since I successfully shipped an entry, a platformer named Breeding Cubes (spoiler : it involve cube reproduction !).

You can play it on my website (need the Unity3D WebPlayer plugin, but you already have it don’t you ?), download the source and rate it.

Theme

I headed for a straightforward interpretation of the theme. Your character has some abilities. You can evolve your playable character (new abilities or better ones) by finding another non playable character and breed with him (her). The new character resulting of this union possess the best abilities of its parents and can now overcome obstacles and progress through the level.

TimeLine

• Compo began Saturday at 3am.
• Woke up at 7am and started brainstorming on the theme while breakfasting
• The first day I worked 11h and implemented most of the features
• I slept from midnight to 8am on Sunday
• The second day I worked only 9.5h including 4 on level building and finally submitted my entry around midnight
• Compo ended Monday at 3am

How did it goes

Since I had no prior experience, I didn’t even really knew where to begin. And even if I did play around Unity before, it took me ages to implement basic stuffs. But in the ends, I successfully implemented almost everything I had planned without coming across major issues.

In total I worked only 20,5 hours on the game. That tells two things :

Unity is really a great tool to work with in very short period of time. I can’t wait to have experience to work faster and see what I can come up with in similar timeframe.

I had to take frequent and sometime extensive breaks. The second day, I was actually bored and tired of working, so I had to take a huge break from 11am to 3.30pm. But I did nod while watching an interview of Edmond McMillen, so it wasn’t a “lost” time on a gamedev perspective.

Also this LD confirmed me that I don’t like neither deadline nor crunch times. Am I fit for this insdustry ? Hopefully I am not working in it yet, I still have time to figure it out and adapt. Also I enjoyed the design, level design and level building phase much more that the coding phase.

Good job everyone who submitted something playable, I will try to play and rate fair as much entries as possible. I am also looking forward to hear from you about my game in the comments.

(If you want to play a great jam entry, let me suggest you “Porté par le vent” it’s really awesome !)

So I’m in for my first LD, which will also be my first game ever.

I will mostly use Unity3D with a bunch of great plugins as GameDraw and iTween as well as Sublime Text 2. I may use Paint.net too, but you can expect graphics full of primitives forms and plain colors.

Good luck and have fun !

Florent

This was my very first Ludem Dare and also my very first original game!

Read my detailed postmortem to see how a novice approaches game development for the first time. I’d love to get real feedback and advice from some of you more experienced developers. Thank you Ludem Dare for pushing me to finally do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.