Game Jam post-mortem

Ludum Dare 53 started for me at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon, one of the benefits of doing the jam from New Zealand. 

The Theme

The last couple of jams, I've gone through the list of themes in the final round of voting, and tried to come up with ideas for each of them, to minimise the "what-am-I-going-to-do?" time. I had an idea for "limited visibility" (a mole burrowing through a garden, popping up to the surface to find some moving target before diving back underground again), and the same idea for "salvage" and "delivery" (riff off the LD52 game). So I was quite relieved when the "delivery" was announced.

One other thing I've noticed in the last couple of jams: I didn't have that "the theme sucks and I hate it" moment. I'm pretty sure the quality of the suggested themes hasn't improved, so I'm putting this down to my growing confidence using Unity to make a game. I still break out in a cold sweat when it comes to creating assets, but that's another thing I need to practice more.

What went right?

Lots of things went well for me this round:

• As above, having pre-planned what I was going to do for some of the themes (admittedly, I got lucky and one of the three themes I'd planned for got picked).
• Setting up a Trello board to plan out tasks, and sticking to it.
• Recognising I'd over-scoped and paring back functionality to the bare minimum.
• Reusing existing assets, so I wasn't spending too much time creating art (this really bit me on the a*** last time).
• Not spending time trawling through YouTube videos trying to find the right Brackeys or Code Monkey tutorial, but just doing something in the way I thought it should be done and finding out that hey, maybe I do know how to program....

What went wrong?

Not too much went wrong for me, more small little issues rather than anything earth-shattering. Makes a nice change.

• Taking a bit long to recognise the over-scoping. I should have been assessing at the end of every day, rather than last thing on the Monday night, so I only had Tuesday morning through to 1pm Tuesday afternoon to refocus.
• Unity gave me a bit of trouble, refusing to compile but making it difficult to track the error down. Turned out to be something with TextMeshPro, and only managed to get it to build after removing all TextMeshPro objects and replacing them with legacy Text objects. 
• Leaving doing a build test till last thing Monday night.
• Wasting the best part of an hour while trying to get the audio to work: sounds play in the editor, play when running a standalone build, but won't play in the editor run mode. Really kicked myself when I remembered Unity has a mute button for play mode....

Overall

I usually enjoy Ludum Dare, even when the final "product" isn't what I had hoped. I'm glad I've learned lessons from previous jams, liking keeping a Trello board (learned in LD52), making sure there's an informative UI (learned in LD51), time-management (learned in LD50). I can't wait for LD54 in September!