It has been two days since Lundum Dare’s deadline and I’m still glowing from the experience.
I’ve wanted to take part in a game jam for some time now but somehow I never managed to. Either I didn’t have time or I couldn’t think of a game fitting the theme in time. When I read about Ludum Dare 34 and saw the weekend it would take place I knew that this was the one. Ludum Dare has been on my radar for some time and with me already doing Devember and that weekend being my only free one in December it was perfect.
It was my birthday on friday and I had family and friends over so I didn’t really start before Saturday morning. When I saw the themes I leaned towards growing from the start but I didn’t want it to be some normal plant growing game. I brainstormed for a while and did some google searches and sumbled over some images of Marijuana and had images for an incremental clicker game in my head almost instantly. I’ve done an incremental game for university before so I knew it was doable to achieve something in little time. I also knew that Unity would probably not be the best choice for the engine. So I went with Phaser, which I’ve also used for university before. While it’s been a while it all came back pretty fast.
While of course making all the graphics and the soundtrack was the hardest part for me it wasn’t as bad as I imagined. They graphics might not be perfect but I’m really proud that I managed to do them at all. As for the gameplay I’m also pretty happy with that. I didn’t think that I would have time to implement the police gameplay in time for the deadline but I did. I was informed today that it’s a little buggy, but I guess these things happen. Also there were huuuge performance issues. Part of the problem was my code because I was calling the UpdateButton function faaaar to often and it was adding button objects to the game each time. Editing that made the game a lot faster but what really did the trick was setting the Phaser object from AUTO to CANVAS so that it isn’t using WebGL anymore.
Now that the jam is over I find it hard to decide if finishing a game in this short time was the best part or if the comments I recieved are. It’s such a great feeling to know that other people are playing my game and enjoying it. It’s also great to see what everyone else achieved in such a short time. Some of these games are truly amazing! My favourite games so far are these two. I’ll definitely keep playing and rating games over the next weeks. It’s also really exciting that people are playing the games on Twitch and Youtube. I can’t wait to see my game played by someone else online.
I’m 100% sure that I will continue to take part in game jams in general and Ludum Dare in particual. Also a few weeks ago I registered for the Global Game Jam event at InnoGames and I am now looking forward to it even more than before. Regarding my other Devember project, I will continue with my Space Invaders game tomorrow.
And a little self promotion at the and, you can play and rate my Ludum Dare 34 game here.