Shortly before Christmas I finally attempted something I’ve been planning for ages: I took part in Ludum Dare. If you’re unaware, Ludum Dare is an international, 48 hour long, individual game development competition where all content and code is to be created within the limited time period.

I’m really glad I took part and regret not doing so sooner. I was worried about having to create my own artwork and music, and that taking part would leave me exhausted for days afterwards and interfere with University work. In reality, I found having a game which I had created every part of incredibly rewarding and am quite proud of my artistic and compositional efforts, even if they’re nowhere near the level of the group projects I’ve worked on in the part. Additionally, I found that staying up for 48 hours straight would have been completely unnecessary and probably detrimental, and maintained fairly sensible hours.

I achieved much more than I had originally expected during the weekend, but definitely saw the jam as a chance to develop something cool with no obligation to continue rather than a competitive endeavour. That said, the community feedback has been one of the most awesome parts so far. It’s a really awesome feeling to have something I made actually described as “fun”, of course, but it’s the constructive criticisms on problems I recognised but didn’t have time to resolve completely, such as collision, elements I never thought anyone would play long enough to require, like an ending, and additions I hadn’t even considered, like your achievements affecting the game, which I am most thankful for.

Let’s Science

In response to the elected theme of “Discovery”, I made a simple research sim game called “Let’s Science”. You take control of a lab and its scientists, and direct them to make a series of ground-breaking discoveries in order to become a world-leading research facility.

I worked in Unity, along with Paint.NET (graphics), sfxr (audio effects) and LMMS (music). I had hoped to work in 3D (having practiced my incredibly basic modelling skills in Blender) but didn’t feel this idea would benefit from it – maybe next time.

You can check out the game along with the other fantastic entries on the Ludum Dare site.