I finished my first ever game jam!



TLDR; What a great experience. I really enjoyed every part of taking place in Ludum Dare 42. I would really appreciate any feedback / comments on the game.

This was so much fun! I was really excited for this weekend, and it was all worth it. Great experience, with all you could imagine, I felt pretty good overall the entire weekend, seemed to had a concept in mind all the time.
Since I am from Germany, the theme got announced at 0:00am local time on Saturday. I did a quick brainstorming session coming up with some ideas and started working on some basic art - some of it actually made it to the game. I then went for a 5 hour sleep before starting into Saturday - main development day.
Everything basically went pretty smooth. I had my concept, followed my keynotes and had a running game by the end of the day. I also managed to include some basic menus and had almost all graphics done. To reenergize I had a nice 7 hours of sleep before waking up for the final countdown.
For Sunday that left me with polishing, level design and sound as my main points of focus. I wanted to start music and sound no later than 3pm, so that I had enough time to add everything into the game and eventually build and fix some bugs. In terms of time management I think I did pretty good overall (it went better than I expected :P), but got stuck on some sound-questions in the end. I did not want to add footstep or jumping sounds, since we are in space. But it felt like the game was pretty quiet, which is why I opted for some more ambience and environment sounds. Sadly time ran out quickly and not all of my recorded stuff made it into the build. I also wish I had planned a little more time on level design, since I wanted there to be a little more content.

For the final hour it all went super crazy. I had a basic publishing chain in mind, basically I wanted to use github pages for web publishing and provide an additional windows download. However due to two gamebreaking bugs I had to rebuild twice and that took away almost all of the submission hour. At least I could work on the ldjam game page and readme file while unity was trying to build without collapsing and crashing.

Retro Perspective: Excitement all the way, hectic at the end and overall I am just very reliefed that I managed to finish something to show within the time limit.

I enjoyed taking part in such an event and will certainly participate in more game jams in the future!

I would really appreciate any reviews / comments. Feel free to give me any feedback.

Get Space Runner

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Admin(+1)

Congratulations, this is well done. Some random feedback

  • The walk animation doesn't feel like it lines up with the speed of the character, maybe you can tweak it
  • I noticed (playing webgl version) that sometimes the seams between tiles would appear. I'm not too familiar with unity, but a trick that works well is to render the entire game to 1x offscreen buffer, then scale that single image up to render it to the viewport. It will give you pixel perfect rendering

Good luck on future jams

Thank you for the feedback! Yea the run animation needs some tweaking, but I needed to put resources else where to make it overall more enjoyable. Also I think I know a workaround for unity with the pixels appearing, but again sadly had not enough time to work on that as well.

I think I might work on this game further to see where I can go with it, and will keep those points in mind. Really appreciated, thanks again.