The 16th LudumDare came to a close early Monday morning(IST). Sadly or not, I slept through the deadline missing all the fanfare that was happening elsewhere. Do I regret the fact that I didn’t get to submit, or for that matter finish my entry? The lessons learned were important enough to make me not regret the whole exercise, So no regrets.
Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated solo game development competition. Entrants develop games from scratch in 48 hours, based on a theme suggested by community.
Ludum Dare was founded by Geoff Howland, and held it’s first competition in April of 2002. Since then, the community has run more than 15 regular competitions, creating well over 1000 games in 48 hours and less.
The competition attracts developers from all sides of the industry. Students, hobbyists, industry professionals from many well respected game studios, as well as many independent game developers.
For many people, it can be difficult to find or make the time create a game or prototype for yourself. We’re here to be your excuse.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/about-ludum-dare/
The 16th LudumDare had 121 entries and countless others that didn’t make it in time. To vote for all of them go here.
My LD adventure started as soon as the theme was announced on #ludumdare on AfterNET. The theme after four rounds of voting thankfully was not Twilight Fandom :P but Exploration. LD as I’ve mentioned earlier is a solo game development competition. The whole point of LD is to have fun, learn how to manage yourself and find out if you have what it takes to pull out a game under tight constraints. I actually wanted to go ahead and use this opportunity to experiment a little more and involve a friend of mine as well. I just wanted to go ahead and try something even if it was against the rules. @lycalyptus (Bibi) freed himself from his work just as I had to start on our little gamedev adventure. Little did we know how hard and downhill the ride was going to be.
I’m not going to crib about what happened, but rather tell you that a huge amount of time was wasted of our 48hour limit due to many mind boggling reasons. So what came out of it? A lot of introspection and ways to work on games and things in general. Please keep in mind that LD is a solo event, but here, I am generally talking about things that went wrong in a team effort, many of which would not have been the case if it was done solo. Please also keep in mind that I am located in Noida-UP-India and Bibisan is in TVM-Kerala-India almost 4000+ miles away.
One of the first things that went wrong was the delay in getting started. The time between the starting of the event to the time we actually got started was inexcusably long! We hadn’t gone through anything, the only thing pre-planned was that we would be using Edward in Flash. We should’ve actually looked more into the topics in Round 4. Then there were things that we had no real control over, like power-cuts, family, work etc that creeped in. Our plans were only rough outlines, with no clear goals in sight – forget them being time-bound. Even with two people involved, it went on as if it was just one person doing things, the lack of clarity lead to problems like me waiting for Bibi to finish things and vis-a-vis. Things that should’ve been finished in an hour dragged on for two, which was the general nature of how things were going; these should’ve been predicted and planned.
So what did we learn out of it?
Pre-Planing – Study all the information you have, decide on what platform you are going to build your game, decide upon the tools you would be using. Many might argue that they can only choose their tools after they know what they are going to do, But even then a lot of things could be pre-decided.
Contingency plans – taking precautionary measures for things that can possibly go wrong – eg: power outage: backup power source, laptop; zombie apocalypse: shotgun, chainsaw.. etc
Planning – looking at the bigger picture and making feasible goals within known limits and sticking with it.
Time-bound tasks and committing to them – I cannot emphasis this point well enough. It takes more than planning! you have to discipline yourself to follow your plan to the end! no matter what!!
Commitment to tasks – you have to exercise this yourself. Let others know what is going on with tasks assigned to you. If its getting delayed, tell them rather than waiting till there is no way of recovering from the damage done. Ask everyone involved to update each other on what is going on.
Clarity in communication – When working with a team, tell people what they are responsible for. Ask them to provide a clear number on how long a task would take them. When unclear of anything, ask the person responsible, don’t assume anything!! Talking face to face is the best way to communicate ideas, If that’s not possible, share your screen or a dabble board online and talk on the phone or over the internet! Chats, email and sms have the lowest priority. Don’t let your meetings drag on for more than 15 minutes(or something similar), plan them accordingly. Be precise and to the point.
Don’t be lazy, don’t procrastinate – You will regret it, Big time!! and that alone should scare you enough. Make it a point not to leave tasks unfinished(if you leave it half way, you might even forget what you were doing when you come back to work the next day).
I guess that’s about it for now. LudumDare was a really fun experience, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be there next time and on all possible MiniLDs as well. I know I slack of and I know where I go wrong. So since I know these things, its about time I did something about it :) and like Elvis sang, “A little less conversation, a little more action please” ^_^ Oh yeah, and do take a look at our LD16 entry that never made it – http://chronosign.com/bin/ld16/.. Bibi did the Character animations and a lot of things that didn’t get into this one and together we did cook up an interesting story together as well. Lets hope we get to do more awesome stuff in the future as well :D
Before I end this blog post, do take a look at some LudumDare Success stories – Apart from all the fun, these are some of the few people who has really reaped benefits from participating in LD – http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/success
