For anyone who is unaware, Ludum Dare is a bi-annual game jam where participants take part in creating a game for a common theme which tends to be announced the moment the event starts. From this point, participants receive 48 hours to create and submit their game.
For Ludum Dare 44, the theme was “Your life is currency”. With this being my first game jam, I didn’t rush into creating the game and I instead brainstormed for probably a bit too long which wasted most of first day. In hindsight, I should’ve just started creating something, even if it was just the basic structure of a video game (i.e. menus and game systems).
Once I had an idea, I finally spent the remaining time rushing a game out. I learnt a fair amount about Unity development (this was my first in depth foray into Unity) and I published something which I think was in theme. I also learnt quite a lot about deploying and publishing embedded Unity games using itch.io.
The game I finally created was called “Nine Lives”. Given the theme of the game jam was “Your life is currency”, I decided I could play on the common expression that cats have 9 lives. The game itself is a bit of a linear roguelike, inspired by earlier The Legend of Zelda games, where you go from room to room. This game was an endless runner and consisted of yourself running around as a cat shooting balls of wool at oversized rats. In the game, you can score points by killing rats, and sometimes collect more hearts to keep your life up.
In the end, although I did follow the theme slightly, it wasn’t a very strong submission. There wasn’t really much of an idea of currency, and although you had a life total in game, it was more of a health bar as opposed to a currency of sorts. I did however learn quite a lot about game development, and how Unity handles collisions and scenes. I also learnt more about the sprite program Asprite. This was my first ever instance of using this program, and I thoroughly recommend it to create in game assets in pixel form as it’s super easy to use!
Below is my submission for the Ludum Dare 44!
There are three takeaways which I learnt when it comes to tackling future game jams. The first takeaway is to not spend too much time trying to think of the best idea to submit something. 48 hours is really not much time for creating a game, so if you don’t have an idea, at least start creating something.
The second thing I took away from this experience was that you don’t need to create something perfect. In my head for this submission, I wanted a completed game to show off, so I went for an endless runner based game. However after looking at other submissions, other games were essentially tech demos, or a first level of sorts. Due to this, they were much more refined.
Finally, the main takeaway was that game jams are there to learn something new. It’s okay to not submit something as really, a game jam is just a fun excuse to learn something new and create something along the way!
