Ludum Dare 53

Last week I participated in Ludum Dare 53 with a team I had never worked with before comprised of fellow CAs many of whom were new to game jams. The theme for the jam was delivery and for it, we made a game about communicating with aliens by memorizing and drawing symbols.

I think that the jam went decently. The team worked well together and the game was moderately innovative and playable if not particularly fun.

Despite the team never having worked together, we were able to communicate fairly effectively and there were no major miscommunications or arguments. Additionally, due to the well-modularized code, there were no major merge conflicts and even small conflicts only happened 2 or so times.

There were three issues with the production process: First, our meetings were often long and unproductive and many could have been replaced with more direct peer-to-peer communications, and the ideation phase of the jam should have been accelerated as we spent too long on ideas that we were never going to make. Second, neither our artist nor our writer worked in engine or played the game until after the jam was over. This caused wasted time for programmers who had to import assets, and created a disconnect in ideas of the game that was the root cause of the many walls of text found throughout our game. Thirdly, the game could have used playtesting and balancing, which resulted in a frustrating experience for many players.

Overall the game was decent and the team worked really well together and we enjoyed working together.