Ludum Dare 58 dev process retrospective

Originally posted at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/collecting-dust/dev-process-retrospective

Saturday night I found myself writing up thoughts on how things were going before realizing that was a terrible way to spend compo time. Finished notes in the hope that someone might find them helpful or at least interesting:

Ways to think up ideas that worked

• Read Wikipedia's list of game genres.
• Look up the one-word theme in a dictionary that lists idioms.
• Step away from the computer and fill up the whiteboard on the living room wall.

Ways that didn't work

• Look over past winners to get into the "Innovative" and "Fun" mindset. Now I know what someone else did, but it doesn't generalize in a way that helps me think of new ideas.
• Mash Wikipedia's random page button twenty times in the hope that it'll be a way to bring random nouns to mind. It doesn't work well for that.
  • I briefly wondered, what if somebody built a way to redirect to a random page weighted by the number of views that page has received to steer it away from overly niche topics? But after looking at Wikipedia's page view data, I think that would trend depressingly current-eventsy :P

Ideas from the living room whiteboard

• Stamp collector simulator with some sort of econ sim going on in the background. Use simulated ebay to buy low, sell high, buy more, collect them all. Very on-theme but I couldn't think of a way to make it fun. (Wouldn't be shocked if someone else figured out how to turn something in this neighborhood into an actual game.)
• Puzzle metroidvania platformer. Start as an emotionless robot (think Lt. Cmdr. Data), collect chips to enable you to have all the emotions. Each new emotion changes your moveset or acts as a status effect somehow; by the end of the game you're involuntarily jumping for joy and also smashing everything in anger and also crying so much that the ground is too wet and slippery for your wheels to get traction. We'll call it "Calm XOR Collected". I think there's potential here but "puzzle", "metroidvania", and "platformer" are three distinct things that aren't my skillset.
• Asteroids, but the flotsam is spaceship parts and your ship is made out of whatever parts you collect. Run into something and it sticks. You have another laser cannon and a second reactor now, yay! You got a new engine, but it's pointing just about exactly opposite the direction that your other engine is facing, and there's only one key that fires all the engines at the same time, not yay! Very definitely inspired by playing Galaxy Trucker at the last tabletop gaming night. I came so close to going with this one.
• The one I went with: Bullet hell inspired by the phrase "collecting dust". The bullets are roombas, the couches are gathering dust and must be defended from the roombas, you play not as the thing dodging the bullets but as the thing that moves the things that need to dodge the bullets.
  • The initial idea I wrote down included "Goal is not to move" and "MOVING BLOWS DUST AWAY" (think "a rolling stone gathers no moss"). In the final game, furniture can't gather dust while you're carrying it, but I would have liked if the mechanics reflected this idea more.
  • I spent a lot of time on Friday writing code to simulate dust levels in different parts of the room's atmosphere. Moving objects would generate dust, dust would flow from dirtier patches of air to cleaner patches of air over time, furniture would suck up dust from the air. It was hard to balance the amount of dust entering vs leaving the room at a given time. It was a bunch of game state that the player couldn't see directly and so it didn't add much fun. I scrapped it Saturday morning and just had the furniture run dustiness += 1 on each tick.

On marketing

• I think I finally figured out how to format title cards. You need a 5:4 image for the games list page, but if your game page has an embedded playable copy, the embed area will cut off the top and the bottom to get something 16:9. This time I tried to keep everything important inside a 16:9 safe zone, but it turns out that, on the game list page, the safe zone after accounting for overlays is juuuust a little smaller than the area that gets shown on the game page.
• Last time I saw some people change their avatars to assets from their games. That's genius and I'm going to start doing it too. I love coming across someone in a comments section and immediately being like "wait I played your game".

Notes to self

• Stock up the kitchen ahead of time. I can live happily on Huel and coffee for two meals a day but not three. If I were better at planning ahead, I would have foreseen the run to Fred Meyer to pick up frozen pizza and taken care of it before time started.
• Do not, repeat, do NOT get bogged down learning a new tech stack. Every time I write a game I feel sad about not having a vec2 library with nice operator-overloaded syntax and that doesn't make a bunch of extra heap objects at runtime, then I re-survey the ecosystem of languages that compile to JS and find out that there still aren't any options that don't add more overhead than I'm okay with. I was hoping that having WASM GC available in browsers would bring new contenders, but no such luck.
  • I'm very happy about the tiny file sizes and practically instant load times that come from working directly in JS!
  • My first thoughts Saturday morning were about Haxe's inline constructors. I spent maybe an hour experimenting before making a note to look at it again after the compo and very deliberately setting it down.
• Having base code that you can copy-paste from old jam projects is way more helpful than I realized! I had the source code for my previous three entries open in background tabs the whole time. When I needed a system to show level intro messages this time around, it was an immediate case of "oh here's one I made earlier".
  • This would be less of a big deal if I bothered to learn a game engine.
• My main takeaway from last time was to spend more time on balance. That was correct. Main takeaway this time: Spend even more time than that on balance.

2025-10-10

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