Now that I have gotten some sleep I’ll go ahead and reflect about how I think I did on my game. I’ll be honest that I wasn’t a huge fan of the alone theme and I didn’t really have any ideas initially. Me and my wife brainstormed together for a while after it was announced, but we couldn’t come up with anything that I was satisfied with. I eventually decided to make a platformer and that I could come up with the exact storyline later. This worked well because as I worked on the platformer code I also spent some time working on the art. While working with the art I managed to come up with a simple storyline that I felt was a good fit for the ‘alone’ theme.

What went right

• Graphics – I really like the look of my game. I had decided prior to the start that I was going to use a very minimal palette and it fit my game very well. I also added a fading effect to the screen that added to the alone factor. Overall, I think the graphics were pretty good.
• Audio – I made a simple short background track that sounds alright. I’m not very good at making music, so getting anything that sounds halfway decent is in a win in my book.
• Editor – I have created a nice tile editor from previous projects that I used to create the game world. It was fairly easy to use and all I had to do was write the code to import the binary map files.
• Storyline – I like the story of my game. I don’t want to give any details, but I like the flow that it has.
• Tools – I was very familiar with the tools that I used. Gimp, PxTone, Visual Studio, C# and XNA. They are all things that I have been using for at least several years.

What went wrong:

• Editor – There are a couple things about the editor that made it tedious to work with. It has auto tiling functionality, but the tileset has to be setup a certain way for it to work and I couldn’t do it with the tileset I was using. It also didn’t do any scaling on the Source texture and because I was using 8×8 tiles, it was a little difficult to select the tile you wanted.
• Time Management – I spent way too much time playing my game. I had more elaborate plans for the storyline, but due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to implement them. You can actually see hints of it in the world if you look closely enough.

Overall, this Ludum Dare was a great experience and I think my game is significantly better than my LD21 entry. I encourage everyone to give it a try and tell me what you think. Here is the link to the entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4628