This Ludum dare was quite unique for us, since we never worked in such a small team in such a short time to create a game over the weekend. I thought I shared some of our thoughts, how our game was made and overall our experience with you guys.

In case you don’t know our game yet, the game is about Bloopy, a little android left alone on this planet filled with humans ripe to harvest. His ultimate goal is to escape from this desolate place and some of his mechanical machine friends will help him achieve that - saving his “world”.

At the beginning, we were actually quite clueless what to do about “harvest”, as we didn’t want to do something with farming as we thought there would be a lot of games about that already. So we brainstormed a bit with everything that came to our mind with harvesting - and we decided it’s gonna be organ harvesting. We had no idea how we will do it and what the scenario will be, but we effectively already wasted half a day coming up with an idea for the game.

So once this was settled, we started creating some graphics, went with Godot 4 beta and created some basic game and went on from there. While we were working on it, we got plenty of new ideas and while some of them were too big and we decided to push them to the back, most of them were put into the game right away.

On the last day of the dare we had a game, that we were not really satisfied with. We created a loop in the game, that was fine. But the game was boring, and not challenging. So again we started to brainstorm on how to make the game more fun, more difficult. And then we came up with the current idea of Bloopy, where it’s a race against time and managing a lot of things at the same time, while running around. Like I said we had plenty of other ideas that didn’t make it into the game - yet! Because we are already working on a post-ludum version to actually polish up the game and put in our last ideas we would have liked to be in the game. Also, we got a lot of feedback at this point and we also wanted to put that into the game. Last but not least, there will be a lot of test runs to balance the game out so it is fun, challenging, not too short and not too long.

Now let’s move over to the learning part: One of the biggest things we learned was that time management is pretty damn important. We didn’t take it very seriously at the beginning, and the backlashes hit us very big. At the end we were a lot into it, but if we were into it like that right at the beginning we would have achieved way more - at least I think so. Planning and preparing things is very important, we learned that now. It would give us way more time to work on the game and finish features that didn’t make it this time. It’s also quite important to have a same schedule, because we worked the best when we were both online - but sometimes we had different schedules regarding chores, sleeping, eating, working etc. So planning, preparing and managing the time is something we will for sure try better next time!

A last thing I would like to mention is that you never know what other people might like when they play your game. For example, in Bloopy we intended on not giving out too much information on how to play the game and how the mechanics work because we wanted the played to figure that out by themselves. But it turned out, while some people like that the majority would have liked some guidance on the game. This obviously also means, you can’t make a game that pleases everyone. But that’s alright. In the end we decided to create a cheat-sheet for those who wanted to have some hints, but even that was a bit too little when we listened to the feedback.

I would like to thank everyone who supported us, who played our game - who liked our game :) - and we are very grateful for the feedback we got. We had so much fun working on the game, being part of the dare and socializing with players, the community, streamers, friends, so basically everyone. It is overwhelming, but the good kind!

I am sure we will return to the ludum dare again in the future, and until then: keep up the great spirit and work everyone!