If your object is to learn, better to try out Handmade Hero, entirely from scratch: https://handmadehero.org/
What the time constraint teach you is to adjust to a time budget. Wear many hats. Improvise. And Finish Stuff. All very valuable lessons that will help any developer.
There's a healthy and beautiful spectrum of tools and languages out there between the "all included" of Unity and the aridness of plain C. Have you tried Löve? It abstracts a lot, but a lot of what it abstracts is really not that important for making games, in my opinion.
One time I decided to make a multiplayer game on a hexagonal grid. Just getting the hexagonal grid working took me over half of the time, didnt produce much of a game at all that time, but it was still fun, it's ok to fail.
I've done it 8 times, once with GameMaker, twice with Unity, and the rest were custom.
For the last few I just do VanillaJS on canvas.
https://github.com/echelon/laser-asteroids
No unity, no unreal, no engine. Learned it all as I went.
Game jams are a fantastic time and place to learn.
2 days though? I don’t know what I would do, its not much time
I look at the experiences of Phil Strahl and I find it really interesting to see from year to year how his experiences with Ludum Dare have changed and what he has learned. It does seem like familiarity with tools is really important.
I like his joke in his Ludum Dare 45 post mortem about how his game launches, testing over, passed.
Getting older I know that having enough sleep is really important for having a beautiful day the next day. I'm not sure how compatible getting enough sleep is with a 48 hour hard limit. Looking after physical health and mental well-being seems really important at this stage in my life. I'm glad that people can get enjoyment out of participating in Ludum Dare and I know everyone's experience will be different because everyone is different. I wish generally people felt less stressed because some of the limits we place on ourselves are optional.
I really enjoyed programming an entire games in construct 2 in 100 lines of code. A decade ago
http://violetgaming.byethost10.com/MartyOmegaFull/index.html
Kudos!
If you're interested, I wrote a post recounting my experience participating in Ludum Dare:
Learning how to successfully manage and complete a large project is definitely something that needs hands-on experience and cannot be completely replaced by doing lots of small projects instead.
That said, the core process is the same and, especially for beginners, doing many small projects instead of one large one is important to become familiar with the gamedev process and get as much practice as possible in the shortest amount of time.
When I’m evaluating an engine I also like some kind of high level overview of how games are made in it. You have some of that mixed in with more how-to levels of detail. Pulling out that high level info into a short intro will help attract people when you’re ready for more eyes.
Looking forward to seeing this pop up again on HN!
Some themes simply lend themselves to engendering more "creativity" than others. I knew it was going to be "unstable", because it's universally hated / feared. But was chagrined to see "One tool, Many uses". It's really the ideal theme for a game jam with time constraint. The inspiration just flows. And really the themes are vague enough to get away with anything.
This entry: https://twitter.com/TheJare/status/1444240947487944707
Previous: https://ldjam.com/users/jare/games
You’re able to cross-compile to mobile + web as well so you’re not just stuck on the desktop.
