Since Ludum Dare 35 I'm regularly participating in every one of them and this one wasn't exception. My release thoughts are positive - this time I've again worked with one friend (with whom we've worked also in the past on Ludum Dare), and I enjoyed it a lot. As this is not a post mortem yet, I will not go into details what went right or wrong - meanwhile I'll just show the results and put out few notes...

Yes, that's one of the screenshots from the game (without UI). I'm using this one as a "cover" screenshot - so it should also be included here. Anyways this was my another experience with Unity and maybe one of the last Ludum Dare experiences with it. While I do like it, if I can think about suitable game for my own game engine for the theme next time, it's possible that I won't use Unity next time.

Ludum Dare

Each 4 months or so, this large game jam happens. It's a sort of competition, well... there are no prizes, and I honestly do it just for fun (and to force myself to do some "real" game development from time to time). It takes 48 or 72 hours to create your game (depending on whether you go for compo or jam category), and there are just few basic rules (which you can read on site - https://ldjam.com/).

Then for few weeks you play and rate other games, and the more you play, the more people will play and rate your game. While ratings aren't in my opinion that important, you get some feedback through comments. Actually I was wrong about no prizes - you have your game and feedback of other people who participate in Ludum Dare as a prize.

Unity...

I've used Unity for quite long time - and I have 2 things to complain about this time, majority of all used shaders in Air Pressure (yes, that is the game's name) are actually custom - and I might bump into some of them in post mortem. Unity and custom shaders combination is actually quite a pain, especially compared to my own engine (while it isn't as generic as Unity is - actually my engine is far less complex, and maybe due to that shader editing and workflow is actually a lot more pleasant ... although these are my own subjective feelings, impacted by knowing whole internal structure of my own engine in detail).

Second thing is particularly annoying, related to Visual Studio. Unity extension for Visual Studio is broken (although I believe that recent patch that was released during the Ludum Dare fixed it - yet there was no time for update during the work), each time a C# file is created, the project gets broken (Intellisense works weird, Visual Studio reports errors everywhere, etc.), the only work around was to delete the project files (solution and vcxproj) and re-open Visual Studio from Unity (which re-created solution and vcxproj file).

Unity!

On the other hand, it was good for the task - we finished it using Unity, and it was fun. Apart from Visual Studio struggles, we didn't hit any other problem (and it crashed on us just once - during whole 72 hours for jam - once for both of us). So I'm actually quite looking forward to using it next time for some project.

Anyways, I did enjoy it this time a lot, time to get back into work (not really game development related). Oh, and before I forget, here they are - first gameplay video and link to the game on Ludum Dare site:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/air-pressure

PS: And yes I've been actually tweeting progress during the jam, which ended up in a feeling, that I've probably surpassed number of Tweets generated by Donald Trump in past 3 days.