I narrowly avoided a disaster this Ludum Dare. Here's what I learned on the way.

Ludum dare has just ended and wow, as a second time participant, things went nowhere near as smoothly as I hoped. Here's what I've learned by going through that grueling journey:

1. Sh*t happens. If I had to describe this year's ludum dare in a nutshell- that's how I would describe it. The artist I was working with had to leave on the same day due to RL issues. That left me with with a very small amount of usable assets and not enough time to look for premade ones. I had to somehow work with that. Then My university decided to randomly hold classes on the last day of ludum dare. Then, as if that wasn't enough, They announced that my yearly result would come out on the day before. I spent the second day frantically refreshing the results page to get some peace of mind so that I could work on the game. Naturally, progress came to a halt. Which brings me to my second point.
2. Don't give up before the end. I almost did. My motivation was already running low with all the issues I was having outside of the game. 12 hours before the submission I realized that I might not make it even if I crunched all night. I closed unity and basically gave up. I procrastinated for two hours playing Sekiro. Weirdly, beating one of the bosses I was stuck on for a while gave me the motivation to retry. Then, I somehow submitted the game less than an hour remaining.
3. Cut your scope again and again. Don't bother with extra features that you don't have time for. In my experience, UI falls in this category. I spent the majority of the second day implementing the UI for an upgrade menu before deciding to replace it with a more simple one. I didn't even bother with a title menu since the game is not very replayable. I think the game is better for it. But this will vary from game to game.
4. Don't be overly worried about clean code. One of the reasons the upgrade menu was taking too long was because I was trying to code everything the clean way. I threw away all of it for a more simplified upgrade system that directly modified the variables in the code. And I just copypasted the same code for all the powerups. It took me just a couple of hours and I never had to look at that piece of code again. Plus, when you do something the wrong way, you have a better understanding about what the better approach might be.
5. Making an actual playable build is important because you'll probably mess up your first time. I said this last year as well. This time I decided to do a webgl build. I didn't know that Itch.io requires you to upload a ZIP file, not a rar. It's a simple mistake but I was stuck on it for an hour. I don't think I'll ever repeat it now. So fail fast and make those mistakes early.
6. Do not be complacent with your progress early on. The first day went really fast for me and I had a lot of things done. But that's only because I was doing the simple things then But progress was slow afterwards and I almost ended up missing the deadline.
7. Know your toolset. I lost a lot of time integrating an external pathfinding library. I also wasted a lot of time writing a save manager (which didn't even make it in the game). Pathfinding and serialization is one most common things you need in games. Learn them before hand so that you don't have to waste time.
8. The theme will always suck. Don't avoid participating on the jam because you didn't like the theme or some other external reasons. I skipped ludum dare for a year making various other excuses. What matters is not the theme but how you approach and design based on it. I don't think my take on the theme was particularly unique, but it is still MY interpretation and all the weirdness that it entails.
9. Accept that you'll never be able to do justice to your ideas. There were a lot of things I wanted to implement but I didn't have the time for.
10. Polish your game- I was going say this but I should really practice what I preach. Unlike last time, I didn't have time to polish the game and it really shows. The main thing I realized from playing other people's games was that theirs was much more polished. In a sea of games, polish is what will separate your game from the rest. I won't link THAT game juice video here (because I've already linked it before and someone else will inevitably post it) but you should watch it if you haven't already.
11. And last but not least, don't beat yourself up by comparing to others. There will always be people who have accomplished much more impressive things in three days compared to you. But know that they still had to reach that point by trying and failing again and again. Your first game jam is unlikely to be that great but over time you will learn and improve. But I'll admit that I still don;t understand how people can make such amazing games on the 48h compo.

Whew, that was a huge wall of text. Thank you for reading this far. I've tried to avoid repeating my previous points from my last ludum dare. If you want to know a first timer's perspective or why you should do game jams I've talked about it here

*This is an old postmortem of an old game. This was originally published on Reddit. You can check the original post here.