Ludum Dare 35 just wrapped up and what a whirlwind weekend it was! For this game jam, the creaters of Shear Madness, Dan Lance (@DanLanceGames) and Sebastian Karolkiewicz (@Murder_Punch) got together once more to bring you Mission: Decomposition.

This is the third game jam game by Dan and Sebastian, and their third collaborative project of 2016. In this process we have learned a ton about fast-paced game production and the process of making a (somewhat) completed product in just one weekend. The making of Mission: Decomposition was both smooth and stressful, but was ultimately a ton of fun.

When I say “somewhat” complete, I mean that. It’s a game. You can play it. You can win, you can lose, you can have fun (hopefully). Thing is, it’s missing a lot of pieces. Things that are critical to gamers, like communicative UI, a rules screen, number of lives, goals, things you want to see. All missing. It’s a compromise that we made in the time crunch. My advice to developers who want to get into a game jam is to pick one or two priorities - beautiful artwork, responsive controller input, complex mechanics, lots of levels, one or two smoothly functional systems. Just make a short list of priorities and make your entire design process about them. I would assert that “Mission: Decomposition” holds art and complexity as its priorities, and compromises on UI, clear rules, and perfect controls and collisions.

All of these things can be addressed in the future, but from a learning perspective, it felt good to try and tackle something much more ambitious in this weekend than the last game jam. “Shear Madness” is about a simple system and an automatic variety of visuals, and we wanted to do something much different. Keep an eye out for some of these updates as we continue to build them into “Mission: Decomposition”.

Ultimately, we’ll both take the knowledge we’ve gained from all of our game jam projects and find our priorities when we approach more larger, long-term projects in the future.

Thank you for playing and for motivating indie devs with your ratings and comments! Make sure to follow Dan (@DanLanceGames) and Seb (@Murder_Punch) on Twitter!