Katamari love letter: The Sentient Cube post mortem

Being prepared.
As mentioned earlier, I've been to enough Game Jams to know what to expect for this event.  The only real difference I felt this time was that I was going to work alone (I rarely do that).  Just in case, however, I did get in contact with MrPhil, and he helped address parts I may not have considered, including the food situation.

Having a schedule.
My schedule was pretty simple: first 30 minutes is brainstorming, and the first day was to test an idea out.  Since this idea worked great, I went straight to developing more concrete features, using Fossil's ticket tracker system to keep trackthem.  I aimed at submitting the game an hour earlier from the deadline, to have a decent chance at submitting the game before the site crashes, and decided to make any final touches the hour before.

Great tools.
If there's one thing I learned from Game Jams, it's to take as many shortcuts as possible.  Unity, Garage Band, Photoshop, and others greatly helped this capability.  Additionally, the Fossil ticket tracker proved to be a great device to prioritize which tasks were more important, such as the tutorial, score-keeping, and so forth.

Minimal modelling and texturing.
I love cel-shading, from an artistic perspective (yay, Windwaker!). Both this theme (minimalism) and Unity's toon shader gave me a great excuse to spend the minimal amount of effort modelling and texturing. Add that with the edge-detecting post image effect, and you've got a masterpiece! I further minimized the work by generating the object's color random, and automatically calculating each object's size on loading each level.

Starting with the third level.
In what seems like a counter-intuitive decision, I made the second level first.  This was a tip I took from the famed Mario creator, Miyamoto Shigeru-san (sorry, I'm Japanese.  I have to be extra formal to this legend!), and it worked wonders.  By creating the later levels first, I got a brilliant insight at Katamari Damacy's level design (an article I may write later), which helped plan how to create the first tutorial level.  With the exception of Credits, the rest of the levels came very easily.

Realizing I forgot to put the splash icon, and spending an hour on it.
It was a complete waste of time for an inconvenience on the player. Worse, I attempted to fix this in the last 2 hours, and realized it wasn't worth it.

Tunnel vision: the controls.
The biggest complaints I received were the controls and the floaty physics. The thing was, I knew I had this problem, and never bothered to fix it. For some reason, I didn't think it was as important, which in hindsight was ridiculous! First rule of game design: a game is not fun until it's playable.

The scoreboard.
I realized after playing other people's games that during judging, the scores and replayability of your games aren't all that important. All judges expect the game to be playable within 5 minutes, so they wouldn't be too concerned about the longevity of the game. Programming stats tracking takes quite a bit of time, so I felt I wasted a lot of time on a feature very few people would be concerned with.

Live-streaming with webcam.
I deliberately keep myself as transparent to the internet as possible. Using my real name as the display name on the Ludum Dare's website is part of this. But even I have my limits in privacy, and in this case, the webcam portion of the live-streaming really went over the edge. I failed to realize until too late that you can actually see me washing the laundry, cooking food, eating, and other aspects of my life I'd rather not reveal so openly. I think the live streaming is great, but on the next event, it won't be with the webcam (only microphone).

Timelaps fail.
I didn't have much hard drive space left on my dev computer, so I timelapsed every 10 minutes. Terrible idea: the resulting video just flashed meaninglessly. This is hilarious in hindsight, because I had 2 external hard drives available with plenty of GB to spare.

No Linux export.
I am so very, very sorry. Signed, Arch Linux user.