For Ludum Dare 33’s theme “You are the monster,” Lucas Zanenga made a giant eye hiding in the moon that shoots things. It was his third jam entry. His writeup is two mistakes he calls obvious — and both are easy to make with the clock running.
Consider the audience that actually shows up:
- He shipped hidden features: healing and mana-regen orbs the player had to discover for themselves.
- Jam players run through dozens of entries and give each a few seconds. Nobody is going to excavate your systems.
- Conveyance and mood beat balance and complexity. It is unfair to expect patience; if people die too much, they open the next entry and you never hear from them.
Always live-playtest:
- He tested online with friends, the sessions went well, and testers posted decent scores. Tired, with nobody home, he submitted without watching a single person play.
- An hour later a friend texted “Wow, I just figured out I can move!” The intro text listed controls and forgot to mention movement.
- WASD plus space and mouse is standard, and it did not matter. Players read the intro text as the complete list of what they could do, so a partial list was worse than no list at all. With no text, they would have hit buttons and found movement themselves.
The failure was not technical. The game worked; it never communicated. And the testing that did happen — online, with friends, with positive results — could not catch it, because nobody was holding the controls while the author watched.
Two lessons, one underlying question: who is playing, and under what conditions?