Greetings! I figured since I’ve spent enough time rating games for now I’d take a little bit of time off of that to write a quick post mortem for my entry – Energy Dash. Hope you enjoy!

DAY 1:

As usual the theme gets announced in the very early hours of the morning for me so I decided to sleep it off and start brainstorming when I wake up. Although I hadn’t done any pre-planning on any of the possible themes (in fact I hadn’t even looked at the list prior to the actual theme getting announced) that didn’t bother me as I had previously decided to purposefully have a more chilled out and not so worrisome LD experience, regardless of the quality of my final product. As usual, I decided to look through other people’s posts on the site to get my brain in a LD mood and hopefully brainstorm an idea. After not too long I settled on this idea of a wave-based shooter where a robot obtains energy dropped by enemies in a factory and then decides whether to spend it on themselves for a quick boost or use it to keep the factory from exploding. It seemed like a solid enough idea so I got to work. I focused on getting all the mechanics I’d need for it to work without spending any time on art or sound yet, which is something I suggest everyone do. By the end of day one I had most of the main mechanics down.

DAY 2:

On this day I decided to start turning this into an actual game rather than just an engine containing the mechanics. I finished up the remaining things I’d need for it to work and implemented a second type of enemy which flies. At about the middle of the day I started working on art. I first got the tileset out of the way settling for a metallic factory look (I still hadn’t decided it was going to be set in space at this point). It was originally this dark blue, but I wanted everything to pop and in order to achieve that I needed to use complimentary colors. In more layman’s terms, if the tiles were blue I’d need to make the background orange to make them really stand out. However, I figured that having such a bright and striking color for the background would get tiring to the eyes so I just switched it around and used an orange for the tiles and blue for the background. As silly as it may sound this color choice dictated the change in setting as dark blue is most often a color associated with outer space. After getting a decent tileset done I worked on the player who I decided to make a spaceman. I googled some images of astronauts for inspiration and after a quick while I had his basic graphics done. I cheated a bit on his walk cycle as I didn’t actually animate it fully but rather animated only half of it, but it worked well enough due to his cartoony anatomy. Plus, it saved me some time. After getting the animation work done and implemented I noticed that he looked a bit out of place due to the white color scheme so I took the easy way out once again and just made him a bright orange to ensure he’d fit the rest of the game’s assets. And so concluded day two…

DAY 3:

This was without a doubt the most stressful day for me. Even though I promised myself to take it easy I still managed to be freaking out by the end of it. I finished the palette swap and then made a couple of sprites for the enemies. These were very quick and honestly probably the laziest and worst looking part of the game. I just wasn’t feeling inspired, I suppose. After that I made a nice space background, consisting of several parallax scrolling layers to mimic 3-Dimensional depth. I adjusted enemy spawning so it was a bit fairer and made some tweaks to the stage for the same reason. Then I focused my efforts on a soundtrack which I honestly got quite lucky with. I’m no expert at music so it often takes me a long time to make a good song, but this time I was able to do it rather quickly and the song came out pretty good, as well. I got to implementing it and then I also added some sound effects. Afterwards came the most boring part of game jams for me and that is all the extra fluff that goes into the UI elements, title screens, tutorials, etc. Not much to say, everything was straight forward, just a lot of boring work. At the last minute I implemented the actual waves mechanic and made it so it got progressively more difficult in the most arbitrary way possible – just increase the enemy amount. Honestly, this part of the development process was really rushed, which explains the slightly unforgiving balance of the final game. I added an icon for the launcher, made sure things worked okay and then uploaded it to the LD site with about 2 or 3 hours left on the clock. Feeling good about myself I went to sleep.

THINGS THAT WENT WELL:

-the graphics: once again the strongest feature of my entry; -the soundtrack: it’s simple and a little repetitive, but I thought I did a good job given the time; -the core gameplay: it’s fun, if a bit difficult and I think the main mechanic of choice between powering up the player or the stage gives a nice twist to what is mostly a classic shooter; -the game feel: I implemented a lot of touches that made the game more fun to play and feel more satisfying (screen shake, enemy flash, explosions, particles, freeze, etc.).

THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO WELL:

-the lack of features: I originally had plans to make more enemy types, have the stage evolve over time to become more difficult and so on, but I was too stressed out and pressed on time to get all that in there which resulted in a repetitive experience; -the balancing: I definitely could have done a much better job at balancing the waves so they progress slower and the game feels more fair; -the controls: I find them pretty intuitive and I have no issues when using a controller, but some users have noted that the control scheme is a little weird for them or hard to use due to non-QWERTY keyboards; All in all, congratulations if you read all that, and if you haven’t already feel free to check out Energy Dash: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/energy-dash