First of all, thanks to everyone who played the game, rated  it, or is reading  this and of course thanks to the ludum dare the this event and platform.

Noisy thief

Now that some days have passed since the jam I‘ve decided to take a look to the Jam and analyze it. I should say that this is the first time  I do a postmortem and will probably look like a diary more than a postmortem, I’m doing it from my point of view (not my team’s) and this is the second game jam I participate (first ludum dare).

My team is formed by five members; 3 programmers, 1 artist and 1 technical artist (AKA the guy for everything and the annoying tasks <3). Three of us(2 prog. and the tech artist) study together at the university on a video game development degree, we are friends since the first year (now coursing 4th) and we achieved to be a really cohesive team. The reaming programmer studies at the same university as us a multimedia degree and the artist is a friend of one of the programmers that finished his degree few years ago on design.

We first meet two weeks before the jam and started working on some assets for a game idea we had so that if the jam theme adapted to it we could have advanced work, at the end nothing was “useful” but that wasn’t the important point since we wanted to start working together and from a team rather than be a group of guys.

First day

Two days passed and we meet again at the tech artist’s house all together there. We live near Barcelona so the jam started at  3am, fortunately we slept that evening :). So here we are!! The jam started. We worked two hours on the idea, was fun to see that some ideas we got other teams also thought about them and made them come to true :D. Once we had the final idea, we all went to sleep at 5am less on programmer that started working.

Second day

We woke up at 9am approx and went to our friend home to start working, the second day (Saturday) was pretty normal, we worked on the idea we had and went to sleep at 5am approx. less one of the programmers that stayed all the night working on the AI.

Third day

Sunday raised and the ones we were sleeping woke at 9am approx. That morning we started working but only one programmer (me) was able to work, the artist and the tech artist, finally that afternoon our artist left us but the other programmer joined us again. That day night we realised that we were a bit fu** up. We had not enough time for all the art and program all the mechanics. At the end we all went to sleep at 1am approx.

Fourth day

Monday was an interesting day. We woke up at 10 am approx but had to go to university for two hours. After that we started working until the end of the jam. That day the artist was at his home in another town and one of the programmers was at university too on the morning and at work at the evening so that afternoon two programmers.

Last night we already realized that we had not enough time to do everything we wanted so we cut some stuff we wanted to add but we still had a problem, only one artist that had never done anything on games was not enough. That afternoon was non-stop working, another programmer and me kept programing all the time on new stuff until 2am, the artist kept working on the characters and the other two started mounting some level parts and making some UI. And of course at 2am, just one hour before the deliver hour everything broke!! We made the same error twice with a conflict on the scene while using github, the unity navmesh wasn’t working and other smaller but still important bugs. So that our was dedicated to solve those errors on one part, prepare the menus on the other and create all the builds. A bit of stress.

Finally we reached the hour and the game was delivered. Another success!!! :smile:

To summarize let's check some  good points and some mistakes.

Good

• We formed the team some time before to reach the date as a cohesive group.

• Invested some time on the idea. Seems normal but on other times we didn’t invested it.

• Used time to relax and sleep.

Mistakes

• I personally think we relaxed a bit too much. It’s okey to use time to sleep but I think we were too confident.

• Didn’t organize properly all the code, specially all the relations between the differents parts of the code.

• Had only one artist with no experience on games development.
• Using new assets and tools we had never tested.
• Using different Unity versions.

But at the end the result is great. We ended the game and I like like the result but more the experience! Definitely will be on more Ludum Dares!!!

If you have arrived here, thanks for it and please rate the game. Noisy thief

Let in comments your game if you want so we will rate yours too :smile: