Hello, my dear fellow LDers!

The final scores are here and it means it is time to evaluate the end result.

So far I had 2 games that made it to the ranking:

• LD39: Runaway Convoy
• LD40: Maze Crawler

Below are the scores for my latest game and their difference compared to my other ranked game:

• Overall: 2.909 (-0.091)
• Fun: 2.606 (-0.161)
• Innovation: 3 (-0.267)
• Theme: 3.03 (-0.603)
• Graphics: 2.924 (+0.091)
• Humor: 1.75 (-0.596)
• Mood: 2.55 (+0.031)

As you can see, I have been rated lower almost across the board. Definitely something to ponder on "What wend wrong", and I suspect that the reason this happened is best described by a comment by @justinooncx:

Interesting game! Or, well, tech demo.

The simplistic Runaway convoy, was actually ready to go on Saturday, so I had all Sunday to add "unnecessary" bits like the animated stars in the background, teleportation effects, sounds and even a Star Wars - style intro before the game. And this gave the game a fair bit more polish. It felt more solid. More complete. Even though terribly short and non re-playable.

Maze Crawler, while being a fair bit better game IMO ((At least developing it definitely felt more satisfying for me)) was nowhere near complete. More than half of the items in the game were placeholder assets slapped together just to have something playable. The game has a lot of potential, but that is what it is - potential. And there is no rating for "potential" in the scoring system. :)

Now a bit more detailed thoughts on each of the ratings individually (Will skip "overall"):

Fun During the preparation to LD I wanted to make a more Fun game than my previous one. It really looks like I failed at that. The main reason here I believe was a poor movement system. TBH the movement script was one of the placeholders, and was tuned to work with maze generated of tiles 3 units wide, and them the final maze was generated of tiles 5 units wide, so the movement ended up being almost half slower than I intended it to be. Which made traversing the maze a bit too slow. Less fun. And honestly - I haven't figured good movement speeds in the post-LD version yet.

Innovation This is actually surprising to me, as I definitely felt more innovating developing this game compared to previous one... But I guess this reflects that traversing a maze is a fairly well-known concept for a game, while the puzzle in Runaway Convoy was not familiar to many players... and this is what this score is reflecting.

Theme Again - I am a bit surprised by score drop here. But I guess this is due to Theme implementation in my last game was pretty obvious, while here... well... The game was set up in a way that you could collect all the keys without ever noticing that the maze is changing as you go. I have a few ideas how to fix it in the post-LD version, but only play test will tell if they are going to kill the fun of the game or not.

Graphics are up. And I guess this is mostly thanks to the game being 3D and floors/walls using some normal mapping. Which (surprisingly) didn't take me that long to make.

Humor Didn't really care that much about this rating. So not surprised it went down.

Mood went up a little. And I really hope that I can improve it a lot more by adding better lighting, environmental props and sounds.

So... What can we learn from all this? One thing that is still haunting me is wasting a lot of time on one thing, that I don't end up completing anyway. This time it was character model animation. Maybe a good thing for me would be to set up a limit for time I spend on one thing in a row. Like if I don't finish something in an hour, I put it aside and start working on something else. This will let me get more simple things done which would make game more complete overall.

Not sure how deal with the experimental creep though.

All of Saturday and a good portion of Sunday I spent working on effectively one thing - the maze generation script that required quite some optimization. ((And the version that was published still had room for improvement. I have already reduced the time it takes to build a maze by at least half! And I think this can be improved even further by more aggressive application of multi-threading)). Yes, this is definitely goes under the "Don't work with stuff you don't have experience with" advice, but.. that is just my thing I guess. It is really hard for me not to push the limits... even if that reads as "bang my head on the limits fruitlessly".

I am still planning to publish the post-LD version sometime soon. But I don't know when would it be.

I hope you enjoyed playing my game, and this LD in general. I definitely did!

Will see you next time.

And please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Cheers!!!