I thought I would do a quick post-mortem on my game for LD 40 (The Exploding Factory).

The game concept was derived from an old classic, the "I Love Lucy" scene where they are trying to package chocolates coming down a factory line, and it ends up malfunctioning and spitting out a bunch of candies. And in order to combat this, they eat the chocolates to try and keep up. It felt like a pretty solid idea, and from the comments I was getting, sounds like I wasn't alone on that, as it fit the theme pretty well.

With my still somewhat limited visual and game design abilities, the execution was still somewhat lacking in quality, admittedly. The game play was very simple, where all you do is click on an item and click on the box to deposit it. This is fine at the start, but it quickly ramps up in difficulty to the point of where it becomes impossible to keep up. That was the source of most of the complaints in the comments, where the feeling was that the difficulty ramps up too quickly. I wanted to give the game a finish state, but it might have gotten there a bit too early. I think some more play-testing of the game play probably would have been better too.

Graphics-wise, I am still pretty weak at that. I did actually put in some animations this time around, which I haven't really done much of on my past entries, so I'm pretty happy about that. But I think that is probably where I need to work on things the most. I hope to work on a slightly larger scale project here to hopefully work on graphics a bit more, but we'll see.

The music and sound effects were more or less an after thought, but were serviceable... so nothing to write home about there.

The good news is that the actual mechanical execution (i.e. scripting) was still pretty solid and relatively bug free, so I think, if I were to say a strong suit, would be that. I just need to work on game design and graphics to help push me up higher in the quality department.

The ranking I got was about average, mostly the same rankings I've gotten on every entry I have put out. I still wish that the ranking process was a little bit more, but I think I've gotten over that and can enjoy the game making process more so than the ranking. I guess with that said, I will probably be back for the next one, and hopefully with some improvements to my game design abilities!