Ah it feels good to be able to write a postmortem again. Last one was for LD34 which was... basically forever ago.

I had three reasons to enter and finish LD41. The first was the magnificent Keynote by @philstrahl, where he said that the secret to LD was making a game that only you could make. I couldn't agree more, and wanted to do my bit.

The second was because I came up with two jokes that I thought were funny and wanted to put these jokes on screen.

The third was as a technical experiment, to see how far I could push my point and click adventure engine and scripting language by trying to stuff a platform game into it. I'd always struggled to squeeze story into platform games in previous Ludum Dares, it never really worked properly and I wanted to see if the benefit of experience and fancy new tools would make a difference.

The writing for the game took the entire first day. The dating sim bit was by far the single most complicated bit of scripting I've ever done and required an awful lot of paperwork in the background for me to figure out all the various combinations. What made it even more complicated is that each character can pair up with two other characters so that people can be... creative... in how they set these characters up. I never want to do this sort of thing again, but I'm glad that people have responded to the inner lives of these brave (and not so brave) soldiers.

The second day was coding and getting the game actually running and doing The Full Vlambeer for the run and gun bit. I don't think I've ever made a game with any action in it before so this was especially exciting and new for me. I knew the more juice I could add to those bits the better they'd work even if it was really only for a few seconds at a time. Hacking in the platform game character controller and keyboard/gamepad controls for the dialog puzzles and menus was extremely painful and took WAY too much time.

Third day was art and music and just generally making the whole game feel a bit more coherent and complete. Was a stressful, awful day and I'm a bit disappointed by how little background art I have but I think each world in this game looks pretty much like it should, if... only just.

When I launched it... I was pretty miserable and worried, but the response so far has been really positive as far as I can tell... and so I've, eventually, decided that I actually quite like this game now. From a technical point of view I'm thrilled with what I was able to achieve, it's kinda crazy how much I've come on since the last little adventure I made for this competition.

Final note: I think I much prefer doing the Jam to the Compo. I had to do the jam because i'm not in a position to be able to publish the base code I started with because that's part of a commercial project, but I found that extra day made all the difference. It's... definitely the best thing I've ever made for this competition. I'm not sure if the score it gets will reflect that but I don't actually care, this is definitely 100% a huge success.

Not going to link to it here because I've got enough ratings to get a score. Just want to say thanks to everyone who's played and rated it!