Well, LD 41 is over for me. I have enough ratings and I'll don't have the time to play anymore game in the week. So might as well do a short Post-Mortem and wait until the results.

My game : Dungeon of High School Romance

When the theme was revealed, I was so down because that was the less interesting one for me. But oh well it's 3 AM and I'm already awake so I'll start somewhere. The first thing coming to my mind was the title, silly and self-explanatory.

For a long time I wanted to try to make a simple dungeon crawler in javascript. I already had an engine allowing a character to move on a map in plain text. It was from a scrapped adventure game about romance and high society. I didn't liked the original idea, but I liked the idea of a romance game with an old text-based dungeon crawler style.

And then I went to sleep. I was really tired.

The first day started really really bad. I wanted to create a new engine generating a random maze, but I had no competences and time to make a complex algorithm. Nothing worked, no idea where to start the code. Three hours after starting to code and going nowhere, I scrapped everything and started by making the title screen and the intro cutscene.

There were actually no game behind the screen, but it felt like the game was going somewhere. During the weekend that's how I worked : How's the game looks and feel is more important than how it's actually play. If it's LOOK like a game, then it's a game. I guess.

Well after the second day I started taking note and making plans, to create actual content and having clear goals, but starting with nothing and trying to have something to show as fast as possible is great for the motivation. At least it worked for me.

I scrapped a lot of idea and a lot of content : Different level, increasing difficulty, more items... But overall I think this game was the most complete I ever done for a LD. I don't know if it's the best, but it's the one with the most ideas and mechanics. And everything kind of work together. There is A LOT of flaws, but the core system work quite nicely, and it's short enough to prevent the game from being boring.

Will I make a post-LD version ? I don't know. Usually I don't do post-LD version, I just re-use the code I made for futur projects. But here, I kind of want to rework it. Or at least make a more complete game with the engine.

As usual, this LD was great, but also it was a really cool project to work on. I hope in the future my LD games continues to increase in size and ambitions, because I have so much weird games to do. And so little time...

( Oh and I guess you can play at my game here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/dungeon-of-high-school-romance )