We're almost at the end of the rating phase, making it a good time to look back on Shrinking Panes (and to try and attract some last minute ratings :wink:). Thank you to everybody who has already played and rated it -- your feedback is greatly appreciated, and I've tried to address some of it in the post-compo release.

The Good

• The narrative. I've been blown away by the number of people who said they enjoyed the story -- it's only 10 lines of dialogue! -- and I'm going to make more of an effort to include some sort of exposition in my future Ludum Dare entries. It also proved a good way to inject some humor into what would otherwise have been a fairly dull experience.
• The characters. There are only three visible characters, and each is represented by a rectangle (or cube). This was originally intended as placeholder art, but the more time I spent staring at the Professor and her Assistant the more I came to love them. I've come to the realization that a consistent style is far more important than a particularly flashy one, and that minimalism can work to my advantage.
• The plan. I've already admitted that Shrinking Panes is not the game I planned to make -- it's not a top-down shooter about somebody trapped in a shrinking box -- but I drew up a prioritized list of features and tried to spend an appropriate amount of time on each of them. Without this plan, I wouldn't have finished in time for the Compo.

The Bad

• The bugs. There's a lot I've clearly forgotten (or never truly understood) about developing in 3D, and the initial release had some fairly spectacular bugs: the player and enemy could phase through the glass under certain conditions, the mouse controls would go crazy on window changes, and the camera could be flipped upside down by looking at the player's feet. (This last bug is still in there -- let's pretend it's an Easter Egg.)
• The textures. I wish I'd had time to introduce a few simple textures to spice up the lab: even a simple bump mapping to imply that the floor or ceiling were tiled would be a great improvement.
• The music. It's not as bad as untRACEable -- nobody's ears bled this time -- but the loop is too simple. Next time, more variation!
• The web build. I always leave this until the last minute, and there are always problems. Maybe next time I'll be more disciplined: even building once a day and asking a few people to play it would likely help a lot.

There you have it. I'm sitting at about 40 ratings, which is twice what I got last time, and overall I'm very proud of how Shrinking Panes turned out. I guess we'll see how proud I should be in 3 days time. :laughing: