LD42 - Yes, finally!
WOW. My first time making it to the top 10, which is still unbelievable!
Here's a short post-mortem, as it went really well, all things considered.
Clearly the decision to go all 2D and minimalistic paid off. Even though graphics still aren't my strong suit and the art in my game was mediocre, going for a strict minimalist style somehow got me into the top 100 for graphics which is a pretty good trade-off. Compared to my previous LD entries where I got tripped up trying to do 3D and did not do too great as a result, 2D really is much more achievable for a compo entry, where I actually had enough time to focus on game mechanics and polish.
The decision to go with a familiar genre - top down shooter - paid off as well. I've always thought that game jams tend to be easy mode if you're doing either a 2D platformer or top down shooter. Not just because its done to death and relatively easy to achieve, but because players just get it, having played so many variants of it. No lengthy tutorials required, its easy to understand, controls are intuitive, everything just clicks. I always trip up on doing tutorials well, and I'm glad that this game was pretty self-explanatory.
The amount of polish matters. A LOT. After having experienced a few jams, I realized its really all about the polish sometimes. I did a lot of tweaking on small matters to make stuff "feel just right", such as the physic impact of bullets, movement of the player character, the death animation. I'm surprised at how well I scored on audio and mood as well, as my ambient soundscape was basically slapping together various pad synths on LMMS, and added reverb to every sound FX. Much better than my past LD entries, where audio was basically an afterthought.
A systematic approach to completing the game did pay off as well. I put up my very first build on day 1 for testing, with about 5 test levels. That allowed me time to gather some initial player feedback, and also helped to guide my focus on making sure that the levels are watertight, without any major bugs and to settle on a consistent design. This is the part of the game jam which I usually dread - the "point of no return", where all the possibilities the game could be collapses into a single invariant state. After getting over this point, things were smooth sailing - then it was just coming up with the levels without having to revise or re-do previous levels.
Leaving the part which can be scaled back last. As all the game mechanics were already tried and tested, and it was just a matter of weaving a logical flow through the mechanics, I left level design to the last. Although I ran out of steam in the last few stages (which is why the level design suffers a bit then), I could easily scale back on the the number of levels and the game would still feel no less complete. I recall this talk about an inverted pyramid here - Article on Gamasutra- which is totally applicable for game jams as well.
With that, I'd really like to thank all the players rating my game and providing great feedback, and especially the streamers playing my game! I will be taking all feedback in to refine my game for a post jam release, so stay tuned!
