Hello fellow indie developers!

First of all thanks to all of you who tried our game and all who will try it in the future, this has been our first Ludum Dare and the first finished game for all of us. A few weeks ago one of our programmers had to insist a lot on participating, we finally did and we couldn’t be happier with the decision.

How did it go?

So, after a long working day, all of us got together, setting up the room for the upcoming 72hours, the closer the countdown was to 0, the more nervous we felt. After the topic was announced we spent about two hours deciding what to do, good and bad ideas, in or out of the topic, they all seemed too hard for us. It was already 4am and we headed home feeling our own defeat. Next morning (9:30am) we came out with a rough idea, spent about an hour figuring out the mechanics and what had to be done… but not deeply enough.

The first few hours of coding went well (we have 2 programmers in the team), the so called “pair-programming” was working wonders as they both connected as a true hive mind, at least while it lasted. Everything started to rumble after a few hours, as everyone worked from their computer, we then realized that the preproduction on the programming side wasn’t enough, so the “spaghetti” became the true monster of our game. No version control was used, and so, as soon as both codes were put together half of it had to be reorganized to fit the other half.

When it comes to graphics, we really messed up on the aspect ratio. It was all designed keeping in mind that it should be usable on mobile devices (for the future) and computers, so we ended up making it 1:1. Obviously this isn’t the answer for any of both platforms, provably the solution would be to draw everything separately and to put it all together with a relatively large background (wouldn’t it be?). Also, with better managing of time, we would have done more animations and a better hit reaction for the “victim”.

The sound design went alright, everything but the alarm noise and the “tic-tac” on the song was made by us. The main song came out quite quickly, which is nice. But we lacked on testing the sounds straight in the game, we waited until a whole bunch of them were ready and polished only to realize that they didn’t fit.

GOOD:

– Ludum dare in general, we had fun, we all survived, it’s something yeeeey!

– General idea of the game, simple, easy to make (+1for preproduction).

– The fun factor and sense of humour turned to be the main factor.

– There’s not much on the game, but what’s there, is solid and works fine (at least for what we have seen)

– We are very happy with the result, even with all the bad stuff I’m about to write below…

BAD:

– No version control was used for programming.

– Tutorial needs to be more comprehensive as some testers ends up spamming the mouse button as well as the space bar to raise the bar (the space bar can be spammed, but only has an effect once the bar gets to the target zone).

– Preproduction for programming was far from enough (-1 for preproduction)

– The drawn scene screen (canvas) ratio was horrible (-1 for preproduction)

– Ended up making more music and sounds that what we finally implemented (-1 for preproduction)

– We should have prepared all our food the day before… ehem… les pizza next time ehem…

– Well skill and speed will improve eventually, won’t they? :C

…

Preproduction result: -3     ->HORRIBLU!