I Made a Thing!

Woo! This was Compo #5 for me, and the timing could have been better for putting aside a weekend to make a game. In addition to approaching finals, I participated in a programming challenge that took up about nine hours on Sunday, so I really had to think hard about how to budget my time.

My strong areas tend to be in Graphics and Audio, so I try to focus on different categories for each event to expand my strengths. Last event, I aimed for top 100 in Overall and Fun, so this event I'm shooting for top 100 in Theme and Mood.

What Went Well

Overall, I think the jam went pretty well.

• The Parallax: I brought back one of my favorite visual tricks, parallax! The background scrolls by in all of its layered glory.

• The Audiovisual Gravy: I prioritized "game feel" elements to fairly good effect, with explosions, button feedback, and camera shake (if you haven't already seen it, I would highly recommend this talk on The Art of Screenshake.

• The Scope: Although there were a few extra elements I would like to have implemented, I feel like I scoped the project reasonably well and made something that was close to my original vision.

• The Logo: Before the jam, I made a personal logo to display as the game loads! Here we go, space fish.

• The "Story": I haven't tried to make a narrative for a Ludum Dare entry before. It's pretty bare-bones, but existent this time around.

What Went Poorly

Any project is incomplete without its pitfalls.

• The Schedule: Once again, I committed around nine hours on Sunday to a programming challenge, so I had to downscope a bit to get a game out on time. This ultimately meant me frantically throwing some audio together in MuseScore and SFXR in the last three hours.

• The Audio: I'm not particularly fond of the direction I went with the music, but it fits reasonably well. One of these days, I hope to make a simpler rhythm-based game and give the Audio category the love it deserves.

• The GUI: Man, creating a GUI from scratch in Pygame really drains hours out of the Compo workflow. The advantage of this is that I'm forced to be really deliberate about how I want things to look and interact; the downside is that I have less time to, you know, make the game. Speaking of which...

• The... Game: It's really not that fun after 30 seconds. I'll pretend it's just a social commentary experience.

Going Forward

I'm already excited for LD45, but hope to make some minor changes to my workflow.

• Newey GUI: I tried out a new architecture for managing frames in-game that I liked, so I might add some support to my base code for next event. Additionally, having some base code for GUI elements would also be nice.

• No Double Dipping: Next time, only one hackathon per weekend, please.

Thanks for Reading!

If you want to check out my game, Microtransaction Mages, check out my profile! Any feedback, especially critical, is super helpful moving forward.