{"author_link":"\/users\/kyavi","author_name":"kyavi","author_uid":"kyavi","comments":[],"epoch":1556744329,"event":"LD44","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":155752,"likes":13,"metadata":{"p_key":"131838","p_author":"kyavi","p_authorkey":"1152753","p_urlkey":"348032","p_title":"bird food postmortem","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD44","p_time":"1556744329","p_likes":"13","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1152753","us_name":"kyavi","us_username":"kyavi","event_start":"1556236800","event_key":"75","event_name":"LD 44"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD44","removed_author":false},"_superparent":139254,"_trust":1,"author":152753,"body":"**#ld44** is my first Ludum Dare, and it was a *fantastic* experience. What\nstarted as a few hours of stress and worry turned into something really\nenlightening and special and I've been *soooo* upbeat all week since! Maybe\nit's the sleep deprivation (!) but on Monday I felt so completely pumped and\naccomplished.\n\nThere's **way**  more written here than intended, but I think (hope?) it's a\nvaluable insight into how the design of the game was approached and how its\nfailures appeared. You'll find out more about the game than expected **^-^**.\nIf you haven't seen bird food yet and have time, please\n[play before reading](https:\/\/kyavi.itch.io\/ld44)!\n\n## Overview\n\nThe game was made in 48 hours, submitted for the jam because the codebase\nit's built on is a work in progress and releasing the source code would be\ntroublesome. All gameplay code and art was created during the jam, and the\nsounds were created with Bfxr except for the guillotine sound, which is two\ncreative commons sounds combined and altered.\n\nComing up with a mechanic for the theme was **hard**, right? A lot of the\ndifficult came from the wording of it being very narrative-applicable. It\nfilled my head with metaphor about the workplace and thoughts of dystopia which\nare interesting, but i wanted to focus on gameplay. Approaching it from the perspective of **sacrifice** made it easier to work with.\n\n**bird food** has you controlling a little worm whose objective is to make it\nthrough a series of grid-based levels. wormy moves at a fixed speed, and can\nmove left, right, up, and down within an 8x8 grid. The levels are built on a\n16x16 grid. To be allowed to move through a level, wormy must consume all the\nfruit present on the grid. wormy grows as food is consumed, which creates\nproblems for the player to solve when navigating tight areas to collect more\nfruit. wormy can use conveniently placed guillotines to remove body segments to\nreach previously unobtainable fruit.\n\n## Core mechanic\n\n![eeezgif-2-3747eb1d38a4.gif](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/24375.gif)\n\nThe core mechanic of cutting wormy up with the guillotine is the main hook of\nthe game, and I'm really happy with how it feels and acts. the guillotine\n**feels** good to use, and **hopefully** inspires a thought of \"oh, that's cool!\"\nin the player. The sound and screen shake add so much to making slicing up\nwormy feel **satisfying**. You sliced wormy up when leaving a level even when\nyou didn't need to, didn't you, you monster?\n\nIt ended up being difficult to design with on its own, because the situations\nthe design can force are so limited and obvious. Based on the feedback of the\ngame I **think** this didn't matter too much, because in the amount of time\nsomeone dedicates to playing a jam game, the **idea** of the guillotine carries\nitself, but for a longer game experience there would need to be additional\nelements in the world to drive new situations and challenges as the player\nprogresses: buttons that need to be triggered together by a long wormy, or\nseparately by a shorter one, and maybe attacking elements like rising floor\nspikes or arrows that would hit a long wormy, but that a shorter wormy could\navoid.\n\nAnother potential aspect is having multiple guillotines. I managed to code\nmyself into a hole with that one: a single guillotine was implemented, then\nreferenced in a few separate places, and by the time I wanted to try\nmultiple guillotines it became difficult to think about tearing the code apart\nwithin the given timeframe. Lesson learnt for future jams, almost **always**\nthrow stuff into lists. In most cases it's not too much extra effort to make\nyour code operate on multiple instances of things **if** you're thinking about\nit. But sloppiness here became a pain point.\n\n## The controls, the grid, the horror\n\nWhich brings us to the **biggest** pain point. Despite every comment being\npositive (which I'm *so* happy about!), almost all of them mention the same\nthing: the grid, and to some extent how that relates to the controls. As\nmentioned, wormy segments reside in an **8x8** grid, whilst level segments live\nin a **16x16** grid. They're different. It sucks, and I couldn't think of an\nadequate solution in time after making the mistake. When working with a grid\nbased game, you really need to have a grid size chosen before working on level\ndesign - if you decide to change that grid size, you often end up throwing a\nlot of design away. I decided early on, pre-level design, that 8x8 movement\n**feels** good on its own. With a fixed rate of movement, the grid size and\nspeed directly impact the responsiveness of the controls. When it came to doing\nthe level art, 16x16 just kind of ... happened. I'm not really sure why. It was\na mistake, and it negatively impacted the result.\n\nHalf way through the jam I realised that **I** enjoyed the controls even\nwithin the mixed grid sizes, whilst also realising it's **extremely**\nfrustrating at first. I tried to work around it. Changing the player movement\nto be 16x16 **sucked**, soooooo so much. It feels **so** unresponsive that it\nwas just awful, far more so than the feeling of miscalculating the movement in\nan 8x8 grid. The easily tweakable aspect is the rate at which wormy moves.\nwormy moves slower in the released version than throughout most of development,\nbut based on the comments probably should have been slowed down more.\n\nThe ideal would have been to design some level elements at 8x8 rather than\n16x16, to keep the responsiveness of controls without affecting player\nexpectations that the 16x16 levels give. Even after messing up the grid spacing\nof the levels this possibly could have been mitigated by making the fruit\nreside in the 8x8 grid - but that was another oversight.\n\nMinor grievance: the guillotine takes up **three** grid squares, which made it\ndifficult to place effectively in the small levels. It also can't be\nrotated.\n\n## Level design\n\n> But, overall, you did a good job, especially how you teach players how to\n> play without any text at the first levels. -\n> [@dainiel-moreno](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/users\/daniel-moreno)\n\nThis comment means a lot to me, because designing levels is often something I\nstruggle with from a creative perspective, but i really wanted to do a good\ntechnical job. The intended design was:\n\n1. Introduce the player to the movement in the first level.\n2. Separately introduce the mechanic of fruit unlocking the level exit in the\n   second level.\n3. Introduce the guillotine in its own on the third level.\n4. Introduce the guillotine and fruit together.\n\nIt's only on the **fourth** level that the guillotine is required to pass the\nstage.\n\nOriginally, the first level didn't have any fruit - just a block in the centre\nthat you would have to navigate around. As i wasn't able to produce any\nmusic for the game, the first level ended up feeling really **dead**. Fruit got\nadded so that the player would experience something satisfying (the 'ding!'\nsound) quickly which the navigation alone didn't deliver, but the fruit is\nplaced before wormy can move out of the beginning narrow passage. The player\nmight has to think about fruit pickup affecting the level exit on the second\nlevel.\n\n![birdfood12.png](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/2437b.png)\n\nLevel three is a special case, having no fruit but requiring the space bar to\nbe pressed to move forward. I don't know how elegant this appears, but it does\nits job reasonably okay (with the minor bug that pressing space to restart that\nlevel when dead causes the end of the level to unlock - most players probably\ndon't experience this).\n\nThe fourth level didn't **require** the guillotine at first, but eventually I\nfound that replicating the narrow passage of the first with some fruit at the\nend requiring a guillotine slice to reach worked well without too much\ndifficultly at this early point.\n\n![birdfood34.png](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/2437e.png)\n\nI was worried about successfully communicating to the player where a level\nends, when they can't exit, and why. The art for the level exit indicators\naren't great. Thankfully, the 'ding!' sound is extremely effective and\ngratifying, and nobody mentioned struggling with this.\n\n## Missed opportunities\n\nSound was troublesome. A few people mentioned that with the difficult\ncontrols, having a sound match the movement of wormy would assist in moving\naccurately. They're completely right, and it's part of why fruit so densely\npacks some segments of the levels. I tried to add a Pacman-like movement sound\nbut the things I tried ended up sounding irritating. I should have tried harder\nto fit this in.\n\nA **great** comment was someone suggesting that levels change colour to show\nprogress. This would have been such a low effort implementation that would add\na lot. I realised just after publishing that there should have been **some**\nsense of indicating the player was approaching the end of the game because\nwithout that, it becomes so tempting to quit when things get frustrating.\nHaving a progression indicator would have meant a lot.\n\nA similar problem was with **level goals**. I would have liked to have more\nflexibility with the win conditions for a level, ideally needing a wormy be\ngreater or shorter than a number of segments to pass. The problem with this was\nthe same as the progression - I failed to think of a way to communicate those\nthings to the player. The general thought was some sort of artwork depicting\n'pips' indicating a number of segments wormy should have to pass the level, but\nit didn't work out. Communicating something to the player was a lot of the\nproblem with the movement system, too - some players think it's too fast, or\nthat 16x16 might be better, but the core problem is that 8x8 tile movement within\na 16x16 tile world goes against **expectations**.\n\n## Theme\n\nVery few commenters mentioned the theme, I'm excited to see how the ratings\ncome back for that category. The design was fully **intended** to adhere to the\ntheme and came to life **because** of the theme. The struggle of wormy\nrepresents the struggle of employment, of cost, and of life. wormy works hard\nto gain things wormy desires (fruit), but part of that earning ends up costing\nthe same thing that is given up to earn more.\n\nThe name of the game, **bird food**, slightly alludes to the metaphor: the\nperception of wormy in the player's eye is that wormy is everything about the\nworld. Realistically, wormy is still just one element of the food chain.\nBut the name is mostly nonsense that was thought up an hour before submission\nwhen I had to draw the splash screen :)\n\nA minor thing that **might** have affected perception of this would be\nbeing able to carry segments through levels. I was worried about how this might\naffect design of the levels, but in the end it wouldn't have negatively\naffected anything.\n\n## Development tools\n\nYou've played the game, right? And you've made it through *all* of this text,\nwhich I'm so grateful for! You get an easter egg! Open up\n[the game](https:\/\/kyavi.itch.io\/ld44), start the\nfirst level, and press `shift` + `e`. Surprise! The level editor is in the\nfinal game! Just before intending to remove it before deployment I figured\nnobody would trigger it **accidentally**, and I worked hard on it, so it stayed\nin **^-^**. Making a level editor is a **big** time investment in a 48 hour\ngame, but it made the final hours sooooo much easier.\n\n![birdfoodedit.png](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/2439a.png)\n\nThe controls:\n\n- left click a tile to add a wall, right click to remove (this **was**\n  draggable until a bug put that to an end, sorry!)\n- hold `f` and left\/right click to add\/remove a fruit\n- hold `g` and left\/right click to add the guillotine\n- hold `s` and click to move the **start** position. use the mouse wheel to\n  change its direction\n- hold `e` to move the **end** position in the same way as the start position\n\npressing `ctrl` + `s` (on the devel version) saves the file to something like\nthis:\n\n```\nguillotine 14 10\ngoal 26 4 right\nplayer 4 0 up\nwall 0 0\nwall 0 2\nwall 0 4\nfruit 8 8\nfruit 10 16\nfruit 4 8\n```\n\nWhen you die in a level, pressing `ctrl` + `space` respawns you in edit mode -\nwhich made it easy to make sure fruit was preserved correctly when saved.\n\nThe levels were set to read in a fixed list of file names (`1.lvl`, `2.lvl`,\n`3.lvl`) and if a file doesn't exist, the level starts in edit mode, which made\ndesigning the game as simple as playing through it. I'm a tool junkie, so i\nwas happy with this system, and the expression you get from being able to\n\"draw\" tiles is a great bonus.\n\n## Bugs\n\nTesting is an extremely important step, which I completely **neglected**\nbecause I have nobody to ask to test it :) The only known bug is that sometimes\nwormy's head visually displaces from the rest of the segments. Limiting the\nscope of the project to just a few elements, and accepting some of the\nproblems highlighted instead of striving to improve every aspect of the design,\nsaved a lot of heartache. Having just one minor bug is mostly luck and\nwitchcraft, which I'm extremely thankful for!\n\n## Reception\n\nAlmost **every** comment mentioned the same flaw (the grid), which made it so\nsurprising that **every** comment was also incredibly flattering and kind. I\ndoubt I'll work on a post-ld version of bird food, but I'm so glad to have made\nit and that people enjoyed it - at least one person even finished it! Now that\nyou know how to remove tiles, you can finish it too :)\n\nThank you for playing and reading! <3","comments":2,"comments-timestamp":"2019-05-03T18:58:15Z","created":"2019-05-01T19:47:06Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":155752,"love":13,"love-timestamp":"2019-05-21T18:51:21Z","meta":[],"modified":"2019-05-21T18:51:21Z","name":"bird food postmortem","node-timestamp":"2019-05-01T21:46:07Z","parent":152754,"parents":[1,5,9,139254,152754],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/bird-food\/bird-food-postmortem","published":"2019-05-01T20:58:49Z","scope":"public","slug":"bird-food-postmortem","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":468418},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"155752","n_urlkey":"348032","n_parent":"152754","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/bird-food\/bird-food-postmortem","n_slug":"bird-food-postmortem","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"152753","n_created":"1556740026","n_modified":"1558464681","n_version":"468418","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/44\/bird-food\/bird-food-postmortem","text":"**#ld44** is my first Ludum Dare, and it was a *fantastic* experience. What\nstarted as a few hours of stress and worry turned into something really\nenlightening and special and I've been *soooo* upbeat all week since! Maybe\nit's the sleep deprivation (!) but on Monday I felt so completely pumped and\naccomplished.\n\nThere's **way**  more written here than intended, but I think (hope?) it's a\nvaluable insight into how the design of the game was approached and how its\nfailures appeared. You'll find out more about the game than expected **^-^**.\nIf you haven't seen bird food yet and have time, please\n[play before reading](https:\/\/kyavi.itch.io\/ld44)!\n\n## Overview\n\nThe game was made in 48 hours, submitted for the jam because the codebase\nit's built on is a work in progress and releasing the source code would be\ntroublesome. All gameplay code and art was created during the jam, and the\nsounds were created with Bfxr except for the guillotine sound, which is two\ncreative commons sounds combined and altered.\n\nComing up with a mechanic for the theme was **hard**, right? A lot of the\ndifficult came from the wording of it being very narrative-applicable. It\nfilled my head with metaphor about the workplace and thoughts of dystopia which\nare interesting, but i wanted to focus on gameplay. Approaching it from the perspective of **sacrifice** made it easier to work with.\n\n**bird food** has you controlling a little worm whose objective is to make it\nthrough a series of grid-based levels. wormy moves at a fixed speed, and can\nmove left, right, up, and down within an 8x8 grid. The levels are built on a\n16x16 grid. To be allowed to move through a level, wormy must consume all the\nfruit present on the grid. wormy grows as food is consumed, which creates\nproblems for the player to solve when navigating tight areas to collect more\nfruit. wormy can use conveniently placed guillotines to remove body segments to\nreach previously unobtainable fruit.\n\n## Core mechanic\n\n![eeezgif-2-3747eb1d38a4.gif](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/24375.gif)\n\nThe core mechanic of cutting wormy up with the guillotine is the main hook of\nthe game, and I'm really happy with how it feels and acts. the guillotine\n**feels** good to use, and **hopefully** inspires a thought of \"oh, that's cool!\"\nin the player. The sound and screen shake add so much to making slicing up\nwormy feel **satisfying**. You sliced wormy up when leaving a level even when\nyou didn't need to, didn't you, you monster?\n\nIt ended up being difficult to design with on its own, because the situations\nthe design can force are so limited and obvious. Based on the feedback of the\ngame I **think** this didn't matter too much, because in the amount of time\nsomeone dedicates to playing a jam game, the **idea** of the guillotine carries\nitself, but for a longer game experience there would need to be additional\nelements in the world to drive new situations and challenges as the player\nprogresses: buttons that need to be triggered together by a long wormy, or\nseparately by a shorter one, and maybe attacking elements like rising floor\nspikes or arrows that would hit a long wormy, but that a shorter wormy could\navoid.\n\nAnother potential aspect is having multiple guillotines. I managed to code\nmyself into a hole with that one: a single guillotine was implemented, then\nreferenced in a few separate places, and by the time I wanted to try\nmultiple guillotines it became difficult to think about tearing the code apart\nwithin the given timeframe. Lesson learnt for future jams, almost **always**\nthrow stuff into lists. In most cases it's not too much extra effort to make\nyour code operate on multiple instances of things **if** you're thinking about\nit. But sloppiness here became a pain point.\n\n## The controls, the grid, the horror\n\nWhich brings us to the **biggest** pain point. Despite every comment being\npositive (which I'm *so* happy about!), almost all of them mention the same\nthing: the grid, and to some extent how that relates to the controls. As\nmentioned, wormy segments reside in an **8x8** grid, whilst level segments live\nin a **16x16** grid. They're different. It sucks, and I couldn't think of an\nadequate solution in time after making the mistake. When working with a grid\nbased game, you really need to have a grid size chosen before working on level\ndesign - if you decide to change that grid size, you often end up throwing a\nlot of design away. I decided early on, pre-level design, that 8x8 movement\n**feels** good on its own. With a fixed rate of movement, the grid size and\nspeed directly impact the responsiveness of the controls. When it came to doing\nthe level art, 16x16 just kind of ... happened. I'm not really sure why. It was\na mistake, and it negatively impacted the result.\n\nHalf way through the jam I realised that **I** enjoyed the controls even\nwithin the mixed grid sizes, whilst also realising it's **extremely**\nfrustrating at first. I tried to work around it. Changing the player movement\nto be 16x16 **sucked**, soooooo so much. It feels **so** unresponsive that it\nwas just awful, far more so than the feeling of miscalculating the movement in\nan 8x8 grid. The easily tweakable aspect is the rate at which wormy moves.\nwormy moves slower in the released version than throughout most of development,\nbut based on the comments probably should have been slowed down more.\n\nThe ideal would have been to design some level elements at 8x8 rather than\n16x16, to keep the responsiveness of controls without affecting player\nexpectations that the 16x16 levels give. Even after messing up the grid spacing\nof the levels this possibly could have been mitigated by making the fruit\nreside in the 8x8 grid - but that was another oversight.\n\nMinor grievance: the guillotine takes up **three** grid squares, which made it\ndifficult to place effectively in the small levels. It also can't be\nrotated.\n\n## Level design\n\n> But, overall, you did a good job, especially how you teach players how to\n> play without any text at the first levels. -\n> [@dainiel-moreno](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/users\/daniel-moreno)\n\nThis comment means a lot to me, because designing levels is often something I\nstruggle with from a creative perspective, but i really wanted to do a good\ntechnical job. The intended design was:\n\n1. Introduce the player to the movement in the first level.\n2. Separately introduce the mechanic of fruit unlocking the level exit in the\n   second level.\n3. Introduce the guillotine in its own on the third level.\n4. Introduce the guillotine and fruit together.\n\nIt's only on the **fourth** level that the guillotine is required to pass the\nstage.\n\nOriginally, the first level didn't have any fruit - just a block in the centre\nthat you would have to navigate around. As i wasn't able to produce any\nmusic for the game, the first level ended up feeling really **dead**. Fruit got\nadded so that the player would experience something satisfying (the 'ding!'\nsound) quickly which the navigation alone didn't deliver, but the fruit is\nplaced before wormy can move out of the beginning narrow passage. The player\nmight has to think about fruit pickup affecting the level exit on the second\nlevel.\n\n![birdfood12.png](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/2437b.png)\n\nLevel three is a special case, having no fruit but requiring the space bar to\nbe pressed to move forward. I don't know how elegant this appears, but it does\nits job reasonably okay (with the minor bug that pressing space to restart that\nlevel when dead causes the end of the level to unlock - most players probably\ndon't experience this).\n\nThe fourth level didn't **require** the guillotine at first, but eventually I\nfound that replicating the narrow passage of the first with some fruit at the\nend requiring a guillotine slice to reach worked well without too much\ndifficultly at this early point.\n\n![birdfood34.png](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/2437e.png)\n\nI was worried about successfully communicating to the player where a level\nends, when they can't exit, and why. The art for the level exit indicators\naren't great. Thankfully, the 'ding!' sound is extremely effective and\ngratifying, and nobody mentioned struggling with this.\n\n## Missed opportunities\n\nSound was troublesome. A few people mentioned that with the difficult\ncontrols, having a sound match the movement of wormy would assist in moving\naccurately. They're completely right, and it's part of why fruit so densely\npacks some segments of the levels. I tried to add a Pacman-like movement sound\nbut the things I tried ended up sounding irritating. I should have tried harder\nto fit this in.\n\nA **great** comment was someone suggesting that levels change colour to show\nprogress. This would have been such a low effort implementation that would add\na lot. I realised just after publishing that there should have been **some**\nsense of indicating the player was approaching the end of the game because\nwithout that, it becomes so tempting to quit when things get frustrating.\nHaving a progression indicator would have meant a lot.\n\nA similar problem was with **level goals**. I would have liked to have more\nflexibility with the win conditions for a level, ideally needing a wormy be\ngreater or shorter than a number of segments to pass. The problem with this was\nthe same as the progression - I failed to think of a way to communicate those\nthings to the player. The general thought was some sort of artwork depicting\n'pips' indicating a number of segments wormy should have to pass the level, but\nit didn't work out. Communicating something to the player was a lot of the\nproblem with the movement system, too - some players think it's too fast, or\nthat 16x16 might be better, but the core problem is that 8x8 tile movement within\na 16x16 tile world goes against **expectations**.\n\n## Theme\n\nVery few commenters mentioned the theme, I'm excited to see how the ratings\ncome back for that category. The design was fully **intended** to adhere to the\ntheme and came to life **because** of the theme. The struggle of wormy\nrepresents the struggle of employment, of cost, and of life. wormy works hard\nto gain things wormy desires (fruit), but part of that earning ends up costing\nthe same thing that is given up to earn more.\n\nThe name of the game, **bird food**, slightly alludes to the metaphor: the\nperception of wormy in the player's eye is that wormy is everything about the\nworld. Realistically, wormy is still just one element of the food chain.\nBut the name is mostly nonsense that was thought up an hour before submission\nwhen I had to draw the splash screen :)\n\nA minor thing that **might** have affected perception of this would be\nbeing able to carry segments through levels. I was worried about how this might\naffect design of the levels, but in the end it wouldn't have negatively\naffected anything.\n\n## Development tools\n\nYou've played the game, right? And you've made it through *all* of this text,\nwhich I'm so grateful for! You get an easter egg! Open up\n[the game](https:\/\/kyavi.itch.io\/ld44), start the\nfirst level, and press `shift` + `e`. Surprise! The level editor is in the\nfinal game! Just before intending to remove it before deployment I figured\nnobody would trigger it **accidentally**, and I worked hard on it, so it stayed\nin **^-^**. Making a level editor is a **big** time investment in a 48 hour\ngame, but it made the final hours sooooo much easier.\n\n![birdfoodedit.png](\/\/\/raw\/1b4\/52\/z\/2439a.png)\n\nThe controls:\n\n- left click a tile to add a wall, right click to remove (this **was**\n  draggable until a bug put that to an end, sorry!)\n- hold `f` and left\/right click to add\/remove a fruit\n- hold `g` and left\/right click to add the guillotine\n- hold `s` and click to move the **start** position. use the mouse wheel to\n  change its direction\n- hold `e` to move the **end** position in the same way as the start position\n\npressing `ctrl` + `s` (on the devel version) saves the file to something like\nthis:\n\n```\nguillotine 14 10\ngoal 26 4 right\nplayer 4 0 up\nwall 0 0\nwall 0 2\nwall 0 4\nfruit 8 8\nfruit 10 16\nfruit 4 8\n```\n\nWhen you die in a level, pressing `ctrl` + `space` respawns you in edit mode -\nwhich made it easy to make sure fruit was preserved correctly when saved.\n\nThe levels were set to read in a fixed list of file names (`1.lvl`, `2.lvl`,\n`3.lvl`) and if a file doesn't exist, the level starts in edit mode, which made\ndesigning the game as simple as playing through it. I'm a tool junkie, so i\nwas happy with this system, and the expression you get from being able to\n\"draw\" tiles is a great bonus.\n\n## Bugs\n\nTesting is an extremely important step, which I completely **neglected**\nbecause I have nobody to ask to test it :) The only known bug is that sometimes\nwormy's head visually displaces from the rest of the segments. Limiting the\nscope of the project to just a few elements, and accepting some of the\nproblems highlighted instead of striving to improve every aspect of the design,\nsaved a lot of heartache. Having just one minor bug is mostly luck and\nwitchcraft, which I'm extremely thankful for!\n\n## Reception\n\nAlmost **every** comment mentioned the same flaw (the grid), which made it so\nsurprising that **every** comment was also incredibly flattering and kind. I\ndoubt I'll work on a post-ld version of bird food, but I'm so glad to have made\nit and that people enjoyed it - at least one person even finished it! Now that\nyou know how to remove tiles, you can finish it too :)\n\nThank you for playing and reading! <3","title":"bird food postmortem","wayback_source":[]}