This was my second Ludum Dare entry, and I am much happier with it than the first one I made.
I wrote up a post mortem on my blog, but here are the relevant bits.

Click here to play my awesomeo game!

Post Mortem

A lot of participants in Ludum Dare have been writing post mortems for their games — a way to talk about what went well and what didn’t go so well. So, here’s mine.

What went well

I think the music in my game is definitely its strongest feature. Since I knew my artwork wasn’t amazing, and trying to make animations still scares me, I wanted to make the music a focal point of the game. I think I was able to capture the feeling I was going for.
Since I’m not a game developer, I don’t know much about what is considered “good” game programming practices. I knew that I wanted transitions to be nice — things fading in and out, that kind of thing, so I spent quite a while making constructs in the code that would fade things in and out based on the game clock. I leaned heavily on EndGate’s tutorials and samples to get me pointed in the right direction, and, in the end, I think that the transitions were (for the most part) pretty smooth.

Once I had some of the “engine” working, including the Dance Dance Revolution game part, I was able to fill it in with content. The “Climb the Rope” song, the “Lunchroom Victory” song and the “It’s Only You” song were all recorded between 3:30PM and 6:00PM on Sunday, giving me less than two hours to put it all back together again. Considering the short time frame, everything managed to come together in a somewhat cohesive ball, and I really was proud of what I had accomplished.

What didn’t go so well

I was overly ambitious. I think that’s pretty common in Ludum Dare. My four levels got whittled down to “if I can just get this one level done…” And even then, I started programming in a “victory” vs. “defeat” condition but just ran out of time… so there isn’t a way to lose, and you basically automatically win. Since there aren’t any other levels, the game just ends after Freshman year… which is kinda funny because the song Climb the Rope ended up being 173 beats per minute, which is a pretty damn fast when you’re trying to hit arrows.

I was also very concerned with the medium in which I was presenting my game. With an HTML5 game, you don’t necessarily have full control over everything, especially timing wise. There was a distinct possibility that when people came to play the game, it could get off… and if the sound was off, the arrows would be off, and it just wouldn’t work. I think having a Win32 executable might have alleviated this in some way, but I didn’t really want to learn a new framework (I didn’t do my homework before the competition, so I just wanted to use a framework that I was at least somewhat familiar with).

My intent was to add more self-doubt into the story as you were accomplishing the tasks. This might have helped solidify the “You are the Monster” theme. Since I didn’t have a chance to do that, a lot of the comments I’ve been getting have been “I’m not sure how this fits the theme,” because the connection to the theme is buried into the lyrics of the songs. The songs are hard to listen to while frantically pushing the arrow keys, so my intent was somewhat lost in translation.

When I finally submitted it, I sent it to a couple of people (my brother, one of my coworkers, and my good friend). Two of them were using Internet Explorer, which I never tested on. I did all of my development using Google Chrome, and it turned out there was a bug where it wouldn’t play on Internet Explorer, and upon further investigation, Firefox. It ended up being a simple thing to fix, but I didn’t get a chance to fix it until Monday morning, about 12 hours after the competition ended.

Conclusion

I am not a game programmer. I don’t even pretend to be one. However, I did my best. All things considered (48 hours, doing everything myself, etc), I am pretty proud of what I built. I’m not sure if I’ll ever “finish” the game, but it was much more fulfilling to have a kinda complete (albeit very short) game.