Hey everybody! :smiley:

As per usual, the time has come for me to write a Post Mortem for my Ludum Dare submission.

This time, I am proud to introduce to you:

Press the Buttons

Press the buttons is short escape game with a twist. In addition to looking around for some way out, you must also regularly press some buttons in a sequence. Doing so will prevent a timer from reaching zero. Which would be a dire turn of events, indeed! (Or so a charming disembodied voice will tell you)

Press the Buttons was conceived with the following tools: - IDE : Visual Studio 19 - Game Engine : Unity 2019 - 2D Graphics : Paint & Gimp - 3D Graphics : Blender - Audio : Audacity, Fruity Loops 20

Press the Buttons is my 4th game I managed to ship for Ludum Dare, but only the 2nd I could submit for the compo. My other 3 submissions were done with another account for LD 24, LD 27, and LD 46. Managing to ship a game for the Compo is a big deal to me. Especially since I somehow managed to do so without compromising too much on the quality of the game.

What went well?

• First and foremost, I glad that I spent very little time coming up with an idea for the game. I usually have several ideas piling up over the first morning. So I end up coding some generic features such as Menus or Game Flow. This time, the idea to make an escape room with a twist came merely minutes after reading the theme. I first imagined it as a joke but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.
• Of course there are still a few bugs remaining in the game, but compared to previous LD submissions, I am quite satisfied with the level of polish of the game. Especially for a game submitted for the Compo.
• In addition to having a satisfying level of polish, I'm also glad to have had the time to implement several "Nice to have" features such as Subtitles for the voice in the game (there are a few more but you'll have to look for them :wink:).
• Last LD, I wasted a lot of time figuring out several things in Unity since It had been a long time since my previous project with Unity (I'm more of a C++ programmer). This time, having learned from my previous game, 3D Modeling and Animating was a lot faster (so much so, that all 3D models were ready by the end of the first day).
• I'm especially proud of the sound design of the game. Very often, sound is done at the end. This time, I decided to spend much more time thinking about sound. In the end, I managed to compose a small background music loop, record several lines for the voice of a character in the game, and implemented some feedback sound effects for most interactions of the game. All of this resulting in something quite satisfying.

What didn't go so well?

• First and foremost, I guess I should talk about my attempt to code my own 1st person controller. It worked for the most part. But collisions were weird. A few hours before the end, I completely scraped it and made one handling physics a bit better. But since it was a last minute change, it caused several bugs I had to fix in a short amount of time.
• One of the biggest causes of time loss during this Compo was that I didn't take the time to use some prefabs. Because of that, any later changes to objects such as chests were costly in time since in many cases, I had to manually setup each object one by one.
• Some of you have mentioned that, the ending was somewhat underwhelming. The reason for that is that for most of the Compo, I focused mainly on the game mechanics without thinking too much of what the ending should look like. A few hours before the dreaded submission hour, I had to do something, so I ended up making an ending screen in as little time as possible.
• As mentioned before, changing 1st person controllers at the last minute cause several bug. Those bugs, I fixed in some shamefully hacky way. For example, the safes in the game used to open towards the player and push him/her if necessary. With the new controller, the player would sometimes be pushed outside the game boundaries. I ended up changing the animation so that it wouldn't even touch the player.
• At first, I had hoped to add more interactions to the game such as pulling out books, or entering passwords in a terminal. Time wasn't really lacking here. I just didn't take the time to think out my level design enough to have something coherent. So when the time came to finalize the level, it was already too late to add anything.

What to do next time? or what should I keep doing ?

• Use Prefabs. Seeing how much time I lost, prefabs will definitely help me next time.
• Keep spending at least a bit of time thinking about Sound Design. It makes a huge difference!
• Spend a bit more time on the Level Design. This time around, I placed many elements pretty much at random.
• Next time, I'd like to try to simplify the game loop of my game and perhaps even toy with procedural generation. Hopefully, that'll leave me more time to work on the game. And perhaps increase the lifetime of the game.
• Finally, I want to keep having fun taking part in Ludum Dare. :wink:

That's all I have to say for now. I hope you've had as much fun making games as I have!