So it’s been a couple of weeks and I think I’m finally ready to put up a post-mortem for the game. (the game can be found here http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=41214 )

This was my first ever Ludum Dare and I was lucky enough to team up with David Tredeau at the Boise Game Developers Group Game Jam.

What went wrong?

There were a couple of things that could have gone better.  Work obligations cut the amount of development time from 72 to 48 hours.  That extra 24 could have been handy for adding some missing pieces into the game and tweaking the difficulty abit.

We have an issue with the jump not registering sometimes when you are on a moving or jump-through platform.  We weren’t able to fix this issue in out allotted time, and it is still partially an issue.  The game also has a pretty steep difficulty.  We were able to tweak it a bit before our time ran out to make it fun, but there are a few spots in the level that need smoothing.

A couple more levels or a much longer level would have also been good.  Once you get past the couple of hard parts the level becomes easy to beat.  The final issue was the looping sound, we didnt have time to properly loop the background music, and I forgot to kill off the sound when you restart.  So you would get the music finishing after retrying a level when you die.

What went right.

It’s fun.  It is actually funner than I was expecting.  The physics and lighting turned out better than we had hoped, and the graphics and sound were great.  (The only thing we didn’t create were the music and ghost sounds.)  David did an awesome job on the concept and the graphics.  The man is a machine.

The ghost sounds were a happy accident.  We were playing with positional audio and had it set to randomly pick a ghost and play the peekaboo sound every 5 to 10 seconds from the ghosts position. We messed up so it would pick a ghost as soon as the other ghost stopped playing its sound.  The end effect was a lot creepier than we expected so we left it in.

What’s left?

Response has been really good, so we are going to go for it and try to make it into a commercially viable game!  We are moving from the HTML5/javascript engine we used to Unity so we will have to rebuild a good portion of the base functionality, but in the end I think it will look and perform better as well.

I guess thats it for my post-mortem.  This will definitely not be my last Ludum Dare.

-Glen Colby /David Tredeau