{"author_name":"jprogman","cat":"LD #32","comments":[],"epoch":1429923240,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"17678","p_author":"jprogman","p_authorkey":"15225","p_urlkey":"52984","p_title":"\u201cAy Pinatas!\u201d \u2014 Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #32","p_event":"LD32","p_time":"1429923240","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"15225","us_name":"jprogman","us_username":"jprogman","event_start":"1429228800","event_key":"27","event_name":"LD32"},"text":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-32\/?action=preview&amp;uid=15225\"><img class=\" aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/compo2\/\/444368\/15225-shot1-1429493637.png-eq-900-500.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"336\" height=\"252\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-32\/?action=preview&amp;uid=15225\"><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">&#8212; You can play the game by clicking here &#8212;<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <p style=\"text-align: left\">I say this Ludum Dare entry went along as I wanted to go &#8212; give and take a few features. &#8220;Ay Pinatas!&#8221; is my fifth game to enter Ludum Dare. (You can see <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/author\/jprogman\/\">my other entries<\/a> in my journal.) I&#8217;m glad to get the general idea all completed and some people who have played it seemed to enjoy it too.<\/p>\n <p style=\"text-align: left\">Now, I would like to share my development story on how it all went &#8212; my postmortem report!<\/p>\n <h2 style=\"text-align: left\">The good:<\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Enemies &amp; combat <\/strong>&#8211; This time, for a change, I managed to add enemies in the game. Without it, the game would had suffered the same fate as my previous entry &#8220;Parallel Worlds.&#8221; While I had more enemy ideas during development, I&#8217;m glad to have three different kinds programmed. The homing pinatas is my favorite and shows that I still know my trigonometry! The combat is simple enough, but I wanted to key things up to add bonuses for destroying more pinatas in a short time &#8212; a spree. The spree is important for scoring.<\/li>\n <li style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Animation<\/strong> &#8211; Exhausting, but happy to get the player&#8217;s animation done! It wasn&#8217;t easy due to a couple factors: 1) small resolution &#8212; only 12&#215;12 pixels; 2) 8-directions. Time consuming, but was able to cut corners with flipping. \u00a0 Sadly, I wasn&#8217;t able to add different enemy sprite art other than the generic &#8220;evil pinata ball.&#8221;<\/li>\n <li style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Special effects<\/strong> &#8211; I love the confetti explosion! What irks me is memory leakage overtime. I don&#8217;t know how Flixel recycle particles, so that is something I needed to find out soon.<\/li>\n <li style=\"text-align: left\"><strong>Camera<\/strong> &#8211; It was simple thanks to Flixel. Although, I was especially proud to fix the camera range (the area which the camera can pan) so it prevent unnecessary scrolling.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h2>The bad:<\/h2>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>No audio<\/strong> &#8211; Once again, I had to sacrifice my time with the audio to finish the game. I find the programming to take 1-1\/2 days to get the game running, but I still got more to do at that point.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Level design<\/strong> &#8211; Because I had only 2 hours left, I didn&#8217;t put a lot of time designing levels. So, the world is quite short to what I had in mind. Most of the blame is how to save the level design into a file and embed it into Flash. I was using single text numbers to represent tile types. While that is a good idea, I was out of luck when I&#8217;m up to 10.\u00a0 Time was short, so I didn&#8217;t bother with that flaw.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Lack of pizzazz<\/strong> &#8211; I wanted to add more effects to add excitement to the game. While I got the confetti done, I still had more to include to express more excitement.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Candy Meter Implementation<\/strong> &#8211; It&#8217;s an interesting feature to not overfill yourself with candy; you&#8217;ll explode! Although, there was no warning to you to not overfill other than what I&#8217;ve said on my description. I was intending to add a candy meter to illustrate how dangerously close you are to overfilling.<\/li>\n <li><strong>No story<\/strong> &#8211; I had a story in mind to help explain what the main character is and why it&#8217;s stuck with a sweeper instead of a broom. The story is a factory making state-of-the-art pinatas that mistakenly turned against humans. One pinata is on the humans&#8217; side, which is the main character.<\/li>\n <li><strong>No title screen<\/strong> &#8211; Like ouch! My last few minutes was spent to spruce up the levels and add enough enemies. So I had no time at all to add a title screen.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>At this point, I wanted to develop a post-competition version of &#8220;Ay Pinata&#8221; to add what was missing or just to improve what I couldn&#8217;t during development. (I really wanted to add sound!) Be sure to keep in touch for the latest development on that. Here&#8217;s a teaser on what that version would look like:<\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/aypinatas_enhance.png\"><img class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-462854\" src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/aypinatas_enhance-300x222.png\" alt=\"&quot;Ay Pinatas&quot; -- postcompo teaser\" width=\"267\" height=\"198\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/aypinatas_enhance-300x222.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/aypinatas_enhance.png 324w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 267px) 100vw, 267px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p>Hope you could give &#8220;Ay Pinata!&#8221; a try and share your comment on the page! Thanks for playing and rating my game!<\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"April 24th, 2015 7:54 pm","title":"\u201cAy Pinatas!\u201d \u2014 Postmortem"}