After a grueling 48 hours and a night of decent rest, here is a postmortem of my first compo entry, Bad Tummy Bunny.

What went right:

• The concept – This idea was the first thing that popped into my head. After about 15 minutes I had almost everything laid out in my head. The KISS principle really helped out here so no time was wasted coming up with ideas.
• The graphics (mostly) – I’m a horrible pixel artist. This is the first time I’ve ever actually created anything decent. Coming into the compo, I was very worried about what I was going to do for visuals. In fact, I was just going to use geometric shapes, but I felt that the theme really required some relevant visuals. The biggest thing that helped me was having a color palette and sticking to it. This really makes things easier when deciding what colors to use for things. The whole game only uses about 32 color (this doesn’t include the fart particles). I did end up spending a lot of time on the artwork though as a result of not being experienced, especially with the animation. Overall I’m pleased with how it turned out, but I could have saved a lot of time and probably added another enemy if I knew exactly what I was doing.
• The sound effects – Fortunately the concept made doing the sound effects a trivial matter. I actually recorded and implemented all of them in the last hour or so before the deadline. Making fart sounds and eating carrots in front of a microphone is so much damn fun. I felt like I was 12. Side note, if you’re trying to come up with generic little jingles for things such as hitting a checkpoint, a ukulele is excellent (that’s what I used for the flagpole sound). Think outside of the box as well. The walking sound was me crinkling a plastic bag.
• The coding – The only way I was able to achieve the polish I did was having an existing codebase. For the camera, movement (not farting), and some of the AI, I already had written a lot of code for my other game I’m currently making that I was able to adapt for this game. My workflow was very similar and it allowed me to implement most of the gameplay mechanics very rapidly. Already having my own coding pattern made things a lot easier. The most difficult thing to write was the fart logic (lol), but that could still use some work.

What went wrong:

• My OCD – I like to spend a lot of time tweaking anything I make because I want it to be perfect. There were several times that I had to remind myself that I was on a strict time limit and needed to move on so I could actually finish.
• The tile system – I lost about 6 hours at the start of the compo trying to get a working tile system. This is the first time I’ve made a tile based game so finding a working system was a pain. In the end though I did get one working that made making the actual level very quick and easy. This one is more of a neutral point because the “wasted” time early on lead to great timesavings later on.
• The controls (sorta) – I feel like this was more of an issue with running out of time than having a broken concept from the start. The issue is that your fart propels you in the direction of your mouse, but there isn’t any visual feedback to convey this. Once you figure it out, jumps are still pretty difficult due to not knowing the exact trajectory you will take. Given more time, I would have added an indicator to show the arc of your jump as your charge up.
• The menu (or lack thereof) – Once again, I ran out of time and wasn’t able to implement a proper menu system. The only form of a menu is the retry and quit buttons that show up when you die. I really wish I could have added a title screen, especially since I had an awesome idea for it. Having a pause menu would have been nice as well.
• The variety – You’re probably sensing a trend here. I didn’t have enough time to add multiple types of enemies or coins. A second enemy type would have greatly benefited the game, but creating the artwork would have taken too long. I also originally wanted to have different size coins. I probably could have done it, but I didn’t want to risk cutting it even closer than I did. Maybe if I had skipped on a couple more hours of sleep, who knows.

What’s next:

Overall, I’m very pleased with how everything turned out. There’s some things I wish I could have added or fixed, but for my first LD, I couldn’t be prouder. That said, I am planning on continuing development. I feel that given the context of the game, I could flesh it out and turn it into a full-blown app within a couple weeks. I think this would fit perfectly on mobile, and so far most of the feedback I’ve received agrees. My hope is that I can make a couple bucks off of it and use it to fund development of Boss Wave. I hope you enjoyed my “little” postmortem, and you get a gold star if you actually read the whole thing!