First things first, if you haven’t had a chance to check out LD scan, yet, you can do so here. I’d recommend you do so before reading this postmortem, as it’ll give you a better frame of reference when reading this postmortem.

How it all happened:
I’ll admit, “Entire Game on One Screen” was a bit of a surprise for me when the theme was announced. I hadn’t done any brainstorming for that theme, so I had to spend my early hours deciding on a concept. My very first idea was some sort of vague fighting game that took place on top of a computer monitor, or “on one screen.” I quickly decided that was a poor interpretation of the theme and wouldn’t make for a particularly unique game, so I explored other avenues. After a bit of looking into synonyms for the word “screen,” I settled on the game that I now have, which focuses on medical screenings.
The actual plans for game mechanics went through a couple of iterations. I initially planned on doing a WarioWare-esque minigame collection, with each minigame being based on a common procedure for medical screening. I never actually thought about how any of them would work, though, and just kind of compiled a list of screening methods on a scrap of paper. The first solid “mechanic” I actually came up with was the simple act of sliding a patient back and forth on a CT-scan by dragging them with the mouse. I immediately loved the idea of that and thought it would feel pretty satisfying, so I started fleshing out a whole game around that.

What Went Right:
Tutorializations: My cousin often jokes that my typical design strategy is to throw players directly into the lion’s den without much instruction and hope that they survive. This certainly holds true for a lot of my older work, but I think that LD-scan does a little bit better than most of my other games with regards to informing the player. Their goal is stated for them outright on the first page of their clipboard, and one of the first things they see before they look for malignant traits is a handy True/False chart that explains the game’s logical operators. Finally, the last page of the clipboard tells the player how to finish a screening and call their patient back for the final decision. The player is generally always informed on what they should do next, which is extremely important.
Difficulty: I’m pretty proud of the difficulty progression in LD scan. The player is always being introduced to new mechanics which both make the gameplay more challenging and more interesting than it was before. The player doesn’t simply need to look for more traits – they need to do so under a time limit, and eventually start negating their results based on patient’s age, height, gender, etc. I’m also happy with how forgiving I made the game. The game had to trigger a failstate after a single failed screening (otherwise the game wouldn’t depend “one one screen”), but it wasn’t until late in development that I decided failure shouldn’t actually send the player any further back than the day they were just on, to avoid frustration.
“Story”:I think LD Scan is actually my first attempt at actually creating a game with an even remotely relevant story. Even though the story is told fairly poorly and treats subjects like medical screening and misdiagnosis with far too little respect (serious business, folks), I’m fairly happy with it. There’s a concise story arc with a beginning, middle and an end, a couple of decent jokes, and some wildly over-the-top failure scenarios which I stand by as the game’s greatest feature.

What Went Wrong:
Time Management: I invested my time in all the wrong places for this Ludum Dare. I stayed up far too late and woke up far too early for my own good, which is not usual for me. My past few Ludum Dares have left my sleep schedule fairly intact, but something about this one compelled me to neglect rest, and I think my work may have suffered for it. Additionally, I lost around four hours of time at the end of the compo because my company Christmas party managed to overlap with Ludum Dare weekend for the second year in a row, and I wanted to attend. I scrambled to put everything together at the very last second, ran out to the party, and found that only two people had showed up and my “date” was running late, as well. Ludum Dare should have been my priority. Parties can wait. (The party did turn out to be really fun, though).
Bugs: I didn’t bother to time myself, but I’m confident that I lost at least three hours of my time just hunting for game crashing bugs in LD scan. A lot of the game’s is generated in loops that create content that adheres to a specific set of rules. There were a lot of these loops, and a lot of them dealt with fairly complex rules. As a result, a lot of them turned into infinite loops that were extremely challenging to fix. I even ended up making a clumsy infinite for loop somewhere along the way that incremented in the wrong direction and never terminated. That one was found by my brother, whose knowledge of programming is limited to a single computer science course from three years ago. He found it within thirty seconds of glancing over my shoulder. I had been looking for twenty minutes. Did I mention that I was lacking sleep?
Workstation: When everything was coming down to the wire, one of the last things I wanted to do was quickly add sound effects to the game. This turned out to be more of a hassle than I was anticipating, as my microphone had vanished and SFXR was no longer on my computer. It took me thirty minutes to find the mic, and just as long to re-download SFXR on my spotty wifi. It really is important to prepare everything you might need for LD well before the jam begins, or you’ll find yourself stressed out and scrambling for tools at the last minute like me. It’s not fun – just take the time to set up your computer in advance and you’ll have a better Ludum Dare experience.