Time for Plankton‘s post-mortem !
I’m thinking about making a post-LD version of this game, so any feedback is very welcome!
I’ll try to do not make the same mistake than the last time, when I dived directly into further development of my jam game without getting the time to think about it properly and getting enough feedback.
This made me give up the project as I ended up polishing a broken game before reworking the basics first.

This is my second participation to the LD, and as the last time, I have been using :

– Construct2 for development : easy to use, and allows to export to html5 (which is more practical for players than an executable), but with plugins from Rex this time
– Bosca Ceoil for music : really easy to use and a lot of fun sounds
– Bfxr for sound effects, Audacity for sound editing
– Photoshop for graphics, but any image editing software can do the trick

Workflow / Development process

• What worked out
  – I have been way more efficent and organised in my process than last time
  – In learned about finite-state machines and wrote some for the first time
  – I did a few prototypes, which I didn’t do the last time, and spent more time thinking about my project on paper and preparing it
• What didn’t worked
  – I should have prepared better, next time I’ll do the warmup jam the week before
  – As the last time, I prepared some animations and sprites for mechanics I didn’t implemented
  – I had to create some music at the very last moment (half an hour before submission), because I realised I could’t use the creative commons field recording I found because it doesn’t fitted the rules. I lost a lot of time because of it
  – I think I overused booleans in my code, where I could have found more interesting or differents methods

Bugs
Suceptible to get edited as people report more of them

– The planktons evolve into frogs but then do nothing (missing feature)
– Evolution2 planktons returning to “dividing” state when clicked on
– Planktons tend to get stuck and not being able to move

Feedback
This is some feedback I got so far, it is suceptible to get edited as I get some more

+ nice graphics
+ people enjoy seeing the planktons evolve

– lack of interesting gameplay
– the feeding process is not very interesting
– lack of a clear objective
– maybe need a more complex gestion of population
– the green frog is too bright and distracts from the planktons
– Planktons need to me more active for getting the food

 >> Play and rate the game here ! <<

Tags: post-mortem