My Entry into Ludum Dare 30 is a little game called Connected We Run. It is an endless platformer game, that you control both characters using the same controls.

What Went Wrong

• Lack of theme inspiration, some themes you can get really excited about, and others just fall short. This was definitely one of the themes that lacked excitement for me.
• Clouded direction, the resulting game suffers from a lack of solid direction. Initially the game was going to be a platformer that you would control the two characters to reach their goal platform/door (similar to Beyond The Horizon by Lazdo) I ended up scrapping that idea really early because it resembled two of my past entries to much (Through The Blue Sea LD23 and its “sequel” I Threw The Red for mLD34) At that point I thought about Endless runners, and decided to go in that direction.
• Platform generation, The first day of the game I spent a good chunk of time getting the platforms to behave the way I wanted them. I wanted the dark and light characters to only collide with their respective colored platforms. A platform not of the matching color you would simply pass under. In the end it never felt right, the light character could jump up into the dark platforms, but it served limited purpose to do so. Then on Sunday morning I decided that the player should just be blocked into their respective sections. And that led to the breaking of my platform generation. (Up to that point you could jump ontop of any platform)
• Platform generated except the first five, nobody has mentioned it in a comment but it is one of the things that has bothered me, the first five platforms were positioned by me to fill the time before the generated platforms reach the player. I did it this way to simplify the player spawning (There is none, and that is why the Restart button didn’t work)
• Speed of the platforms, The speed was intended to start slow and slowly build up speed. It does build up speed, but at such a slow rate it is hard to notice.
• Title screen, While the title screen show a lot of good information, it could also be improved visually. I really like on the end screen where the text is mirrored. I am glad that I found time before the end to add in a title screen, because what it was in the initial submission was barren and white.
• Restart Button on the end screen, initially there was one but when I updated it before the compo ended (adding music, sound, and a title screen) I had to remove the restart button because it was not functioning at all. So I inserted a message in its place to refresh your browser to replay, I didn’t think it was a big deal in a 48 hour Ludum dare game, but several comments have mentioned it.

The initial title screen when first submitted

What Went Right

• Global Leaderboard was a great idea for this style of game, I have used them in the past, and always declare the base code for one, but it has been a while sense using it. The Leaderboard as several people have pointed out has no semblance of security, its just a page that gets queried with your name, score, and the game ID.  I have never had the response to any of my past entries that I have had to this one, so I have never bothered with any attempts to secure my Ludum Dare leaderboard. That may change soon.
• The score, although there have been some criticism of it seeming to be random, I enjoy the range of numbers that it produces. The score is calculated based on the times of the character. The first of the two characters that go out becomes the multiplier. Then when the second character goes out the score is calculated. (Lowest Time * (character 1 time + character 2 time)) So while you can continue to play after one of the characters is out, your score will ultimately be lower than someone who took both characters farther.
• Music and sound was a last minute addition, in fact I submitted before there was any music or sound, and ended up finding some time after to add them in. I think they both add a lot of the game, and it wouldn’t feel quite the same.

Gameplay begining screenshot

Other Thoughts

• One of the other criticism has been that when one of the characters fall out the game should end. I made the decision to keep the game going and to use it as a scoring system because of how I defined connected worlds. There was a blog post that I saw early on (I didn’t save the link) that showed several different images of connected worlds. The post looked at the definition of Connected worlds, and how it differs from a mirrored world. I then came up with my definition of how the connected world works, and build from that. The platform generation is independent and different in each world, so I felt that the characters should be able to function independently of one another.

Future

I think I almost always say I am going to continue the game in my postmortem, and then I rarely do. But I’m going to say it again, I will be making a postcompo version of the game, with fixes and improvements largely to the title screen, platform generation, leaderboard, and overall increasing the speed of the game. What is going to be different this time is that I will be making a Youtube video series of the improvements to the game. The series will start on Monday September 22nd, after I finish up the Ludum Dare 30 Games series.

Tags: postmortem