I worked a lot harder on this Ludom Dare then the last one. Did it pay off? Well, I think it did… I mean, my game is kind of amusing, and longer than my last entry. But there are still some things I would like to have worked on more, or added.

The Good

I kept on schedule through this LD. Everything I did took as much time as I thought it would. Friday, I started the project. I came up the concept for my game, and once I got back from dinner with my family, I made a few sprites, and a background. I also started music. I finished the fight scene on the Saturday, and even made some extra sounds and graphics for Sunday. On Sunday, I finished the intro and handed in the game!

I came in luck with the music. I can’t make good music, no matter how hard I try. I tried fake music generator, but it wasn’t generating the type of music I needed. And I couldn’t make what I wanted on Otomata, (which is a really cool music device btw), so I went to Abundant Music. It generated a super slow song, that had potential. I sped the song up (a lot), on Audacity, and boom! Nice background music, (well I think it’s nice)!

I figured out how to check if the player is walking on ground in Unity2D, for the first time. I also made it so he has to jump over a gap, which was pretty good.

I learned the more about the differences between OnTriggerEnter2D, and OnCollisionEnter2d, which is great because I always seem to have trouble with collision detection in Unity2D, and not knowing the difference between the two, was probably was part of the reason!

Graphics were pretty good. I’m not very good at making them, but thanks to the powers of Gimp, they didn’t look to shabby!

Screenshot!

The Bad

Difficulty. The game was way to easy. For some reason Unity had this glitch where, some of the mirror beams would travel faster than I coded them to when I ran the game in the editor, (thank God it doesn’t happen in the build)! This made it harder for me to win when I was testing, so I thought the game was harder.

The intro was too long, and the game was to short. I should have made the intro faster, and more interactive, and the game longer, and harder.  I find it sad that my game didn’t have a lot of gameplay, because that was what I was trying to focus on this competition!

I should have made it so you are able to skip the cutscenes. They really get annoying after a while.

Controls were a bit funky. You have to press the down arrow to go duck, and the down arrow to get up again. I used to have it so you press the up arrow to get up, and up arrow to jump once standing. But I found that made it harder to jump over the mirror beams , (especially with Unity  making them super fast). So I made it so you can press the up arrow to jump when ducking, and the down arrow to stand when ducking. It’s kind of confusing to press the down arrow to get up though. It’s actually ironic in a way…

Animation wasn’t the greatest, but I do suck at graphics, so how good could it have been?

I had to make a lot of sprites. One for each deformation of Alex, in jump pose, duck pose, and stand pose. What I should have done was make four different versions of his head, each with a different deformation, and moved them whether he was jumping, ducking or standing. But oh well, what can you do?

In the scene where Alex’s mirror breaks, I should have made the text “My reflection.”,  fade out faster. And I should have made the scene after fade in, because it all of a sudden just appears!

My Overall Feelings

Overall I think this was a pretty good LD. I learned some things, and found some cool new tools that I might use in the future. Though my game is short, and there wasn’t that much game play, it’s crazy, and funny, and I had fun making it!

Timelaspe

And finally if you want to play my game, you can find it here.

Tags: postmortem, timelapse