First game jam in my career done, resulting in Hot and Cold. Time for a summary! I’ll list what went right and what went wrong, just because everyone does it this way.

Hot stuff

• Graphics.
  Other than some stuff that I’ll mention later, I did a pro job here. Honestly, I don’t know a thing about drawing and art in general, so it was quite a challenge. I decided to go for a minimalistic look with 8×8 pixel tiles and sprites – relatively easy and quick to make, not much detail is needed and can still look good. Credits for inspiration go to this tileset by Soundlust and the game I once enjoyed – Legends of Yore.
  
• Animations.
  There’s just a few of them, they’re all 3 or 4 frames long and the logic behind them is quite strange, but in my humble opinion they look really good. Especially destroying barrels is very eye-pleasing.
  
• Aseprite.
  Connected with the two above points, the software I used. As stated on gosu forums before, Aseprite is the only pixel art tool I don’t hate. I used old free 0.9.5 version for the compo, but I was happy to pay $10 earlier today for the newest version. It’s really good.
• Concept.
  I was quite pleased the theme, but to be honest I would be happy with almost every one there was. In the final voting I upvoted more than a half of them, and downvoted only two. The idea of stwitching between worlds might not be very original, but it’s a good setup for a game and it was the first thing that came to my mind, so I just went with it. Of course, lots of planned features were dumped/changed as time was passing, but the main point is there.
• Game mechanics.
  There might be not much to it, they’re quite poorly coded and rather undertested, but I was very pleased to realize that they all seem to work OK. Maybe I just didn’t try hard enough, but at current state I wasn’t able to cause the game to crash or even find any major bugs (and I’m the person that is supposed to know all the code flaws).
• Blogging.
  Okay, some of you might think it’s just a waste of precious time, but I found writing these short posts very helpful. I’d really recommend doing this, as it basically lets you think for a moment about what you’re doing, rate your progress and simply blow off some steam. Just take a look at my journal, it’s not too long, but there’s abundace of hilarity and drama.
• Exacly, drama.
  Ludum Dare is just too much fun, drama and excitement. I was so glad when it was over, but I would (and I will) do it again. And again. And maybe once more.
• It’s a game.
  Not much of a game, but it is. It has some kind of a a goal, and a win condition, and shit. So it’s a game by definiton. That makes it not truely complete, but the most complete game I ever created. Let me elaborate. I made jCaster, but it’s basically just an experiment (and it’s in development – very very slow development – for over a year now). I made – and finished – this pretty neat Game of Life implementation, but as we all know (or should know) – GoL sadly does not fulfill any game definition known to humanity. I made some other projects that are not even worth mentioning. But yeah, my point is – last weekend I finally made a game. Deal with it.

Cold stuff

• Time management.
  I hesitated what should be number 1. on this list, but now I’m pretty sure it’s the right choice, because it’s the source of all further evil. I had 48 hours to make a game and I wasted more than a half of it. Looking back I don’t think I spent even 20 hours actually working. That means, I wasted at least 28 hours on sleeping, eating, drinking too much beer and making all the general stuff when all I had to do was follow the damn train, CJ to create a damn game. And I even failed to prepare a mind map, or a TODO list, or anything alike. I made myself disappointed.
• Levels.
  There’s the tutorial that you can go through in less than one minute (I finished it like 20 minutes before compo ended). And that’s the only thing that a regular player can see in game besides main menu. So yeah, not much in terms of gameplay. And that’s the main direct reason why my entry is rather disappointing (or a complete faliure, if you prefer).
• Code redundancy.
  That’s something very specific that makes me not sleep very well at night ever since. I can’t understand how I could think it’s a good idea to load every level from 4 different files and store the data in (wait for it) 7 (seven!) arrays. Okay, to be honest I know how – I had 2 different ideas to approach this matter and ended up mixing them. I did not fix this for, how I happened to think of it at the moment, simplicity (sic!) sake. But still, that’s just one example.
• Code in general.
  Yeah, even though I’m known of hacking the hell outta every single line of code I come into contact with, I believe this might be the ugliest source I’ve ever produced. Mixed conventions (or no conventions whatsoever), chaos, devious logic that even I won’t be able to understand after a while and everything is hardcoded. Still, it’s some kind of fail/win situation, because as mentioned above, it turned out to work quite decently. But don’t read it, especially if you want to become (or already are) a good programmer.
• No debugger.
  One of the reasons for the two above. You know, I love writing in Ruby. And I love using Komodo Edit. The problem is, there is no good free Ruby IDE with a debugger (I think there’s Aptana Studio available, but it was crashing on my PC when I tried it some time ago). Komodo is a really lovely editor, but it’s only an editor, a fancier Notepad. I’d love to own Komodo IDE, but $90 for a personal licence, seriously guys… Anyway, of course there’s always an option of debugging in command line, but I never really used it, so it would probably be slower than searching for mistakes by reading the sources backwards and underwater. So there was no debugging involved at all.
• Lowering standards.
  The game was supposed to have

  “pretty complicated levels, not only with fires and barrels but also water, lava, rocks, guards and stuff”
  – myself

  I think we all know what happened

• Message window.
  Or the big ugly sign. You know what I’m talking about. This thing:
  
  It’s hideous and I know it, because it was supposed to be just a temporary placeholder. And it happened to stay there. (To some extent the same could be said about main menu background, except it’s not that ugly.)
• Effects.
  Or no effects at all. You know, lights, shadows, particles etc. I wanted to have at least some kind of cool transition effect between dimensions, but again it was something killed by priorities.
• Music.
  I had an opportunity of at least trying to create something, but my decision, decision was I’d rather sleep. So then there was no other option than generating soundtrack in cgMusic. The actual levels themes – you know, the ones you will never hear – are pretty nice in their generic way. And then there’s this absurd march I decided to play in tutorial
  And you know what, I was lying about the “you will never hear” part. Level 1-4 music is included with game files (in levels directory).
• Travels.
  Would not recommend.

So here you go. That’s all I can think of at the moment. Again, I’d like you to check out Hot and Cold. It’s not all bad, and at the very least you won’t waste too much of your time on it I’m thinking of eventually making a post-compo version to actually finish what I started.

Tomorrow I wish I will finally start looking at other people’s entries. Sadly, I’m just one guy and I can’t rate all the games out there. So if you specifically want to hear my opinion, feel free to ask, I’ll be happy to give one! (especially to a person who was not bored to read this far :))

Damn that’s one long post.

Tags: postmortem