Alright so looking back I have never yet gotten around to posting any thoughts on my games. After the event is over I tend to kind of forget about the whole thing. But I’ve remembered this time so I’ll make some notes.

WARNING: KINDA LONG AND RAMBLY

Overall this game was me having another go at a tile-based platformer. Each Ludum Dare I try to do something I haven’t done yet, or something I feel I haven’t done properly. I’ll look at what things I did the last few times and set rules for myself to try and either avoid making the same mistakes or to simple keep things fresh and interesting.

For Ludum Dare 28 (Theme: 10 Seconds), I made a platformer with the restriction that you can only press one button at a time. Overall, a bit of a restrictive mechanic that didn’t work that well in practice, but the main issues I had was that I felt I hadn’t had a proper go at level design, since I completely ran out of time and scrapped half the planned levels in that one. The issues were basically all stemming from poor time management. I spent a bit too much time implementing extensions to the platforming behaviour which in turn didn’t get enough levels to be used. On top of that, the levels were all made manually within Construct, which was slow and tedious and inefficient. I should have either gone with a different approach or used an external level editor.

This time round I didn’t quite get it perfect either, lots of room for improvement, but hey, I only had 48 hours, and I did a few things differently. All the levels still weren’t done very efficiently (notepad), but I got a system in place for the game to create the tiles and things from stored data rather than manually placing things within construct. Also, getting it to automatically place the correct tiles for borders and things so I could simply specify which blocks were solid and which weren’t.

Another key thing this time round was the graphics. Specifically, I quite like the rift effect and how it affects the gameplay. Visually it was something I was tossing around last LD (Theme: Beneath the Surface), and while last time I decided it was too ambitious and went for something simpler (and more boring, bad idea), this time I decided the concept fit the new theme just as well, if not better. If I were to extend the game any further, I could potentially add more “layers” to the game, though I’d also remove the time limit and expand the view.

The tiles and sprites were pretty quick (probably an hour for the lot of them, tops), so that wasn’t something that a lot of thought was put into. Backgrounds are the bane of my existence. Should probably have gone with something other than a single static image, since I simply didn’t have the time to make something that didn’t look like scribbles. But then with the room-based levels I couldn’t really do parallax.

So overall, I’d say that a level-based game design doesn’t really suit me for a Ludum Dare. I’m glad I had another go at it and I’m happy with the progress I made, but the amount of effort that goes into level design does not translate into a lot of time playing the game, so next time I’ll consider something with more replay value. The graphics are something that was simply an afterthought this time, so that’s also on my list of things to focus on improving, and I suppose sometime I should try making a game with more audio quality than simply having shitty sound effects generated with sfxr.

In any case, the Ludum Dare was a lot of fun this time round, and I look forward to number 31 in December!