I’m trying to get more votes so I thought I’d post a post-mortem on my entry: Portal Patrol.

Not a real ending, is it?

So no, I didn’t finish.  I honestly didn’t think I’d finish all of my ideas in this game, but I did think I would’ve gotten further than I did.  I spent so much time on making the game open-ended that I didn’t really incorporate any of the core mechanics of the game itself.  Yes, this is interactive fiction, but to me it feels like less of a game and more of an introduction to a game.  In fact, that’s exactly what it is.  Right when the action is about to start, you get the “To Be Continued” screen above.

However, I am proud of what I came up with.  My fear was that I would procrastinate and play Marvel Puzzle Quest or watch YouTube videos or lurk on reddit or maybe even hook up my PS3 and play games.  I didn’t do any of that stuff, and I am proud and hopeful because of it.

My new fear is that I won’t continue development of this game.  So many times I’ve made a prototype of a game and then thought “I don’t want to go back to that code”, or “I’ll come back to that… some day.”  My driving force right now with this game is that it is truly incomplete, and I won’t really know if I want to complete it until I implement the core mechanics that I had originally planned for it.  I don’t have the 48-hour deadline to light a fire under my behind anymore though…

I honestly don’t know how I could’ve improved my development before final submission.  I feel like if I spent too much time pre-planning instead of agile development, I would’ve done more planning than actual development.  I also feel like although limiting player-choice would’ve allowed me to speed-along faster, it wouldn’t have been the game that I want to make.  So many times I was tempted to give a 1.2.3.4. or a)b)c)d) menu with specific branches, but I wanted the player input to feel more natural.  Instead of “1) Enter portal”, the player can input “portal” or “enter portal” or “jump into the portal” or “dive into the portal”, etc.

I do feel like I bit off more than I could chew in regards to the 48-hour deadline.  With so much focus on open player choices, there was no way I’d get anything close to a finished product done in time.  I think I offset that with honesty, though.  There is nothing on my entry that says “This game is complete” or “Experience all the action and thrills…!”  An attentive player will know going in that the game is unfinished.  I didn’t want to NOT submit anything just because it was unfinished.  I may be wrong, but it is my opinion that it is better to submit something that at least gives a good idea of what to expect from the game than submit nothing at all.

I did give myself about an hour to play-test the game after my coding frenzy.  I constantly iterated towards the beginning of development, but towards the end, there was a long stretch of time when I was just coding, saving, coding, saving without actually running the code.  In that hour of play-testing, I came across a lot more bugs than I had expected (which should have been expected).  I’m happy that I gave myself that time, though, or else the final submission wouldn’t have just been incomplete; it would have been completely unplayable.

The biggest thing I learned during development of Portal Patrol was how to implement binary serialization.  Yes; Portal Patrol has persistence (which you would discover if you tried restarting the game without having died first).  I felt like persistence adds to the overall play-ability of the game, and it would have been unacceptable to not at least try to add some sort of persistence.  I spent my entire first night of what I thought would have been development solely on learning binary serialization.  I wrapped my head around it, even though there were times where it felt like I wouldn’t.  I think that has been my biggest immediate reward from this project.

In conclusion, I’m pleased and proud to have participated in my first Ludum Dare compo.  I created something that I truly want to expand on, and I learned binary serialization, which will help me with game development in general in the long run.  I still have a long way to go, but Ludum Dare 30, in it’s own ways has helped me move towards my life goal of becoming a professional game developer.  Baby steps.  Frantic baby steps.  Thank you for reading my post-mortem (this is the first post-mortem I’ve ever written, by the way), and I hope you enjoy Portal Patrol!