Coming back today after some sleep my worries that the game I was making wasn’t really fun confirmed themselves so I’m not going to spend more time fighting the engine. You can play what I’ve made here, I’m not going to submit it for people to rate. The current source code is on GitHub.

A mini-Post Mortem

Engine: This was my first time using a HTML5/JavaScript based approach instead of my usual Python approach. I used a relatively unknown engine, DarlingJS, and did not prepare enough, so you’ll not be surprised when I tell you that I now think this was a bad idea. While I like the highly modular approach, the examples and documentation were outdated and from reading the source code, it was often not clear how to use certain components. For example, I didn’t manage to get any kind of animation to actually display in my game. Still, I liked the entity component system-based approach. I still think that HTML5 is the way to go for my next Ludum Dare but I will probably roll my own engine until then.

Design: Idea-wise, my space grappling hook plan was a nice silly one, but it’s actually pretty hard to move around in space in a controlled manner. In other space games, you can typically choose the direction where you apply force yourself, and only being able to pull into the direction of other planets is fairly limiting. Movement is really important for a game and mine is just way too frustrating. I’ve also seen other people doing fairly similar stuff in this compo so I also don’t think that my idea is particularly unique anymore.

Graphics: Also the first time that I used my graphics tablet to create the in-game graphics which was more of a spontaneous decision but I think it fit the general style of the game well. TexturePacker worked very well together with Pixi.js so I’m happy about this part of the workflow.

Audio: Did not get around to it.

And that’s it, wish everybody luck and a great time!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem