Any Ship can be a Minesweeper… Once – Posts Mortem.

For my first Ludum Dare I decided to flip space invaders upside down with a battle ship launching depth charges at enemy submarines. In the end I’m pretty proud of the outcome but I learned a lot about my workflow and just how easy it is to turn a good idea into a mess of brain melting spaghetti code. To be honest, looking over the source now gives me a headache.

The GOOD.

Everyone seemed to like the style I went with. Hand drawn artwork, explosion sounds I made with my mouth, and an acoustic cover of the village peoples In The Navy I did on a whim with a few minutes left at the very end.

I really liked the 2d wave physics, and I spent a good amount of time getting it right. It’s based on a series of springs that propagate their tension across the surface of the water.

The gameplay, for me at least and from the feedback I’ve received, is pretty fun. It’s not easy but still possible to win and it feels like a really simplified skill-based arcade game.

The BAD.

The code quickly devolved into something resembling a burning dystopian landscape that still fires up some weird ptsd every time I look at it. The take-away lesson is proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

I would have liked the difficulty to have progressed over time, and there is a mechanism to apply this, but it doesn’t affect gameplay enough. As the time runs out I increase the cap on how many enemy torpedos can be on screen at any given time, but in practice it feels just as button-mashingly difficult out the gate as it does when the clock runs out.

Final Thoughts.

The thing I found the most interesting was that even after all the effort I put into making the physics behave the way I wanted, it was the artwork and the sound effects that stood out to people. I spent a good amount of time making the waves move, and making the depth charges lose velocity and change trajectory when they hit the water, making everything look just right, and nobody seemed to be nearly as impressed by that as the cheesy song I recorded in the last 10 minutes. They’re subtleties that don’t stand out but that flesh out the look of the game in a way that people probably notice more subconciously. Either way I’m overwhelmed by just how much positive feedback I’ve received and you’re all awesome for being a part of ludum dare. Can’t wait for the next one!