{"author_name":"dylanwolf","cat":"LD #29","comments":[{"author_name":"","time":"May 6, 2014 3:40 pm","epoch":1399408800,"text":"I thought the sprites in your game looked really sharp.  I didn&#8217;t know that you have a live stream, but I&#8217;ll be sure to check it out next time.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1399387800,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"29932","p_author":"dylanwolf","p_authorkey":"20078","p_urlkey":"65398","p_title":"LD29: \u201cUpper Crust\u201d Post-Mortem","p_cat":"LD #29","p_event":"LD29","p_time":"1399387800","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"20078","us_name":"dylanwolf","us_username":"dylanwolf","event_start":"1398384000","event_key":"22","event_name":"LD29"},"text":"<div style=\"width: 235px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-29\/?action=preview&amp;uid=20078\"><img src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/compo2\/thumb\/55db1934650e87fbf639147a915d993e.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"169\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">LD29: Upper Crust<\/p><\/div>\n <p><strong>What went right:<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>I typically scan through voting rounds 1-4 results before Friday to generate some ideas. I felt the &#8220;world-switching&#8221; idea for &#8220;beneath the surface&#8221; was the strongest one I had this time around. (Granted, the idea was a rip-off of <em>A Link to the Past<\/em>.)<\/li>\n <li>I&#8217;m happy with the art. I&#8217;ve learned to work (rather quickly) with my\u00a0sketchy &#8220;hipster art&#8221; style. I feel I pushed myself a bit further than last time, especially with the tileable spirtes. It&#8217;s still a little flat and distorted compared to trained artists, but it&#8217;s definitely good enough.<\/li>\n <li>I didn&#8217;t create all the little mechanics that I&#8217;d initially brainstormed, but\u00a0I was pleasantly surprised with what I did get in place and how it fit together. The comment that mentioned &#8220;unconventional combat&#8221; felt good. Up to that point, I didn&#8217;t consider this idea much more novel than the standard top-down action-adventure.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p><strong>What could have gone better:<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>There&#8217;s decent use of the world-swapping, but it could have been better. I wanted the overworld to feel &#8220;safe&#8221; (hence why there are no enemies and you heal there), but it never became anything more than a waypoint.<\/li>\n <li>As pointed out in the comments, the mana system was unnecessary. I still think there might be some use for it, to prevent you from just &#8220;teleporting&#8221; out of every sticky situation. It would need a lot of tweaking, though. Perhaps independent cooldowns on teleportation and lava burst would work better.<\/li>\n <li>I feel like I phoned in the music. A few more takes and I could have ironed out some of the rough bits. I didn&#8217;t stretch myself with the Underworld guitar&#8211;it was\u00a0what came comfortably to me rather than what fit the mood. I did stretch myself on the Overworld, but that means gratuitous mandolin which can be a bit jarring (it&#8217;s not my forte).<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p><strong>What went wrong:<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Livestreaming. I assumed some of the glitches I was getting in Windows Saturday night was the result of livestreaming\/recording (as my gamedev laptop is pretty mediocre). I didn&#8217;t have any viewers on my stream, so I shut it down. Now, I wish I&#8217;d at least recorded the full weekend to video so I could put together a timelapse.<\/li>\n <li>This concept uses a lot of colliders&#8211;camera boundaries, pickups, enemies, hazards, clickable areas, etc. I wasn&#8217;t prepared for how colliders from two separate overlapping worlds might (unintentionally) interact. I didn&#8217;t fully understand which items should cause triggers versus collisions until later in the development. I lost a lot of time to bugs that just &#8220;appeared&#8221; when I added a new feature, and patched them with the code equivalent of spit, gum, and duct tape. A bit more planning into my physics layering and hierarchy and a bit less premature optimization would have been helpful.<\/li>\n <li>PlayerController.cs is a hideous god object singleton that rules over the dystopian wasteland of game state with an iron fist. I started sticking player-related state there, and at some point just decided to put <em>all<\/em> my game state there, too.<\/li>\n <li>I hadn&#8217;t looked at UTiled in a while and I&#8217;m not an expert on optimizing graphics. Saturday night I first noticed the tile maps weren&#8217;t displaying pixel-perfect and panicked. Scaling down to 640&#215;480 was a time-saving <del>hack<\/del>fix, but it was disappointing. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-29\/?action=preview&amp;uid=19362\">ViNull<\/a> pointed out that my problem was in Unity texture compression settings, so it was a quick, simple post-compo fix.<\/li>\n <li>I had an idea for a monster that would stand in place and hurl fireballs horizontally or vertically if you passed by. Since it wouldn&#8217;t be as easy to kill as rock monsters or avoid as lava, it would have added variety. Unfortunately, it was way down the list and didn&#8217;t make it in.<\/li>\n <li>I started level design way too late. Saturday night I sketched out the 4 levels, and by Sunday I was too stressed to keep going once I built them out. I could have used more of the breakable rocks and enemies to add some variety to those levels. After playing through the game a few times post-jam (plus <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-29\/?action=preview&amp;uid=22901\">Armanky&#8217;s Strawberry in the Underworld<\/a>, which does &#8220;world-swapping&#8221; better than I did), the squandered potential was painfully obvious.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/ld29\/\" rel=\"tag\">ld29<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"May 6th, 2014 9:50 am","title":"LD29: \u201cUpper Crust\u201d Post-Mortem"}