Hi there!,

As my first ever submission to Ludum Dare (Jam) I must say I’m quite satisfied with the ending result.

I started out quite late on saturday morning. I live in Europe so I was already around 8 hours behind schedule. But nothing to worry, since the proposed theme really inspired me.

At first I though about the typical kind of games: digging, submarines, mining, monsters from the depths coming to haunt the player and so on.  Problem is, I wasn’t really feeling like programming any of those kinds of games and I suddenly decided I wanted to make a story-driven game where the player knows nothing right from the start (not even the controls) and has to start moving and checking things around trying to figure out what is going on. In other words, I ended up making a point&click adventure game about an amnesic astronaut stranded on a strange orange planet with two suns (woot).

 What went right

– I ended up being quite pleased with the game’s atmosphere and graphic style. Detail is minimal and only vital objects are in plain sight. I got the graphics done in no time at all. I guess I’m getting quite used to Pixen by now.

– The story-  I know you can only get a glimpse of it given the length of the “game”, but I had a full and sound script ready on paper and I’m really looking forward to finish it up and letting you all people play it to the end.

– Even though I had little time to spend on making the game over the weekend I somehow managed to get something done, playable and without bugs. It may not be a big deal for everybody else but it is for me, since I wasn’t so sure about uploading it considering the story wasn’t finished and that in my mind the game probably was only appealing to me. By sunday night I was sure I was not going to publish it but a good friend encouraged me to submit it anyway and I must say I’m glad I did, considering the good reviews it is getting now.

What didn’t go that well

– Using enchant.js –  I’ve been working with it over the last few months and I’ve somewhat become fond of it. It’s really easy to set up, it’s clean, and you don’t have to work that much to get basic stuff up and running. This is what I thought before starting the compo, considering I’ve already finsihed a few (action) games with it.

Truth is, I had to spend more time that I would publicly admit figuring out how to get the click listeners working on objects and text labels. I also had some trouble with the character’s movement, but this is probably my fault, since it was my first ever point & click game.

Also, the scene structure worked well in action games, but with and adventure game like this one I ended up with having a big hardcoded mess which works, but I would not dare to finish up a full game this way. I totally have to set up a more clever way of doing things.

– Not being able to add more content to the game – I spent a lot of time getting everything working so in the end I only had the time to set up 8 scenes, and beacuse of that the game feels more like the a micro-demo than anything else. Good news are that I  really want to keep working on it and release it sometime.

– The TERRIBLE walking cycle of the player’s sprite (sorry about that).

– Almost no sound at all- I wanted to keep things silent at the start of the game, and that really builds up the mood I think, but being honest, adding a bit of ambient sound could have improved the experience a lot.

All in all, I’m happy of having taken part on LD29 and I’m really looking forward to the next one

By the way, if you are interested on seeing where “Leaving Home” goes please check out for news here: http://www.strandedsoft.com/ or follow this twitter profile: https://twitter.com/StrandedSoft

Thanks a lot everybody and good luck!