{"author_name":"Andy Gainey","cat":"LD #29","comments":[],"epoch":1398728580,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"30335","p_author":"Andy Gainey","p_authorkey":"30311","p_urlkey":"65808","p_title":"Symptomatic Retrospective","p_cat":"LD #29","p_event":"LD29","p_time":"1398728580","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"30311","us_name":"Andy Gainey","us_username":"againey","event_start":"1398384000","event_key":"22","event_name":"LD29"},"text":"

The following was originally posted on my own site at experilous.com\/1\/blog\/post\/ludum-dare-29-retrospective<\/a>.\u00a0 Some additional white board images are included there.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ludum Dare is over, and my entry, Symptomatic, can be viewed here<\/a> (or jump straight to the game itself on my website:\u00a0 experilous.com\/1\/ludum-dare-29\/<\/a>).\u00a0 The non-competition jammers are probably wrapping up their 72-hour game jam entries as I type, but having done the 48-hour competition, I\u2019ve had the luxury of relaxing for a full 24 hour already.\u00a0 Time to look back and reflect.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

What a confusing tangled mess!<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For getting this done in 48 hours, I\u2019m reasonably pleased with myself.\u00a0 I had a hard time properly assessing my pace, since I\u2019m so used to measuring things in days and weeks, not hours.\u00a0 24 hours into the competition, I had only just implemented basic user interactivity, and still didn\u2019t have anything like a proper game available anywhere other than in my head.\u00a0 That concerned me, since I was wanting to use Sunday for polish.\u00a0 But if I didn\u2019t even have a complete game, what good is polish?<\/p>\n

I did manage to get something slightly playable before I went to bed Saturday night.\u00a0 In fact, I spent about an hour \u201cplay testing\u201d it, not realizing that a full hour had passed.\u00a0 Essentially, I had gotten the toy implemented enough to try playing with it, and the evidence from my sample size of one suggested that there was some fun to be had here.<\/p>\n

I quickly got the full range of proper game play implemented Sunday morning (starting a new game, winning, seeing progress, et cetera), which allowed me to move on to things that ordinarily I would not call polish, but for a gamejam, definitely feel like a bonus.\u00a0 The most notable of these were simple manual, animations, sound effects, and a couple of interface enhancements involving paths.<\/p>\n

In the end, however, I suspect that any fun inherent in the core is hard to find, because the mechanics of the game are not readily apparent to the player.\u00a0 One has to conceptualize a lot.\u00a0 For me that was easy because I designed<\/em> the mechanics.\u00a0 But for an ordinary player, it\u2019s not at all clear why things pop up in the location that they do.\u00a0 Granted, that\u2019s kind of the whole point<\/em> of the game, to not immediately know why, but to puzzle it out through logic and experiment.\u00a0 But when your game\u2019s core concept inherently makes your game hard to comprehend, well, um, that sucks.\u00a0 Because of this, I could not visibly indicate where the pathogen or the symptoms were moving; that would give away the answer.\u00a0 But by not doing so, it becomes massively more difficult for a player to realize what is happening.<\/p>\n

Part of my inspiration for this game was Minesweeper, so I contemplated why it was that Minesweeper manage to be simple to comprehend, despite similarly hiding information from the player.\u00a0 I realized that Minesweeper makes it really painfully easy to lose when you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 The player sees all of the mines, all of the possible hints, and where they went wrong.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t take too many losses before you start to comprehend what\u2019s going on at least on a basic level.<\/p>\n

For my game however?\u00a0 You can\u2019t<\/em> lose.\u00a0 Ever<\/em>.\u00a0 The only way to actually see the correct paths, where your guesses were correct, and where they were wrong, is by winning<\/em>.\u00a0 And if you don\u2019t understand very well how the game works, winning is really hard<\/em>.\u00a0 The lesson?\u00a0 Give the player a way to fail, and enable that failure to teach the player something.<\/p>\n

Will I come back to this game?\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure; it\u2019s not exactly the kind of project I get excited about.\u00a0 It could work well on mobile, especially tablets, but I have little interest or skill in mobile game development right now.\u00a0 And whatever nugget of fun exists, there\u2019s a lot of work to figure out how to restructure the mechanics to make that fun excel.\u00a0 I did have lots of ideas during the jam that I had to shelve due to time constraints.\u00a0 That\u2019s always a regret with tough deadlines (though it\u2019s good practice too).\u00a0 Some of the ideas were simply additions or small tweaks to try to make the game more comprehensible.\u00a0 Some of them are radically different ways of using the hidden paths concept.\u00a0 Some came from Friday night before I had even landed on the idea of using hidden paths.<\/p>\n

Come to think of it, Friday night was really fun.\u00a0 I might in fact try to carve out time in the future to simply brainstorm for its own sake.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the biggest benefits of game jams for designers, I think.\u00a0 That, and getting to evaluate your designs after you\u2019ve got them functioning.\u00a0 But everything in between is just a high stress slog, it seems.\u00a0 I rarely learn much on a technical level simply because I don\u2019t have the time<\/em> to do so.\u00a0 Instead I use what I know, what works, and cut corners everywhere.\u00a0 Perhaps sometimes I\u2019ll run across ways to cut corners that don\u2019t actually harm the code quality, leading to efficient architectures and patterns that I can use in the future, but for the most part, I don\u2019t want anything I write during a jam to make its way into production code.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it was overall another good experience.\u00a0 That\u2019s two game jams down, and two playable games complete.\u00a0 I\u2019ll look forward to and fear Ludum Dare #30.\u00a0 This last time I seemed to manage my stress better than with Ludum Dare #28; perhaps #30 will be a walk in the park.\u00a0 Until then, it\u2019s back to working on my city builder project!<\/p>\n \n

Tags: compo<\/a>, final<\/a>, postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"April 28th, 2014 6:43 pm","title":"Symptomatic Retrospective"}