I just woke up a while ago. Now I feel ready to write this!

Theme

I don’t get prepared before hand for any theme. Sometimes a theme may give me an idea upon reading it during the voting, but I don’t intentionally try to know what I could do with any theme. So I was as prepared for this theme as I was for any other (except “It never ends”; I had a cool idea for it).

But this theme was both easier and tougher than every other from previous entries to me. I usually have an idea early and keep working on it through all the weekend. This time, though, I had only a concept early on, and this was after a lot of thinking. I first decided that I wanted to make a story driven game (and therefore a visual novel thing), so I started getting the engine ready with Flixel. Then, I posted a concept here and started to think about a story for it… Which wasn’t coming out nicely. Then, I kept going forth and back between writing the story and drawing assets.

Another thing I did was keep coming back to read the original concept. I was afraid I might get off track again (as I did with Hummy’s Hunger), so I was tried to think how I was going to fit the theme with the game.

Time handling

Seems like each passing LD I get better able at handling my time. I didn’t feel as pressured as with previous LDs. Before, I’d keep working until the last second while panicking cause there were too many things still to do/broken/etc. Since I set on a story driven game, that didn’t depend too heavily on implementing stuff, I was able to take it easy and, after writing a basic VN engine over Flixel, concentrating on assets.

I knew what I had to do and how… Also, since I had a setting in my mind, but not the story itself, I was able to think about the graphics for the world before writing anything. This really helped as I only did start writing the story at the ~23 hours left mark.

Seems like I’m out of time. If I left this as a draft, I’d probably never finish. So I’ll post this as is and, later, I’ll write the rest of the postmortem.

Thanks for reading. 😀

Tags: postmortem