Alright I lied in the title. I have not been working on this game for 25 years but it does mark something special. 25 years ago I started connecting to BBS’s and playing DOOR games like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD for short), Barren Realms Elite (BRE for short), Operation Overkill II (A post apocalyptic rpg that predates fallout!) and many others. If you are curious about these or other DOOR games I suggest you google them. While your at it google “Telnet BBS” and try one out for yourself! Anyways on with the Post Mortem.

What Went Right

1. Game Idea – I knew right off the bat what I was going to do. Since there were no ratings this time around I was free to explore other styles of games. I really wanted to do a Text Based adventure game and this seems like the proper time to do one and since Ancient Technoloy won doing a text based games seems really appropriate.

2. Stress – Normally things get a little stressful at 2 points in the LD. Right before the theme is announce and right before I have to submit. This time around there was none of that, although I was hurrying a little in the end to submit but I’ll talk about that in the what went wrong section.

3. Confidence in using Unity – Having worked with Unity and C# for a while now really helped when it came time to create the game. I only had a couple look ups this time around and I’m sure as I keep using Unity and C# I’ll only get better at them.

4. Learned something new – Normally its not wise to try and learn something while taking part in a Game Jam, but I let this one slide because it was really easy. It was the PlayerPrefs. I’d never used them before and I needed them for my game. I really like them and I think I will continue to use them in future games.

5. I successfully completed another Ludum Dare – I think I will include this in all of my Post Mortems I do for my games. This was my 14th game created for Ludum Dare and I look forward to my 15th and beyond ones!

What Went Wrong

1. Not learning from my previous Post Mortems – So to start this off I will talk about something that I should be doing before every Ludum Dare. Not only me but everyone who has entered and written a Post Mortem. Re-reading them to make sure you don’t repeat some of the things you put in the “What Went Wrong Section” again. I failed to do this, in fact I have never done it and I really need to start doing it. Perhaps some of the things that are listed here would be listed this time has I learned from my previous mistakes. Like they say “If you don’t learn from your mistakes you are doomed to repeat them again”.

2. Loss of Focus – this one is new to my Post Mortem. Normally I have good focus when I’m creating a game in 48 hours, I can only chalk this up to the fact that there were no ratings and I didn’t feel the urgency that I normally feel when I participate in Ludum Dare.

3. Time Management – Ah yes Time Management my old nemesis you are back once again to wreck havoc on my life. This one goes very good with the next point so I will talk about this below.

4. Poor Planning – I’ve not looked at my previous Post Mortems, see point 1 :), but I don’t believe this one has been listed before. Anyways I didn’t plan out my game well enough. I jotted down some notes, had a basic concept of what I wanted the game to be about but it took me longer than I expect to get the end result. What I should have done was plan out each screen. There weren’t that many of them and by doing this I would have seen the scope of what I was doing. I would have seen that the Shop was the largest part to program and would have saved that for last.So since I didn’t plan out how I was going to create my game this lead to poor time management which in turn lead to some features not getting implemented in the game.

5. Inadequate Game Design knowledge – This one has never been listed before in one of my Post Mortems and I have to say it was really hard admitting this. I can say my Game Design skill has gotten better from when I first started but its not at the level I would like it to be. I need to find a good resource to read so that I can enhance the Game Design knowledge I already have.

Well that wraps up LD36 for me. If you would like to try out my game you can play it here