(For a link to the game, click the image) 

Hey, it’s my second Ludum Dare, it was much harder this time around since it went to be a platformer.

First Day :

There we were, me and my “crew” searching ideas on Skype, throwing stuff around on the chat, until I had the one idea that would bind them all : 5 skills (one was removed along the way), 1 skill point and several maps to exploit the concept.
It sounded easier to do on the paper, so we rushed into CraftStudio (the gamemaker used to make the game) and started creating one map each (It was around 5-6 levels if I recall) and that was our first mistake, not focusing on one and only one map.
Our second mistake was already there too, each map had it’s own textures, and not everybody can make great textures, at the end of the day we were proud, nothing could’ve warned us of the errors we were making.

Second Day :

I woke up quite late and couldn’t start the server until X hours, I started it and we resumed the levels editing (I also implemented a platformer script I did for another game), but at around the 36 hours mark (the middle of the jam) I just looked at the maps and I figured out it was just not right at all, everything looked weird, that’s where I had figured out we had just lost those 36 hours and we were in crunch time.
So I quickly scrapped the map and focused on making one map with one set of simple texture (that I had already used in Delayed) as an aesthetic thing I added a color for each path.
I focused on scripting while the crew were making the levels, and there I needed to find a way to kill the player with the red block, it was not going to be easy.

Third Day :

My idea was to make 6 points around the player that would figure out the block ID it was in and if it was the red block it would insta-kill the player, it seemed easy but after trying for 2 hours I simply gave up and went for the “simple” idea (that was going to ultimately make the game need optimisation) which was making every red block and entity (if I recall it was around 360 entities in total but that was the only way to get the game made in time) so we did that and the end result was the possibility of death. (minus the 2 seconds freeze due to the scene reloading, I’ll explain this one later)
I quickly made sounds in BFXR and a member of my crew gave me a music, another found a name to the game.
After this I was coding each block type and after a while it was finished, with only 2 hours on the clock, it was around 1am and I had school so it was really quick, I posted it and left to bed, but I was happy because we had finished the game.

After the Third Day :

I had the game tested by some friends and they all thought it was good, but after each death the 2 seconds lag was annoying since you die a lot in the game.
So I went to fix that with an instant respawn and since every blocks were entities it was easy, but there was the need for an optimised version as some people couldn’t play it because of framerate issues, so I knew what to do, figure out a way to wipe the 360 death entities, and I took my block ID idea that I had previously and after hours of testing I had finally managed to do it and erased the 360 death entities, and it was working like a charm (it may have slightly bigger hitboxes though) so I released the optimised version and voila, I had finished the game !

In four months, there’ll be the next Ludum Dare, and this time we’ll keep it simple, see you there !

Tags: postmortem