Dumb Treasures was my this LDs compo entry. Planned as a “You only get one unit” turn based strategy game, it actually turned into a small “collect all 16 treasures with the only solider remaining in your army” micro-adventure.

It is the story of a countries army. The country Bla went bankrupt and only a single soldier remains. This soldier is then send to a treasure island where he has to collect 16 treasures as fast as possible. The whole island is save, since there are no dangers.

The stort is simple, so is the gameplay.

Play and rate now

What went right

• Restrict my colors
  This time, I used the NES color palette as found on Wikipedia to restrict my options. This worked great since I didn’t have to find the one color out of 2^24.
• Using bfxr
  Having sounds improved the game a lot, even though there are only two sounds.
• Simplify early
  When sunday afternoon arrived and I had only worked 6 hours on the game in total I decided to drop all my plans (enemies, traps) and focused on implementing a really simple gameplay but doing it nice aaaand doing a whole game. That results in having a nice start screen, an introduction and a result screen that makes the game look much more polished.

What went wrong

• 8 hours
  Should I really say more. Due to unplanned events I had much less time than expected.
• Not using a framework
  Again, I had no time before to prepare a framework with common used code like state management. I haven’t lost much time to it but some.
• Focusing on graphics
  I spend way to much time on the floor tiles which are nice and probably save my a** during the voting but may I should’ve spend that time on implementing some game elements like traps.
• Not providing alternative controls
  I absolutely regret not implementing the Gamepad API everytime I see that cheap SNES USB gamepad clone on my desk. I’ll may integrate it in a later version.
• Not providing a leaderboard
  Dumb Treasures has no deeper meaning or big challenge. The only challenge is the countdown. I should have spend ten minutes to implement serversided leader-boards in the dirtiest way possible. That would’ve improved the players involvement a lot.

Tags: post-mortem