I’ve had a couple days to relax now and do a few other things, and it’s interesting to look at the game a bit more objectively than when I was making it.<\/p>\n
The thing I most enjoy about the Ludum Dare is that I’ve been coming away from it having learned something more often than not. Either a simple trick that I thought of in the process, or some more general things I can apply to a game later, perhaps the next LD.
\n This time round, the main goal I had was to try and do something a little different than the last couple of times. I had some very good ideas beforehand for the Corruption and Creation themes, but in the end You Only Get One came up and I had to spend a couple of hours brainstorming for a proper concept.
\n As the game stands now, I think that there probably could have been better concepts to use, but I’m still pretty happy with the results.<\/p>\n
Good Stuff:<\/strong><\/p>\n – Using Construct 2. It’s always emphasised for beginners that using a tool you know is the best option, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s quick and simple for me to get the mechanics down, and the default behaviours can be modified easily to suit my needs.<\/p>\n – Getting the mechanics down first. All the technical stuff was out of the way before I worked on any graphics that weren’t placeholder. It gave me a lot of breathing room for level design, and there were even a couple of things I programmed in that didn’t make it into any actual levels.<\/p>\n – Using tile-based graphics. Before getting interested in actual game development, I liked making tilesets for Jazz Jackrabbit 2. As a result I have a lot more practice in that area of development than others, letting me get something satisfactory down quickly. I do need to get away from using dull grey graphics, though. That’s a rather unintentional pattern emerging. – Using Tiled. Contrary to Construct 2, I have never used Tiled before in my life. C2 recently added tilemap support, and also importing tmx files from Tiled. However, I just had no idea how to use the program beyond what common sense tells me, and C2 does the essentials just as well and without having to swap programs.<\/p>\n – Making a tile-based game. As mentioned above, tilemap support for Construct 2 is a new feature. The drawback to this is that it’s still within the first few updates where there are bugs and issues. I found a bug not long after I started using the tilemaps that crashed Construct completely. Luckily, I’d been saving fairly regularly, so not much progress was lost, but repeated crashes don’t help development. The issue has already been fixed, so props to the C2 developers as usual for their frequent updates, but it comes back around to sticking with what you know.<\/p>\n – Sound. Sound has always been the last thing I add to a game. I’ve had little practice regarding music, and for sound effects all I have is SFXR. Still, this time round the sound effects were added in literally 15 minutes before the deadline and it shows pretty clearly. Perhaps next time I should take the lack of sound into consideration for my design plans.<\/p>\n – An irritating main mechanic. This is obvious pretty soon. The idea was to take the controls from the player, only let them have one button at once, and then repeatedly give them useless abilities. The intended impression was to be almost taunting, but eventually giving the players all their hard-earned abilities at the end. As it is currently implemented it just gets in the way. – Keep things simple. Stick with what I know, or more specifically what I’m good at. Learning new things is great, but often should be kept out of a project that needs to be finished on a deadline. TL;DR:
\n Room for improvement:<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n Overall, I’d say this was a pretty good Ludum Dare. I’m looking forward to playing other people’s entries, assuming I can get some more stable internet. I’ve seen some fantastic-looking stuff while I was making my entry, and It’ll be good to see other people’s takes on the theme.
\n The main things I’d take away from this for the next Ludum Dare, or my next prject in general:<\/p>\n
\n – Keep a consistent art direction. The sprites in this game were considerably less polished, and felt a bit out of place compared to the tiles.
\n – Don’t frustrate the player. With heaps of games to be played in the LD, if I want my game to stick in people’s memories then they have to enjoy it, plain and simple.
\n – Take sound into proper consideration. Sound is an important part of an action game, and at the very least you don’t want your sounds to be annoying the player.<\/p>\n
\n Ludum Dare was awesome, and I learned a bunch of stuff.<\/p>","time":"December 17th, 2013 8:19 pm","title":"Into The Fortress Post-Mortem"}