This will be my first postmortem ever, but hopefully it won’t be too bad..

I’m happy (and a bit surprised) that I finished my entry this time. I was close to giving up at a few different times, but in the end I’m quite happy with the result and glad that I stuck with it. My biggest obstacle this LD was the lack of time. I usually spend a lot less than 48 hours because I like to sleep and other things around the house needs attention. This was even more true this time since I have a newborn son (3 weeks old). Apart from getting my sleep during the night, I also had to babysit when my wife wasn’t available and we did a few trips for a couple of hours each day. I knew this would be the case before hand so when trying to come up with a game idea my biggest problem was that I always felt that I wouldn’t have enough time to complete a somewhat finished game based on the concept. A few of my favorite ideas had to be scrapped for this reason. In the end my game is a very simple game that is very different from my original idea, but still quite fun.

The original concept was a turn-based strategy game where the player had to survive in a maze where the walls were moving every 10 seconds. The final game is more of a fast-paced action game where the walls move every couple of seconds and new enemies and gold is spawned every 10 seoconds.

What went bad

• Theme – the 10 second theme was definitely not my favorite and I had a hard time coming up with an idea that I felt was good enough and that I could finish in time (see above).
•  Motiviation – After the first day was over I was seriously considering not finish my entry. I was still thinking of using my original game idea and I just couldn’t figure out how to make a fun game out of it. And I felt that instead of spending the whole sunday on something that would never be finished/fun I could spend it with my wife and son instead.
• graphics – The game doesn’t look toooooo bad, but I still wish I would have had enough time to replacing my placeholder graphics with something a bit higher quality. I’m no artist though, so chances are it would have look quite bad anyway!
• Target platform – I tried exporting my game to HTML5 from GM, but it didn’t run at all in Chrome, ran awfully in firefox and ran okay in IE10 (no sounds though). Because of this I have only uploaded a no-install windows version. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to run for all people.

What went well

• Game maker:Studio – I’ve been using GM for the last two LDs and I definitely have a love/hate-relationship with the application. It allows me to create games very quickly which is important (see above again). But as a programmer, I find the GM scripting language quite awful and I miss doing some “real” programming.
• Sunday
• Music – For the first time I created my own background music. It is of course a very simple piece of music, but it was fun to make and I’m happy with the result. PixiTracker was a lot of fun to work with as well!
• Result – My LD entries are never the best looking or sounding, or the best polished games. But I usually think that I succeed in creating something that is quite fun to play. I think that I succeeded with that this time around as well.
• Mood – I think the blinking red lights, the background music, and the moving walls, all work well together to create a specific mood for the game.

What I will do different next time

• Game concept – My concepts are usually similar to each other (last three involve shooting, 2/3 involve zombies, etc) and often use a common game style (platformer, top down shooter, etc) where the theme doesn’t play too big a part. This is partly because I want to do something simple that I’m sure to finish. It is also partly because I don’t do many games outside of LDs, so last LD was my first platform game, and this LD was my first top-down-shooter. In the future however I want to come up with a game idea that is more directly tied to the theme.
• Coding – I probably won’t use GM next time. I want to write a base library and write some real code!
• Web platofrm – I feel like I lose out on a lot of people trying my game by not offering a web based version. Next LD I will for sure offer a web based version (probably Flash since I’m thinking of using Haxe and OpenFL).
• Juice – I want my next entry to be very juicy!
• Community – Finally, next LD I’m gonna try to be more involved with the community (reading and writing blog posts for example).

If you haven’t tried my game, feel free to do so and I’d appreciate an honest comment!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11705

Tags: post-mortem, red-alert