The Run is done for a few days now so I’ll better write my post mortem before I forget the small hurdles. First, let me introduce The Run shortly.

You are playing a small slime and your goal is simple. Get to the rooms exit by walking on floor, walls and even the ceiling. The facility your trapped in is in a bad state so be aware of toxic liquids. Be also aware of traps, since defense systems will detect you after 10 seconds in a room and will be trying to stop you from reaching the end. Though, it is possible to finish the levels even when the 10 seconds are over. How fast can you beat all five rooms?

Play and rate now

What went right

• Head first
  I started this Ludum Dare game by doing most of the game-design before writing any code to save me from thinking about basic decisions during coding. This worked out great and I could focus on the code while coding.
• Doing pixel art
  Doing 8×8 pixel art again was the best thing I could do. I finished the assets pretty fast and I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. With more time for preparation I’ll may try WebGL next time.
• Fixing the screen size
  Not having to care about dynamic screen resizing like in my LD25 game was a huge simplification since I could expect a fixed resolution when coding. Next time I’ll may be flexible again but for this game it was perfect since the screen size equals the size of one room.
• Gameplay decisions
  One hing that was clear to me when I started working on this games code was that I didn’t wanted to make a hard 10 seconds limit. That’s why I implemented the traps. The original goal was that every room has a prisoner that you CAN free for the price of losing time and having to get around the traps. The prisoner was later replaced by bottles since I ran out of time for doing their sprites. The controls were doing well except of relying on physic.
• Flexible input system
  I’m happy with the way I implemented the input handling. When a key is pressed or a button on a known gamepad (and gamepad mode is enabled) these are mapped to actions like “left”, “right”, “jump” or “use”. So the entities don’t care where the input come from or how it is proceeded, they only need to check if they need that action. This would allow touchscreen controls as well.

What went wrong

• Leveldesign in the text editor
  My biggest mistake was to make no ingame level-editor. To edit a level I had to Alt+Tab to the editor, change a letter and Alt+Tab back to the browser and reload the whole game. A simple toggleable editor mechanic would’ve result in much more levels. Another problem was that I started doing levels 3 hours before deadline.
• Rely on physics
  When I decided to do the whole stick to the wall mechanic I did not thought it would be this hard. I had to rewrite the players physic three times before it got kinda bug-free. I also made the mistake not to give it away to players early. Thus some players had problems with the controls I didn’t see.
• Redoing the basics
  Another mistake I did was to implement the state manager and thus the menus and screens during the last six hours. I also missed the chance to do a real statistics screen (with death counts and such) simply by losing time due to the initial plan to not use libraries covering the basic stuff like bitmap fonts, state managers and controls. I’ll either use an existing library or do my own next time.
• Not finishing features
  The game has basic support for XBox 360 controllers, though this requires manual activation. It would’ve been much better if I had integrated game controls selection into a start screen (“Press space or start…”). Same applies to some in-game features like death counting by reason and the collectible bottles that have basically no use at the current state.
• Keeping it silent
  One major mood breaker is, that I didn’t create any soundtrack to the game is completely silent. A little loop would’ve helped the game to build a more intense atmosphere.
• Naming
  The Run is too unspecific for this game, since the character is a slime without legs. May I should start naming my game next time not in the very last hour.

Tags: post-mortem