This has been my second LD and I’m very glad things went so well.  My last LD ( #25 ) was so horrible it couldn’t even play and I didn’t get ranked at all.  This time around things went incredibly well.  Here, I’m going to break down what good and bad happened.

The Good:

1) Getting a platform engine set up.  I had a solid engine in the first 3 hours of the LD and that was good for a number of reasons.  First of all I had an idea of the direction of the game.  It cut down on the number of ideas I had to sift through to get the right one.  Second, I could start making the game immediately.  This meant also that I could get a better idea of what my game was going to be.

2) Deciding on time warps.  The other major idea I had was having a platformer gauntlet where you had to get to a checkpoint in 10 seconds, then get to the next.  When I woke up on day 2, I realized my idea for having 10 seconds to do a level, but having the ability to warp back ( essentially a poor man’s Braid ) was far superior both in level design possibilities and in general innovation and creativity.

3) Utilizing streams to get playtesting.  I was often on dvcolgan’s stream, which meant I could talk to 50 + people.  This meant I could upload my game continuously and see what I needed to change.  I got suggestions that ultimately improved my game a lot, such as a suggestion to rename “respawn” to “warp” which made the main game mechanic far less confusing.

4) Having a final boss.  This was probably my best decision, even though it cost me 10 hours that I could’ve spent on more levels.  I was planning on finishing the game by just having a room with the Golden Scepter on  platform, but having a final boss changed a lot.  This meant the game ended with a challenge, that added a level of meaning to getting the Golden Scepter.

5) Spending monday off the computer.  By the time I had uploaded my game, I was practically seeing the world in lines of code and numbers.  By monday, I was almost content with never seeing a computer again.  So I took monday to walk, read a book, spend some time with my family, and away from this damned machine.  Very good idea.

The Bad:

1) Hacking in the boss.  I’m pretty sure the way I did it halved the games performance.  I was running 200 fps before the boss, but once I implemented him and hacked in a terrible lever system to accommodate for the fight, it ran 100 fps even when you weren’t fighting the boss.  I’m sure if I just created a separate entity for the lever instead of hacking the block class to do what I wanted, and made a simple boolean to check if I was in the boss room, then the game would have performed fine.  Instead I ended up losing tons of frames to a hackjob that made the game run like crap.

2) Being sick.  I had no control over this but my cold really did cut down on the quality as I ended up spending a lot of time sleeping and medicating myself.

3) Cookie Clicker.  I wasted so much time on that dumb game.  In fact, as I type this, I have it open in one of my tabs.  It is pretty much the death of productivity, so tinkering around with it made me lose so much time.  I bet I could have had 20 levels instead of 15 if I had never played it.

So that’s the good and the bad.  If you want to play Time Wizard, just click this link : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=6412