Hey everyone! After a good night’s rest I’m ready share my thoughts about LD27 and my game, Daisy.

If you haven’t played it yet, click here to check it out!

What went well

• I had pretty solid mechanics. The movement, jumping, and most of the seed planting felt really solid. I have to thank the 2DToolkit and 2dCharacterController plugins for this, because they made working with 2D in Unity so much better.
• I really enjoyed the theme. It pushed me to think of a game using a mechanic beyond my initial impressions of it. I think we probably all thought of the “Wario-ware” type game when we heard 10 seconds, but I think the great games are the ones that found a way to implement a mechanic beyond that. To me, it was a very natural part of my game, and didn’t feel forced (plants need sun, right?)
• The game had a beginning, middle, and an end. Something that every story should have, and that (almost) every game should have, in my opinion.
• Relatively good art for this being my second “real” attempt at pixel art. I really enjoy it, but didn’t find much time to work on it over the summer. I got a Wacom tablet, which helped speed up the process tremendously.
• Sound was incredible! It took the game up several notches higher. I used Abundant-music.com to make the music and SFXR to make the sounds. Very easy to use programs that make a huge difference in the polish category.
• Skype. I talked about it last time, but it was really encouraging to just be idly chatting with someone else who was working on LD as well. It helps with frustration and fatigue, and overall is a great motivator. Thanks Sakuyan! (check out his game SliP, it’s great!)

What didn’t go so well

• First time using 2D Toolkit for a full game, and…whoops. There’s a reason they put tools in there to help your game be more optimized but silly me, I didn’t bother to learn them before hand. First time trying to batch my sprites resulted in my entire first level getting very screwed up. Ditched the sprite batcher. Game still runs well, but the web version has a pretty long loading time.
• The game scales in difficulty way too fast. There’s a limit to how much content you can make for LD, and unfortunately since I decided to spend a good amount of time on the art and seed planting mechanic, there wasn’t much time for level design. Since I only had time for 3 levels, and my sprite inefficiencies didn’t allow for levels any larger than what I had created, things got difficult pretty quick.
• Not enough time to really explore interesting things regarding seed mechanics, particularly their interactions. I’d love to have puzzles where you are forced to use the jump spring and vines to climb a steep area, while at the same time making use of the light plant to stay alive. I didn’t get around to doing that though.
• I was sick. I had to come down with a pretty nasty cold thingy on Thursday morning. Nothing I could really do about it. Ended up doing the all-nighter between Saturday and Sunday anyways, although today I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t!

Things for the future

• More level-design in the back of my head while programming mechanics and drawing art. I think perhaps a few hours less of working with the seed mechanics and more time for level design, it would have been a better game. We didn’t really need the vine seed, and the shooter seed was only really used once. I probably should have just picked one to toss out, and then spend my time elsewhere.
• Learn sprite batching in 2D toolkit. People can’t play and rate your game if it takes too long to load. Again, I apologize to anyone who had to sit through the loading times. I think the game is worth the wait, hopefully you do too!
• I thought I’d use Construct2 this time, since it has proven to be a nicer platform for quick 2D game creation, but the addition of the aforementioned Unity plugins really made this a non-issue.

Thanks to everyone who is playing and rating my game, and thanks to everyone who keeps the competition running smoothly!

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Andrew Kennedy