What’s the minimum time in which you can make a game that looks reasonably finished and attractive and is fun to play?  In an attempt to answer this question, I decided to spend this LD48 creating as many games as I could.  I wanted them to be classic arcade-style in a varied mix of genres, so that each game really provides a different experience.  To shorten time, I decided each game would have only one (hard) level, one enemy type, and one goal criterion, based on which you get a bronze, silver, or gold rating.  Art is always a problem.  However, with my new sprite generator I can create lots of sprites, and combined with Evolvotron, I have a “psychedelic shoestring” art style of my own   I managed to churn out 8 games, taking a little over 2,5 hours for each game in total.

I consider the project altogether succesful, and I am quite happy with some of the games, which I think could be made into stand-alone games with only a little extra work.  However, I did get carried away with the technical achievement of creating games with very different mechanics.  Next time I should maximise even more on fun, even if the games would be more similar to each other.

I also made a timelapse, which I will post later along with a graphical analysis of time taken, hopefully shedding more light on the biggest time wasters this time round.  I tried to create all graphics and sound in a single batch to save time.  However, my impression was that I’ve been fiddling with the backdrops a little too long for comfort, in order to get reasonable colour schemes.  Also, just typing in the code seemed to take a lot of time.  I produced on average about one line of code every 40 seconds.  What was definitely better than last time is that I didn’t need to playtest and tweak the game and controls for ages.

>>> Play the games here <<<

NOTE: there is a postcompo version with a restart game option.

Tags: minigames, postmortem