I made a game “Minimal Force” this weekend, and here is the post-mortem:

What went good:

• Idea. A puzzle platformer! A reverse metroidvania! At first the idea didn’t seem trustworthy, but it appeared to be a good one.
• Level design. Hmm… I managed to make a level for every item lost, without any not-fitment.
• Graphics. I totally made some good graphics myself! I’m going to make an individual post about it.

What went bad:

• Time. I submitted the game at 0:33 AM. That’s too late!
• Planning. I had to recode several things because I didn’t plan them well!
• Bugs. I had a lot of bugs, and I still have some. I didn’t plan to release a post-compo, but I think I’ll have to release a bug-free version.
• Punctuation. Sorry about that, I just don’t know English punctuation!

What went average:

• Sounds. I included just one sound, and generating music seems a bit unfair. But who cares if the music is awesome, right? (Now I think the music wasn’t quite made in the given time. I just had a folder of music generated beforehand, and I picked one from it. But I could just enter the seed into the generator and generate it once more, so I think it’s OK.)
• Theme. My favourite was ‘Every death is meaningful’, and I was a little disappointed when I saw it’s ‘Minimalism’. I couldn’t make any idea for some time, and the one I came with didn’t seem trustworthy.
• Maths. I still haven’t found a way of calculating velocity of an arrow so it perfectly goes through a given point. But the boss wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
• Community. I was streaming the process of game making, making a timelapse and posting frequently, but it’s not more than usual. I didn’t even have a journal, unlike the previous time.

What did I learn:

• Drawing a bit better.
• Using Tile Studio a bit.

And here is a timelapse (I missed a part at the beginning, when I was drawing levels with Tile Studio, and a part at the end, when I was submitting the game):

Since I have a lot of holidays this and next week, I’ll make sure I get a gold coolness medal. I’m also planning to stream playing LD games.

Tags: post-mortem