Port mortem is where you write what went good and what went bad, right? Well, let’s get to it then-
First of all, here’s my entry- http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22590
I was going to post it in the compo, but then my computer became crazy and I had no internet connection. It’s sad, really, but looking at my game now, I think it fits the jam better.

What went good:

• In terms of code quality, this project exceeds almost all of my other projects in every aspect.
• I was having fun doing the graphics, even though they’re probably the crappiest you’ll find here.
• I found out that most of the utility classes I wrote months ago, such as Animation and Font, work seamlessly, so that if I when I start new projects, I’ll have all the boiler-plate code already available and know it works. I had fun abstracting code which I usually have to look at the whole time I’m working on my project, so all in all, my framework worked nicely.
• I’m happy with the concept of the game. I came up with it within 10 minutes of seeing what the theme is, and I don’t feel like I could have improved upon it had I waited 5 more hours. The idea fit the theme, was extremely east to implement, and worked nicely throughout the process. It’s not really a good game at all, but that wasn’t the point for me.

What went bad:

• Saturday- us Jews can’t use electronics on Saturday. It meant I had to join when everyone else was already 13 hours into the jam, but this is just a minor gripe. I had lots of spare time.
• I realized, when it was too late to reformat the framework, that the game state framework I’ve been planning for the past few weeks has a flawed core function. It means I couldn’t make a menu screen, a (real) pause screen, or a level editor. This is my next problem:
• I’m already awful at level design, having to code a level every time was just too much. If I’d made a level editor from the beginning, I would probably have made double the amount of levels in the final product, which is a measly 7.
• I wasn’t satisfied at all with the sound effects BFXR generated, so in the end there isn’t any sound in the game at all, which is a shame. For future projects I’ll know to ask friends to make the audio instead of a cheap (but sometimes effective) sound generator.
• It’s the same with graphics- I don’t really care that my graphics suck, but when I started writing the actual gameplay I’d already worked for more than an hour trying to set up the framework, which is way more than the usual for me, and when I got the core gameplay set up, I started working on the basic sprites. Their cruminess, along with the sucky feel the game had in the beginning, got me seriously demotivated. I was even considering scrapping the idea and starting anew, but then I read some posts of people who had done just that and regretted it, so I pushed on, and I’m glad I did.
• I was really shoddy with how I implemented collision detection and other things of the sort, so that adds up to the game total crumminess. I know how to write good collision detection code, so that’s not really a problem for future games.

All in all, this was a really fun experience. I’ll be sure to participate in august, and in the meantime, let’s rate some games!