Last weekend i created a game called “Villainous Dungeons” for the 48h compo. You can play/rate the game here.

What went right:

• Tools. I used FlashPunk to make the game. This turned out to be much more useful than i first thought it would be. I have been jamming a lot with FlashPunk over the last few months and I have become very familiar with it. This made coding stuff much faster than i first thought it would be.
• Idea. This is the first LD (that i have finished) where I had an idea for a game, where the gameplay really fit the theme. It wasn’t very hard to code either (this was why i failed the last LD). It was also an idea that i could pull off in the time that i had.
• Sound. Even though the sounds are just SFXR sounds, I think that i used sound the sound really well. A sound is played when you select a guard. Different sound play depending on weather the hero or one of the guards were hit.
• Time. I did spend the time i had quite efficiently. I didn’t spend too much time on animation or drawing. I had a train trip on Sunday where I also got a bit done.

What went wrong:

• Time. I had a few Christmasy things to attend over the weekend, so i barely had time to make games.
• Playtesting. The game wasn’t really playable until the very end of the compo. This meant that i couldn’t tweak the gameplay as I was making the game.
• Controls. The thing most people seem to dislike about the game is that the controls are kinda tricky. I am not really happy with them either. Even I have a hard time playing some of the levels.
• Level design. The levels were designed in the middle of the night on the last day of the compo. I was so tired that i started to feel sick this is why there are only 4 levels in the game.
• Graphics. The graphics is are really ugly pieces of programmer art. This is especially terrible because  I know i can do better than that.

What i learned:

• Sound. As i mentioned before I think that i used sound really well in the game. I have never really used sound as part of the game design before, but i think it worked really well.
• moveBy(). This is such a useful function and I never knew it existed until last weekend. The function moves the entity by whatever you set it to and does all of the wall-collisions for you. Before this i used a really clumsy set of for loops to do my moving/wall-collision.
• Get it playable. Next time I do a game  jam I will focus on getting it playable fast, rather than spending a long time programming the  individual parts of the game.

Overall I am pretty happy with the game. With the amount of time I had, I am pretty amazed that i could even finish the game in time.

Bye!