{"author_name":"TheSheep","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1356028380,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"47423","p_author":"TheSheep","p_authorkey":"11694","p_urlkey":"83087","p_title":"Vanillian post-mortem","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1356028380","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"11694","us_name":"TheSheep","us_username":"sheep","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"<p>Let me sum up how this Ludum Dare went for us this time. We wanted to work together, so we did jam this time &#8212; Makdaam did music, sounds and level design, and I made the simple engine and graphics. The things that I&#8217;m mostly happy about and think that we got right:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li> I used love2d, having only about two weeks of learning it (and of learning lua). This seems like a sure way to fail, but it was actually fine.\n <li> The AdvTiledLoader library saved me a lot of time, and Tiled let us design levels relatively painlessly.\n <li> Using music as a part of the level design seems like a viable strategy.\n <li> The workflow for my graphics is the same that I used in previous Ludum Dares, and it seems to work well, except for tiles, about that later.\n <li> Making the distributions for all the platforms was very easy with love2d.\n <li> I had an emergency plan of adding shooting to the game and turning it into a shooter if anything went wrong, but that didn&#8217;t happen.\n <\/ul>\n <p>What went wrong:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>If you are setting out to make an adventure game, make sure you at least have some outline of the plot. We left the plot for last, and it was a huge mistake &#8212; we only did very basic and rudimentary things so it can barely be called a game (you can&#8217;t even win). Another person taking care of the characters, plot and levels would be fantastic.\n <li>The freehand style doesn&#8217;t work too well with tiles. It was hard to make them tile and still retain their rough looks. I also didn&#8217;t make all the necessary tiles, so you can see some gaps and inconsistencies if you look carefully.\n <li>Collisions are hard, but fortunately getting them perfectly right is not necessary for the game to be playable.\n <li>Sound support of different libraries varies greatly between different platforms, even with a multi-platform framework like love2d. The game crashed on Windows just because we pre-loaded the sound files into memory.\n <li>An overlay layer is not enough to make top-down levels look right in respect to obscuring sprites.\n <li>Defining the dialogues and quests directly in the map files is a mistake &#8212; makes it too hard to see everything at a glance and make improvements. I think that I should have only defined named locations, and have all the plot and text in a separate file that refers to them.\n <li>We didn&#8217;t have the free time and any energy left to work on it for the third day of the jam. We could have come up with a real plot and polished it all much more, but we were so completely tired, that we haven&#8217;t.\n <\/ul>\n <p>You can play it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&amp;uid=11694\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <p>Some input from Makdaam:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>There&#8217;s not enough time<\/li>\n <li>Learning milky tracker proved to be more difficult than expected<\/li>\n <li>Sounds and music are not implemented right anywhere<\/li>\n <li> 1 out of 50 melody ideas can be rendered almost instantly in a tracker without any training<\/li>\n <li> 1 out of 10 melodies are usable<\/li>\n <li> sfxer FTW<\/li>\n <li> Audacity is enough to make your own synth samples with distortions<\/li>\n <li>none of those samples will be used in the final LD product, so don&#8217;t waste your time in Audacity<\/li>\n <li> prepare for your neighbor getting a new hifi during LD<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 20th, 2012 1:33 pm","title":"Vanillian post-mortem"}