{"author_name":"Desi Quintans","cat":"LD #24","comments":[{"author_name":"Cake&amp;Code","time":"September 5, 2012 10:48 am","epoch":1346860080,"text":"I&#8217;m glad I was able to help you out and get your game going! And for 48 hours, you did a pretty stellar job too. <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/>","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1346823240,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"51514","p_author":"Desi Quintans","p_authorkey":"14456","p_urlkey":"87208","p_title":"\u2018Additive\u2019 post-mortem (spoiler: I had fun!)","p_cat":"LD #24","p_event":"LD24","p_time":"1346823240","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"14456","us_name":"Desi Quintans","us_username":"desiquintans","event_start":"1345766400","event_key":"12","event_name":"LD24"},"text":"<h2>Introduction and special thanks<\/h2>\n <p>This was my first LD, and I came here fully expecting to faceplant from over-ambition or poor time management. But I submitted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-24\/?action=preview&amp;uid=14456\">my puzzle game, <em>&#8216;Additive&#8217;<\/em><\/a>, polished and complete with hours to spare. It&#8217;s the first complete game I&#8217;ve ever done, and it&#8217;s gotten more positive feedback than I had dared to dream, and the process of making it shoulder-to-shoulder with all you other fine people (especially on IRC) was awesome.<\/p>\n <p>Before I start the post-mortem, I want to thank &#8216;Cake&#8217; from IRC for giving me a quick pep talk around six hours into the compo, when I was feeling particularly unprepared. I also want to thank all of the IRCers who complained that my first release candidate was too cryptic, and especially &#8216;Tau&#8217;, who played through the entire thing and deliberately found ways to break it. My game would be half of what it is without such playtesting. On with the post-mortem!<\/p>\n <h2>Part 1: The pre-feedback post-mortem<\/h2>\n <p>This is actually the second post-mortem I&#8217;ve written for <em>Additive<\/em>. The first one, written immediately after submission and before voting opened, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2012\/08\/26\/a-post-mortem-of-additive-pre-feedback\/\">can be found here<\/a>. Its salient points are:<\/p>\n <h3><strong>What went great<\/strong><\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>I knew my strengths and weaknesses at the start of the competition, and this guided me towards reasonable ideas and goals.<\/li>\n <li>Making a puzzle game was a great decision because the very nature of a puzzle game works against feature creep.<\/li>\n <li>I used a notebook to organise myself and work through problems.<\/li>\n <li>I set some time aside to brainstorm ideas.<\/li>\n <li><strong><\/strong>I developed a quick way to make levels, which was more efficient and accessible than building the game board in Unity&#8217;s editor.<\/li>\n <li>I avoided crashes by limiting sugar and caffeine intake.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h3>What went poorly<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>It was very difficult to design puzzles.<\/li>\n <li>The game is not colorblind-friendly because I had a hard time letting go of the aesthetic I had developed.\u00a0<em>This is not the kind of developer I want to be!<\/em><\/li>\n <li><strong><\/strong>I didn&#8217;t have enough time to deepen the game&#8217;s mechanics.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h2>Part 2: The post-feedback post-mortem<\/h2>\n <h3>\u00a0More things that went great<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>I decided on a feature lock after the first day.<\/strong> By the end of the first day I had a working game. The second day was dedicated solely to polish and level creation: no gameplay changes allowed.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I did early testing.<\/strong> Sticking the game up on my Facebook delivered exactly zero constructive criticism. Posting the game on IRC for fellow devs to play got me immediate blow-by-blow feedback, and my time budgeting on Day 2 allowed me to work on every single one of the issues that were raised.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I put a lot of effort into visual player feedback.<\/strong> I changed the buttons on the main menu at the last minute to make them look more buttony and clickable. There&#8217;s a nice marker to indicate the selected block. The marker and the selected block pulse with color. Blocks animate towards their new positions instead of just teleporting over.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I spent even more time on aural feedback. <\/strong>When you click on a block, it makes a sound. Deselecting a block makes a different sound. You get a different sound again when you try to make an invalid move. When blocks combine, the sound they make depends on the outcome. Sound makes a game feel alive and reactive. Skimp on graphics before you skimp on sound.<\/li>\n <li><strong>I think I picked a fairly cohesive style.<\/strong> The game is an exercise in minimalism (like I said in Part 1, I knew I was bad at art). Its presentation was informed by the effect of parenting a spotlight to the camera and tilting the camera 45\u00b0 towards a plane. I felt that an understated look deserved an understated and elegant sound, so I used single piano notes in GarageBand iOS for sound effects. The game would have been a dissonant mess if I had used SFXr.<\/li>\n <li><strong>Having the tutorial levels was a good idea.<\/strong> It gave me the opportunity to dress the game up with prose, and it also communicated the essence of the game efficiently and enjoyably. It became even better when I added explicit instructions on suggestion from the IRC testers.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h3>The only other thing I can think of that went poorly<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>The black squares imbalanced the game.<\/strong> It was intentional that you&#8217;d be able to walk the black squares around in the last level, gobbling everything up with wild abandon. I didn&#8217;t know that this was possible in the other levels, and the game&#8217;s difficulty suffered as a result. Some of the levels have black squares adjacent to each other because I was actively trying to avoid this exploit. If you poke through my timelapse and my source code, you&#8217;ll see that I actually did have other ideas for color combinations and win conditions (some of them were actually suggested by players in the game&#8217;s comments), but I knew that the game was already pretty good with black squares as they are, and I had no time to change the mechanic and playtest it to my satisfaction.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>In all, I&#8217;m incredibly proud of what I made. It turned out far better than I expected, and the experience is invaluable. I am already feeling the itch for some rapid prototyping, so you <em>know<\/em> I&#8217;m going to be back in December. Thanks for reading, and don&#8217;t forget to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-24\/?action=preview&amp;uid=14456\">play <em>Additive<\/em><\/a> if you haven&#8217;t already!<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <h2>A surprise for you, dearest reader!<\/h2>\n <p>I&#8217;ve uploaded pictures of the dev notebook entries I made during LD24 to <a href=\"http:\/\/cowfacegames.com\/games\/additive\">Additive<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/cowfacegames.com\/games\/additive\">&#8216;s page on my website<\/a>. It starts the day before LD, and ends with the list of things I wanted to address in this post-mortem.<\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/journal\/\" rel=\"tag\">journal<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/notebook\/\" rel=\"tag\">notebook<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/post-mortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">post-mortem<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/successstory\/\" rel=\"tag\">SuccessStory<\/a><\/p>","time":"September 5th, 2012 12:34 am","title":"\u2018Additive\u2019 post-mortem (spoiler: I had fun!)"}