<\/strong>Planning<\/strong>. After the theme was announced on the IRC channel, the first thing I wrote in my notebook was “EVOLUTION!!! FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU!!!”, then I had some ideas about monkeys evolving, then about ‘devolution’, where you have to remove genes to make a species dumber, eventually leading to extinction. I finally settled with a game where you have to ‘evolve’ a spaceship by defeating enemies.<\/p>\n Keeping things simple.<\/strong> I made an effort not to make sure the game mechanics didn’t go beyond my abilities. I’ve never tackled AI in a game I’ve made before, so I just created a very simple ‘AI’ system.<\/p>\n Sense of getting stronger.<\/strong> I really didn’t know about how this turned out until I played my game after submitting it.<\/p>\n What went wrong:<\/strong><\/p>\n Work commitments \/ Real life.<\/strong> I spent the majority of Saturday at work, leaving me with little time to work on the game.<\/p>\n Lack of play testing.<\/strong> Some felt the difficulty of the game was too hard, and others said it was too easy, once they’d figured out the tricks in defeating the enemies.<\/p>\n Not knowing what I was doing.<\/strong> Sometimes, I would forget what I was working on within my code. I feared that some things could be left unfinished.<\/p>\n Cut content.\u00a0<\/strong>I had originally planned on having the player destroy smaller, lower level ships in order to gain health (which would’ve given a greater sense of evolving), but instead, decided that stopping vertical movement would restore 5% of your health per second instead. I also considered having icons appear above the enemies, to indicate their ‘dominant’ stat (the one which will be upgraded when you defeath them). I was running out of time, so these features were cut, as well as a score system, and a win condition (getting to the ‘Dragon’ level).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why did I name the game ‘Gravallax’?\u00a0<\/strong>Because I work in a restaurant that serves Gravlax<\/a>, and I thought that the name of this dish sounded like a retro space shooter. We sold a lot of Grav(al)lax that Saturday.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You can play my game RIGHT HERE<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 28th, 2012 4:24 pm","title":"Gravallax: The post-mortem"}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/gravallax1-550x413.png\")
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