So after a sleepless night we managed to package the game and enter the LudumDare Jam. All in all we are satisfied with what we put together, though looking back we could have prepared more with getting to know our tools better. XNA is a relatively painless way of creating games, although limited to Windows and Xbox.

We came up with the premise pretty quickly, cutting a few ideas early (creature breeder with arena battles, procedurally generated Metroidvania) due to scope and style. We decided on evolving the character itself. By collecting items in the world the mechanics for controlling the character would change, and the way you interacted with the environment would change with it. One example of this would be how at first you could only breathe in water, and later only air. A lot of this we ultimately didn’t have time to implement.

Due to time constraints the final dragon form was cut from the game, as well as several intermidiate forms (e.g. fins for better swimming, another pair of limbs for wall jumping and running). One of the key issues we had was time management. We had a lot of ideas, yet didn’t take into account how much time would be eaten up by learning things on the fly and tracking annoying issues. Also putting effort into things finally cut from the final build can be a little frustrating. Case in point the running cycle for the planned second final form:

Running cycle for a wingless dragon

So what lessons did we learn?

• Manage your time! Complete critical tasks first, leaving polish for the last day.
• Cut features aggressively and early. This helps with the first as you are concentrating on things that are going into the final build.
• Take the time before hand to practice the different aspects and pipelines of your chosen framework.

Most of these are very familiar to us from reading others postmortems from previous dares, but I guess some things you have to experience to actually know them. Now we have a much better picture of how much work can be done in 3 days, which should help manage the process in future compos.

Take a look at the finished game and let us know what parts we did well and what we could have improved.

Tags: jam, ld24, postmortem