Mission complete!  I (mostly) finished my 2nd Ludum Dare game, End Humanity.  Since post-mortems are the thing to do, I shall be doing that thing.

What went well

• LÖVE is still great, and Lua is still…alright.  It was a pleasure to work with.  I can’t recommend it enough.  Supposedly there’s a potentially working web-player for LÖVE.  I’ll need to see if it will work with my game.
• I was able to come up with an okay game idea based on the terrible, terrible theme.  I take that back, it’s not terrible, it’s just that I didn’t expect it to win.  I had a decent idea of what I could do for most of the last 20 themes, but I had no idea what to do for “evolution”.
• I was able to finish the “core” of the game relatively quickly.  Making placeholder art really helped, although some of the placeholder art I ended up using.

What could have gone better

• I wanted to make a game that was different from my last game, but I made another shooter.  Not that I have anything against shooters, I just wanted to do something a bit different.
• I think should have spent a few minutes making very simple and effortless placeholder sounds and music in addition to the placeholder art.  I think it’s easier to program the sound/music initially instead of towards the end like I did with this game.  In retrospect, some of the placeholder art could have been simpler; e.g., the plane could have been a giant triangle.
• sfxr and Audacity were quite handy, but I wish I had the time to use my mic and at least attempt to get some better sounds.
• I wish I had time to put a tutorial in.  If not that, at least a help screen.

What went horribly wrong

• I think I tried to make my game too big.  I only put 24 hours into the game.  If I had put in the 30 hours that I originally planned to, then I think I would have been fine.  But I didn’t.  I didn’t get to add all the abilities, enemies and features (e.g., mute) I wanted to add.  Also, I didn’t get a chance to properly balance the difficulty.  I tried to at least make the game beatable (unlike my last game), but I’m a bit worried I made the game too easy.  Now that I think about it, it might just not get hard quickly enough (that’s what she said).  I think the later waves might be a bit brutal.
• Since I ran low on time, I just forgot to do certain things.  I forgot to turn off the FPS counter off.  There are no sounds or graphics for the heal and toxic cloud (which is now an invisible toxic cloud) abilities upon activations.  I completely neglected to make the ground something other than a green slab of green.  I’m sure other neglected things will come to me later this week.
• It took me 2 hours to come up with and record all of the music, and that’s terrible (too long).  I’m not too pleased with how the battle music turned out.  Also, I don’t think it’s properly EQed.  Since I was so strapped on time, I didn’t get a chance to go back and readjust the levels like I had wanted to.
• Art is still hard!  Pinta is okay when it works, but it’s a bit buggy.  Gimp is nice, but too meaty for my mouse drawing abilities.  Maybe I should invest in a tablet.  I figure it would be easier to draw things with a tablet than using a mouse to do psuedo-pixel art.  I’m not really that into pixel art anyway.

So that’s pretty much it.  Have you destroyed humanity yet?  You probably should.  I’m sure this is where people start doing the self-promotion; e.g, telling people to follow them on various social things.  Unfortunately, I’ve no wares to pimp.