Hey everyone, this is my post-mortem, for the entry which I dubbed ‘Virgin Blood’, a game about an aged count who seeks to rejuvenate himself by consuming the blood of a fair maiden: the castle princess.

Lucky for him, the princess is spending the afternoon in the castle gardens.

Unlucky for him, his fatigue makes him unable to fly high enough to avoid guards and get straight to her, being forced to make his way through the garden labyrinth.

And may I say, I finally got to achieve something important in this LD – enough gameplay to call it a game.

So here are some things worth mentioning about its development:

WHAT WENT RIGHT:

– it helped A LOT to use software like MagicaVoxel for content creation, although you should always squint an eye on the stats/profiler. I had some trouble with poly count, before ending up simplifying things, so that the game has a proper framerate even on webgl builds.

– it helped A LOT to plan level design in a way that progressively helps the player understand the game. Very few people complained about not knowing what to do in the game. Although I do regret I had no time left to scatter the instructions themselves across the levels.

– it helped A LOT to sleep well. And although this is the compo I worked on the LEAST (around 12 hours or so) , it feels as if I’ve done the MOST so far.

– I made a really good choice combining twitch elements and move planning

WHAT WENT WRONG:

– it would have helped A LOT to spend at least 15-30 minutes for the audio. no loop, no sfx for this entry, which is sad

– it would have helped A LOT to spend more time fixing bugs after the submission. I only fixed the critical ones. But as it turns out, a glitch that had no actual implications except for aesthetically looking odd, made players think some of their fails were caused by it. I’m talking about the feeding animation. Should’ve fixed it from the start.

– I made a really poor choice combining tile-based character movement and keyboard input. I could have probably changed that in time but I was so caught up with what I was working on, that I dismissed the issue. And a bit lazy.

These being said, cheers and congrats to everyone!

And don’t forget to play and rate the game if you haven’t already. I’ll be dedicating these last hours doing the same for you