Play Seeds of Destruction
If you haven’t played, I recommened you do. It’ll only takes a few moments to get the gist. It is a flash game, so you won’t waste anytime downloading/installing.

What Went Right?
1. Practice – I spent a good month practicing. I knew I wanted to use Flash and FlashPunk which I’ve never used before. So, I spent about a month before the event doing tutorials and then I worked on porting my Ludum Dare 17 – Islands entry to flash. Althought I didn’t finish the port, it was good to get my hands dirty with FlashPunk.
2. Chevy Ray’s Code – When the keynote was released and I discovered that Chevy Ray had given everyone a beautiful gift of awesome code, I immediately downloaded it and studied it. Then, during LD23, when brainstorming I threw out ones that could not be used with his starter code. It definitely shows that I did this, but I think it was worth the trade off.

What Went Wrong?
1. Bad Screen Switching Bug – in the last hours of the LD I ran into an impossible bug when switching between the different screens. I couldn’t unravel it because I didn’t understand Flash, FlashPunk and the Chevy Ray’s keynote code well enough. I spent too much time trying to “fancy fix” it. I should have switched to hack mode earlier. I ended up with a hack, that included restarting the game within the game. If you play it long enough I think it’ll run out of memory and crash. Doh!
2. Big Plans – I spent a lot of time on my animated cut scenes. It was planned to be more involved, but I noticed in time that I had to triage. I, luckily, was able to tell the bare bones story with what I had already created, but I stress how lucky I was here. I could have easily ended up with a lot of work being abandoned. I need to better judge how much I can get done in the time allotted.
3. Curse the Cursor – Several people complained about the green cursor being hard to see against the light blue sky. I hadn’t noticed this at all. I need to build in some “looking” time into my future plans. I was so busy with game play I didn’t consider the easy of use.
4. Distractions – I spent too much time surfing. If you watch the time lapse below I think you’ll agree. While surfing is a normal part of my routine, I feel it got out of hand. Typically I surf to give me and my subconsciousness time to organize and think about problems. Maybe I need to come up with a different way to take these thinking breaks. One that is less likely to degrade into just procrastination.

Time Lapse

Tools I used
Color Wheel:
FlashDevelop
MS Paint
Google Images
Fitbit
iPhone 4
My Camera
FlashPunk
TweenMax
Chrome
imgur.com

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse, tools