>> Play Tiny Conflict <<

Hi everybody! Since I finished my game I’ve had time to look at feedback and think over the progress of making my game. This was my first Ludum Dare, and my second game that has reached a playable state (The first one being my LD warmup!) So here’s my post-mortem.

What went right:

• After about 40mins of brainstorming, I had a good idea of where I wanted to go with the game. I found that the easiest way to come up with ideas was to draw something (see point 2.)
• I started off with some concept art! This was very helpful and I would recommend this to anybody starting a game. It gives you assets to use, a goal to work towards and most importantly, motivation!
• The underlying gameplay is very solid. I don’t even know how I did it, but that the end result is very fun and enjoyable to play.
• The game looks nice! I very much enjoyed making all the planets, and by picking at the art (I would make some art, code it into the game  and repeat) I felt like I was making great progress.
• I managed to do well considering I had school on the final day of the compo, which cut about 9 hours off my total time.
• Physics and particles! The way that the planets bounce off of each other looks and feels very nice, and the particles which come from the collision are satisfying (see the quote from notch below.)
• I was very organised before the compo, with my base engine all sorted and ready to go. Honestly, if I didn’t do the warmup the weekend before I probably wouldn’t have made a game half as good as what I did.
• Music! I listened to tons of music as I was creating my game, and that helped somehow.

What didn’t go as well:

• The game severely lacked instructions. You were told in the beginning “Use WASD to move, and hover over planets for more information” but it never actually told you what the goal of the game was (oops!) or how to progress. If you did hover over the planets however, it would show “click to upgrade” or “click to migrate”, but that wasn’t nearly enough.
• I left a lot of things up to the last few (5) hours. I got to the final stretch, and I soon realised that I needed to rush to get it finished in time. This included the instructions, music, a bit more content (including art) and exporting and packaging my project. I somehow managed to do that all in 5 hours, but they were the parts of the game that fell short of the standard that I had set previously.
• The music was made with wolfram tones, and was pretty bad 😛 I removed it later because I wasn’t sure if WolframTones’ ToS allowed it to be used.
• Some people have trouble running the game, but I honestly have no idea why. Thankfully, it’s a minority group.

Here’s some advice from notch to anybody making games:

Game design protips: 1) More particles. 2) Shake the screen. 3) Flash anything that takes damage. 4) MORE PARTICLES!!! 5) PAAAARTIIICLEEES

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed my game

Tags: postmortem