Hello there. My name is Arhan Bakan. I’m a senior CS student at Hacettepe University, Turkey. This is the postmortem of my first entry in Ludum Dare competition. I had a lot of fun in the competition, so it definitely won’t be the last one for me.

The Good Stuff

• Before I started working on my entry, I was confident that it was impossible for me to finish a game in 48 hours. “Just gonna try the Jam if I fail the Competition.”, I kept saying to myself. In the end, however, I finished the game with one hour left on the clock. Sure, there are some places where I can say “I wish…”, but I feel like it’s a fun game overall and I managed to learn a lot from the process.
• Base game concept (a shrinking maze) came to my mind within the first few hours, and it turned out to be a simple and effective idea. Also, I set my goals for 48 hours pretty accurately.
• Sleeping. Lots of sleeping. 13 hours out of 48 were basically spent sleeping. I don’t understand how people manage to stay up all day and night to work on a game, but I just can’t do it. It’s way better to sleep well and think with a clear mind. Eating habits based on fruits and vegetables also work like a miracle when all you do is sit on your butt and code all day long.
• Learning from other people’s mistakes. I read some tips on how to survive a game jam before the weekend. And it all helped a lot. Reading good advice is always helpful.

The Bad Stuff

• Should’ve known the engine better. I worked on Unity3D. It’s the only game engine I’m familiar with, however, I’m not familiar with it enough. I spent nearly 3 hours on the character controller and after the dust settled, it was only a few lines of code. This competition made me a lot more experienced with the engine, but I still have a lot to work on.
• Lack of music. I couldn’t find a fitting content generator for music, and I was not prepared to compose music on my own. Next time, I hope this won’t be an issue as I’ll come back having finished my homework. 😉
• Lack of interesting gameplay. For most of the users (and friends) who played it , the game has a good concept, decent graphics but not enough gameplay to keep the user interested enough to finish it. It’s also a bit tough for most of them, and this takes away from the fun, too. Most of this problem was due to time constraints, so I’ll try to do better next time.

Thanks for reading through my postmortem. I’ll definitely be back for the next Ludum Dare if I have time for it. It was a great experience.

If you’re interested, be my guest, play and rate my game if you can.

PLAY —–>          WORLD GONE WRONG          <—– PLAY

Tags: postmortem