Play Asylum

what went right:

• I did use the tools I know – so my workflow was quite good and I could jump into the action right away
• reading through the Flashpunk documentation before LD started turned out to be a quite good idea. I learned of some function I didn’t knew exist – and although I didn’t use this specific one’s – reading the documentation of your engine is never a bad idea
• this old-school 8bit style graphics are very easy for me to produce and many people like my stuff – so I assume I’m good at it. it’s a good idea to stick to what you’re good with for LD
• I took some time to think about the theme and develop a pretty good concept in my head which I played through “with my mind” several dozen times. prototyping with your mind is something that people should invest more time for

what went wrong:

• time management … oh boy did I screw up.
  initially I thought I’d have the whole 48 hours but suddenly stuff happened and I even ended up abandoning my LD entry completely at one point. it was only several hours before the deadline that I got time to continue working and had to code in lightning-fast mode. the complete development only took about 12 hours.
  because of this I also had to cancel several features and make my game a lot shorter than I initially planned
• I didn’t do any sound … mainly because I didn’t have the time. but also because I’m quite inexperienced with audio so I figured to finish everything else first.
  as the development progressed it turned out sound is very much needed in this game and it could get literally 10 times better with some good audio – so I recorded some effects but sadly didn’t have the time to implement them
• the beginning of the game is much much too long. everybody who played it in the context of LD told me so. and that’s exactly the point. I playtested it only on it’s own and didn’t realize that most people would play it in a series of LD entries, so my game would start quite lame in comparison. this is a lesson learned – always account for the fact that your game is going to be played in a series of games.

what didn’t make it in the game:

the main level was planed much much bigger. I planed platformer elements (canons, enemies, moving platforms, portals…) that should make it more of a game. during playing this the background story would have been unfold and the player would have learned how the character ended up in the asylum and a bit more about what the monster represents. I also tried to use a bit of psychology for this – the hanging chains, the long fall and the shrinking room are all symbols for his story.

the game would be much better and much more disturbing as well as thought-provoking if I had the full 48h instead just a quarter of it – it also would feature sound

what my conclusion is:

I’m happy I didn’t abandon the project and finished what I could. all in all I’m quite proud – I don’t think it’s to shabby and it’s my first LD after all.
however – for my next LD I’m definitely going to make sure to no be kept away from working on my entry.

Tags: postmortem