Well, my first time participating in an actual Ludum Dare was interesting at least.  I was  just coming back from vacation without internet so I had no idea about the theme or enough battery life in my laptop to get started until Sunday.  A minor setback I suppose.  Hah.  Anyway, I threw around a bunch of ideas, which all resulted in failure, until I came upon the idea for Tiny Archaeologist, which you can play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8229 Originally the ending was supposed to be a section where you are chased by water, but after two hours that still wasn’t working so I scrapped it and put what is there now.

Anywho, let me start with the theme.  I loved it.  It fit with so many ideas I’ve had floating around my head for a while now so coming up with an idea was easy.  Of course I made up a new one, but that’s besides the point.

Now let me talk about my game.  In my opinion it’s a solid meh.  I think it came out okay, but it could have been way better.  Let me start out on things I liked about it.  Firstly, I liked the idea.  I love games with tiny characters and huge worlds, so it was awesome to be able to make one myself.  I also am moderately pleased with the graphics, while they could have been better, they are some of the better pixel art I’ve done.  One of the best parts of this was I got the opportunity to work with Stencyl 2.0, and this was a really great crash course on some of the new features.

Now for the negative. I spent most of the time on the graphics, but I still don’t think they were varied or bright enough.  They seemed a little dull to me.   The music was just a simple loop, but I didn’t have time.  And putting music always gives me difficulty because of the long process of getting it from pxtone to Stencyl, so the ending got a little chopped off.  The gameplay is barebones and incredibly simplistic.  I wanted to add more, but since I started late, there was no time.

I’ll end this on a positive note: I had a really great time working on this, and I look forward to more LD’s and more games in the future.

Until then, see you,

toaster

Tags: flash, ld23, postmortem, stencyl