Here is the post mortem to my game Shape Escape.

You can watch the timelapse here.

THE BEGINNING
I stayed awake until 3 a.m. when the theme got announced (I’m living in Germany). Then went to bed and thought about different ideas. When I woke up I got myself a nice breakfast with my family and talked about my idea where the player can shapeshift the main character and each charactar has an own AI/Behaviour. So the player won’t be able to control the character directly. A little bit like lemmings but with only one character.

My tools were Monkey-X, Photoshop, Tiled and Logic Pro. I had a very bad start: First thing I needed was to load in and render a Tiled-Map. Something I did a hundred times before. But as I decided to not use my own “framework” I got into some trouble. I just thought I could extract the tiled-loader out of it, but it has so many OOP-Crap-Dependencies I had two choices. Write a new tiled loader from scratch or switch to my old framework. I decided to write a new tile loader from scratch and lost around 4 hours.

But after that it went quite smoothly. I decided to try the core mechanic with very simple art (I just used various colored Rectangles for everything) and when I put the first shapeshift into my demo-map I decided that the game mechanic ist quite good so I would go on with the idea.

The second day some annoying collision bugs popped up and it required quite some time to fix them. The rest of the day I spent building some levels (wished I could have added more) and created a simple chiptune in Logic. I used a “Instrument-Layout” I’ve created originally for my platformer Tiny Thor, because I knew when I start to select/search for the right sounds that could take myself hours and hours. After improvising on my synth for some time I found a nice melody I liked and from there I’ve arranged the song around it and I’m so glad that people seems to like it because time was slowly running out and I was in a really hurry.

In the end I’ve submitted my game around 6 hours before submission deadline which was very relaxed. I could have added more levels probably but I was out of energy and decided to submit the game and see what people might think.

I already have TONS AND TONS of idea how to develop the game further, but haven’t decided if I’ll do a post-compo version. 😉