Last weekend was Ludum Dare 22: Alone, obviously why else would hundreds of people gather to make no less than 891 games not including those that were not submitted?  I took part of this awesome gathering for the second time, with Ludum Dare 21: Escape being the first.  During that entry I had the following postmortem of which after reading I realize I didn’t put in all the things that went wrong.  I feel to that list should have been “pick a smaller idea”, although I suppose that previous idea was very flexible in size.

What went right:

I had the weekend to myself, with no interruptions or responsibilities.

I picked a framework I was familiar with, and had tools to do what I needed.

I followed the theme well with a simple idea of taking a team sport, and playing alone vs the other team.

I spent little time debugging issues, crashing, etc.

I added sound effects and music early on.

What went wrong:

The idea was far too big for a weekend project, too many little rules.

The idea never turned into a game really, despite a win/lose condition; It was too hard, or too repetitive if the player managed to learn the patterns.

Some art; the player/ai characters, was completely temporary and never replaced with something better.

I spent far too much time programming.  My framework needs to allow me to manage/do less, if it is to be useful in LD.

What was learned:

I need to spend more time on art/music and content.  To help with this I am rewriting/adding to my framework so that it will manage more things for me.  Instead of loading a sound, and remembering to unload it, I should just be able to PlaySound(“Yada.wav”).  It would go a long way in reducing the time I spent programming, or at least the time spent programming “needless” things.  An idea for a 48 hour game must be small.  I went into this compo knowing I needed to aim to be complete with my game by the end of day 1, yet the idea I chose was far too big for that.

I am waiting for the next LD, where I hope I can shine through and get this done right.

Play and Rate: 10 Yards Alone