It’s a little late but here is the post mortem to my competition entry The Lonely Island, which you can find here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3428 .

The plan.

My plan was to make a bit of a survival simulator where you are stranded alone on an island and you have to slowly gather the resources you needed to make your escape. I wanted to have day/night cycles, mountain areas and loads of different items to find and craft. All this turned out to be a little too ambitious though and I ran out of time before I could add any of these things. In the end I had to quickly implement making a raft and escaping before the development time was up.

Day one

The first day went extremely well. I got the tile maps loading and rendering very quickly and made great progress on the GUI along with some of the more important mechanics. I’m not too familiar with AS3 and Flash Punk but most the things I tried to do either worked first time or worked shortly after trying to implement it. Bug’s didn’t take more than 5 – 10 minutes to fix and it started to look like I would be able to add either everything or most things I had planned on, but I was wrong.

Day two

In comparison to day one, day two was a nightmare. Nothing worked first time and major bugs took what seemed like forever to fix. It didn’t take long for me to see I either wasn’t going to finish on time or I wasn’t going to be able to add many features. I started off the day by getting the map scrolling with the players movement, and this caused a load of problems and broke most of my GUI and I had to spend at least half the day fixing everything. I learned a valuable lesson from this though, get scrolling maps in ASAP in the future. After I finished climbing over that humongous hurdle I didn’t have long left to implement the crafting system. After thinking for a while and the most easy and time efficient way to get crafting in I decided to go with a simple combining method for creating tools and the raft. By the time this was done I only had about 20 minutes to implement some simple sound effects and get my game submitted.

What went well

I have never really tried to make a GUI before so I’m pretty proud of the results, even if it is a little crude. This is also my first game from the top-down perspective, which was a nice change of pace making.

What  didn’t go well

Many things. The art, for instance wasn’t particularly good but then again my art never is, I just wish I had some more time to spend on it.
The scrolling maps, as I stated earlier, didn’t go well while implementing and ate up most my time but at least it got sorted out in the end.
My game also ended up being too easy and lacking in features as a result of various problems and the time constraint.

Most importantly, did I have fun?

Hell yeah I did. Making a game to a set theme in 48 hours is an amazing experience and I learn so much each time I enter. Ludum Dare also has an amazing community surrounding it which I am proud to be a part of.