![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/compo2\/thumb\/245a68476d78d40a7f603ec5e71977ae.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The Good<\/strong><\/p>\n I decided before the compo I would not make a game about killing things (having kids changes your thinking).\u00a0 This helped me come up with something original (for me anyway).\u00a0 Okay, so you kill the trees and you kill the fish when you cook it but hey, baby steps.<\/p>\n I took lots of breaks, got enough sleep, and ate healthy.\u00a0 I think this made a big difference in my stress level.\u00a0 I wasn’t even feeling that stressed when Sunday came and I still didn’t know what my game was going to be about.<\/p>\n I found an animation template that helped immensely.\u00a0 My programmer graphics perhaps went from fugly to “charmingly ugly”.\u00a0 I probably would have spend the whole two days just adjusting pixels to make the guy walk without it.<\/p>\n The Bad<\/strong><\/p>\n I made the n00b mistake of committing my pre-competition thoughts to either Random Generation or Evolution themes, both having great possibilities.\u00a0 I never thought Alone would win.\u00a0 So when it did my mind went blank.\u00a0 “How can I make an original game about being alone?\u00a0 That’s like 90% of games already out there.”\u00a0 I spent Saturday just making a generic game and hoping inspiration would hit me.\u00a0 That might explain why you saw down trees by umm, punching them?<\/p>\n I waited until late the last night (GMT+1 here) to make most of my sounds.\u00a0 My kids were sleeping in the next room and I was exhausted.\u00a0 Not the ideal environment for trying to voice hilarious dialog.\u00a0 Next time I will do this during the day and leave quiet night-time for coding and graphics.<\/p>\n Not enough playtesting. I got my wife to stop rolling her eyes long enough to try the game a couple of times so that helped.\u00a0 Myself, I only played in easy mode (everything costs 1 log) to test all the features because building the boat over and over got tedious.\u00a0 When your own game gets tedious to play after just a few times that should tell you something.\u00a0 I missed the message because building the boat is still tedious.<\/p>\n Got too used to seeing my placeholder graphics for terrain.\u00a0 The only piece of terrain that wasn’t created in the first 3 minutes of the compo is the freshwater, which is exactly one tile out of 300.\u00a0 I should have looked at it with a more citical eye.\u00a0 Spending just 20 minutes on terrain would have made the game look much better.<\/p>\n The Ugly<\/strong><\/p>\n Not this time.\u00a0 It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.\u00a0 Can’t wait for the next one!<\/p>\n \n