Here goes a postmortem for my first LD game, Lighthouse Keeper. I started working on the game on Saturday afternoon and finished almost on the deadline.

This was a great experience even if my game didn’t turn out great

What went right:

• Managed to submit a game, even if it’s horrible, buggy and way too hard.
• The art is ok in general terms (for programmer art!), atleast better than stuff I’ve done before.
• Using stuff I’ve worked with previously: C++, SDL, OpenGL.
• Simplifying my original idea so I could finish in time.

What went wrong:

• The game ended up being too hard. Should probably tune the wolves and player attack damage and/or add more lives to the player. Actually you started with 5 hearts but decided to drop to 3 just before submitting the game.
• You can walk on water! Didn’t have enough time and decided to work on other stuff instead of adding collision detection for staying on the island.
• I spent too much time trying to figure out isometric tiles when I could have just render a rotated quad for the island (pretty much did this to save time).
• The code is horrible, there’s repeated stuff and it’s messy. This is because I just started coding right away with no planning or thinking before.

Tags: postmortem