It seems to be traditional to, in your postmortem, say what went right and wrong. So here goes.

Good stuff

• I managed to adhere to my schedule almost perfectly. I’ve had enough practice with timed contests by this point to know exactly how much I can accomplish in a certain amount of time, which is a huge boon.
• With two hours left, I decided to include a boss, because I felt the game ‘didn’t feel right’ otherwise. As much as a recipe for disaster as that sounds, I pulled it off, and debugged the last boss bug with only minutes to spare. Like a boss. 😀
• Python was an incredible language for gamedev, even though I had only recently learned pygame. I was much more productive than in (say) Actionscript.
• I feel my graphics have much improved since my LD19 entry.

Bad stuff

• I had a wrist failure which took me out of the compo for almost 10 hours. I wrote about it in detail in pt 2 of my postmortems.
• I was making some dumb decisions by the end of the first day. I prioritized sound effects over getting the game done, and I’m not quite sure why I did so in retrospect. I think it was because I was really tired and it was detracting from my ability to make good decisions.
• As much as I’ve improved, I still feel my graphics were subpar, and I should have devoted more time to them.
• I wanted to apply fancy graphical filters and stuff like that, but didn’t have time. More than that, I didn’t know how. The graphical style of appy 1000mg in particular was a great inspiration to me, but I was unable to replicate it in any way. I need to look more into pygame’s advanced features in the future.
• I had to port Python, which took about 6 hours of work. But since I had work, I didn’t get the ports out until 24 hours later, which meant I fell behind in ratings. That was disappointing at the time, although I’ve mostly caught up now, I feel.

What I’ve learned:

• Get an ergonomic keyboard!
• Care more about graphics. They really are important. Particularly, after you’ve finished with implementation, graphics are arguably the most important thing to work on.
• Porting is hard. It’s such an advantage to choose a language you don’t have to port.

Two big problems with the entry, and one thing that’s separate. I’m going to work on graphics and buying a nice keyboard (that second one is pretty easy to work on :D) and I plan to really knock LD22 out of the park! Check out my game, Escape Artist!