{"author_name":"elbowroom","cat":"LD #21","comments":[{"author_name":"Petzi","time":"August 22, 2011 11:16 am","epoch":1314029760,"text":"You were wondering who would read your post, well I happened to stumble upon it and did read it. I was also tempted to go for a maze-generator, as it would give the player lots of variety and replay value while taking away the player’s ability to learn the stage. Fortunately, through another project I’m working on I discovered that generation is often a huge pain to make, so after a bit of pondering I realized that it was a terrible idea. Even if the game had an infinity of levels, people usually don’t play Ludum Dare submissions more than once or twice.","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"vandriver","time":"August 22, 2011 11:42 am","epoch":1314031320,"text":"A lot of us read these!","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"","time":"August 22, 2011 11:56 am","epoch":1314032160,"text":"If you’ve done randomly generated levels before, it doesn’t take too long as my LD entry has randomly generated levels. =] I usually take my further after the compo so I’m not too worried about people not playing through it enough.","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"","time":"August 22, 2011 11:56 am","epoch":1314032160,"text":"Heaps of people read these posts. I read a fair chuck as they scroll past, but rarely comment on them. It’s especially interesting seeing the postmortems – especially the things that almost everybody does wrong, repeatedly, even though we all know we should avoid them!","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"","time":"August 22, 2011 12:32 pm","epoch":1314034320,"text":"Whenever I visit the site I skim through every single post on the front page, but I almost never bother commenting on them anyway, so don’t feel down if you think nobody’s reading..","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1314028380,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"63783","p_author":"elbowroom","p_authorkey":"3590","p_urlkey":"99568","p_title":"Where we write stuff no one reads","p_cat":"LD #21","p_event":"LD21","p_time":"1314028380","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"5","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"3590","us_name":"elbowroom","us_username":"elbowroom","event_start":"1313712000","event_key":"7","event_name":"LD21"},"text":"

I always wonder who reads these posts, there are so many and they keep coming in so I guess we might as well focus on the games..<\/p>\n

However, I do feel that granted the premission I have a few things to write about Ludum Dare\u00a0 21, My first LD was 20.
\n Unlike my first LD, this time I only completed nearly 20% of the features.
\n This Theme was actually one I\u00a0wanted long before the\u00a0LD21 and I ended up coming here unprepared to\u00a0make an exquisite submission.<\/p>\n

I spent the entire first day on perfecting the first feature that hardly affects gameplay(random maze) and only using one sample so the player doesn’t benefit from the variety of having a fresh new maze each time we play.<\/p>\n

The game I wanted to create, a rougelike inspired shmup,\u00a0 (Think Metroidvania meats Powder)where you play as a space traveller caught in a massive (not so) abandoned \u00a0space station looking for some spare parts to fix his rig and save some bucks.<\/p>\n

Requires improvement:<\/p>\n

The game was suppose to introduce the story to the player in game amongst other things, like powerups, enemies, bosses and traps, this feature will only\u00a0be in a future version.<\/p>\n

The good:<\/p>\n

I learned something I should have known by now.
\n How to blit fast in AS3 which I never tried before.(I actually used shapes)
\n This was very refreshing and got me highly excited near the last hours.<\/p>\n

What I learned:<\/p>\n

I really should focus on making gameplay elements first.
\n Making and playing with the actual player experience is far more important than the technical aspects, cause if the game ends up not finished, I would like to think that people enjoyed my submission.
\n Otherwise it would be a technical demo competition and not a game making event correct.<\/p>\n

Anyhow I’m sure tomorrow I’ll play all the great games and enjoy and start getting some code ready for the next LD.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading.<\/p>","time":"August 22nd, 2011 10:53 am","title":"Where we write stuff no one reads"}