When I decided to enter this LD, my rationale was thus: My weekend is free, I’ve always enjoyed the products of LD, and I’ve only ever created a “finished” game once. My end goal wasn’t to create a polished, high-quality game, but to just finish something. Something, hopefully, that could be considered a game.

I think I succeeded, and perhaps, on the way, actually made something fun too.

If you haven’t yet, play and rate here.

What I did right:

Dedicated enough time: I made sure that my weekend was free of chores, projects and distractions. My family was aware that I would be busy all weekend and took care not to bother me unduly.

Prepared for the possible themes: I came up with some concepts in my head for each theme, and that cut down a lot on the prep time when I found out that Discovery won.

Chose a simple, easy to implement gameplay mechanic: Tile-based world, no animations, player character is the only character that moves. That helped a lot with the engine programming, and left me plenty of time to do content. This could also be thought of as a thing I did wrong, because it meant the fun relied solely on my storytelling, which I don’t consider a strong point.

Tone down the scope of the game: My original design ideas had the player discovering who they are by the actions they take and decisions they make, with a total of 32 possible final “selves”. However, I soon realized when I got to the content part that I simply did not have the time to make such a game. I decided that it’s better to succeed with a smaller scope than fail with a large scope, and thus I mostly scrapped the existing plot ideas and went with a combination of two clichés: amnesia and aliens.

Frequent breaks and relaxation: A luxury afforded to me by my simple engine design, I kept my mind fresh by playing other games, reading the blog feed and reading a book. Having new looks on old problems is unspeakably beneficial.

What I did wrong:

Community: As evidenced by the fact that I’m only now thinking to do a post-mortem, I wasn’t as active with the community as I should have been. I didn’t supply any beta builds, I only did one in-progress post and it was very bereft of information. At least I did a timelapse and a live stream!

Lack of beta testing: Publishing a beta build would have helped a lot with getting some bugs squashed a lot quicker. I managed to kill most of them anyway, simply because I finished early. Two that are left over: The knife respawns (could be considered a feature!) and if you try really hard you can make the numpad enter more than four digits. (You have to click in-between two numbers).

Relying on writing: I’m an analytical writer, not a creative writer. The fact that the fun of my game relied on my writing skills for the interest/fun was… Well, as FireSlash put it, “…without direction I find it hard to stay interested.”

Lack of beta testing: I’m repeating this for emphasis. I found out that my game was actually pretty difficult too late to make a significant change. I’m actually pretty surprised most of the commenters have managed to beat it without any significant hint – only one of the 15 or so friends of mine who played it was able to solve the puzzle themselves. Perhaps that is why FireSlash lost interest – there was only one hint and it was rather vague.

Didn’t find out about AutoTracker-C until after the compo: I mean, hot damn.

In Conclusion..

I had a lot of fun with this, and I’ll certainly be doing it again in four months.  The most shocking thing to me so far was the amount of positive feedback I’ve had on the story in the game – I’m going to chalk it up to beginner’s luck and next time, I’ll focus more on gameplay.

A note on commenting and rating

I noticed that the thing I wanted the most as the rating period has been going on was feedback. Then I thought, other people are probably feeling the same way! So I made it my goal to play and give constructive, useful feedback by way of comments to as many games as I can. And I want you to do the same. Have fun and good luck!