http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-19\/?action=preview&uid=2925<\/a><\/p>\n What went right:<\/strong><\/p>\n I made a game!<\/strong> \u2013 About 10 work hours in, I realized that if it wasn\u2019t for the competition, this was precisely the moment when I\u2019d normally stop on a hobby project and leave it unfinished forever. I am so glad for the external pressure. Thanks, Grandmaster Ludum Dare!<\/p>\n 20×20 and the 1 screen game<\/strong> \u2013 I am a programmer, no arguing it. This means I\u2019m not an artist. Limiting my assets to teeny pixels really helped keep those limitations from being the focal point of the game. Not to mention I saved sooooo much time by not having to deal with mechanics like paging, scrolling and camera.<\/p>\n Design Up Front<\/strong> \u2013 I\u2019d decided that I was going to spend two hours designing on paper before I wrote any code. This was tremendous. I managed to go through several crappy designs<\/p>\n No Level Design<\/strong> \u2013 I\u2019m a huge fan of Lost Garden. If you\u2019ve never read it, it\u2019s one of the best design blogs I know of. Anyway, I\u2019ve really been convinced to push for \u2018evergreen design\u2019, that is, design that can be played forever, not driven by \u2018once through\u2019 content. Besides, I\u2019m not a very good level designer. It was really hard to shut off all the possibilities of level based games from my design thinking, but in the end it was worth it.<\/p>\n Polish Last <\/strong>\u2013 I tried really hard to keep myself on task and spend my effort on mechanical completeness more than anything else. Probably 75% of my polish came in the last hour of the competition. I\u2019m pretty sure that if I\u2019d tried to polish each mechanic and feature I\u2019d have never finished at all.<\/p>\n Making lists<\/strong> \u2013 Each night I would make lists of all the features I needed to implement next. This really helped me keep priorities focused and not to go down the rabbit hole on anything.<\/p>\n Lucky Tuning<\/strong> \u2013 I am so lucky my game is playable. The tuning was all guesswork and I didn\u2019t even get to play it more than 2 minutes before submitting. It\u2019s actually not bad!<\/p>\n Skip Audio \u2013 <\/strong>Yes it\u2019s nice, but a playable game seems nicer.<\/p>\n What went wrong:<\/strong><\/p>\n Time<\/strong> \u2013 I had planned to only work about 20 hours in this competition. I have a family and also my sister and brother-in-law were in from out of town, so I was expecting fairly limited constraints. That being said, I had even less time than that. By the end of the first day, my game wasn\u2019t even mechanically complete and I was feeling pretty low. The last day I slept in accidentally and only managed to get 3 hours in between everything that was going on<\/p>\n Last Minute Purpose<\/strong>\u2013 Even with my design up front, I still had no idea what the purpose of the game was until the last hour. Discover the green planets is what I came up with. Funny that I didn\u2019t think of a goal related to discovering until the end. I tend to get a bit \u2018mechanics focused\u2019 as a designer. This was very risky.<\/p>\n Shops are so complicated<\/strong> \u2013 I went through three iterations on the architecture for my in-game store before finally getting it right. It was terrifying and took up at least a third of the total competition. The end result was the ability to arbitrarily upgrade statistics on the player object, but it took way too much time to get there.<\/p>\n Chopping Block<\/strong> \u2013 Some things didn\u2019t happen. Pink planets are completely pointless, which is so frustrating because they are huge and at the fringe of the galaxy and you just want them to be awesome. \u00a0Lots of stuff just didn\u2019t make it.<\/p>\n Lack of feedback<\/strong> \u2013 Every time I watch someone play my game I cringe a little. They understand the game, but there\u2019s just not enough feedback to keep them from making silly mistakes or getting stuck unnecessarily. The vast majority of the feedback that\u2019s there went in during the last 20 minutes of the competition.<\/p>\n Need more Engine \u2013 <\/strong>This was my first time ever working with HTML5 and canvas. I spent about 3 days building up some really basic example code for drawing things, handling input and preloading images. Wow I really wish I had spent more time building up a library for this. Particularly for UI elements like text controls, popup windows, etc. I sunk so much time making quick hacky versions of what was essentially library code that could have been spent on the game instead. Next time I\u2019ll be more prepared.<\/p>\n What\u2019s Next:<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s so much more I could do to make this game awesome. Here are some of my plans:<\/p>\n
Better UI \u2013<\/strong> More than anything else, the game just needs better feedback. Tell you when you\u2019re running out of fuel or armor more clearly, show tooltips on all the things in the world, give you enemy stats before you get in a fight, tell you the resources a planet has to offer, better rollover highlighting. Infinite time can go here.<\/p>\n The Money Game – <\/strong>Credits should only drop from enemy ships and never from planets, changing the money game dramatically and giving you more reasons to hunt down enemies and fight.<\/p>\n Resource Distribution –<\/strong> Create variations of the green planets that drop different resources instead of all planets dropping all resources. I want you to have to hunt for the resource you want to get the upgrade you\u2019re targeting<\/p>\n Tuning – <\/strong>The resource tuning is probably a bit high, especially around the edges of the galaxy<\/p>\n Audio – <\/strong>Learn how to do audio in HTML5 and add audio to the game.<\/p>","time":"December 22nd, 2010 9:12 pm","title":"10 Minute Galaxy Post-Mortem"}