It’s been an educational LD for me.

Here are a few of the things that I learned:

• I can’t stand developing more bland action games
• I am okay with developing something that is not difficult to play, even if it doesn’t have any sort of combat
• I spend loads of time on making sprites for enemies. Comparing the time I’ve spent spriting characters for Evening to the time I spent spriting characters for Little Ninja really highlights that for me
• It is more important to have a game than a thing with sound. That’s a tough one for me, but it is something that I have to learn.
• I should come here with some codebase prepared. It wouldn’t be much, but it would let me get to making the actual game much faster.
• It can still be LD if I’m in the jam, it’s just a more laid-back LD. I got it in my head not long before LD that the jam just somehow wasn’t LD (Whatever that actually meant), and denied myself a laid-back, social experience. Next time, the jam’s the plan, and the compo’s an optimistic outcome.
• It’s okay to only have one playable character, and it’s a huge time-saver. Even though I seem fixated on having spear/distaff in my games, it’s not needed for everything.
• I understand now that I have a fascination with female leads in my games. That’s not something for me to “conquer”, but something for me to simply break from now and then.

I also gained a few other things over the weekend.

Yesterday I received a DSi-XL as an “early Christmas present”. “Christmas present” meaning “thing that my mum bought for me with the money I was receiving from my relatives for Christmas”. We aren’t really big on holidays in my family, so the practical idea of just getting the thing when she already had the money and was shopping anyway, then just give it to me when we got it because having it and waiting for it is the sort of holiday tradition my parent aren’t huge on.

The DSi-XL, for those who don’t know (And I’m sure there are those) is a DSi (DS with front and back cameras that can download software from the “DSi Shop”) with very big screens. It also comes with Flipnote Studio. And on top of that, a big pen-style stylus (In addition to the normal DSi stylus)

I will probably be using Flipnote Studio to make mockups of things from here on, and I will probably start posting those mockups once I get good at making them.

I also gained a tiny bit of understanding in what Jonathan Blow calls “exploration design”. When designing Evening, I originally intended for it to be a screen-by-screen platforming challenge, but changed my mind while playing with features during early testing. Not that folks here would have seen that, as I’m sure you can guess.

Finally, I have a game idea that’s unlike things that I have done before. I really do. I’m excited about it. Something that’s actually semi-original for a change.

The post-mortem for Evening comes after the break.

Evening – Post-Mortem (Jam Version)

Summary:

Evening was originally supposed to be a low-stress run-and-jump game featuring a series of screen-long challenges leading to an ending that used the theme in a “poetic” way. What it ended up being was an incomplete but fertile prototype.

What Went Well:

• I was very deliberate in doing something that felt different than the platformers that I have made in the past, and did indeed make something that felt different to play.
• The animations for the girl were pretty good, though I still feel I could have done better.
• The art style I chose to use for the girl turned out pretty good
• I actually had something to submit for the jam!

What Went Badly

• I didn’t work nearly as hard as I could have in the last 24h that I had. I slacked off for most of that time and wound up with something that wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been
• The girl and the terrain have a visual mismatch that I felt didn’t look right. In trying to make the terrain look organic, I made it look really weird and rough.
• The graphics were incomplete, and would have added to the game immensely.
• I didn’t add in ledge-grabbing, so the “game” wound up with spots where the player would not quite make it up a jump, but could have grabbed the edge and pulled themselves up if I’d put that in. That mainly bothers me because I really wanted to put it in originally, and feel bad that I didn’t.
• The game lacked any sense of “discovery” at all. This is mainly because it was incomplete, but even the original idea was kind of lame.
• The girl’s jump animation took too long to run. I should have sped it up and maybe dropped a frame from it. It got a bit frustrating sometimes.

Overall Impressions

Evening was fun to work on, and a nice departure from Little Ninja. This game taught me that yes, I’ve been making platformers that feel fundamentally the same for a long time. Even Probe and Little Ninja feel a lot like platformers that I used to write in Python/Pygame.

Evening has some promise with a bit of tweaking, but as-is it just isn’t a real game. Still, it was game-like and I managed to get it to that point for the jam.

The controls worked fairly well, but could still use some tweaking, and some of the animations take longer than they should (Notably the pre-jump animation). Notably, I do want to separate high-jumping from crouching. As one comment playfully pointed out, you could well have the girl crawl on her hands and knees the whole time so she could jump higher. That’s weird and I don’t want that kind of behavior to give such an advantage.

Because it was an LD entry that was started with 36h left in the jam, it wasn’t very ambitious. The post-jam version will be much more interesting.

Where to Go From Here

Evening has some promise as a game provided that some things are tweaked. I fully intend to work on it and try to turn it into A Real Game.

I will add some features to it and make the level design much more complex. At the moment I’m thinking of putting in items that give new abilities along the way, and making the level design less about “go right until you win” and more about following a complex path. That means adding a vertical component to the level design, which isn’t a huge problem for me.

I will be switching from a continuous view (IE: Camera scrolls freely over the whole game world) to an area-by-area view (IE: Camera scrolls freely within set areas, and then scrolls between them when the player enters a new area)

I will probably redo my sprites for the girl, because I want her to be about 2 tiles tall. One bit of weirdness I ran into was that I couldn’t put in an overhang that was 2 tiles high, because the player would have to crouch to get into it (Her hitbox is 75 pixels tall when she is standing up) and that wouldn’t look right.

I will definitely redo the terrain. It looks really weird and I don’t like it. I will choose something that is visually simpler and actually matches the look of the game.

I have a lot of hope for Evening, and I think I can turn it into a fun game. I’ll periodically post demos as I go. (Probably not as aggressively as I was doing for Little Ninja, though…)

Peace

— Mr. Dude