I’ve been too busy at work and at home (and sleeping this afternoon ;-)) to write a post-mortem yet, but now I’ve finally got some time – so I’ll just jot down some quick lessons learned…

The previous time I participated in Ludum Dare I spent a lot of time designing a very complex puzzle game, it was so complex that I failed to complete development of the features needed to build interesting levels and gameplay… so this time round I went in the opposite direction and hardly did any design at all, fearing that I won’t be able to finish an entry. So this time round my game is pretty much feature complete – it’s just not much fun :-(!

Once I’d finished coding all the features, I found that it was quite time consuming and difficult to build interesting puzzler levels, I think this stemmed from a number of problems:

• Enemy features were not interesting enough
• There wasn’t enough interesting interactions between enemies
• I was quite tired / sleep deprived by the time I started on level design
• Designing good puzzles takes time, I think the time constraints on this competition maybe make puzzle games a poor genre choice (too dependent on good content)

I also had boatloads of problems with publishing my entry, I wanted to do Java Applet or JNLP, but I still haven’t gotten around to either – both are a bit difficult to get working, so this is something I should figure out how to do before competition as part of setting up my tool chain.

So my list of things to do differently next time:

• 48 hours is a long time (6 work days) – even if you lose 12 hours to sleep, etc. you still have 4.5 days.
• Following from the above:  spend at least 4-8 hours on design at the start (including level design on paper) you’re too tired in the last 8-16 hours to design fun levels then.
• Tool-chain setup should include testing web publishing of the game.
• Puzzle games are a poor choice of genre, rather do something more arcadish with running or jumping or shooting.

All that said, I’m still quite satisfied that I managed to complete an entry – flawed though it may be… I can’t wait for LD19 as I definitely have lots of room for improvement!