Ahoy all!

Last weekend I made a compo entry called Castaway.

If you speak French, you might want to read my lengthy writeup on Les Forges. Else, here are the traditional bullet point lists :

What went well

• Using familiar tools (custom framework, FlashDevelop, HaXe, Photoshop, Reason, etc.)
• Using project management techniques and tools. I used Asana to handle my ever growing todo list and a mini scrumboard for tracking bugs. Pictures at the end of this post.
• Recording custom sound effects. This was my first time and I’m very happy with the result (especially since it didnt take long). Picture below.
• Testing. Two friends came on Sunday evening and played the game again and again to spot bugs. They were the one writing the scrum post-it and it was very useful.
• Chronolapse. Making a timelapse took no effort and I love the end result.

What went not so well

• Theme. I did not think long enough of the theme and started working without a clear idea of what my game would be.
• Time management. I spent too much time working on animations and art assets instead of making content. Look at this 8 frames walk cycle : . This is wasted time, lots of it.
• Balancing. The game is way too hard ; my testers thought it was funny because of it but I should have considered this as alarming.
• Oops. A critical bug that crashes the game on slow computer was shipped in the compo version. Maybe the test configuration should include a slow computer too.

Pictures

Asana

Bug tracking scrumboard

Sound design tools

Even though my game is way too hard, too short and unforgiving, I’m still happy with what I did. I am satisfied I made some art and music that were not 8bit/chiptune over the course of the weekend and more importantly, I had lots of fun. Next time, I will NOT make a sidescrolling platformer, that’s my objective.

Thank you all for reading/playing/rating !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 25th, 2011 at 11:33 am and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.