Hey, I decided I’d write a short post-mortem for my first Ludum Dare entry – Terminally Ill. Quite fitting I thought…

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Before I begin, let me introduce myself: my name’s Sebastian and I’m a sixteen year old aspiring game dev from South Africa. I think that covers everything important..

I stumbled (well actually crawled on all fours) out of bed at 4am on Saturday morning to read the theme announcement. I had spent a half hour the previous night sketching out some rough ideas for the themes I thought most likely, so the first thing I did upon hearing the theme was minimalism, was to just flip through my notebook to find the relevant page. This is what I found: http://bit.ly/theLDSketch

Not the most awe-inspiring of GDDs! But I decided to go with the idea anyway.

So the first hour or so I spent just getting a basic text system down where I could give the program a string array and it would type it out nicely and not go over the edges or anything silly. And of course I also had to get the player’s side to work with basic functionality like backspacing and detecting commands. Nothing too difficult, but it still took a while, groggy as I was.

Then I decided I should probably give the player some context, so I started working on a few basic story ideas. At first I wanted to have a kind of Portalesque story where computers have taken over the world and are performing tests on humans to determine whether or not humanity poses a threat to them. I had some vague ideas of making it so that you had to do very badly in the tests so that they wouldn’t wipe your entire race out, but I struggled to find a way to turn that into enticing gameplay. Unable to find a story I was satisfied with I decided to leave it until later, but I did make the decision that I would take a rather dark theme. In general I prefer more light-hearted games so I’m not sure what the logic behind that was, but anyway…

At this point I thought it was time to start working on some actual gameplay so I decided to create the first minigame – pong. Pong is pong, so it didn’t take much time to make (although I do think I could have implemented it a lot better than I did) and I started thinking about some other ideas. In retrospect I think I should have sat down and planned all the minigames out because as time went on I started running into problems with things like the multiple games requiring the same controls and I didn’t want to make the player use obscure controls like IJLK to move around, because thats just completely unintuitive. Another thing I feel I should have planned better is the layout of the game. I am quite happy with the end layout, but I must have changed it at least six times during the creation process which really slowed things down. One of the main problems there was that I couldn’t figure out how many games should be playing at once. I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep the players’ terminal open so they could type stuff in, for example I was going to have a minigame where the computer would ask you a random question and you’d have to input the answer before the time ran out.

By the end of the first day I had a fairly decent system where I could add games in and the terminal would output what game was being added and what controls were required to play it. I had only managed to complete two minigames however, pong and a falling block dodging one. At this point I was unhappy with my progress and contemplating spending Sunday just relaxing and not submitting my entry after all. When I woke up I decided I might as well just see where the game would go if I spent another day working on it.

I dawdled quite a bit, watching some tv series and the like and by midday I had only managed another three minigames. I decided I should at this point turn the game into something playable and from there I could refine it and add more minigames if I had the time. So I decided on a final layout with two games split horizontally and the computer terminal on a strip on the side. After some intense arguments with the framework I set up on day one I had everything working semi-smoothly.

Now it was time for the part I was most apprehensive about – the music. I play a bit of piano and I have a nice little midi keyboard that I’ve never learned to use properly, but I’ve never actually tried to compose anything. Well I did try once, but the results of that once was the main reason I was feeling so apprehensive :P

After listening to the Castlevania song Bloody Tears a bunch of times over I finally started bashing away at some keys and after a little over two hours I had something that could be considered more or less not completely unbearably awful.

I then put everything together, spent a frustrating hour chasing down elusive bugs, spent an even more frustrating two hours trying (and completely failing) to get my mac, pc and linux builds to not completely break when downloaded (not sure if there’s something wrong with dropbox at the moment or what) before finally admitting defeat and just uploading a web build.

So I think in the end I’m quite happy with my game. I’ve received a number of positive responses which is very gratifying. Despite some ups and downs my overall impression of the event is a very good one and I’ve found it extremely fun playing through everyone else’s games. I think the main thing I need to remember for next year is simply more planning!

Well that’s it for me, didn’t mean to write quite so much..

Cheers – Seb.

Tags: First Ludum dare, postmortem

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 at 7:32 am and is filed under LD #26. 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.