Play ‘Super 1-Bit Space Arena’

So, here’s my post mortem I wanted to write for quite some time now.
LD#26 was my third time participating and it was the first time everything worked more or less as I planned to.

I started by thinking something up that would fit the theme and chose to interpret it in a visual way, in terms of color depth, so it ended up being a 1-bit game – the most minimalistic color depth. Since this isn’t limiting genre wise I had to decide that next. Although I’d really liked to make a RPG but that’s something I simply can’t do within 48 hours (yet). The only other genres I have experience making games of are platformers and generic action games – so I decided to choose one of those. For some reason unknown to me (it might be because I was re-watching Star Trek Enterprise and Firefly at the time) I wanted to put my game into space, which fits action more than platformer – and what’s more fun than an arena shooter? yes, nothing, so this was settled then 😀

What went right!

• I love Flashpunk!
  By now my workflow is tuned almost to perfection – I can make art, code and implement content at a fast pace for/with it. I already decided to use something else next time – but for this time it simply felt like the obvious right choice – and it was.
• 1-Bit graphics rock!
  It’s both very hard and very easy to work with very minimal graphical possibilities – like in this case, only two colors – since the art can be produced very fast and efficiently, yet it’s hard to get those few pixels right. However, by now I’m not too shabby as a pixel artist so this was a lot of fun for me and suited my skillset
• time management is key!
  I made a lot of breaks and was able to get everything done nonetheless. the biggest reason being that my workflow didn’t let me down and I didn’t stumbled over significant hurdles along the way
• I’ve implemented everything I planned!
  yes – this is a first for me. The game you can play is exactly what I imagined when I started making it (except for 2 gameplay thingies I’ll explain later). Having a to-do list and getting everything done in time is such a great feeling

What didn’t!

• Although I’m quite pleased with the audio of my game – it’s far from great. I’d really like to get a less repetitive, more funky music track but simply wasn’t able to achieve that. mainly because I suck at music. I’ve known for a long time that the first person I’d hire for a dev team of my own would be a music guy.
• Sound effect variations are incredibly awesome – yet I didn’t implement them. As many comments pointed out the weapon fire sounds are very repetitive and although this  leads to a nice retro feel – it also doesn’t sound that great after a while. One of the things I learned this LD is to always produce slightly mutated sound effect variations and play them randomly.
• I’m not happy with the AI – but I implementing some nice A* pathfinding seemed unnecessary at first – yet as my game progressed it became clear it would improve it a lot. So I started hacking it together but couldn’t get it to work without screwing up my time schedule – so I dropped it
• I should have introduced the different monsters step by step instead more or less all of them at once (although there’s some nifty background algorithm going on determining the quantity and quality of monsters to spawn), but didn’t think of it until it was to late to implement
• my original idea was to get exp points for “killing” monsters to level up the currently used weapon (in terms of knockback and frequency) but I somehow changed that plan – that’s the reason why you already start with those 3 weapons. I should have stuck to that plan – since I feel it would have improved my game (never ever cut a feature if you’re not completely sure it would make the game worse or would cost too much resources)

So – what now?

I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll eventually make a post-compo version but chances are I won’t. However, I had a lot of fun and am proud of my game and it’s a delight to see what you guys have come up with and play your games. being part of LD is a wonderful experience, every time