I already made a post the day after LD ended about how ambitious my LD concepts should be. When coming up with a concept for LD I like it when that concept borders on the impossible of what I can make in only 48 hours. Of course it’s easy to venture into “way impossible” territory, and that’s what usually happens. It happened this time.

I never did a propper post-mortem however, so here it is.

What went right:

Graphics: I had very little problem finding the right style and keeping it consistent. It didn’t take long for me to create a nice palette and start pixeling. This was important, because I had a lot of programming ahead of me.

Music: Music came naturally as well. I had only 2 pieces planned (battle and overworld) but I missed a town piece, which was finished in no more than an hour. I didn’t end up spending a lot of time on either audio or graphics and I went on to programming sooner then I would normally have. The best thing is I don’t think it actually shows.

Programming: Making an RPG, I knew programming was going to be long and difficult, but I never really got stuck anywhere.

Unintentional humor: I never set out to make a funny game, and I think most people who do set out to do that usually fail. What ended up happening is that a lot of test messages, initial dialogue and one second decisions ended up staying in the final version, somehow giving the game a cohesive humorous character, that people have seemed to like.

What went wrong:

Programming: While I didn’t run into any mayor problems, there was simply too much to do. The battle system took up so much time, and after that I still had to program breeding, which I had already carefully planned out before making the battle system so it would take less time. I’m actually happy I managed to finish those two things at all.

Feedback: A lot of players commented that it wasn’t clear to them why they died. The game doesn’t really give good feedback on how much damage something does and why. If elements align up in the opponents favor that quickly ends up in an instant kill. In the end one of the more important skills for a player to learn was knowing when to run away.

Enemy design: By the time everything was in place and I could start designing the world and enemies, there was almost no time left. What should have happpened was that I had a number of enemies that increased in difficulty, forcing the player to breed bit by bit to create better and better critters. In the end I only had three enemies. The difficulty gap between those enemies was so large that I don’t think many players felt motivated to breed better critters.

Conclusion:

Yes, I did end up choosing a concept that was way too ambitious. But in the end I did have fun trying to do the undoable. I’m proud of what I did manage to do, and I will probably try to do something insane like this again next time.

Some things you just never learn.

 
Play the game here

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2013 at 6:18 am and is filed under LD #25. 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.