The end of rating is ‘nigh and I feel the urge to put together my thoughts on the last ludum dare.

Play the game.

The theme

As usual I tried to stay away from the obvious interpretations of the theme. I had the strong desire to make something in the platformer/action area and decided on the theme ‘you only get juan': a mexican princess gets married against her will – everytime you try to break out of this arranged marriage your father says: “you only get juan” with juan being you future husband.

The story was cut out in the end and during development I found out that all the underlying Ideas were centered around the mario games. Inversed roles of the princess and mario, a corrupted mario, a redux version of mario: all of this has been done before. I looked at pictures of the first mario level  from super mario bros on vgmaps and really wondered how a world could be expanded. Especially if there was some kind of underworld beneath 1-1. In the end I decided to expand on that idea and turned the game into what it is now: A deeper and darker exploration of the first super mario bros level and the life and death of game characters. “You only get 1-1″.

What went right

As complicated as the design process was, I think in the end it turned out all right. Level design was my major concern and level design in this case involved a lot of testing. Luckily I had some local people who helped and made some great suggestions. People are great
I am at a point right now that I can really work fast with Lua and the Löve framework. I have some good workflows and patterns in place. My code in (generally) structured and stays readible for me.
Implementing plattforming physics is always ‘fun’ and a bit tedious but this time I think I nailed it: no major bugs like in some former LDs.

What went wrong

There is some code that I really want to tidy up and I think I still have some design issues.

First of all there is a coingate which only lets you through to the last part of the level, which is the replay of the first part. You have to have a specified amount of coins so that the gate opens. I played around with different values but decided to reduce the coins in the end. The gate was built because I wanted to encourage exploration and discourage speed runs. But for LD game it you also should be able to play through most of the game in 10-15 minutes, so I lowered that. In the end the value was a bit too low, as most players didn’t felt that there was a barrier here.

The code had some major delta time issues, especially on slower machines, so that in the end I decided to give upper values to delta time to still get predictable and expected behaviour of the collision detection. I’m really tired of things falling through grounds

Media

I made a walkthrough of the game which covers most (but I think not all) of it.

You can also find the music track from the title screen on soundcloud:

I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to try my game.