Post Mortem of “Louis and the Louse”

My first step in the gamedev field was last december. As I was learning how to use SFML I wasn’t experienced enough to join ld28. But then I also learned Unity and I was able to make it in miniLD50. One month later I was participating in LD29 and this is my post mortem.

First of all I would like to say that I managed to finish a game before the 48h deadline and that made me proud =D.

Saturday

I dedicated the entire Saturday morning to game design. Beneath the surface was one of my favorite theme and I already had an idea but I didn’t want to rush things out.

At 2pm the game design was done and I had a basic menu and a first level working.

I knew graphics would take me a lot of time and wouldn’t serve any purpose if the game was broken.

This is why I dedicated the Saturday to coding the game mechanics. Hopefully I knew my way around unity and was able to realise that 48h would not be enough to implement all the things I wanted. Sacrificing the less important features I managed to finish the mechanics and add some little content before going out. Because yes, when it’s your friends birthday you can hardly decline the invitation and spend the evening coding.

Sunday

Most of the Sunday was spent drawing and doing the end of the game. And 30min before the deadline mark “Louis and the Louse” was on-line, my game was ready to live its own life.

You can see down there the evolution of the graphics between Saturday and Sunday.

What I would change if I could

• Managing my time better : even if I could finish my game I think focusing more on LD would have allowed me to make a longer game.
• Music : A few days before LD I learned how to use a tracking software. Unfortunately I did not had the time to use it. A voice in my head keeps telling it’s for the best because I’m not such a talented music maker. Anyway, some sounds would have been great.
• User friendliness : I did not had time to make a really user friendly game and people were confused when they first played the game. Even though I made a “tutorial”. So that’s definitely something I’ll try to improve next time.

My last word

Finishing some thing that’s yours and getting good feed-back about it is the best feeling ! Thank you ludum dare for making this possible !

Play “Louis and the Louse” !

Any criticism is welcome !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot