I’m still working on this, yo.

Let’s get it out of the way first why I didn’t submit anything: the point of LD for me is to get insightful comments about what to improve, and the flaws were obvious to me already. It’s like, yeah I get it, it’s confusing and feels unfinished, cause it is. If I don’t find the gameplay appealing myself, there’s no point in having the community repeat that to me.

I clearly focused on the wrong stuff on the weekend. My sweet AI patterns didn’t end up mattering in the end. I sorta forgot I was making an arcade game, and swamped myself by bringing too complex behaviour into it. Such a Jwatt thing to do. People don’t care about the AI doing a dance, they just wanna shoot some bad guys and rack up points.

By the time I’d reduced the thing to a “Human Tetris with random encounters” like it should’ve been from the start, everything was a mess, and there was no time left to fix the game (or to thoroughly playtest it). So I figured I’ll continue working outside of the event with a “soft reset” mindset. The main mechanics and many of my enemy designs are still functional and reusable, after all.

Importantly, there’s still a community interested in playtesting it, and some have even suggested putting a price tag on it once it’s done. I’m not big on monetizing my games, but I do see the point; it could be a neat touchscreen game, considering your main interaction is literally an analogue for swiping. And it’s not like difficult to build for Android with Love2D.

Not to mention Love2D’s sweet shader FX brah didn’t you say you owned a GPU?? We can like 60 FPS on your GPU if you don’t mind??? 60 FPS on the “P.C.” console forever???

Tags: pre-rebirth post-mortem