Michael Wilson and James Lloyd of @ponywolf partnered with Scott Meyer from @mutatedsoftware to create a multi-player deathmatch entry titled Flat Earths.

We are petty fracking excited about how it turned out, both from a playability and visual polish standpoint. If you haven't, stop reading this and grab a controller (and a friend or two) and give it a shot.

What went right?

Nearly everything

This was by far the smoothest LD I've worked on. We made some rough sketches pretty early on and had a prototype (for single player, no bots) working in just a few hours.

Look and Feel

This is our first try at putting shaders into our workflow, and we really come up with something fast and simple that looked interesting. Without the pixel-y look I think this game would have not gotten as much attention.

CPU/Bots/AI

I didn't have much confidence that AI would work in this game at all, but for a few minor issues (see What went wrong?) the bots are a huge addition to the game and lets anyone pick up and play--and hopefully return with a few friends.

Controller support

We got PS4, Xbox, Xbox One, Steel Series and some old school Game Pads AND Keyboards all working on both PC and Mac... Some are better than others, but all in all you should be able to scrounge up a decent 4 player setup with thrift store quality controllers.

Squishy/Juicy

Much of the physics are fairly rigid bodies, but the characters (built in Spine) are hooked up with a pretty loose "follow" function. This gives the game a feeling of just being on the edge of control, which we really liked.

Humor

We didn't get as much text into the game as we wanted, but the descriptions and tweets we done for the game all have a great tongue-in-cheek tone.

What went wrong?

Fixing bugs and adding features too late

We got stuck in the all too common trap of trying to fix bugs on one system while dropping a few new maps and scoring features on another system which led to more bugs, and so on and so on. We did 3 or 4 patches in that last 4 hours and still messed up the timer and scorekeeping in the final game. On first blush you wouldn't notice, but the scoring isn't quite correct.

Character differentiation

The characters and their aquatic rides don't have enough visual differentiation to make it easy to find who you are after a respawn. An easy fix, but we were too busy on showstopping bugs to re-visit this in the last few hours.

CPU/Bots/AI

Scot did some incredible work to make the bots functional, but again the time didn't allow us to tweak them to make a single player experience that would be a consistent challenge. That said, just the fact there is AI in there at all is a huge win.

LAN support

I personally wasted a bunch of time trying to get local LAN support working that could have been used to make the game better. I almost always give up on a feature in LD games, and I should have given up on this sooner.

Scanlines needed an off switch

GIFs of the game with scanlines on look pretty messed up, and (unless you are at least 1080p) captures are equally dicey.

In conclusion

Again, I am super-proud of the team and we were over the moon (that is also flat) when we saw a group of four from Stumpt play a few round on their Twitch channel.

https://youtu.be/cq9ScVPrmsI?t=15m52s